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According to new statistics from analytics firm Flurry, the average mobile user now spends 9% more time using mobile apps than the Internet. That's 81 minutes per day for mobile apps versus 74 minutes per day spent surfing the Web (both desktop and mobile). But mobile apps haven't always been more popular than the Web, says Flurry. Only last year, these positions were reversed, with users spending 43 minutes on apps versus 64 minutes on the Web.

Social media use leads to higher satisfaction among owners of smartphones and traditional mobile phones, according to a new report from J.D. Power and Associates. Smartphone owners who use their device to access social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, have satisfaction averages of 783 on a 1,000-point scale, nearly 22 points higher than smartphone who rarely access social media sites on their device. Currently, more than half of smartphone owners users their device to access social media sites via the mobile Web or mobile applications. While rates of mobile social media site usage are not nearly as high among owners of traditional mobile phones (9%, on average), satisfaction among traditional handset owners who use their device for social media is notably higher than that of traditional handset owners who don't access social media (754 vs. 696).

Walmart has purchased Small Society, a Portland-based mobile developer that's built apps for Starbucks, Amazon, Whole Foods, ZipCar, the Democratic National Committee, and others. Financial terms were not disclosed in an announcement on the retail giant's @WalmartLabs blog earlier today. Small Society's team will join an existing @WalmartLabs location in Oregon, according to the post. Launched in 2011, @WalmartLabs is designed to create technologies that propel the multi-channel brand as a social-mobile commerce player in the years to come. The company also appears to be mounting an agency-like infrastructure that could bypass vendors, keeping some digital marketing development in-house at the Bentonville, AR-based big box merchandiser.

Although it's difficult to predict what the future Internet will look like, it's probably safe to say that certain trends we've seen during the past decade will continue. This means that the Internet will become further integrated into our daily lives, becoming more ubiquitous, available, autonomous, and mobile. The engineers who are guiding the Internet in this direction are doing so by developing mobile agents, which are pieces of software that can autonomously migrate from one computer to another and interact with each other.

How important is Twitter in the political revolutions sweeping the Middle East? That was the topic of discussion on stage at the CTIA mobile and wireless convention today in Orlando, Florida and two very different, very strong opinions were voiced. "I don't think anyone in their right mind would say that sending a tweet is the equivalent of activism," said Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, "but it's another tool people can use." Kenneth Roth, executive director of of Human Rights Watch, one of the world's most respected human rights organization, framed things very differently though. He said on stage (above) that mobile technology in general would make it impossible today for something like Nazi Germany to unfold again the way it did historically.

About 20% of information workers report that they have conducted work related activities from a mobile device while driving. That's just one of the findings reported in a Unisys and IDC survey on the consumerization of the enterprise released today. The survey has a number of expected findings - employees are using their own devices for work, IT sees mobile support as a priority, etc. But the survey also puts some numbers on the current "always on" nature of work in the post-PC era.

Mobile quiz startup Qrank will announce next week that it has raised a seed round of funding, including an investment from early Twitter VP of Product Jason Goldman. Qrank is building out a platform that will let any organization with a backlog of content use it to create smart, fast-paced mobile trivia games. The games incorporate social networks, location, chat and other social features. It sounds awesome. Goldman is one of five investors in a convertible note of $350,000, ReadWriteWeb has learned and the company has confirmed. The company will use the funding to build a self-service platform, acquire more high-profile customers and complete an analytics dashboard. The existing consumer app gets high marks for responsiveness and user engagement.

"Focus groups can only tell you so much. Companies in the mobile business also need to know the right problems to solve, which involves understanding people's implicit needs and unknown desires. Ellen Isaacs, a user experience designer and ethnographer for PARC, explains the benefits of using ethnography to develop better mobile products."

"GIVEN the widespread adoption of smartphones, text messaging, video calling and social media, today's professionals mean it when they brag about staying connected to work 24/7." Too much connectivity can damage the quality of one's work, says Robert Sutton, author of "Good Boss, Bad Boss" and a professor at Stanford. Because of devices, he says, 'nobody seems to actually pay full attention; everybody is doing a worse job because they are doing more things." Mobile devices and social media, he says, "make us a little more oblivious, a little more incompetent." Just recall those pilots who overshot their destination two years ago because they were using computers, he adds.

According to a new report from Forrester, 62% of information workers in North America and Europe work remotely. The report says that many clients are approaching the firm for insight on creating best practices for remote, mobile workplaces assuming these changes are part of the remote future when in reality the change is already well underway. Previously, we looked at some of Forrester's research indicating that as much as 18% of the workforce used their personal smartphones for work, whether they were allowed to or not. That research showed only 29% of workers polled did work outside the office.

Walmart, the world's largest retailer, embraces social, mobile, and the startup spirit to compete against Amazon. Will it be enough?

Over the last 18 months, digital technologies - including mobile, analytics, big data, social and cloud - have reached a tipping point with business executives. Analysts said there is no choice but to increase technology's potential in the enterprise, and this means evolving IT's strategies, priorities and plans beyond tending to the usual concerns as CIOs expect their 2013 IT budgets to be essentially flat for fifth straight year.

The constant stream of information we get through mobile and hand-held devices is changing the way we think. Matt Richtel, a technology writer for The New York Times, explains how the use of digital technology is altering our brains -- and how retreating

This is worth reading and thinking about on both a governmental and at an organizational level. As elements in a system become more interdependent, and as the speed and scale of financial, informational, contractual, physical transactions between the elements of a system increase, the system can become more prone to big shocks from relatively small disruptions.  If Churchill said in the age of radio that "..A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on" what would he have said about organizations in the age of mobile devices, Twitter and YouTube?

The increasing use of text-messaging by teens - and increasingly often, by younger children - has given some people cause for concern. They argue that the abbreviations used in texting are detrimental to literacy development. Spelling, grammar, phrasing - these are all somehow poised to suffer, critics of texting contend, because of the use of shortened words and sentences. Soon, they predict, students' essays will be filled with LOLs and L8Rs. But a new study from Coventry University finds no evidence that having access to mobile phones harms children's literacy skills. In fact, the research suggests that texting abbreviations or "textisms" may actually aid reading, writing, and spelling skills.

Copycense points us to the bizarre news that the Massachussetts state legislature has decided to ban Twitter from office computers. While Facebook is still allowed, and officials can still tweet via their mobile phones, it's banned on computers. The Legislative Information Services dept is claiming that it's because Twitter is "vulnerable to viruses," but that's fairly bizarre reasoning. Twitter itself is not prone to viruses. Some users may post links to viruses, but that's true on Facebook as well. Besides blocking all of Twitter seems like a sledgehammer approach.

The same surveys that show CEOs' ideas of successful business strategies also show that they view the environment of the business, not the business itself, as the source of the greatest business risk - because it keeps changing faster and faster. As it does, customer needs and wants will inevitably do so as well, and probably faster and faster. Your business intelligence that analyzes these needs and wants must be open to the customer's indication of those changes - which often show up as information in an Other Category. And if you want to hug the customer closer, you need to ensure that the customer's changes result in the customer finding you to be an even better fit for purpose, and thus hugging you better. To do this, pick business intelligence solutions that will continue to handle the Other Categories of the future. Your customers may well hug you for it.