The best don’t play it safe but push themselves, reaching for and even succeeding the best of their abilities. Sometimes they may go too far… But the proper reaction to such efforts is not to sneer but to applaud their daring, their willingness to give it their all.

Some quick questions to ask yourself to make sure that you’re doing the right things:

• Is your task list for the day in alignment with the bigger picture? If not, why?
• Is this client actually a client you want to keep dealing with?
• Having complete these tasks will you be any closer to your goal by the end of the week/month?

“In 2010 so far, Australian consumers bought more than one million items on eBay via mobile devices.”

This is double the number of people who were using their mobiles to shop just seven months earlier.

Interestingly, eBay’s mobile sales in Australia are growing faster than they are in any other country with Aussies buying one item every 15 seconds.

These are very promising indicators but eBay is just one site. I’m keen to see if this sort of behavior is seen across the board with other retailers. How is the Combined Taxis App going? What about the pizza chains non-voice mobile offerings?

I know its “old” news but this figure never ceases to amaze me. Once you account for factors such as: not everyone eats McDonalds, not everyone uses the mobile internet and more you start to see just how huge that 25% is.

Initially all a customer had to do was show the website to receive the coupon. In 2008 McDonalds bought in NFC and the service continues to tick over.

View a demonstration of the McDonalds coupon site.

You can read a bit more on Mobile Commerce Daily and Cartes Asia.

From the eMarketer report today:

According to Nielsen, smartphones were used by 25% of the US mobile phone audience in Q2 2010, up from 23% the previous quarter and 16% in Q2 2009. The research firm predicts they will overtake feature phones by the end of 2011.

This increased ownership of smart devices is driving growth in mobile internet usage. The acceleration of this trend has led eMarketer to raise its forecast relative to the estimates released in November 2009. According to eMarketer projections, 85.5 million mobile users will access the web from their mobile devices in 2010, versus 83.5 million in the previous forecast.

Paul Budde on South Korea:

Up until 2007 South Koreans continued to shun mobile phones with PC-like functionality, unlike in the US and European markets where such devices were becoming increasingly popular. At that time there were only 10 smartphone models in South Korea, compared to the hundreds of phone models being introduced within the country on a regular basis. Some customers were turning away from smartphones because they were bulky, expensive and also had limited Internet connectivity.

Into 2010 a shift was underway in South Korean consumer’s perception of smartphones, perhaps enticed by the applications offered through the iPhone. South Korean manufacturers ramped up their production of smartphones to account for around 50% of all production.

If you’re thinking “mobile marketing isn’t relevant to my business” then you are dead wrong. If you’re dealing with anyone that might potentially check their email from their phone then mobile marketing is important to you. Today, almost everyone deals with clients that use BlackBerrys, iPhones or any other type of mobile that lets them easily access their email. Some people have been booking a third seat at a restaurant for their partners BlackBerry.

You must make sure these people can read your email on their phone.

Put yourself in the mind of someone reading your email from their phone. They’re either sitting on public transport, rushing between meetings or out and about. They need to be able to quickly digest whatever it is you send them.

Here are X tips to make sure the emails you send are mobile friendly:

1. 1. Keep your emails brief and clear. This should go without saying but becomes even more important if someone is reading your email from their mobile.
2. Resize your images to be no more than 300 pixels wide. This is slightly smaller than the width of the iPhone. Doing this means the reader doesn’t need to zoom in or out.
3. Check your signature shows up nicely on a mobile. Send an email to yourself, friends or colleagues and see how it looks. You may want to do a bit of tweaking.
4. Keep paragraphs short. On your laptop or computer a paragraph can be many sentences long. On the mobile a 3 or 4 sentence paragraph can mean A LOT of scrolling. By breaking your sentences up you make your email easier to skim and thus easier for a mobile reader to digest.

Test it out yourself. Send a few emails you would usually send or are about to send to yourself instead of the outside world. Try and read that email from your mobile while putting yourself in your reader’s mind (they might be waiting for a bus that is just about to pull up). Would you be able to quickly understand the emails contents?

Android users will surpass iPhone users by the end of 2010, according to statistics collected by Google’s Admob ad network, said Admob Team Manager Brendon Kraham. This is despite the fact that the data usage and number of apps on iPhone (and iPod Touch) far exceed those on Android.

You can read more over at MobileBeat.

One of the findings that struck me the most is:

It turns out that the prime time for mobile browsing in every country was at night, from 8 p.m. to midnight. This holds true for all the countries in the top 10, with the real variation coming at other times of the day.

My guess at why this is the case would be entirely based on what I do. I sit down at night and flick through my Google Reader feeds or other sites. I don’t really get the chance to do this during the day. Whilst I don’t think the majority of the mobile internet population is flicking through Google Reader, I imagine they still just want to flick through the internet and at night is when they get the time to.

• Apple claims that cumulative app revenue has reached $1,4bn by June 2010. This is based on 5bn downloads (free and paid)
• Several reports have pinned the number of paid apps to be about 73-77% of the total. At the moment, there are 225.000 apps in total, which at 73% gives 164.250 paid apps.
• The average revenue is roughly then 1.4bn/164.000 less Apple’s 30% cut, which means developers earned on average $6.100/app over a 2 year period, or $3.050 per year/app.
• However, average is not a relevant measure, because it is skewed as the tail of apps is long. There are a few apps who make the majority of money, so the relevant number is the median, where 50% make more, and 50% make less
• The average price for an app, based on a number of reports, is roughtly about $1.95/app, which puts the number of paid apps downloads to about 733 million, or 15% of the total number of downloads.
• SuperCollider Blog reported that half of all paid apps have less than 1000 downloads, say 999. At $1.95, that means the median revenue over two years is $1363, or $682 for one year, i.e. app $ 700 (see SuperColliders post on the economics of branded apps for more).

It is taken from a comprehensive analysis of iPhone App economics.

You really need to decide on what your goals are. Free apps are generally downloaded more than paid apps and thus have a greater reach. Advertising on your free apps can be a better option than charging for your app in terms of revenue generated. That said, charging for an app has seen some great successes.

Checkout one of my old posts: Brand Marketers: Don’t Sell Your iPhone App! If you’ve found this of interest.

You can read more about it on diji and MediaPost. For a detailed analysis of what they did wrong take a look at Forrester.