Vodafone has announced that Indian electric vehicle manufacturer Mahindra Reva is incorporating machine-to-machine technology into its recently-launched e2o electric car.

Customers can use a smartphone app to check their car’s battery charge, control the air conditioning and lock or unlock doors. The car will also send its owner an alert if the parking brake is left off or a door is unlocked.

New figures from Informa Telecoms &  Media expect twice as many over-the-top instant messages as SMS text messages to be sent between mobile phone users this year.

It says an average of 19.1 billion OTT messages were sent from smartphone apps each day in 2012, compared with an average of 17.6 billion person-to-person SMS messages.

New research from marketing business Tradedoubler suggests that footfall is no longer a useful measure of retail success.

It’s found that consumers are often seeing products in-store and then using their mobile phones to check for cheaper pricing elsewhere.

Mark Bridge writes:

At the beginning of the 21st century I moved from Vodafone to work for its Vizzavi multimedia portal, wooed by talk of context-specific advertising that would one day use a customer’s location and search history to ensure any ads were precisely targeted. And I’m not the only person who’s been seduced. Consumers, ad agencies, client companies and mobile networks have all been promised much by mobile marketing.

Yet more than a decade later that kind of sophistication seems to be lacking from most mobile marketing messages.

Mark Bridge writes:

This week there was only one set of financial results that attracted the mainstream tech media. Apple reported the first drop in quarterly profit for several years as figures fell by 18% to around £6.1 billion. On the positive side, it made around £6.1 billion profit. It also announced dates for its developer conference in June and promised a new version of iOS.