Ben A. Reitzes of Barclays Capital says that if Apple releases a device costing no more than $1,500, Apple could immediately claim roughly 5% of he HDTV market.

In doing so, Apple would generate first year product revenue of approximately $17 billion.

“Apple’s eventual television could be so much more than a TV — including gaming, video, communication, content delivery, apps, computing and all the capabilities of the current Apple TV — it is not really fair to compare it to products already available on the market,” Reitzes said Tuesday.

“It appears more and more likely that the company is actively engaging partners about a potential device and content,” he adds. “If Apple were to sell a TV, we continue to believe its margins and pricing could be industry leading given its vertical integration with content. We believe that Siri could be used as a groundbreaking interface for TV,which could be used as a content hub — glued together by iOS and iOS devices.”

Reitzes believes the long-awaited Apple HDTV will come after Apple enters fiscal 2013 this October.

Are you intrigued by the prospect of an Apple HDTV? Might it make your must-have list along with other Apple gadgets when it finally launches? Please weigh in with your two cents below.

According to published reports in the Financial Times, Facebook could launch its mobile advertising platform in early March.

Why the rush? Facebook clearly wants to illustrate to the investment community that it has established – or is in the process of establishing – viable and highly lucrative income streams.

The writing was on the wall for this platform based on the language Facebook used in its IPO filing last week.

“We currently do not show ads or directly generate any meaningful revenue from users accessing Facebook through our mobile products, but we believe that we may have potential future monetization opportunities such as the inclusion of sponsored stories in users’ mobile News Feeds,” Facebook revealed.

As of this writing, Facebook is planning to hold a marketing-related event in New York City on February 29th. Current plans call for Facebook to raise the curtain on its mobile ad platform at that time.

Analogous – at least in theory – to Twitter’s Promoted Tweets, Facebook may begin adding “featured stories” into people’s mobile feeds. What does this amount to? Marketing-led posts that could deliver invaluable opportunities to advertisers of every variety.

But Facebook has already denied the welcoming of any “rich media featured stories.”

“We want to clarify that we are not working with any agency to create paid ads on our mobile platform,” a spokesperson for Facebook said Monday.

Still, with its IPO on the horizon, Facebook clearly has a strategy to begin generating marketing dollars out of its 425-million active mobile user base.

What will the rumored mobile ad platform look like? For now, only hazzy comparrisons can be made. But by early March, Facebook’s “featured stories” may go live. And in the process, they may change the landscape of mobile marketing dramatically.

What do you think Facebook is planning? Please weigh in with a thought or comment below.

Just two weeks ago, massive crowds outside of Beijing’s Apple Store caused Chinese police to deploy crowd-control measures to ease the iPhone 4S frenzy caused by the device’s long-anticipated arrival.

So unruly were Apple fans that the company was forced to strip the Aple Stores of their iPhone 4S unventory and revert back to selling the smartphones online only in China for the time being.

Not surprisingly, in response to the iPhone 4S frenzy, China is now seen as Apple’s next big market to conquer. In order to do so, says investment bank Morgan Stanley, Apple will all but certainly team with both China Telecom and China Mobile to make future generations of the iPhone available on all three Chinese carriers.

With such an eventuality likely before year’s end, Huberty predicts that some 40 million iPhones will be sold in China in 2013. That’s not bad, considering that Apple sold 68.5 million iPhones all around the world in 2011.

Huberty also believes that Apple’s Chinese ambitions will be greatly helped by the fact that the company’s sixth-generation iPhone may be compatible with China Mobile’s approaching 4G TD-LTE network.

“The deal,” the WSJ report reads, “could raise as much as $10 billion and value the social network between $75 billion and $100 billion.”

Sources “familiar” with the matter are quoted in the article but not named.

As of this writing, Facebook could file documents with the Securities and Exchange Commission within the next 48 hours. Executives for Facebook, however, are said to still be wavering about the timing of the decision, with it remaining a strong possibility that the filing won’t occur for a few more weeks.

In the big picture, Facebook is still believed to be targeting an IPO between April and June of this year.

Do you believe Facebook is going public as soon as the sources indicate? Please weigh in with a thought or comment below.

Fueled in large part by Google’s mobile search advertising business, the industry reached new heights in 2011 and 2012 is already shaping up to put 2011 to shame.

Aided greatly by the surge in smartphone ownership and the ubiquitous dominance of mobile ad networks – with Google’s AdMob, Apple’s iAd, and Millennial Media chief among them – new estimates from eMarketer place mobile advertising’s growth off the charts.

According to the latest projections, mobile advertising spending in the US approached $1.45 billion last year, which represents an 89% increase year-over-year.

US mobile ad spending for 2012 is expected to reach $2.61 billion.

“Right now there are many researchers out there looking at nearly the same empirical data about the mobile marketplace and drawing completely disparate conclusions,” says Noah Elkin, eMarketer principal analyst. “In order to form the most complete picture possible about the mobile ad market, we think it’s essential to evaluate multiple information sources-rather than a single dataset-especially as the market remains immature.”

Elkin, however, notes that Google remains the wildcard when it comes to estimating the mobile ad industry’s future growth. If Google grows faster than expected, so too will the industry.

eMarketer believes Google’s mobile ad revenues for 2011 represented about 51.7% of the entire industry’s revenue.

Fewer than twenty-hours removed from the company’s record quarterly earnings report, analysts viewing the cold, hard data say Apple has likely bumped Samsung out of the top spot by a sizable margin.

Last night, Apple revealed sales of 37 million iPhones in the last three months of 2011 alone.

Samsung is expected to announce later this week that it sold only 35 million handsets in comparison worldwide.

Although Samsung produces a wide array of devices and Apple makes only one smartphone – the iPhone – Samsung didn’t see any of its products reaching the level of intense popularity achieved by the iPhone 4S after it’s October introduction.

Nokia is yet to report its sales results but analysts are almost universally expecting the company to place a distant third from Apple and Samsung.

According to a trusted Chinese source speaking with the publication, production has already commenced on the iPad 3 as manufacturers in Asia scramble to have the first batch of refreshed tablets ready to roll out by early March, when they are expected to begin shipping to consumers and Apple’s increasingly expansive list of retail partners.

“This first lot production implements LCD’s, which are produced by Sharp Electronics Corporation, and aims to be shipped at early March,” the report reads.

The prominent Japanese Mac news website reveals that Foxconn has reportedly assumed 85% of the production load for the iPad 3, with Pegatron handling the remaining 15%.

In addition to the Makotakara report, supply chain insiders and Wall Street analysts almost universally agree that the third-generation iPad will debut within the next ten weeks, if not sooner.

On Wednesday, Apple started sending out invitations to the media for an event described as being “educational” in nature. In other words, don’t look for any major product releases or refreshes.

The January 19th event will take place at the Guggenheim Museum.

Apple Senior Vice President Eddy Cue will likely preside over the presentation, although Apple is yet to confirm as much.

The event is widely expected to focus on new developments with the iBooks platform, especially with regard to education and digital textbook publishing.

Be sure to stay with Mobile Marketing Watch next Thursday for all the latest news and fallout from Apple’s presentation.

What are your expectations for the event?

Despite years of rumors suggesting this technology was on the way, Apple is yet to roll out any such features. But this week, evidence emerged at the US Patent and Trademark Office to reveal more insight into Apple’s purported long-term plans.

According to Apple Insider, the patent application called “Low Threshold Face Recognition” illustrates how Apple could utilize a low-computation solution in iDevices for the purpose of recognizing a user via an iPad or iPhone’s front-facing camera.

The patent suggests that Apple’s technology doesn’t “aggressively analyze” a user’s face. Rather, it focuses on a “high information portion” of a human face to gauge the measurement of distance between ones eyes, mouth, nose, etc. in order to identify the iPhone or iPad user.

The software then measures the freshly-acquired data in real-time against the reference image stored on the device to determine if the iDevice owner is, indeed, the person currently accessing the device.

Would you support the implementation of facial recognition technology in future generations of iPhones and iPads? Or does that sort of creep you out just a tad?