It was announced today that the Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) has finalized its privacy guidelines for mobile apps, which marks the first formal document of its kind to address the core privacy issues and data processes of today’s mobile applications.

Among other things, the guidelines were created to address three key issues; including annotated guidance on core privacy principles and consumer-friendly language for developers to consider using; ways to inform users on how data is obtained and used; and guidance on security and confidentiality of information.

For more information on the release, visit this Mobile Marketing Watch article.  The final guidelines document is available here.

With any evolving market, the products come first (and live in a sort of wild west environment) and then certifications evolve in order to give the consumer a guide to purchasing the right solution.

The mHealth space at this moment is in the process of evolving its certifications.  Basically we’re laying the tracks for the intercontinental railroad to drive on.  The wild west isn’t gone yet, but we can see it’s end.  All those with a good solution should be happy at these news.

Read more here.

The 2012 awards season is heating up, not just at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts (Oscars), but in the mHealth space as well. As hot as this space is, it should be no surprise that there are many new awards and grants opening up.

The just released guidelines for the 2012 TripleTree iAwards read like the owners manual of mobileStorm for Healthcare, so you know we will be submitting, and we welcome the competition!

The three categories for the 2012 iAwards are:

1. Operational Effectiveness – Best solution for reducing costs and improving operational efficiency
2. Clinical Application – Best solution that enriches clinical care delivery
3. Consumer Experience – Best solution to enrich the consumer or patient experience

Read the full submission guidelines here.

Current reimbursement for telehealth by the federal Medicare program is a whopping 0. However, that is all changing.  In a special report from CES this past week, Neil Versel from Information Week released an analysis of spending trends and how everything points to massive changes on the horizon.

He cites the increase attention that studies are getting that show home monitoring having the potential to reduce readmission by as much as 69%.  From there, the financial math is simple.  Check out the full report here.

Michael Lustig, CEO of Movero, INC has come up with a new set of 7 Best Practices for ensuring that a given mHealth program is as, ehem, healthy as possible.  The guide is great, but reinforces the consistent problems faced by organizations that take a hardware centric view of their mHealth strategy.  Check out our recent blog, Too Much Hardware, Not Enough Software.

Here are the best practices.  Read Michael’s full article here.
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The folks over at Bizcommunity.com have published 6 trends expected for the new year in terms of email marketing.

Covering everything from a rise in gamification to mobile and social media integration, the list covers some interesting trends we can expect for the year ahead.  ”Despite what the doomsday predictions say, email will not become irrelevant due to the rise of social media,” the author notes.  ”As one of the most cost-effective and efficient eMarketing service offerings, email marketing is expected to continue to be a crucial part of the digital marketing mix in 2012.”

The full list of predictions is available here.

According to new data from the Anti-Phishing Work Group (APWG) and email certification provider Return Path, “email dependability” is becoming an increasingly important issue for consumers and email marketers alike as phishing attacks and other fraudulent messages are causing major trust issues on the consumer side and deliverability issues for marketers.

According to its latest report, the APWG said that over 47% of all phishing attacks target the financial services industry, and as such email dependability is seriously affected when customers suffer a loss of trust in a brand as a result of phishing attempts and fraudulent emails.  While the financial industry is targeted the most, the problem is industry-wide.  Research from Return Path shows that on average about 20% of commercial email messages are not delivered to the targeted inbox as intended, but are blocked or filtered erroneously before reaching their destination.

More information on the APWG report is available here.

According to new research from mobile advertising network InMobi, global smartphone ad impressions grew an impressive 488% in 2011.  Even more impressive, global impressions stemming from tablet devices grew a whopping 771% in 2011.

Looking at mobile ad impressions broken down by operating system, InMobi found that Android took the lead in 2011, with a 21% share of mobile impressions on the company’s network.  Still, Apple contributed to 17% of impressions, although the firm’s impression share spiked to 23.4% in North America, mainly spurred by the release of the iPad 2 and iPhone 4S.

More on InMobi’s report is available here.  Or, check out this post on Mobile Marketing Watch.

According to new data released from comScore, more than 16.9M American consumers accessed health information via their mobile devices during the last few months of last year, up more than 125% over the same period last year.

The research also found that roughly 60% of those seeking health information via mobile devices, or 3 out of 5 consumers, were under the age of 35.  The firm also noted that health information is quickly becoming one of the fasting growing mobile content categories.

While there’s been plenty of forecasts for what the mHealth app market will do in 2012 and beyond, new research out recently from Research2Guidance tallied up the total revenue earned during 2011 at a whopping $718M — from mHealth applications alone.

The research comes as part of Research2Guidance’s new report entitled “Mobile Health Market Report 2011-2016,” which attributes the growth in mHealth app revenue to the increase in smartphone users, increased consumer demand for immediate access to health information, and the doubling of the number of mobile health applications available on the supply side.

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