A new report from IT research company Gartner forecasts a growth in mobile advertising spending this year, with the total global spend increasing to $18.0 billion (£10.9 billion) from last year’s estimated $13.1 billion total.

That growth is expected to continue for the next few years, with the mobile ad market being worth $41.9 billion (£25.4 billion) by 2017.

Analyst firm Ovum has published its mobile payment and mobile advertising predictions for this year.

Ovum expects continued technology and service innovation, notably around location-based applications, in the mobile payments space in 2014. However, there will be increasing complexity within the mobile payments ecosystem this year, and on-going challenges around the business model for digital wallet services.

Continental, the automotive supplier best known for its brakes and tyres, has announced a new project with the Nokia HERE mapping and location business.

It follows an announcement in September last year, when HERE partnered with Continental Corporation, Magneti Marelli and Mercedes-Benz.

A new research report from Berg Insight expects shipments of consumer-focussed M2M devices to increase from 5.3 million worldwide last year to 13.8 million in 2017. That’s a compound annual growth rate of 21.1%.

It notes that eBook readers and personal navigation devices are the most common consumer M2M devices.

The market for portable GPS-enabled devices is forecast to grow from 33.3 million units last year to 36.79 million in 2018, despite an anticipated dip this year.

Similarly, total revenue from these device is expected to fluctuate for the next couple of years but will rise to $7.14 billion (£4.5 billion) in 2018.