NPD DisplaySearch Senior Analyst, Richard Shim said, “Mobile PC brands read the writing on the wall in the fourth quarter. Consumer demand for notebooks was expected to be weak following modest back-to-school results, especially with the expected launch of Windows 8 on the horizon, and increasing interest in tablet PCs. As a result, brands focused their typical holiday price cuts on tablets to boost demand.”

Although the numbers sound impressive for Apple, many disagree with counting iPads along with laptops. Apple doesn’t think the iPad is a mobile PC either. CEO Tim Cook has been very open about the fact that he expects there to eventually be some cannibalization of Macs due to the iPad, though it may already be happening to Windows PCs.

That’s the stance of Boston Analytics, anyway, which analyzed the past, present, and future of mobile value added services in India.  And if anything, Boston Analytics may have taken a conservative approach – James Quintana Pearce believes it significantly underestimated the number of cell phone subscribers.

On to the data, then.  Boston Analytic’s graphs show India’s per capita GDP going up and mobile call tariffs going down.  Also, mobile revenues appear to be rising, even though the average revenue per user is dropping.  And these trends appear ready to continue for the foreseeable future.

So India’s shaping up to be an even more tempting spot for Google and Yahoo than it has been in the past.  Other American companies – including AOL? – could also try out their mobile products in this market.  (AOL has, by the way, given no indication that it would make such a move, but the company’s ongoing layoffs indicate that it needs to try something, and an expansion into the UK occurred just last month.)

We’ll see where this goes, but as with just about everything, don’t expect much to happen before the beginning of 2008.

Baidu has already beaten Google in terms of mainstream, computer-based search; despite some clever tricks on Google’s part, the Chinese company’s lead looks pretty much insurmountable.  So, less than three weeks ago, Google China’s Kai-Fu Lee announced that his people would concentrate on mobile markets.

Now, Dan Nystedt reports, “Baidu is already working with China Mobile and China Netcom Group on new services for the launch of 3G in China next year, said Alan Zhang, business development leader at Baidu . . .”

Nystedt then continues, “He declined to elaborate on new applications in the works, but said the current WAP portal would be important to Baidu’s 3G efforts.”

And whatever Chinese word translates to “crap,” it’s likely that a bunch of overseas Googlers are saying it right now.  It’s not inevitable that Google will lose this battle, though, so as things development, we’ll dutifully report updates and stats back to you.

G.cn takes users straight to Google.cn, where everything will perform just as it always has (or hasn’t).  For Google fans who are at a traditional keyboard, it’s a neat time-saving measure.  Where the search giant really hopes to succeed, though, is probably with users who prefer Baidu.

Confession time: I like the BBC far more than CNN – it tends to deliver real world news, as opposed to stories about American entertainers.  When I was much younger, though, I thought that typing out news.bbc.co.uk was the only way to reach the BBC news site, and so I’d often head to CNN instead.  (It was a happy day when I discovered that bbcnews.com took me where I wanted to go.)

If Chinese citizens succumb to the same laziness, Baidu.com could lose out in a big way to G.cn.  The likelihood of this happening – which is admittedly small – is compounded once you think about the booming mobile market in China; hitting fewer keys means a lot to people using tiny cell phones.

So what seems almost like a cheap trick is actually something of a brilliant move.  Kai-Fu Lee – or whoever thought of launching G.cn – deserves a big bonus.

Internet access is often easier and cheaper to get through cell phones, and Kai-Fu Lee, the president of Google China, told Reuters, “These mobile users have very different usage patterns from the American users.  Most Chinese users who touch mobile Internet will have no PC at all.”

A more cynical person might interpret that comment as an excuse – Google China hasn’t exactly delivered results that Sergey, Larry, and Eric Schmidt can be proud of.  But Lee appears to have been merely stating facts, as he also added, “China has a large mobile opportunity, with so many mobile users who will become mobile Internet users in the next few years as 3G and other technologies become pervasive . . . .  That requires thinking from ground zero on how to design products that fit their needs.”

Lee had little – or, more accurately, nothing – else to say in regards to timelines or product specs, but it looks like this’ll be one more way in which Google tries to get a toehold in China.  If it’s successful, Google’s mobile efforts in America might well follow suit.

In a conference call last week Google CEO Eric Schmidt said, "Our mobile searches are increasing rapidly compared to a year ago; they are growing more quickly than nonmobile searches." But he pointed out  "they are still a very small percentage of total searches," Schmidt said, "which is of great frustration to us."

Sandeep Aggarwal, an analyst for Oppenheimer &Co. told Investor’s Business Daily, "There are three times more mobile users in the world than PC users," he said. "Mobile is a very important platform for them and they are going to do everything they can to get there."

Google has a number of deals with wireless carriers, including T-Mobile and Vodafone to provide its search service for those carriers customers. Google president and co-founder Larry Page commented on a possible Google phone or mobile operating system saying,"I don’t think again that there’s a requirement to do any things like that…we would also love to get even greater numbers of people and wider access to our applications that we provide…So I think that it is more of an opportunity for us then a cost".

" We have tremendous usage of our current mobile applications and we have deals with very, very many different wireless carriers and so on, and many other types of carriers. I think those things will all continue."

If Google does build its own mobile phone or wireless operating system it could damage the relationships it has with mobile carriers.  Jonathan Hurd, director of Altman Vilandrie & Co. said that Google cannot afford to get dropped from any carrier while its working to expand its wireless search ad service.

Of course, it’s not like there are a billion of the things (yet) – the only other mobile social network ever covered by WebProNews appears to be Bluepulse.  And as it so happens, VentureBeat’s Matt Marshall describes Trutap and Bluepulse as director competitors, then writes, “Trutap says it will differentiate through partnerships with the major social networks and carriers, but this is yet to be seen.”

Still, Trutap’s not flailing around without hope.  The company’s apparently got almost $8 million to its name, and all the standard doodads – messaging, chat, photo-sharing, and blog features – that every social network should have.  It also turned a few heads at the TechCrunch40 conference.

“The firm is the only British enterprise to be invited to the Techcrunch 40 conference,” noted the Telegraph’s Richard Tyler.  And while we’re speaking of British head-turners, I might as well mention Keira Knightley, who’s pictured in Tyler’s article for not entirely irrelevant reasons.

Anyway, we’ll try to stay tuned and report how things turn out for Trutap – assuming we can see the results on those itty-bitty screens.

WebProNews chatted with Keighran about the company’s approach to the mobile market. He explained how the platform, developed in university, supports a wide range of phones (though not smartphones, currently).

Across that range, Bluepulse has maintained an agnostic approach to carriers. Viral distribution and word of mouth, not carrier or handset maker partnerships, have pushed Bluepulse to the point where they deliver 100 million pages to users per month.

A key to Bluepulse’s appeal comes from the desire people have to personalize their phones. Communication and personal expression walk together, in Keighran’s opinion, and is important to mobile phone owners.

That influences how Keighran wants their ad-supported model to work. They have been testing ad delivery based on time, location, and profiles of their users. Someone who’s an Avril Lavigne fan may have been offered the opportunity to be her “friend,” and gain access to certain extras through Bluepulse.

As they continue their ad tests – the Avril Lavigne one was part of a test with Sony BMG – Bluepulse will keep reaching out for their target audience with features like group chat and mobile widgets for services like Flickr or Blogger.

In a way, that has been a challenge for Bluepulse. We asked Keighran about expanding in the US, where inferior data networks as compared to Japan and Europe could be an obstacle. He acknowledged that, but expressed confidence based on US users showing up in enough numbers now to put America in the top five of countries using Bluepulse.

eMarketer estimates that by 2011, mobile search will account for about $715 million, or close to 15 percent of a total mobile advertising market worth $4.7 billion.

In April 2007, iCrossing reported that three-quarters of mobile Internet subscribers access mobile search services.

The U.S. mobile search market is expected to have some growing pains over the next two or three years as the major operators, portals and mobile search start-ups compete to be the mobile search leader.

eMarketer Senior Analyst John du Pre Gauntt said, "Mobile search in the US has all the right parts on the table: a huge online advertising ecosystem, the world’s leading content industry, massive portal players, major league mobile operators and a host of VC-backed start-ups."

"In other words, it’ll be a bloody mess over the next few years sorting out the center of gravity for mobile search, as each player tries to convince the others to follow its lead. The good news for marketers is that there’s enough of a prize for the winner(s) that resolution will come."

"The explosion of non-official mobile content Web sites is causing the sun to set on the i-mode business model of a dominant mobile carrier selling incremental content and services to its user base," says John du Pre Gauntt, eMarketer senior analyst and the author of the new Japan Wireless: Marketing to a Mobile Society report. "Flat-rate pricing for 3G services and a broadening of the scope of industries with a strong interest in mobile services means that mobile marketing and advertising has become all the more important in Japan."

Japan’s Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications (MIC), says that the number of mobile subscribers has been slowly increasing over the past year. In February 2007, Japan surpassed the 100 million mark for mobile subscribers. This means that the majority of the country has access to wireless services and only small segments of the population are not served by mobile services.

According to MIC figures, the number of 3G subscribers for all carriers now is over 60 million. With full penetration of mobile, wireless accounts for much of the Internet-based activity of the Japanese public.

eMarketer estimates that approximately 70 percent of the Japanese population, or 89 million people, is connected to the Internet. Out of that Internet population, mobile was slightly more preferred than the PC.

"Japan’s situation is well advanced compared with mobile markets in North America and many parts of Europe, where the primary value proposition seems to revolve around a singular technical niche, such as the music phone, TV phone or e-mail phone," says Mr. Gauntt. "Yet all major advanced markets seem to be converging toward a kind of maturity beyond novelty features."

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