Connected cars are fast becoming the topic that has the telecoms industry’s tongues wagging excitedly. This year, Ford’s chairman gave a keynote presentation at Mobile World Congress, RIM showcased a connected Porsche at its BlackBerry World 2012 event, and Google secured the first ever self-driving car licence in the US. And as the connected car market continues to evolve, mobile operators are finding that they have a key part to play in the ecosystem, and are having to invest time and resources to ensure they are not overlooked as the connected car market matures.

Microsoft has attempted to get into the social networking space by launching its own social network So.cl, which is specifically targeted at students.

The stats on Facebook usage are jaw-dropping, with over 900m registered users, over 500m of whom visit daily. For many of those users, Facebook is the internet. It’s the place they go to connect, to communicate, to share and – increasingly – to spend time consuming content. Much of that content – photos and status updates – is user-generated, but in terms of time spent and revenue generated, the importance of professionally created content, notably social gaming, cannot be overlooked. And by virtue of its scale, Facebook is becoming an important global platform for more traditional media content such as music and video. Yet attempts to charge users for such content have so far failed to gain traction.

Mobile operators worldwide should be preparing for an impending surge in traffic over the next several years, with mobile users in 2016 consuming an average of 6.5 times as much video, over eight times as much music and social media, and nearly ten times as much games than in 2011.