It’s the time of year when the mobile telecom industry does its best to forecast the trends of 2013.

ABI Research and Juniper Research have both published their predictions, with mobile data, device trends, retailing, operating systems and gaming all on the list.

Mark Bridge writes:

Last week I pointed out that picking the best bits from other people’s tech reviews didn’t look good when the full version was pretty uncomplimentary. And today I’ve discovered another mobile network guilty of tripping itself up with words.

Mobile banking has seen significant worldwide adoption in the last twelve months, according to a new report from global consultancy Bain & Company. Its Customer Loyalty in Retail Banking report notes that the highest mobile banking penetration was in South Korea, where 47% of respondents had interacted with mobile banking in the previous three months.

The highest frequency of using mobile banking was noticed in the USA, with survey respondents averaging 4.9 mobile transactions in the previous three months.

This week's podcast includes news of two more UK virtual networks, Nokia's property deal, a break-up for ST-Ericsson and Huawei's new partnership with Three.

We also look at WiFi hotspots in London taxis, Ofcom's research into customer service, pre-loaded security software on Android smartphones and a man whose iPhone may have cost him a job.

Machine-to-machine (M2M) communication is offering mobile networks an unrivalled opportunity to dramatically increase their connection figures. At the moment, over 100 million M2M-enabled devices - from vending machines to smoke alarms - are providing information automatically, with mobile networks carrying the majority of this traffic

Jürgen Hase, Vice President of the M2M Competence Center at Deutsche Telekom and Chairman of the M2M Alliance, offers his M2M predictions for 2013.