Mobile Web tech vendor Bango (News - Alert) has published statistics which, company officials say, “confirm that the United States is at the forefront of mobile Web growth with a three fold increase in usage over the last year, taking it to second position behind the UK.”

The increasing popularity of mobile search as a way of finding new content and services is fueling this rapid rise in mobile Web usage.

By working as a “global exchange” for the mobile Web, Bango is able to provide insight into where mobile users are coming from and what handsets they are using. The Bango platform detects users from more than 190 countries accessing the mobile web.

According to Bango data, the top five countries accessing the mobile web via Bango in April 2007 are the UK at 27 percent, the US at 21 percent, South Africa at 11 percent, India at 9 percent and Indonesia at 3 percent.

In the first quarter of 2007 the top handset was the Sanyo Katana SCP 6600. The fact that the Sanyo Katana is only available in the United States reflects the rapid growth in mobile surfing by US mobile users.

(Bango identifies users by their country and network of origin. The ranking is produced by measuring the number of user visits to mobile Web sites from each country.)

“We see that wherever flat-rate data charges are pervasive in a country then there’s much more Web browsing,” said Anil Malhotra, SVP of Marketing at Bango. “We expect to see more competitively priced flat-rate data plans in the US which will stimulate further Web browsing.”

Bango also has detected that nine percent of all accesses to mobile websites are from India, up from 4 percent a year ago. Company officials attribute the surge to the fact that India, with a population of just over one billion and no reliable established fixed phone line network, relies on mobile phones to stay in touch.

Late last month Compass Intelligence released a report saying businesses in the US will spend roughly $9.0 billion on CRM and other mobile applications by 2011.

This year American businesses are expected to spend an estimated $3.8 billion on mobile applications, which include mobile and wireless-based custom-coded and packaged applications, including productivity, Enterprise Resource Planning, e-mail, CRM, security applications, and more.

This market is poised for double-digit annual growth into 2011 and is primarily targeted to improve productivity and collaboration across businesses. Major trends in this industry include growth in productivity-based applications, growth in sophisticated and business-oriented devices, and a major attraction to service providers to strengthen profit margins.

Compass Intelligence recently released a series of market forecasts and reports on mobile applications in the US, all part of a new subscription services called Applications.

Compass’ research also found that the Professional Services and Government industries are expected to be the two largest spenders on US mobile applications, representing 37 and 22 percent respectively in 2007, and the small business segment with 38 percent and enterprise business with 42 percent are expected to be the largest spenders on mobile applications from 2006-2011.

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David Sims is a contributing editor for TMC (News - Alert) Net. For more articles please visit David Sims’ columnist page.