Symantec has released its annual MessageLabs Intelligence Special Report, ranking the most spammed U.S. states and territories.

According to the report, Idaho receives the most spam (for the second year in a row), at a rate of 95.2%. The top spammed states are Idaho, Alabama, and South Carolina, with spam rates above 93%. The national average is only 89.3%. Indiana, Tennessee, Illinois, Utah, Washington, New Hampshire and North Carolina are next in line.

Opera has released its new State of the Mobile Web report. In the report, Opera finds that 8:00pm through 12:00am are the peak hours for mobile data consumption.

"Regardless of differences in economy, culture or location, those four evening hours account for a disproportionate amount of mobile data consumption," the company says.

According to a new report from ABI Research,  Smartphone shipments are expected to grow 21% this year to 224 million, but "Shanzai" devices may be getting a fair share of consumers’ money.

Dynmark has released a report based on a study of creative marketing agencies’ use of mobile marketing. The firm spoke with figureheads from agencies including Ogilvy, Gyro HSR and Essence Media.

What ways do you use mobile in your marketing mix? Discuss here.

Update: Quinn Daly, senior vice president, Corporate Communications at Demand Media has gotten back to us with the following comments:

Google has released a report that details its economic impact in each of the 50 states in the U.S. In the report, Google says it generated $54 billion of economic activity for American businesses, website publishers, and non-profits in 2009.

"In a time of tighter budgets and a slow economic recovery, we’re glad to support so many small businesses and entrepreneurs across the country by helping them find new customers more efficiently and monetize their websites through targeted advertising," says Claire Hughes Johnson, Vice President, Global Online Sales.

Last year we looked at a study about the state of social media marketing, looking at common questions businesses had about it. A lot has happened in the social media world in a year’s time, and many businesses have gotten into the swing of things since then.

SeeWhy has released an eBook with an interesting premise for online retailers. It looks at how the top 10 converting e-commerce sites drive their website conversions. The main takeaway, a representative for SeeWhy tells WebProNews is that "the top 10 converting e-commerce sites, on average, convert roughly 10 times as many visitors into customers as the typical site — 23 percent vs. 2-3 percent."

Mobile advertising firm Millennial Media has put out a report mobile devices and their impact on advertising. "For the past year Millennial Media has released a monthly SMART report (Scorecard for Mobile Advertising Reach and Targeting), which discusses trends in the mobile ad space. Beginning this month, they’ve decided to release an additional device-focused report, the Media Mobile Mix," a representative for the firm tells WebProNews.

Social media use among businesses has grown significantly over the past year or two, but new research from E-Consultancy, in association with the Online Marketing Summit (where WebProNews is conducting exclusive interviews this week), indicates that most businesses are largely still in the experimental stage when it comes to their efforts.

As you know, smartphone usage is on the rise, and that means more opportunities for businesses to sell to customers via their mobile devices. We often hear about how important mobile is to the marketing strategy and especially future strategies, but how much are consumers really into shopping from their phones?

Even as social media has grown to be a much more widely accepted form of communication among businesses over the years, there is still plenty of data out there depicting the flaws and setbacks that can occur when social networks are used in the business environment.

AdGooroo, a competitive intelligence agency, has released a new report, which indicates that there as has been a decrease in active advertisers for Google, despite projected Q4 gains.

Gartner has released some research findings that indicate consumers will spend $6.2 billion in 2010 in mobile application stores. Meanwhile, advertising revenue is expected to generate $0.6 billion worldwide.

According to Gartner, mobile app stores will exceed 4.5 billion downloads in 2010, eight out of ten of which will be free. Gartner also forecasts worldwide downloads in mobile application stores to surpass 21.6 billion by 2013, and free downloads to account for 82% of all downloads in 2010 (87% in 2013).

Skype announced that its share of international calling minutes has jumped by 50% year-over-year. This data comes from a new report released by research firm TeleGeography.

According to this report, Skype’s share of international calling minutes jumped to 12% from last year’s figure of 8%. Telegeography says that the volume of traffic routed via Skype is growing at an "astonishing" pace. The following graph shows the net increase in international phone and Skype traffic from 2005 to 2009.

Symantec has put together its "State of the Data Center" report, which is the product of a survey of 573 businesses in 26 countries.

According to Opera, Facebook is the most popular site on the mobile web in Africa. In addition, a report from the company shows a 5% jump in global mobile Internet users.

Opera Mini has garnered more than 41.7 million users worldwide showing a 5.3 percent jump compared to the previous month, according to the report. The number of page views in November went up 9.5% and data consumption increased 8.3% compared to October.

Opera is reporting that usage of its Opera Mini mobile browser has jumped 11% in just a month, around the world. In addition, they say data transfers have gained 16%.

You may have read about the online price wars going on this holiday season between Walmart and Amazon. It looks like both companies are doing quite well as a result (not that that is much of a surprise). According to data from Experian Hitwise, Walmart was the top retail site on Thanksgiving Day, and Amazon was the top retail site on Black Friday.