Global mobile revenues will be $1.1 trillion in 2012. Here’s why.

You know what’s cooler than a billion? A trillion! That’s exactly where the mobile industry is going, according to a new GSM/Wireless Intelligence study, The Global Cellular Industry Balance Sheet.

The study estimates global mobile service provider revenues will be $1.1 trillion in 2012, thanks to a massive boom in four major economies — Brazil, Russia, India, and China — collectively known as the BRIC economies. The BRIC operators had revenues of $170 billion in 2010 and will exceed $200 billion in revenues in 2012. Developing markets will be the primary engine of growth, contributing over 40 percent of global revenues by this point. In comparison, developed economies are stagnating:

Total revenue growth in developed economies has stalled at around 2 percent since 2009.40 percent of operators in the developed economies saw revenue declines last year.The demand for smartphones has led to higher handset subsidies and that’s causing some issues for carriers, which saw profit margins in the developed world decline by 1.4 percent in 2009 and 0.3 percent  in 2010 to stand at 35 percent of total revenuesThe worst hit operators are located in Western Europe (Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain), Eastern Europe (Czech Republic, Hungary) and the more mature markets in the Middle East (Bahrain, UAE), as well as a number of second-tier operators in the U.S.

Some other notable facts:

Voice revenues still account for 75 percent of recurring revenues on average in developing countries and 70 percent in developed countries.Data-only revenues (which exclude revenues from messaging services) represented 16 percent of total revenues on average in the developed region in 2010, compared to 11 percent in the developing region.In 2012, over one-third of total revenues globally will come from non-voice services.Data-only services will represent close to 20 percent of total revenues.

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Bad taste in music? Here’s how to avoid sharing on Spotify

We all have our secret Lady Gaga songs tucked away in our playlist or the 80's Monster Ballads that are loved rather than ironic affectations, so now as the streaming music service Spotify comes to the U.S. here’s how to avoid sharing the skeletons in your musical closet.

First things first. The default setting for Spotify music sharing is public on everything so if you want to get control of that, go to the top right corner where you should see your profile. Click it, then you should get an option to edit your profile as shown here:

When you click through that edit button, you get the area where you have granular control of what people see. Every time I open this screen, it automatically checks the box that has me automatically sharing new playlists, so uncheck that if you don’t want to share your new creations. Otherwise, click the slider and it will switch your playlists from public to private. Only one of mine is shared at the moment, and as you can see below, the shared OM playlist is green.

For those wondering what the results look like on the other side, Mathew kindly checked out my profile and shared the results here:

In these examples, I have shared my Spotify via Facebook, which means people who are friends with me on Facebook and who connect their Spotify accounts can see me on Spotify, and I can share songs by posting them to Facebook. However, when sharing a non-public song or playlist with someone on Facebook, then friends can see the song and playlist even if it isn’t public normally.

For those who don’t connect Spotify with their Facebook accounts, this is less complicated, although people can still find you by typing “spotify:user:username” into the search bar if they know your user name. Then people can only see your shared playlists. Plus, you can tweet public playlists out and can offer people access to them (there’s also a widget you could post on your blog or Tumblr). So, if you stop to manage your profile — even if you haven’t connected the service to Facebook — and be careful of what you share via social networks, you should be able to keep your unholy love of ABBA in the closet if you wish.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (subscription req’d):

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Hey Startups: Here's How To Totally Screw-Up Going International

Going international is a big growing up step for US startups, and an important one. The Internet is global and most fast-growing startups like Twitter, Zynga and Foursquare see most of their growth outside the US. 

Unfortunately, the common practice by which startups go about translating their product is through crowdsourcing: getting your own international users who already use the product in English to translate it for you. Facebook was the first big startup to do this and they've been endlessly imitated since then.

In a recent blog post on internationalizing startups, Andreessen Horowitz Partner John O'Farrell endorses this approach. The post is a great read for startups that want to go global, but on this particular point, he's just dead wrong. 

Why? Simply put, because crowdsourced translations are invariably awful. 

Your writer was born in France and is relatively fluent in English. I often compare how software is written in French and English, and I almost always end up using sites in English. 

When Facebook opened up translation to French, I eagerly jumped in. In a cleverly thought-out system, anyone could propose translations for what's going on in the software, and other could vote. Invariably, the translation that was upvoted the most was either grammatically incorrect, awkward, or both. And my alternate translations were always voted down. Why? 

Simply because the overwhelming majority of writers and voters on Facebook were 14-year olds with poor French. And that's what's going to happen. Crowdsourcing works great for some things. Translating a consumer-facing app is not one of them.

The problem isn't just with poor grammar and the embarrassment that comes with it. The problem is the importance of copy-writing. 

How you label things in your app is vitally important, both to user experience and just generally to your brand. For Facebook, words like "Poke", "It's Complicated" and "Friending" have gotten into the lexicon. It's important to get them right. Crowdsourcing very rarely accomplishes that. 

Some will retort that crowdsourcing is cheaper than hiring an agency to translate your product. And the answer to that is that if you can't afford professional translation then it's too early to translate. The addressable market for an English-language app is not just the 300 million people in the US, but the 100 million or so English speakers in Canada, the UK, Australia, etc. plus the many, many English-fluent, early-adopter types all around the world. That's plenty enough to tackle. 

When you get there, make sure your app is properly translated.

Don't Miss: 11 Tools To Get Your Startup Off The Ground In No Time →

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