Paul Berney from the Mobile Marketing Association talks about the group's latest mobile commerce research in this week's edition of The Fonecast. And, as usual, there's a look at all the major industry headlines from the past 7 days – from 3G data 'rationing' to the Yahoo! phone and the closure of Vodafone.net.

A report from Gartner says the number of mobile payment users worldwide will exceed 108.6 million in 2010, which is a 54.5% increase from last year. This represents 2.1% of all mobile phone users.

Asia/Pacific is the leading region for mobile payment, with 2.6% of all mobile users - 62.8 million people - making payments on their phones. The report also notes that the Short Message Service (SMS) is still the dominant mobile payment technology in developing and developed markets.

The UK is leading the way in mobile commerce, according to a new report from the Mobile Marketing Association. A new report from the MMA and its research partner Lightspeed Research reveals that 19% of UK consumers currently participate in mobile commerce, followed by 13% of Germans and 9% of French. Purchasing on mobile phones is led by 18 to 34-year-olds; 29% of UK consumers, 21% of German and 15% of French consumers were in this age group.

Today's special podcast from The Fonecast contains an extended interview with Ben Whitaker. Ben is CEO of Masabi, a mobile ticketing company that's developing a system to allow users to buy UK rail tickets direct from their mobile phones.

Mark Bridge writes:

Last week I spotted a couple of mobile-related news stories that involved payment company MasterCard. One came from CPI Card Group, which had introduced a “next-generation, MasterCard-approved payment tag” (a.k.a. 'sticker') that enabled “any mobile device to be used to make payments anywhere using the worldwide contactless MasterCard PayPass standard” (by sticking it on the back).