Here are a few of the top stories in which eMarketer data and analysis were featured during the past week or so:

The Wall Street Journal – Yahoo’s Board Games Risk Shareholder War
Silver Lake may be the yin to Yahoo’s Jerry Yang, but shareholders should at least get a say in the matter. The Internet giant is not-so-giant anymore. Its business, not to mention its stock, have been depressed for years as rivals Facebook and Google have leaped ahead in online advertising. Read more.

The Wall Street Journal – The $100 Billion Question That Looms for Facebook Fans
As initial valuations go, $100 billion is a big number to ask. But at least Facebook has a business model to buy into. Read more.

The New York Times – ‘Ford’ of Tech Companies, AOL, Must Keep Innovating, C.E.O. Says
Analysts at the research firm eMarketer estimated that AOL’s portion of display revenue in the United States would decline to 4.2 percent this year, from 4.8 percent in 2010. At the same time, AOL subscriptions have sagged. Read more.

Agence France Presse – “Cyber Monday” sizzles with US online shopping
“Overall, it is certainly shaping up to be a good season,” said eMarketer principal analyst Jeffrey Grau. “E-commerce is sort of reshaping the holiday shopping landscape.” Read more.

Associated Press – Twitter simplifies in bid to engage more users
The research firm eMarketer estimates that Twitter’s ad revenue will approach $140 million this year and rise to $260 million next year. As a privately held company, Twitter doesn’t disclose its revenue. Read more.

Reuters – Amazon’s advertising push gains steam
Amazon.com Inc is known as the world’s largest online retailer, but the company is aggressively expanding in online advertising, putting it on course for a clash with Google Inc, the leader in the space. Read more.

Bloomberg – Google’s AdMeld Deal to Clear U.S. Antitrust
Google Inc.’s $400 million acquisition of AdMeld Inc. has been recommended for antitrust approval by U.S. Justice Department staff attorneys, two people familiar with the matter said. Read more.

Advertising Age – Twitter Launches Self-Serve Ad Platform With Small Group
Twitter began the roll-out of its long-awaited self-serve ad platform with electronic payments enabled — a cornerstone of its revenue model — in mid-November with a group of fewer than 20 advertisers. Read more.

MediaPost – M-Commerce To Hit $6.7B In 2011
Mobile commerce will nearly double to $6.7 billion this year — fueled by rising smartphone adoption and growing mobile Web use, according to a new eMarketer forecast. Read more.

2010 is proving to be the first year for widespread mobile shopping. Consumers in greater numbers are using their mobile devices to assist in in-store shopping, from browsing retailer websites to scanning barcodes to get product and price comparison information to checking in to search for deals. Not for nothing is Google considering paying up to $6 billion to acquire Groupon.

Some recent headlines attest to this trend in mobile-enabled commerce:

• As my colleague Jeffrey Grau noted in a recent post, IBM’s Coremetrics unit reported that consumers embraced mobile shopping with a fervor not seen in previous years. On Black Friday, 5.6 % of people logged onto a retailer’s site using a mobile device, a jump of 26.7% compared to the prior Friday. Following Cyber Monday, Coremetrics announced (detailed report here) that 3.9% of people visited a retailer’s site using a mobile device.

• Scanbuy, a provider of mobile barcode solutions, saw a 30% year-over-year jump in barcode scans over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend. Black Friday scanning activity alone was 20 times the daily average, Scanbuy claims.

• But it was PayPal that reported the most impressive number. The eBay-owned payment service trumpeted a 310% year-over-year increase in mobile shopping.

As impressive as these developments are, it’s on the payments side that mobile still has the farthest to come. With some exception, most consumers are not yet using their devices to complete their purchases. eBay is the exception that proves the rule, if only because it is so far out in front of every other company aside from Amazon in the volume and revenues it generates from mobile. eBay projects that it will sell $1.5 billion in goods via mobile devices in 2010, more than double the gross merchandise value it saw in 2009.

PayPal is a big driver of eBay’s mobile success. The New York Times reported that it is on pace to handle upwards of $700 million in mobile transactions this year. That sounds like a big number, but according to the Times, it’s “less than 1% of the money processed through PayPal.”

On the other hand, it’s a big enough number to be threatening to a lot of the entrenched players in the payments space, mobile or otherwise. That includes the carriers as well as credit card companies, all of whom fear being cut out of the loop, particularly at a time when mobile transaction volumes are on a steep upswing.

Not surprisingly, then, there are many new mobile payment initiatives emerging. Just prior to the Thanksgiving holiday, Verizon Wireless, AT&T and T-Mobile announced they were joining together to form Isis, a system that will use near-field communication (NFC) to facilitate contactless payments (as well as offering credit, debit, prepaid and a potential host of other services). As Silicon Alley Insider noted, the joint venture is a big deal “because getting the carriers to agree on anything is generally very hard to do.”

However, uniting a trio of fierce competitors is only the first hurdle. Driving adoption and managing the differing needs of other participants in the banking and payments value chain are formidable challenges as well. The three carrier partners in Isis, with more 200 million subscribers between them, do have the advantage of a built-in scale and many established mechanisms for marketing the payment solution to subscribers. On the other hand, as the always astute Greg Sterling observed, consumers do not have a lot of trust in the carriers, which may work against uptake of a carrier-sponsored solution.

As I noted in my May 2010 report, “Mobile Banking: Financial Services Firms Look to Cash In” (full report available for Total Access subscribers only), much of the excitement and innovation in the financial services space is being driven by the desire to solve the mobile payments challenge. Consumer demand is there and an effective system would certainly help to encourage more sophisticated forms of mobile commerce. Whether Isis will emerge as a contender remains to be seen.

The bottom line: the mobile payments space need not be a winner-take-all scenario. Whichever service or services that offer security, convenience and scale have a strong change for success.

It’s certainly a big piece. Barcode scanners are not widely adopted in the US – yet – but consumer awareness is rising fast. The popularity of the RedLaser iPhone app, which topped five million downloads earlier this month, is a sign of what’s to come. To keep pace, Amazon just added scanning capability to its iPhone app.

As my colleague Jeff Grau noted in his June 2010 “Mobile Shopping from In-Store: A Potential Game Changer” report (full version available here to Total Access clients only), shoppers who scan barcodes to compare prices, locate product reviews and create wish lists are still in the minority. Not surprisingly, Generation Y shoppers, who were raised on the internet and view their mobile devices as an extension of themselves, are the early adopters. They are the ones pushing retailers to offer a more interactive in-store shopping experience.

But clearly, they aren’t the only ones. According to the September 2010 “ScanLife Mobile Barcode Trend Report” from Scanbuy, a provider of mobile barcode solutions, traffic generated from scans has climbed 700% since January 2010.

Price comparison is a key driver of this increase in scanning. In a survey conducted by BuzzBack Market Research for NCR, 43% of consumers in nine major markets, including the US, said they view barcode scanning to find the best prices as an important way to give them more control over the shopping experience.

With its competitive pricing, efficient service and extremely well optimized product catalog, Amazon benefits directly from the steep increase in barcode scanning activity. Adding the capability to its own app only increases Amazon’s competitive advantage, not just over brick-and-mortar retailers but other online merchants as well. As ReadWriteWeb put it succinctly:

With Amazon’s new barcode-scanning technology, it’s not so much of a global price comparison engine but one that answers the simple question: “I wonder if this is cheaper on Amazon?”

Integrating the scanning capability is a smart move for Amazon because it removes friction from the buying process and enables interested consumers to pull the trigger on a purchase right from within the app.

The takeaway: barcode scanning is slowly transforming the in-store shopping experience. But if Amazon has anything to say about it, barcode scanning will make the shopping and buying experience more mobile than ever.

While the buzz in 2009 was all about social networks as a function of the Web, in 2010, marketers’ attention will focus increasingly on the ways social networks are becoming the medium for communicating on mobile devices. Video is likely to play a key role as well, as mobile users are “socializing” video from their devices to a far greater extent than they are watching it.

I wrote about this phenomenon and other key trends in mobile marketing in my latest iMedia Connection column, which went live today. Following is a clip from the full article:

Consolidation among mobile ad networks is clearly lining up to be a major theme in the year ahead. Even so, achieving scale in display advertising on mobile devices is just one piece in a much larger puzzle — that of using mobile to showcase full-blown marketing and commerce experiences.

Marketers often talk glowingly about mobile’s flexibility and how effective it is at activating other media. However, mobile has traditionally been a less effective vehicle than other media for end-to-end consumer experiences. In order for mobile to reach mass adoption among marketers, the medium has to develop beyond its core strengths in communication and messaging.

Fortunately, startup activity is rife across many keys areas of the mobile sector, and the next 12 to 18 months should see many of the missing pieces fall into place. The continued fusion of mobile and social and the appetite for apps (among both consumers and brands) will facilitate more involved marketing experiences. In fact, location- and social-aware apps and utilities will be a key avenue for brands looking to engage consumers on the go.

Mobile advertising will likewise grow more sophisticated, with improved targeting capabilities and richer, more engaging options across multiple channels, from apps to browsers to SMS. Augmented reality (AR) seems destined to generate more ink than activity or revenue in 2010, given the limited number of mobile handsets that support it, but AR is worth keeping an eye on nonetheless because of what it portends for the future of mobile marketing. It represents an innovative way of creating a virtual overlay to the physical world by combining and maximizing on-board device features (e.g., camera, GPS, accelerometer, broadband connectivity).

With the rise in mobile broadband access and the proliferation of multimedia smartphones, video viewing (and consequently, video advertising) is set to become a more integral part of the mobile experience. Paid content models such as iTunes will continue to expand to mobile devices, but the growth in mobile web and application usage will also create opportunities for marketers to engage with viewers in both professional and user-generated video content.

The article takes a detailed look at different segments in the mobile marketing space and profiles a number of companies to watch, so be sure to read through to the end to get the complete picture.

The holiday season is upon us and consumers are busy in search of deals, both online and off. Not surprisingly, mobile devices figure to play a bigger role than ever this year in this process, much in the same way they are playing a bigger role in everything consumers do.

Amid a generally sunnier outlook for retail spending, Deloitte’s 24th annual holiday survey found that 19% of US consumers ages 18 and up plan to use their mobile devices to assist in their holiday shopping this year. That may not seem like significant percentage, but bear in mind it’s more than double the 9% who said they planned to use their phones in last year’s survey. And as with most mobile-related endeavors, age is a big factor: 39% of 18-to-29 year-olds said they expect their mobile devices to play a role in their shopping activities, double the rate among all adults.

Still, much of the mobile-driven retail activity will be research-oriented rather than direct m-commerce, according to Deloitte. Of the “mobile shoppers” the survey identified, 55% said they will use their mobile devices to find store locations, 45% to research prices, 40% to get product information and 31% to read product reviews. By contrast, just 25% indicated they would make purchases using their mobile devices, while 32% said they would use their phones to get discounts and coupons.

The interest in mobile coupons points a trend that will intensify for consumers and retailers alike in 2010, so the 2009 holiday season can be seen as the kickoff for tighter integration of mobile in the retail process. The Yankee Group predicts the number of mobile coupons redeemed in North America will increase eleven-fold from 2009 to 2010, while the value of mobile coupon transactions will soar from $5 million to $62 million, and continue growing from there. By 2014, Juniper Research forecasts that mobile coupons will generate nearly $6 billion worldwide in retail redemption value. Interest in mobile coupons is high (particularly so among higher-income shoppers), but most consumers expect them to be free, regardless of income.

Retailers and shoppers: what has your experience been this year with mobile?