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When it comes to the nuances of the mobile landscape, there are not many people out there more knowledgeable than analyst Chetan Sharma. We have long relied on the work of Sharma at ReadWriteWeb to inform our own reporting and opinions about where the mobile industry is going. For the start of 2012, Sharma turned it around. He surveyed a wide swath of insiders to determine what the biggest stories were in 2011 and how the industry will evolve in the new year.

By consensus, the top story was the rise of Android and its dominance over the ecosystem. A close second was the passing of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs. The Kindle Fire, intellectual property battles and “other” issues round out the top five. Who will succeed in 2012? How will developers make money? What will be the breakthrough category in mobile in 2012? Sharma’s results are below.

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Google The Most “Open”

This may come as a joke to most many industry followers, but Sharma’s insiders vote Google the “most open player in the mobile ecosystem” for 2012. Granted, the options are not that much better, but Google rocked the competition with a little less than 70% of the vote while no other player, including Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, Nokia, the carriers, OEMs or Amazon got more than 10%. This is the fourth year that Google has been the most open in the mobile according to Sharma’s polls, though the percentage has been decreasing since its peak in 2010.

So much for “clopen?”

Really, there is a lot more to being “open” than just the vague espoused by the so-called “clopen” argument – that Android is open to developers but not particularly so to users. Google has made the entire Ice Cream Sandwich source code available online to anybody that knows how to use it. Are there problems with the update process? Certainly. But, you do not see anybody trying to put iOS/webOS/Windows Phone on the Kindle Fire or HP TouchPad.

Breakthrough Category

The insiders are still high on mobile payments as the breakthrough category for 2012. There were a lot of advancements in mobile payments in 2011 but the thought of paying with your smartphone is still more of a dream than reality for most consumers. About 23% of consumers have now warmed up to the notion of mobile payments according to a recent report. The next breakthrough category is mCommerce followed by mHealth, enterprise and near field communications. Sharma’s insiders are not nearly so high on mobile advertising as they were a year ago.

The survey predicts that the financial sector will be the leader in mobile payments. This fits in with what we have seen in the latter half of 2011 where the technology and financial sectors started to merge. No other company or industry vertical got more than 20% of the vote, with the cellular operators (Verizon, AT&T, etc.) and startups (Square, Dwolla, LevelUp) competing in the space.

Movers & Shakers

What company is going to make the biggest mobile acquisition in 2012? The group thinks that Microsoft has the biggest potential to purchase something large. Many of the pundits in the survey probably think that Microsoft will be forced to make some kind of major plunge like putting in a takeover bid for BlackBerry maker Research In Motion or going all the way with Nokia and just dragging the company under the Redmond umbrella.

Google, as always, is could be a viper ready to strike and snap up a large mobile company. It has done so before and surprised the industry each time, with both AdMob and Motorola. The carriers are likely to make more content and developer acquisitions in the coming years than they have previously showed interest in before.

The most influential person in mobile last year was Steve Jobs, followed by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. Android creator Andy Rubin came in fourth behind … Angry Birds?!

Mobile Web, Native Apps, Monetization & The Cloud

Is 2012 going to be the Year of the Mobile Web? Most of the respondents said that the “mobile Web will start to become more relevant.” About 13% fewer answered that “apps will continue to dominate” than did so in 2011.

Mobile cloud computing will increase in 2012. That includes people tying data services to their smartphones but also developers tying their applications to the cloud. Enterprise is the leading use-case for the mobile clouds with storage and media each taking 20% and apps close behind at 19%.

You can see the full survey results from Sharma’s insiders here.

Overall, we can use Sharma’s survey as an accurate roadmap of what to expect in 2012. More mobile Web, more cloud, more disruption while Android and Apple dominate and the rest of the ecosystem has to play catch up.

There are 20 questions in total in Sharma’s survey. Head on over and let us know how you would answer each of the survey questions in the comments.

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October 2011 Sets Video Viewing Record With 21.1 Hours Per Viewer
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The company is announcing the Kindle Owner’s Lending Library, which will feature thousands of books that Kindle owners with an Amazon Prime membership can download. This comes in addition to the Prime library of more than 13,000 movies and TV shows.

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Amazon Really Wants You to Own a Kindle

According to Amazon’s release, the company is paying a fixed fee in some cases, and in other cases paying on a per-checkout basis for each Kindle title that’s in the library. That means that any way you slice it, Amazon is paying to let its customers check out books.

Why? Amazon says this is “a no-risk trial to demonstrate to publishers the incremental growth and revenue opportunity that this new service presents.”

Don’t Get Too Excited

Unlike Amazon Video Streaming for Prime, there’s a limit to Amazon’s largess here: Users get access to one book a month with no due dates. So if you have dreams of burning your library card and tapping the Kindle library for all your reading needs, guess again.

The company says the library will have “thousands” of titles, including more than 100 current and former New York Times bestsellers. Right out of the gate, Amazon is offering Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game by Michael Lewis, Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond, and The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.

Note that this only seems to be available to owners of Kindle hardware. If you’re using the Kindle app for iPhone or iPad, you’re going to be out of luck. If you do have a Kindle, it should show up in the Kindle Store when you click “See all categories” and you’ll be presented with the option to buy for free.

This is a nice little feature, though I’m not sure it would sway most users from a different e-reader to a Kindle. When I’m in a reading mood, I often tear through as much as a book every day (though more often every two or three days). So the lending library isn’t going to keep avid readers full up on reading material. But, every little bit counts. A free book is better than none. What say you, readers? Would this convince you to buy a Kindle, or pony up for Amazon’s Prime membership?

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Kroes told the OpenData Forum in Brussels she expects for a pan-European forum for public data mining to go live no later than 2013. “Will she really be able to pull off all that?” the commissioner asked rhetorically, referring to herself.

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A Commission report last November (PDF available here) produced by a technical workshop convened in Luxembourg of data standards experts, including W3C, painted a very broad picture of the types of data the government is looking to federate. A new data portal would need to include a small group of very interesting datasets first, the report stated, to attract citizens’ interest early. But then these early datasets would need to be stitched together with bigger datasets, the ownership of which may be indeterminate. Goal #2, the report said, would be to “deeply integrate a small set of very high quality datasets demonstrating immediate value and, in time, capable of acting as a scaffold for the integration of many other datasets. Candidates in this second role are geospatial, transportation, statistical and financial datasets.

Yesterday, Comm. Kroes narrowed and focused the definition of these datasets somewhat: “Making good use of public data can make your life better. Whether it’s route planning using public geo-information or public transport data, a local community crowd-sourcing its maintenance priorities, decision-making built on statistics of all shapes and sizes, or data journalism that helps explain our world,” she told attendees.

“Research in genomics, pharmacology or the fight against cancer increasingly depends on the availability and sophisticated analysis of large data sets,” the commissioner continued. “Sharing such data means researchers can collaborate, compare, and creatively explore whole new realms. We cannot afford for access to scientific knowledge to become a luxury, and the results of publicly funded research in particular should be spread as widely as possible.”

But sharing such data may not be the intention of some member countries that may have had intentions to license that data commercially. For them, the commissioner implied, she would not be against imposing new rules compelling member countries to license their data at low or no rates: “In particular, we’ll be looking at the way data is disclosed – the formats and the way data licenses operate to make re-use straightforward in practice. We’ll also be looking at charging regimes because expensive data isn’t ‘open data.’ In short, getting out the data under reasonable conditions should be a routine part of the business of public administrations.”

Kroes envisions private citizens being able to develop their own applications around this publicly available data. When the Commission submitted a tender last April for freelance and open source programmers to build the data portal, initial reaction from developers – as told to CrowdSourcing.org – included statements implying that if governments were as open as Kroes envisioned, projects such as WikiLeaks would be rendered unnecessary.

“I think one of the biggest excitements is a really radical move to open up all spending and to be fair,” said Cambridge, U.K.-based Open Knowledge Foundation founder Rufus Pollock. “The U.K. Government isn’t too corrupt, but imagine places where corruption is a problem. Imagine that all over the world!”

The OKF is one of the leading organizations behind the Data Hub, an open effort to build a data portal around public data sets. The Data Hub’s initial store consists of 83 datasets provided by the W3C Linking Open Data Interest Group, including the Allen Mouse Brain Atlas – a record of gene expressions recorded from genome images of mouse brains; the CIA World Factbook; and the Freebase RDF Store which includes topics gleaned from Wikipedia. The challenge for developers now may be to demonstrate how mashups may be created to link all this data together in some meaningful fashion.

Meanwhile, the challenge for the E.C. will be to find an inexpensive way to open up more meaningful data.

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