Donald Stuart, CEO of Brainstorm, explains why mobile operators are well placed to take advantage of the revenue streams opened up by location technologies.

The area of Location based services (LBS) has been getting a lot of attention of late, and it’s no wonder, Juniper Research has highlighted that the Mobile Context and Location Services market is expected to generate revenue of $43.4 billion by 2019, up from $12.2 billion in 2014.

A new research report from Berg Insight says the market for mobile machine-to-machine (M2M) communications has begun to move from the 2G to 3G and 4G technologies.

Although cellular M2M devices on HSPA and LTE networks are expected to account for under 20% of the global market by the end of 2014, they’re forecast to dominate with more than 50% by 2018. Meanwhile, shipments of 3G/4G M2M devices are expected to overtake 2G M2M in 2017.

The number of people using Windows-based smartphones in the UK is expected to overtake the number of BlackBerry users this year, according to a new report from digital marketing specialist eMarketer.

It anticipates the number of BlackBerry users dropping by 35.2% this year to 2.4 million, with an even steeper drop in 2015 to just 1.4 million users.

Ofcom has published research on mobile phone call quality from the ‘big four’ UK network operators.

It’s used data from mobile analytics specialist RootMetrics to better understand consumers’ experience of making phone calls on the EE, O2, Three and Vodafone networks.

A new quarterly report from ​ABI Research show that shipments of ‘forked’ Android smartphones - those that use the Android Open Source Project rather than Google’s own version of Android - accounted for 20% of the smartphone market in Q2 2014.

Shipments of AOSP smartphones increased by 20% from the previous quarter, while the total market grew by just 3%.