According to the MMA, this new edition covers a broad range of topics including the unique Indian perspective on mobile marketing, whether Pakistan can build a mobile marketing channel, mobile payments, mobile social media, and why the US Government cares about location based marketing.

All told, there are ten articles packed in the new issue. They include:

• “SMS Marketing: The Role of Permission and Acceptance” by Prashant Amin, Bijal Zaveri Amin, R.P. Patel
• “Mobile Marketing: the Emerging Indian Perspective” by Varsha Jain, Saumya Pant, Aarzoo Daswani
• “Can Pakistan Build a Mobile Marketing Ecosystem?” by Yasmin Malik
• “A Comparative Study of the Telecommunication Industries of India and South Korea and Mobile Handset Market War of South Korea” by Jayrajsinh Jadeja, Kedar Shukla
• “Driving Frequency with Mobile Social Networks (MSN) and the Mediating Effects of Price and Quota Promotions” by William F. Humphrey, Jr., Debra A. Laverie
• “Mobile Application Adoption by Young Adults: A Social Network Perspective” David G. Taylor, Troy A. Voelker, Iryna Pentina
• “Social Media Use in a Mobile Broadband Environment: Examination of Determinants of Twitter and Facebook Use” by Sangwon Lee, Moonhee Cho
• “Mobile Payments: The Reality on the Ground in Selected Asian Countries and the United States” by Meiling Pope, Ryan Pantages, Nadeshda Enachescu, Ryan Dinshaw, Corey Joshlin, Robert Stone, P. Albert Austria, Kala Seal
• “LBS Marketing: Why the Federal Government Cares and What You Can Do About It” by Monica Desai, Greg Louer, Ryan King, Maria Wolvin
• “Thinking Human: Permission Based Mobile Marketing Can Help Lead the Way” by Mihai Vlad

“From presenting perspective on South Asian markets to exploring the use, impact and potential of mobile social media, this issue of the IJMM is extraordinarily valuable for those doing business in the mobile industry and academics,” says IJMM Editor-in-Chief and Director of the Institute for Mobile Media Research Michael Hanley. “The IJMM gives critical insight into emerging trends and markets that will inspire academics and allow marketers, agencies and enabling technologies to plan strategies for tackling their business challenges in these areas.”

Juniper estimates that mobile banking users worldwide will reach 530 million by 2013, up from just over 300 million in 2011. The report heralds mobile services to be “a fundamental component of banks’ business strategies as they respond to the current financial crisis.”

The report found that as banks migrate from traditional bricks-and-mortar approaches and seek competitive differentiation, mBanking offers an opportunity for all banks to improve operational efficiencies and customer retention and acquisition as a cost-effective communication channel.

“Mobile Banking will be one of the greatest success stories of the mobile commerce industry over the next five years, as consumers observe the benefits of accessing banking services on the move,” says report author Sonia Lalli. “As customers become comfortable with undertaking basic banking functions on their mobiles, an increasing number will adopt transactional-based banking enabled by the enhanced functionality afforded by smart devices, exposed to an all-immersive consumer experience.”

The Mobile Banking whitepaper from Juniper is now available to download. To grab it, click here.

“The Rise of Mobile Social Targeting,” which is available now for download, addresses how audiences continue to make the jump to smartphones and tablets. In the process, the number of users accessing social media on a mobile application or browser continues to rise.

According to the white paper, there has never been a better opportunity for brands and advertisers to immediately understand consumer intent and deliver the appropriate message to the correct audience.

“Traditionally, behavioral targeting technologies have been tasked with analyzing user behavior to derive intent, and secondly interpret the hypothesized intent for semantics. This process of machine inference is less than perfect and even companies such as Facebook have publicly acknowledged the challenges with this approach,” says Dilshan Kathriarachchi, Addictive Mobility’s CTO. “Our technology interprets a social data set rich with user described intent, allowing us to focus all our effort and energy at tackling the semantic question for mobile advertising that address real-world problems for end-users and advertisers alike.”

“The Rise of Mobile Social Targeting” explains the benefits of this social data to advertisers and marketers. Social targeting uses social data to build real time and highly customized audiences at scale.

Nussar Ahmad, Addictive Mobility CEO, says the information that is gathered is far more relevant to advertisers who can use that information to target their products to the most appropriate audiences.

“We are excited to publish a white paper that will shed light on those misconceptions and offer the advertising industry some direction on how to leverage the massive opportunity that social data represents,” Ahmad concluded.

The whitepaper underscores the MMA’s commitment to expanding knowledge about and familiarity with Location Based Services (LBS).

“Mobile Location Based Services Marketing” was created by the MMA Privacy and Preferences Committee.

For many marketers, Mobile Location Based Marketing promises an unprecedented, new way to connect with customers, delivering highly relevant, targeted messages at the time and place when a consumer is most likely to act on them. A capability that only mobile delivers.

“A maturation of technology, combined with innovation in marketing techniques, mean that LBS marketing is poised to take off,” says MMA North America Managing Director Michael Becker. “With today’s publication, the MMA is leading the industry forward, defining and exploring the potentially limitless possibilities LBS marketing opens up for all doing business in the mobile channel.”

The “Mobile Location Based Services Marketing” whitepaper points to current examples of Location Based Marketing’s use in the marketplace, and identifies likely future-use cases. It is intended, says the MMA, to inspire the reader to consider how location technology may be applied most effectively in their real-world marketing scenarios. It is the first step toward the development of best practices, and the long-term goal of the creation of industry standards.

To check out the whitepaper for yourself, click here.

On Tuesday morning, Millennial Media published the second edition of their fascinating Mobile Intel series.

Produced with the folks at comScore, “the Mobile Intel Series is designed to guide marketers through the immediate and very real opportunities in mobile advertising,” Millennial Media said today in a press release.

The automotive whitepaper contains information on the mobile auto audience, and how they use their mobile devices to research cars, find dealers, engage with brands post-purchase and more. The report also contains data on what top auto brands are doing in mobile today, and how they are reaching and engaging consumers.

According to the comScore study, 68 percent of mobile auto consumers are male, and 55 percent of the consumers are between the ages of 18-34.

Mobile auto consumers also tend to be more affluent than the general mobile population, with 34 percent of users having an annual income of over $100,000. These consumers also choose to access auto content frequently – very frequently, in fact.

“Mobile ad spend in the automotive industry has grown over 200 percent in the last year, and advertisers are recognizing that they can make a real impact with consumers,” says Jamie Fellows, Senior Vice President, Product, at Millennial Media. “Whether they are trying to increase brand awareness, drive consumers to a dealership, or increase app downloads, mobile is a medium which works for auto advertisers. We hope the latest version of the Mobile Intel Series can help brands navigate this landscape.”

For more information about the report, check out today’s Mobile Marketing Watch Minute.

To obtain a free copy of the report, click here.

Juniper estimates that he total value of mobile payments for digital and physical goods, money transfers and NFC (Near Field Communications) transactions will hit $670 billion by 2015 – a remarkable jump from $240 billion this year.

These forecasts represent the gross merchandise value of all purchases or the value of money being transferred.

Juniper says the growth will be sweeping across the industry and across the forthcoming years. The new Mobile Payments Strategies report revealed that “all segments will exhibit 2x to 3x growth over the next five years.”

The anticipated growth, the research firm says, will largely be driven by the rapid adoption of mobile ticketing, NFC contactless payments, physical goods purchases and money transfers as people in both developed and developing countries use their devices for everyday transactions.

“Our analysis shows that emerging segments such as physical goods payments, NFC and money transfers will fuel market growth by a factor of 2.7 times by 2015,” writes Juniper senior analyst David Snow. “Digital goods is the largest segment and, although forecast to more than double, it is not growing as quickly as some of the newer segments.”

The top 3 regions for mobile payments (Far East & China, W. Europe and N. America) will represent 75% of the global mobile payment gross transaction value by 2015, Juniper says, addin that digital goods payments will account for nearly 40% of the market in 2015.

Juniper’s new ‘Mobile Payment Strategies: Opportunities & Markets 2011-2015′ can be downloaded now at no charge from www.juniperresearch.com.

Juniper speculates that the continued growth will be driven by the arrival of new services (Apple’s iMessage is cited as one example), and the accelerated adoption of existing services like AOL’s AIM, Blackberry Messenger, Microsoft’s Windows Live, Skype and Yahoo! Messenger.

The launch of these free Mobile IM services has been facilitated by the increasing number of smartphones in use, low-cost data packages and the development of high speed mobile networks. While some IM services are ad-funded, most are viewed by the operators as customer retention tools, with the only cost to the user being the data usage charged.

Juniper, however, sees no sign of Mobile IM services replacing SMS as a primary means of text communication on mobile handsets.

“SMS has one distinct advantage over ‘over-the-top’ services: its ubiquity,” writes Mobile Messaging Markets Report author Daniel Ashdown. “With an SMS I know I can reach almost any handset in the world, if I have its number. While IM services have some advantages, such as real-time communication and apparent absence of cost, the market is fragmented by different services which cannot communicate with each other.”

Juniper’s research also led to projections that premium-rate SMS and MMS will decline due to challenges from other forms of billing and delivery. MMS traffic and revenue, on the other hand, will continue to grow, but Application-to-Person (A2P) MMS will not have as big of an impact as A2P SMS. Lastly, Juniper finds that mobile email adoption will likely persist as the number of handsets with QWERTY keyboards, Internet access and larger screens increase.

To read the full Mobile Messaging Markets Report from Juniper, click here.

Covering everything from the opportunity retailers are presented with in terms of mobile advertising, to trends, stats, campaign examples and much more, the new 20-page whitepaper takes a deep dive into how retailers can fully leverage the mobile channel.  The report includes data from comScore’s recent Mobile Retail Study that surveyed consumers with three key objectives in mind: 1.) Explore the mobile retail industry and understand its growth; 2.) Delve into the demographics and behavior of mobile retail consumers; and 3.) Understand exactly how mobile is being utilized throughout the purchase funnel.

With so much data and insight included in the report, I suggest you head on over and download for yourself, but here’s a few quick bullet points…

• Over 13 million consumers accessed retail content on their mobile phone in a given month; 2.2 million accessed some sort of retail content almost every day.
• Mobile retail users tend to be more affluent than the total mobile audience; Ranked by income, the $100,000k+ bracket is the leading demographic for mobile retail users.
• Consumers rely on their mobile devices to guide them through every step of the purchase process, from determining if they need a product (52% of respondents), to making a purchase (38%), to evaluating a product post-purchase (12%). Advertisers can capitalize upon this behavior to reach consumers on mobile, regardless of where they are in the purchase funnel.
• 21% of survey respondents made a purchase using their mobile phone in the last month, not including app store application purchases. Consumers bought a wide range of items, led by consumer electronics, followed by clothing/accessories, food, entertainment tickets, and travel-related purchases.
• Brands in eight different retail subcategories invested in mobile on Millennial’s network in April 2011, from department stores to computers & electronics retailers to luxury fashion brands.

That declaration, which was based on the measurement of consumer response rates, is made in a joint white paper titled “Permission, Privacy, Measurement: The Way Forward.”

“The result of findings provide detailed information on the changing landscape of the Asian mobile marketing and advertising space, and highlighting the importance and growth of opt-in mobile advertising in the region,” the report noted.

Out There Media, of course, is already familiar with the effectiveness of mobile advertising in Asia. The company’s opt-in database in that part of the world stood at 5 million at the end of March 2011

While the audience is not particularly divided along gender lines, with slightly more men (51%) than women, permission-based mobile marketing has a broad appeal, with 77% being under the age of 30, and with the clear majority (60%) coming from the highly-desirable 20-29 age group. Appeal also extends beyond youth, with 72% coming from consumers aged between 20 and 39.

The MMA says that for the time being, the average conversion rate for opt-in mobile advertising campaigns stands at 25.15%, considerably higher than the rate for mobile display ads (in the low single digits), over twenty times the response rate for direct marketing (1.38%)5 and very much higher than web advertising (where 0.2% is considered a successful campaign response rate).

The report also shows that opt-in advertising caters to all verticals with most actively engaged being fast moving consumer goods, beauty and fashion, finance and automotive.

To read “Permission, Privacy, Measurement: The Way Forward” in its entirety, click here.

The company has been busy despite its anniversary, also announcing a new whitepaper entitled “The Mobile Advertising Ecosystem,” which describes how app developers and mobile publishers can best navigate and monetize mobile advertising opportunities.  “Smaato has produced this whitepaper to help give an overview of the industry to those taking their first steps into mobile advertising,” said Harald Neidhardt, Smaato CMO and Co-Founder.  ”We hope that the information in this paper and the monthly Smaato Metrics help to educate and provide a benchmark to demonstrate that mobile ad-optimization can drive effective monetization on a global scale.”

Speaking of Smaato’s always interesting monthly mobile metrics reports, the company also used its birthday to release its latest summary for July.  Among the highlights, Apple showed a significant increase in click through rates (CTR) globally and as well for the US and the European market, while Android decreased enormously in the US and lost its solid position from June.  Also, after four long months in decline, the CTR Index of Windows Phones increased for the first time globally, while the global fill rate of ad networks dropped from 22% to 16%.