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CBS Outdoor and Blismobile have installed Bluetooth kit on 100 buses operating in central London on routes which include retail hotspots Oxford Street and Regent Street, says Maria Stadtmueller. Passengers are invited to turn on their Bluetooth and accept a message to start downloading bespoke content onto their handsets.

Volkswagen has added new features to its Sports Car Challenge gaming app – officially released just two weeks ago – in line with demands from enthusiasts, writes Mark Terry. On the track, there’s now an animated driver and two new camera perspectives, plus enhanced controls for handling the cars. And in the showroom, players can now check out the interiors of all six sports cars in full detail via the newly added 360° panoramic view.

Just 3% of smartphone owners who have downloaded an application for an incentive use the app often, while of the remaining users, close to two thirds redeem the incentive and un-install the app – or never use the app again – according to a survey conducted by mobile advertising outfit Pontiflex and Harris Interactive.

The research also found that 57% of smartphone owners and half of tablet owners prefer free apps with ads which keep them within the app, rather than a disruptive experience which pulls them to a mobile browser.

The mobile browser continues its dominance over mobile apps as the most frequent format for accessing online information and content across both mobiles and tablets, according to the Orange Exposure 2011 study into media habits in the UK, France, Spain and Poland from Orange and TNS.

The audience for mobile social networking in Europe’s five largest markets (EU5) has grown 44% over the last year, with more than 55 million users accessing social networking sites or blogs via their mobile devices during September 2011, says comScore. And while most mobile users access social networking sites via a mobile browser (31.3 million), the number of people using mobile apps has doubled on the previous year to 24.2 million.

Almost three quarters of the EU5 mobile social networking audience accessed Facebook via a mobile device in September 2011 – the largest mobile audience of any social network – and an increase of 54% over the past year. Nearly 8.6 million mobile users accessed Twitter.com, representing a 115% jump.

Those brands ranking highest in the 2011 Interbrand Best Global Brands report also have more presence in the various mobile app stores in terms of the number of published applications, according to a new report from Distimo, The 2011 Top 100 Global Brands & Their App Store Status, writes Mark Terry.

The most popular categories for brands to publish their applications in are the ‘personalisation’ and ‘lifestyle’ categories.