I hope everyone had a great Christmas holiday. Here is this weeks quick 5 minute easy-to-digest wrap up of the big news in mobile.
Telstra is the first carrier in Australia to enable SMS from Twitter of notifications (via Official Twitter blog).
GfK Australia predict that Australians will spend close to $2 billion in 2009 on video games – this is close to double the record $1 billion in box office reciepts expected to be collected this year by Australian cinemas.
The release of the highly anticipated official Google Android phone – NexusOne – is only days away. Specs/pictures are leaked to Engadget and Mobile Crunch reports that the release will be invite only. Android is now starting to gain momentum in the USA with many more handsets slated to come out in the first quarter of 2010.
According to Flurry, the biggest mobile app analytics company, iPod Touch download volume saw a nearly 1,000% jump in downloads on Christmas Day.
Also seeing a record in digital sales was Amazon, with Kindle books outselling physical dead-tree books for the first time on Christmas Day. Wired Gadget Lab read through the lines on this press release however and hypothesized this spike was due to people who had received a Kindle for Christmas and then downloaded books (besides, who would buy a physical book on Christmas day?). This probably explains part of the spike in downloads witnessed by Apple on iPod touch.
Finally on the topic of Christmas – eBay announced this week that it had sold 1.5million items this holiday (though definition, again, of holiday was a bit vague). Regardless, eBay is leading the charge of mobile selling, of non-digital items, with over 750,000 people accessing their application each day.
I mentioned Flurry previously, well last week they officially became the worlds largest mobile application analytics company – by reach – when they announced their merger with Pinch Media on Wednesday. This ought to bring some welcome consolidation to the measurement and analytics side of smart phone marketing which still suffers from fragmented industry reporting and research.
Finally – this week’s hottest app releases & updates are:
