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"Flurry stacked up time spent with mobile apps next to the web and TV. Although it didn't take into account multitasking-which research shows is very common among mobile app users-Flurry findings indicated that US consumers spent more time in apps than on the web. And their time spent with mobile apps (127 minutes) was nipping at the heels of their time spent watching TV (168 minutes). Flurry broke down mobile app usage into categories, and found that mobile gaming led the charge, accounting for 43% of the time spent with mobile apps worldwide. Social networking came in second, accounting for 26% of consumers' time, and entertainment and utility followed, each with 10%."

"predicts mobile games could drive the whole game software industry's revenues to $100 billion by 2017, making it one of the most lucrative sectors for entertainment and software. He said the mobile and online game sectors could grow at a compound annual growth rate of 23.6 percent to $60 billion by 2017."

Free-to-play games are taking off in mobile. In those games, users play for free and pay real money for virtual goods, such as the virtual dresses that CrowdStar sells in its It Girl game on Facebook. In social games on networks such as Facebook, virtual goods revenue is expected to be $2.9 billion in 2012. That means that mobile is catching up at a pretty good clip and it explains why so many startups are diving into mobile games.

"Steve Yankovich, eBay's VP of mobile, said the average transaction on eBay's mobile apps runs between $30 and $45, in contrast to companies that sell 99-cent mobile games or virtual goods. On the high end, he notes that more than 9,000 cars are sold every week through the app, some of which are priced above $100,000."

"There are 211.5 million people playing games in the United States, a loss of 12 million players (5 percent) from 2011's numbers, the NPD reports. Not all of the gaming categories lost players, however: Mobile gamers rose 9 percentage points to take 22 percent, and digital gamers gained 4 percentage points to 16 percent. This makes mobile gamers the largest audience segment, surpassing core gamers, which held the top spot in 2011. The remaining categories - core, family and kid, light PC, and avid PC gamers - lost 17.4 million people this year. This is a "slight decline," the NPD says."

Mobile games may endanger big console and PC gameas, because they are drawing lots of hardcore gamers and attention and money.

Opinion piece on the impact that mobile gaming will have on the console gaming industry at large.

Of note: 80% of ppl 18-49 play mobile games, compared to 50% playing console games. Also, the average mobile player is 28 yrs, compared to 34 for the avg console gamer.

This game first became popular on Facebook, and the game is built with Flash. Moving to mobile native apps is not hard from there, because Flash lets you then re-package the same game for iOS and Android with only minor changes required. Advergaming is a product I sincerely wish Moxie would offer to their clients. We still have considerable expertise in building Flash games and content.

"Ingress, the Alternate/Augmented Reality (AR) game from Google's Niantic Labs, is a major evolution of mobile gaming. Apparently, it's also a good way to get arrested. According to a post on Reddit (I know, I know - but stay with me on this), an Ingress player in Ohio was detained by police for his in-game actions. Specifically, he was "hacking a portal" near a police station. His phone had technical difficulties, which led him to linger by the portal/police station for a bit, catching the eye of local law enforcement and leading to the detention. After the original post, other Ingress players responded with similar stories. One aroused suspicions by wandering around an empty parking lot at night. Another, trying to hack a portal next to an air traffic control station, had to run from the local sheriff. A third was called in for questioning after hacking a portal outside of a "high-traffic drug area.""

AFK's app makes it possible for gamers to send in-game messages to friends from their mobile phones. Basically, though online games typically have to be accessed from a laptop/desktop, the AFK app makes the chat functions of games compeltely mobile. The company is predicting with the rise of app's like World of Warcraft's Auction House for iPhone, MMOs will look for new ways to detach functions from the gaming environment so users can have access from anywhere. Interesting marketing opportunity: where in-game advertising may have been awkward, advertising on top of game services (such as chat) may be more palatable.

According to Nielsen's figures, 93 percent of those who have downloaded apps in the last 30 days say that they would be willing to pay for games; compare that to news, at 76 percent. Overall, a whopping 64 percent of downloaders said they had downloaded a game-showing how, while games can be considered niche content by some, they are, at the end of the day, more mainstream than even weather apps:

"News and magazine apps are a segment where the momentum is likely to shift towards the Web within the next two to three years," noted senior analyst Aapo Markkanen. "Since news and media content already account for a large share of smartphone usage and are likely to play an even bigger role in later adopters' usage, changes in this segment alone will make subscribers on average download fewer native apps." The next wave of smartphone owners in mature markets like the U.S., Western Europe and Asia will download fewer apps than the first one-third of mobile consumers who bought smartphones, according to the report on mobile app storefronts. At the same time, ABI expects that in the games and utilities categories, the mobile Web will probably never catch up with native apps, due to the difficulty in matching the user experience. ABI's outlook on the future of apps appears at odds with a separate report released Tuesday by Strategy Analytics, which maintains that the emergence of HTML5 won't put much of a dent in the app economy. Instead, it predicts the Web programming language will lead to the spread of hybrid apps that combine HTML5 with native APIs (application programming interface) to harness the best of native and open standards.

HTML5 has been tipped to be a game-changer, with some predictiving it will take over most mobile platforms. But what is its real impact to the mobile industry?

mobile game that enters users in for a chance to win swarovski prizes.

"Facebook is testing a new ad unit that places game suggestions directly into the notifications feeds of mobile users"

rent mobile game for one day then buy it if you want to keep it

It's like Netflix for mobile games. 

myYearbook buying up a few Android apps to build its mobile presence. One-third of the site's traffic is coming from mobile. 74% of myY users say they use it to meet new people, 50% say flirting, and 40% say to play games. 400-percent increase in mobile ad impressions over the last year.