For Americans who own cell phones or other mobile devices (at least 85% of the adult population, according to a new survey), 2011 ushered in a whirlwind of news.

Some of the year’s top mobile stories were mostly hype (QR codes and cell phone radiation) or vaporware (those persistent iPhone 5 rumors). But other developments were genuinely important to the U.S. mobile landscape.

Here’s a quick — and entirely subjective — list of my picks for the 10 most important stories and trends for 2011 in U.S. mobile news:

1. Goodbye (mostly) to unlimited data plans; hello throttling. The digital divide between those with high-speed Internet access and those without remains a huge problem in the United States and elsewhere, leading to significant inequities of opportunities and services.  (Full Article)

The rapid rise of the iPhone, iPad and other mobile devices has fueled a mad rush of venture funding into consumer-facing mobile companies. During the 2011 first half, according to Rutberg & Co., venture capitalists invested $3 billion into 358 mobile companies – with $960 million going to the “media and applications” sector, defined as social networks, mobile games, mobile advertising, app platforms, news aggregation, photo sharing and group messaging.

VC investment in enterprise mobile companies has been more tepid. According to Rutberg, VCs invested just $254 million into “enterprise IT” mobile companies over the same span.  (Full Article)

Back in the early 1990s when the first wave of concern about labor practices in China emerged and photos of factory conditions spurred the creation of what we now call Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), Chinese manufacturers cleaned up their act and largely did what their Western buyers wanted. They couldn’t afford to lose the business.

Fast forward 20 years and it’s as though 1990 has dawned again. Every week seems to bring some story or another of a Western company caught with a Chinese supplier that’s dumping chemicals or infringing on worker rights. Despite the vast improvements to supply chain management over the past decades, companies are still being surprised by suppliers behaving in a way that doesn’t exactly jive with their annual sustainability reports. So what’s going on: Did those early efforts just scratch the surface? Is China tired of the West telling it how to conduct business? Is supply chain management so complex that few companies can truly sort it out? Given that much of the news these days centers around tech and electronics companies, is it more to do with the clandestine nature of those industries? Or are we just hearing more about it now because it’s tougher to get away with labor and environmental violations for long before someone snaps a pic on their smartphone and it becomes a big news story? (Full Article)

Aravo Solutions, Inc., the leading provider of cloud-based Supplier Lifecycle Management (SLM) and B2B information and collaboration solutions, announced today that a European-based Global 200 healthcare solutions company, has selected Aravo to enable their world-wide procurement transformation initiative. The selection was the result of an exhaustive analysis of the market during which the company evaluated several vendors to help it with new supplier discovery, supplier enablement, and supplier risk management. Using Aravo’s Supplier Lifecycle Management (SLM) solutions, Aravo’s customer will improve supplier information enterprise-wide, lowering operating costs, reducing supply chain risk and ensuring regulatory compliance across its global supply base.

The company offers a diversified portfolio of products delivering innovative pharmaceuticals, consumer health products, preventive vaccines and diagnostic tools. With divisions in dozens of countries around the world, a large part of their growth has come through acquisition. In response to the resulting supply chain complexity, the company has begun an enterprise-wide supplier lifecycle management initiative that will positively impact their collaborative relationships with vendors and ultimately improve customer satisfaction.  (Full Article)

Aravo Solutions, Inc., the leading provider of cloud-based Supplier Lifecycle Management and B2B collaboration solutions, announced today that Aravo Assure(TM) is now generally available to help buyers and suppliers transform the way that they manage their B2B trading relationships. Using Aravo Assure(TM), the industry’s first — and only — trading partner information network with a focus on risk, performance, compliance, and sustainability, thousands of companies are already reducing the cost of managing and sharing critical business information, while finding new customers for their products and services.

Aravo Assure(TM) was built to enable a new paradigm for the way that businesses engage, share data, and collaborate. In the same way that social network companies like Facebook, LinkedIn, Yelp, and Twitter have changed the ways that we shop, communicate with friends, and search for jobs, restaurants and service providers, Aravo Assure(TM) will change the way that companies create and manage their B2B presence and relationships. Using the latest many-to-many, Enterprise 2.0 technologies delivered in an intuitive, web based system, buyers and sellers will easily discover new trading opportunities, safely and securely share critical business information, and drive down the administrative time and expense involved in managing tens or hundreds of thousands of trading partners.  (Full Article)

After tremendous growth in the US, InsideView, the leader in sales intelligence and social selling, announced today the beginning of its global expansion with its UK and Ireland Edition. Thousands of US business organizations now deploy InsideView’s award-winning company and people intelligence to increase the productivity of their customer-facing employees and improve metrics across the customer cycle, including lead conversion, win rates and customer retention and expansion.

With the UK and Ireland Edition, InsideView takes this competitive advantage worldwide, providing professionals with effective intelligence that helps them be more targeted, relevant and timely in their sales and customer management efforts. The UK and Ireland Edition of InsideView will be generally available in the first quarter of 2012, as a stand-alone application as well as a mash-up within market-leading CRM applications including Microsoft Dynamics, Netsuite, Oracle CRM On Demand, Salesforce.com, SAP, and SugarCRM.  (Full Article)

InsideView, the leader in sales intelligence and social selling, today announced the launch of People Insights. InsideView People Insights allows business professionals to connect with the right person, with the right message, at the right time — ultimately driving greater productivity and revenue.

A New Type of Connection Connections are more important than ever for reaching and engaging your prospects. More than 90 percent of executives never respond to cold-call sales or unsolicited emails, while more than 80 percent do engage when referred by a connection — whether through a friend, colleague, customer or industry peer. InsideView Connections grows your reach beyond social networking sites (your personal connections) to automatically leverage your extended business network of coworkers, executives and board members, previous employers, and customers (your corporate connections). Even young professionals, who often have a limited Rolodex and professional network, can now instantly leverage their company’s extended network of corporate relationships.  (Full Article)

Aravo Solutions, the leading provider of cloud-based Supplier Lifecycle Management (SLM) and B2B collaboration solutions, today announced that a Fortune 100 high tech manufacturer has selected Aravo SLM to power its global supplier lifecycle management program. The Fortune 100 manufacturer selected Aravo to transform its supply chain systems and processes in order to proactively respond to increasing complexity and risk in their supply chain.

Manufacturers today are faced not only with increasing regulatory compliance pressures, but also with significant and growing risk of costly disruptions given increasingly global, diverse and interconnected supply chains. In order to mitigate these risks, the company sought to deploy a more efficient, comprehensive, automated supplier management system to drive increased visibility into trading partners while promoting proactive supplier management via automated dashboards, metrics-triggered alerts, and mitigation plans.  (Full Article)

Ten times more companies started using intelligence to sell better in 2011′s Q3 than any other quarter. That’s according to the latest numbers from InsideView, the leading provider of sales intelligence for the enterprise. The company also revealed it delivered more than 8 million unique new opportunity sales triggers to its customers during the same period.

Intelligence Over Data: Quality and Quantity in Harmony

InsideView’s sales intelligence provides something data simply can’t: a competitive advantage. Anyone can provide a current title, phone number or email address on a lead. Only InsideView can provide this basic information, but more. For example, a business event — like an acquisition or merger — that warrants sales outreach, or news event like a product launch, that matters to the ongoing sales conversation.  (Full Article)

Partnership Increases the Number of Solar Friendly Rooftops, Using Domestic Manufacturing

Toledo, OH One of the solar electricity industry’s most established and trusted solar product procurement & logistics firms, groSolar, has been selected to represent Xunlight, manufacturer of cutting edge and highly reliable flexible thin film solar modules. This is the first thin film groSolar has elected to represent, simply because of Xunlight’s quality products. Xunlight is now available to groSolar’s 1,500 plus independent dealers across the nation, most of whom are independent solar contractors.  (Full Article)