According to the Yankee Group, a full 27% of all apps downloaded in 2010 were of the paid variety. I’d imagine that a sizable proportion of these are in the $0.99 range, but that’s still a buck per download. The Yankee Group report goes on to predict that this number will rise to 32% by 2015 with the growth burgeoned by carrier billing.

Right now, you typically need to set up an iTunes account, a PayPal account, or provide credit card information if you want to download a paid app. In fact, in 2010, only 7% of paid apps were purchased via carrier billing. That proportion will apparently increase to 25% by 2015, making it so much easier to get yet another version of Angry Birds. It’ll likely be easier for app developers to make money too.

The biggest area for growth will be in the Asia-Pacific region. While 94% of app downloads were from the United States in 2008, that’s shrunk down to just a third. Today, almost half of all downloads are from places like Hong Kong and Seoul; Asia is huge and it’ll represent a sizable chunk of the estimated $36 billion to be spent on apps in 2015.

Who said you can’t make money a dollar at a time?

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With news of many new mobile payment services, faster networks and new features hitting us daily, it is no surprise that we are more connected than ever. And accompanying that global connection to society we have come to expect a certain level of convenience and quality. Yankee Group, a research firm from Boston, MA, has presented extensive research on the future of mobile usage and mobile transactions. Their research shows that at the conclusion of 2010, total value of global mobile transactions was at $162 billion, and they anticipate that it will be $984 billion by 2014. To supplement the research, Yankee Group conducted a consumer survey, which found results showing that, although mobile transactions are expected to increase drastically, less than 10 percent of consumers would be willing to pay extra or mobile transaction services such as mobile banking, mobile coupons and mobile payments.

“Every silver lining comes with a big, dark cloud and the explosion in mobile transactions is much the same,” said Nick Holland, senior analyst at Yankee Group. “Although mobile transaction service usage is increasing phenomenally, consumers show little interest in paying any additional fees for them. If banks, mobile operators, card networks and retailers want to tap mobile transactions as a revenue stream, they’ll need to come up with more creative schemes than per-transaction fees.”

Revenue and the opportunity for more money is always in the forefront of corporate decision makers, and this is an obvious possibility with such an explosion in transactions. Although at this point, with over 90 percent of consumers refusing to pay additional fees, attempting to exploit this opportunity could have major implications on the future of mobile transactions.

Yankee Group’s mobile transaction forecast tracks metrics on mobile banking, international and domestic remittances, contactless cards, mobile coupons and NFC communications. Other forecast findings include:

• Asia-Pacific overtakes EMEA as the mobile banking powerhouse: In 2010, EMEA leads all regions with 42 percent of worldwide active mobile banking users, followed by Asia-Pacific (38 percent), North America (16 percent) and Latin America (4 percent); but by 2014, Asia-Pacific leads with 54 percent, followed by EMEA (32 percent), North America (10 percent) and Latin America (4 percent).

• Mobile coupon usage explodes: The number of active mobile coupon users is expected to grow from 2.7 million in 2010 to nearly 35 million in 2014.

• Near field communications (NFC) takes off: The number of NFC-enabled phones will grow from just 834,000 in 2010 to 151 million in 2014, a CAGR of more than 300 percent. Similarly, the value of NFC-based transactions will explode from $27 million in 2010 to $40 billion in 2014.

[via Yankee Group]

The post Global Mobile Transactions To Reach $1 Trillion by 2014 appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

What’s that? You thought the Internet generation was only interested in tweets and YouTube videos? As it turns out we still read books, but we’ll be increasingly turning to e-books moving forward. In fact, a forecast is calling for some huge growth in the e-book market.

As it stands, global e-book reader sales were recorded at about $1.9 billion last year with a total of just under 11 million units sold. According to Yankee Group, those numbers will increase to $8.2 billion and nearly 72 million units, respectively, by 2014. That’s a lot of growth.

The forecast also calls for a worldwide doubling of the installed base of e-readers each year (up to 127 million by 2014), even faster adoption by the European market (143% growth each year, compared to 19% growth in smartphones), and reductions in the average e-reader price. Right now, the average e-reader is $182. They’re expecting that to drop to $114 by 2014.

Considering that you can already pick up something like the Kobo Reader for $100, you realize how far we’ve come from the initial $300+ price tags of the first Kindles. That said, tablets like the iPad weren’t supposed to replace e-readers… but they have been for many people. Is that the real wave of the future or will e-paper and e-ink still have teeth? I don’t read a lot of books, but I am getting more and more tempted to get one of these things.

[Yankee Group]

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Yankee Group has released the first-ever global tablet forecast, predicting last year’s $16-billion tablet market will continue to outpace HDTVs, handheld game consoles and mp3 players in sales of over $46 billion by 2014.

That’s even taking into account the prediction that tablet prices will fall to half over the next four years, averaging $237 in 2015.

The American think-tank figures sales will remain strongest in North America for a while (37 per cent of the market in 2010) before sales in the Asia-Pacific region blow past, reaching 58 per cent of the market by 2014.

The company will be releasing a full report this week, titled “2011 US Tablet Forecast: A Rising Tide Lifts All Boats.”

The Boston-based technology researcher Sarah Rotman Epps of Forrester Research says the tablet market is growing rapidly. Not only are we seeing dozens of new tablets hit the market at CES, these new devices are expected to reach 10.3 million U.S. consumers this year alone and 82 million in 2015.

“When Apple’s iPad first debuted, we saw the device as a game-changer but were too conservative with our forecast. Since then, we’ve fielded additional consumer surveys and a SMB and enterprise survey, conducted additional supply-side research, and seen more sales numbers from Apple,” Rotman Epps wrote.

[Yankee Group, Forrester]

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