The average revenue generated by each mobile phone user (ARPU) dropped between 6% and 9% globally last year, according to a new report from ABI Research. The company's calculations compare Q3 2009 with Q3 2008.

In Europe, ARPU fell by between 5% and 8% (although Austria's ARPU shrunk by over 9%) – and in India ARPU dropped by over 10% year-on-year as new operators and the introduction of per-second billing put pressure on voice revenues. However, ABI Research estimates that ARPU decline is likely to flatten out in Europe and North America as mobile data revenue increasingly replaces falling voice revenue.

Anthony Keyworth, Orange UK’s Director of Product Marketing, has been gazing into his crystal ball to predict which business-focussed mobile applications could change the ways we work in the next five years.

His top four future developments, published under the heading “The next frontier for mobile business applications”, are:

Research company comScore has published a study that looks at social networking access via mobile web browsers. It's found that 30.8% of smartphone users in the USA accessed social networking sites via their mobile browser in January 2010, up from 22.5% year-on-year. Access to Facebook via a mobile browser has grown 112% in the past year, with Twitter experiencing a 347% jump.

In total, 11.1% of all US mobile phone users accessed a social networking site via their mobile browser, an increase of 4.6 percentage points from January 2009.

25.1 million mobile users accessed Facebook via their mobile browser in January 2010. MySpace attracted 11.4 million mobile users, while Twitter had 4.7 million mobile users in January. These figures are just calculated from mobile browsers and don't include almost 6 million mobile phone owners who access social networking exclusively through applications on their mobile phones.