Over the past 12 months, mobile access to the Internet nearly doubled to 8.5%, not counting tablets, according to data released this week by StatCounter, a Web analytics company.

BlackBerry Partners Fund, which invests in applications for the BlackBerry and other mobile devices, has come together with China Broadband Capital Partners to set up a US$100 million fund, called BlackBerry Partners Fund China, that will invest in mobile Internet and mobile cloud technologies in China.

Newcomers to the mobile-phone market are driving more wireless Web access at the expense of the phone makers that have been around for a while, according to a new report from AdMob.

Social networks such as Facebook and Twitter are responsible for the growth in the use of the mobile web, says CCS Insight.

Over 40 percent of mobile web traffic comes from Apple iPhone users, says AdMob.

While one of the fastest growing revenue segments for mobile operators is mobile internet, driven by access fees and data traffic, mobile user ARPUs (average revenue per user) dropped between 5 percent and 15 percent year-over-year in the fourth quarter of 2008 compared to the same period in 2007.

Perhaps pre-alpha was a bit too early for Mozilla to release its Fennec mobile browser for Windows Mobile.

After being plagued with project overruns and a scaling back of the final system, the US military's next generation satellite communications network is another step closer to reality, with completion of the payload module for the third and final Advanced Extremely High Frequency (EHF) satellite.