A new report from Juniper Research has forecast that over 950 million mobile phone users will be using their handsets for mobile ticketing by 2018.

That’s more than double this year’s anticipated total of 458 million people worldwide, with most of the growth coming from transport-related services.

We're celebrating the seventh anniversary of The Fonecast this month with a handful of our favourite interviews from the early years.

You'll hear Ben Whitaker from Masabi, Truphone co-founder James Tagg, former Olympic athlete Steve Backley OBE and online banking pioneer Steve Townend.

Mark Bridge writes:

Farewell, ST-Ericsson. It didn’t bode well when CEO Didier Lamouche announced his planned departure a couple of weeks ago – and now both STMicroelectronics and Ericsson have confirmed they’ll be splitting the company between them before closing it down.

UK business Masabi, which has pioneered the introduction of mobile tickets for public transport, has secured $2.8 million (£1.8 million) in funding from investment firms Fontinalis Partners, MMC Ventures and m8 Capital.

The money will be used to accelerate the roll-out of mobile tickets in the USA following the company’s successful implementation of m-tickets for rail and ferry services in Boston.

UK-based m-ticketing technology specialist Masabi has demonstrated a proof-of-concept Android application that can read and display the contents of ITSO-based transport ticketing smart cards. ITSO is the UK government-chosen standard for smart ticketing that’s already being used by transport operators including Go-Ahead, Stagecoach and Newport Transport as well as in a number of regional schemes.

Masabi’s Smart Card Buddy Beta has been developed by the company’s Beta Labs programme and can be downloaded from the Google Play app store.