The mobile phone segment is very competitive with every quarter bringing some sort of a surprise. Back in May this year, I had written about an IDC report that had listed the world’s five largest mobile phone manufacturers. Nokia, quite unsurprisingly, had the top slot while Research In Motion and Sony Ericsson had their spots in the top five secured.

Just a few months and a few launches later, there seems to be a complete revamp of the last three positions. Thanks to a robust growth in sales despite a number of reported bugs, Apple has notced a spot in the top five. LG has had a lackluster period and has seen the number of units sold drop. Sony Ericsson is out of the top five.

Here is the latest top five list along with the units sold in the quarter Q3 2010. The corresponding worldwide market share is in the brackets.

1. Nokia : 110.4 million (32.4%)
2. Samsung : 71.4 million (21.0%)
3. LG Electronics : 28.4 million (8.3%)
4. Apple : 14.1 million (4.1%)
5. RIM : 12.4 million (3.6%)
Others : 103.8 million (30.5%)
Total : 340.5 million (100%)

What’s your favorite browser? I changed from Firefox to Chrome over a year back and it looks like there were several people like me. The latest report from Comscore shows that Google Chrome has grown by over 210% in the year between Sep ’09 and Sep ’10. What’s more interesting is the fact that Internet Explorer, for the first time ever in the past decade, has falled below the 50% market share level.

Here is how the current web browser market share numbers stand. The corresponding number for September 2009 is offered alongside within brackets.

Internet Explorer : 49.9% (58.4%)
Mozilla Firefox : 31.5% (31.3%)
Google Chrome : 11.5% (3.7%)
Safari : 4.4% (3.3%)
Opera : 2.0% (2.6%)
Others : 0.6% (0.7%)

Mozilla Firefox has had an absolutely flat year. Do you see any reason behind this?

An important part of social media marketing is the way marketers exploit the retweeting functionality on Twitter. This is because marketing campaigns over Twitter or any other social medium are pretty much dependent on how viral the message spread and on Twitter, retweets enable users to spread any message to their own followers setting up the virality in motion.

Sysomos has conducted a study of retweets the crux of which is presented below. If you are a social media marketer, you can compare your own results with the average numbers presented here to analyze the success of your social engagement.

Number of tweets that are retweeted : 6%

Number of retweets in

the first hour : 92.4%
the second hour : 1.63%
the third hour : 0.94%

Of course your results are bound to be a lot different from the average results since messages from corporate accounts tend to have a lot more retweet potential. Nevertheless, this is a study, the results of which are pretty interesting.

Smartphone adoption is growing and so is the adoption of newer smartphone platforms like iOS and Android. Not surprisingly, older platforms like Symbian and Windows Mobile are not as popular as they once were, though in market share terms, they still rule the roost. Comscore has published their results (July 2010) for the smartphone platform market share study and this is how the numbers stack up. The numbers in brackets show the change in percentage points since July 2009

Symbian : 54.4% (-14.4)
Apple : 19.2% (9)
Microsoft : 11.6% (-2.3)
RIM : 8.0% (1.6)
Google : 6.1% (5.6)

Smartphone adoption in the EU5 (U.K., France, Germany, Spain, Italy) has grown 41 percent in the past year to 60.8 million subscribers. Currently, more than one out of every two smartphones is a Nokia manufactured device, although Nokia accounted for more than two out of every three smartphones a year ago.

In any discussion about the growth and usage of text messaging, it is always the teenage population that dominate the discussions. However, according to a recent study by Pew Internet, the adults are not too distant either. The study found that close to 8% of adult users sent more than 100 text messages on any average day. More than a quarter of adults users in fact sent more than 20 text messages in a day.

However teenagers are still some way ahead. The Pew Internet study reports that 29% of teenagers send more than 100 text messages in a day and close to half the teens send more than 50 SMS messages on an average day.

Here is how the numbers spread out.

Adults
Zero : 8%
1-10 : 51%
11-20 : 13%
21-50 : 13%
51-100 : 7%
101+ : 8%

Teenagers
Zero : 2%
1-10 : 22%
11-20 : 11%
21-50 : 18%
51-100 : 18%
101+ : 29%

Apple and Google have been fighting a lot over numbers of late. Steve Jobs had recently mocked Google’s claims of activating over 200,000 devices everyday by claiming that Apple was a notch higher – activating 230,000 devices. As both the companies have clarified, this number does not include OS upgrades and is hence a likely indicator for the number of devices sold.

Looking at these numbers from the outset though, it may seem like these are the two companies at the forefront of smartphone adoption. But not so. Nokia has just unveiled their own numbers that show the gap that exists between a leader like Nokia and the other smartphone makers. Do note that this list does not account the number of Blackberry and Windows Mobile phones sold and so they are also likely to compete for the top spots.

Number of smartphones sold worldwide everyday

Nokia : 260,000
Android : 200,000
iPhone : 80,000

Interesting to note that a majority of Apple’s iOS sales come from the sale of iPod Touch and not the iPhone (or iPad, for that matter). The Android numbers come from devices sold by a number of manufacturers and still Nokia manages to outnumber them all.

British Petroleum deals with products that really don’t need to be advertised on Google. At least that used to be the thinking of the marketing team at the company till the great oil leak happened. However that changed in June this year during the height of the oil crisis when the company went on a rampage taking its message through the online medium to its customers. According to a report on the Adage, the amount spent on Google Adwords during the crisis equaled a staggering $3.6 million. That takes BP to the top ten list of brands advertising on Google Adwords in USA – a list that is topped by AT&T Mobility.

Here are the top ten advertisers on Google Adwords for the month of June 2010

1. AT&T Mobility : $8.08 million
2. Apollo Group : $6.67 million
3. Expedia : $5.95 million
4. Amazon : $5.85 million
5. eBay : $4.25 million
6. BP Corporation : $3.59 million
7. Hotels.com : $3.30 million
8. JC Penney : $2.46 million
9. Living Social : $2.29 million
10. ADT Security : $2.19 million

It has been quite a while since I wrote about the social networking space in India. Last time I wrote about this was with respect to the December 2008 numbers when Orkut was a clear leader that had been fighting a new kid on the block; Facebook. Back then, Orkut had 12.8 million monthly visits compared to Facebook’s 4 million. Now a year and a half later, the tide has finally shifted in favor of Facebook. The world’s largest social network has not spared India and has taken over Orkut as the most popular network. According to the Comscore metrics, Facebook now has over 20.8 million monthly visits from India – marginally above Orkut’s 19.8 million.

Here are the top ten social networks in India in terms of uniques in July 2010 according to the Comscore metrics.

1. Facebook : 20.87 million
2. Orkut : 19.87 million
3. BharatStudent : 4.32 million
4. Yahoo Pulse : 3.5 million
5. Twitter : 3.34 million
6. LinkedIn : 3.26 million
7. Zedge : 3.2 million
8. Ibibo : 2.96 million
9. Yahoo Buzz : 1.8 million
10. Shtyle : 1.55 million

An article I wrote back in October 2007 – Will Facebook overtake Orkut in India makes for a good read about a time when Facebook was the 16th most popular site in India.

The internet is slowly getting mobile. Wired.com had an article recently that proclaimed that the web was dead and the future was in the mobile apps. So, given such discussions, it is fair to assume that mobile phones are going to be a very significant area of marketing in the years to come. Consequently, mobile advertising is picking up too and jargons like CTR (Click through rate) that used to be limited to the web is now being used for the mobile platform as well.

So which platform offers the best returns for the advertiser? In a study of iPhone, iPad and Android plaforms, Chitika found that Android users were the most heavy ad-clickers. However, is this a positive thing? Some observers like Om Malik point out that the higher click-throughs on Android could stem from the fact that the older versions like 1.5 and 1.6 had clunkier user interfaces that may have confused the user with respect to differentiating ads from actual content. While that is plausible, it’s not entirely convincing. Here are the CTRs measured over the three platforms

iPhone : 0.654%
iPad : 1.01%
Android : 1.187%

Why do you think CTRs on Android phones are better?

How much spending goes online when you take away the travel bookings part? According to a study conducted by Comscore, the growth of retail eCommerce spending that excludes travel-bookings has been slowing down over the years. This is how the growth has been – In the second quarter of 2007, retail eCommerce grew 23% year-over-year. This number came down to 13% by Q2 2008. Thanks to recession, there was a fall in the spending numbers in 2009 with Q2 of that year registering a fall of 1% YoY. Now, finally, there has been growth in retail ecommerce spending this year. However, the growth percentage is not as splendid as it once was at 9%.

Here is the retail eCommerce spending in absolute value over the past few years.

Q2 2007 : $27.97 billion
Q2 2008 : $30.58 billion
Q2 2009 : $30.17 billion
Q2 2010 : $32.94 billion