Apple has moved past LG in the worldwide rankings of mobile-phone unit sales. According to IDC, Apple is now the world’s third largest mobile-phone manufacturer, behind Nokia and Samsung.

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IDC Energy Insights is one of the smart grid sector’s top research firms. Each year it issues its top 10 predictions for energy and utilities. I attended this year’s webinar and came away with my own version, which I’ve shared with you below.

I want to emphasize that my version overlaps with IDC’s but is not precisely the same. These are my interpretations and reactions to IDC’s predictions. In many areas I agree with IDC. In a few others, I feel they may have over- or under-stated the issue. Case in point: I list only nine predictions and they are not all the same as the ones IDC chose to highlight.

To see the “official” top 10 list, go to this link, scroll down until you see the list of web conferences, and click on Energy – Utilities. You can replay the webinar and/or download the slides.

1). Utility mergers will accelerate.

2). Demand will flatten or even fall. After decades of sure, steady growth, consumption growth in North America has flattened and may begin to fall after 2012. This could force a difficult adjustment in an industry that has come to expect growth in consumption.

3). Municipals and co-ops will drive new AMI deployments. Their focus will be communications networks that can handle next territories (urban and rural). And that can handle multiple applications for multi-utilities (electric, gas, water).

4). Distribution automation spending will continue to accelerate thanks in part to short payback periods (18 to 36 months typically).

5). Utilities will invest heavily in analytics to manage Big Data. Utilities are getting large volumes of data from smart meters. Now they’re trying to figure out how to get business value from that information. And how to use it for “real-time” trading and “real-time” operations.

6). Smart buildings will become important to utilities. 25 states have energy efficiency standards or targets. Smart buildingscan help meet such goals. The building energy analytics market will double between 2012 and 2015, jumping from 3 billion to 2 billion.

7). 2012 is the make or break year for electric vehicles. That is when we will be able to see whether they will go mainstream anytime soon.

8). Grid-scale lithium-ion battery prices will plunge. Prices are not cheap yet, but they are already half what they were two years ago, with further big drops on the way.

9). Solar PV growth will moderate, falling to roughly 25% per year. It appears current grant programs will be allowed to expire, reducing the incentives to install solar PV.

Jesse Berst is the founder and chief analyst of Smart Grid News.com. He consults to smart grid companies seeking market entry advice and M&A advisory. A frequent keynoter at industry events in the US and abroad, he also serves on the Advisory Council of Pacific Northwest National Laboratory’s Energy & Environment directorate.

This article originally appeared on SmartGridNews.com. SmartGridNews.com is the Internet’s oldest, largest and highest-ranked smart grid site. Visit for up-to-the-minute analysis of smart grid trends, smart grid technology and smart grid companies. Sign up for the free email newsletter or follow SGN on Twitter.

Image courtesy of Horia Varian.

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Enterprise employees have shifted from the gray and controlled world of corporate IT to the colorful Oz of consumer technologies, but according to data from an IDC/Unisys survey IT is in need of some kind of wizard to sort things out. According to dual surveys of 560 IT managers and another interviewing 2,660 employees and executives at large companies, IT underestimates the number of employees using laptops, mobiles and tablets as well as is unable to support those consumer devices.

And this isn’t just a matter of IT angst, there are issues for the bottom line as 89 percent of IT departments say they have not and have no plans to modernize customer-facing apps for mobile devices this year. A mere 6 percent have adapted their customer-facing apps for mobiles so far, which any of the 25 percent of folks using a smartphone for their web access instead of a computer can likely tell you.

Presumably as an IT services provider we can expect Unisys to use this data to sell their services that could help IT out of their morass. When it comes to mobile tech, Unisys/IDC counts laptops, smartphones and tablets. In some cases, totals will not add up to 100 percent because other options offered on the survey were not included in the infographic. Finally, the 20 percent of respondents who said they are texting, tweeting or emailing while driving need to stop. Seriously.

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While smartphone consumers are still taking their time to embrace Windows Phone 7, Microsoft appears to be having more luck with developers. The mobile platform has reportedly crested the 25,000 app mark for Windows Phone Marketplace, according to at least one tracker site.

WindowsPhoneAppList puts the number at 25,076 right now, slightly ahead of another app tracker WP7AppList. That’s up from an official count of 11,500 apps announced in late March. It’s a far cry from Apple’s 425,000 iOS apps and Android Market’s 200,000 apps, but it’s a pretty impressive showing for a platform that just launched in November but has struggled to convince users to sign on. Gartner estimated that Windows Phone 7 mustered just 1.6 million in estimated sales to end users in the first quarter.

The new app milestone shows that Microsoft is seeing some results from its efforts to line up developers and make it easy and attractive for them to build apps. Even without a large user base, developers are apparently getting in on the act, perhaps in anticipation of bigger things to come. WP7AppList shows that new apps spiked in late May and early June.

I originally wrote about how Microsoft opened its wallet to get some early marquee apps into Windows Phone Marketplace. I’m not sure if Microsoft is still doing so, which could be a factor. But it seems like that the growing developer momentum is due to a number of factors including rising optimism in the platform.

With Microsoft’s deal with Nokia announced in February, it puts the world’s largest phone maker behind WP7. The first WP7 phone from Nokia will appear later this year, but next year should be when we see a lot of WP7-based hardware from Nokia. That partnership has certainly won over research firms like IDC and Gartner, which expect WP7 to edge out iOS by 2015 to be the No. 2 challenger to Android.

But those projections are a ways off, and it will take time for the platform to prove itself out. The bump could also be due Microsoft’s work in courting developers. It’s put together some great resources for developers and in April, it released a set of tools for iOS developers to help them port their apps over to Windows Phone 7. Microsoft released similar tools for Android in June.

With an impressive-looking software update in Mango coming this September, it looks like WP7 is closing the gap on the competition. As I noted, it’s a solid update that helps WP7 catch up in many ways to its peers. And Mango is open for developers, as of this week.

Microsoft understands it’s about building ecosystems and that’s why Nokia felt it needed to pair with WP7, to erect a third ecosystem that could challenge iOS and Android. WP7 has gotten off to a slow start with consumer adoption, and Microsoft still needs to sell phones and show there’s money to be made on the WP7 platform.

App submissions won’t continue to grow if no one’s buying the phones. But Microsoft seems to be playing with an eye toward the long view, and that definitely includes making sure it’s got ample developer support to ensure the platform remains attractive to users. Research In Motion and HP should take note, because getting developer support is increasingly a key part of the success of a platform.

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Dear people who yelled at me when I said netbooks were garbage: I was right. IDC is reporting that sales of netbooks running the Atom platform are flat. Why? Well, first off people have a little cash so they want to buy something nice for themselves instead of a $350 junkbook.

Competition from Netbooks that use processors from United Kingdom-based ARM–commonly referred to as “smartbooks”–and tablets, such as the iPad, will also be a factor in the Atom-based Netbook slowdown, Rau said.
In the first quarter of this year, Atom processors as a percentage of Intel mobile processors fell to 20.3 percent, compared with 24.3 percent in the fourth quarter of last year and 23.5 percent in the third quarter, according to Rau, citing figures to be published later this week. “Pretty much all of last year, it was in the 23, 24, 25 percent range. So, 20 percent coming into Q1–that’s a noticeable change,” he said.

So yeah, you can argue that you’re doing all kinds of crazy work on your netbook, but that doesn’t mean your next laptop will be a netbook. It will be actually usable.

Spending on Internet advertising declined in the United States and worldwide for the second quarter of 2009, and a recovery may still be a ways off.

U.S. spending dropped 7 percent, to $6.2 billion from $6.6 billion, and worldwide spending was off 5 percent, to $13.9 …