Author: Ingrid Lunden

Apple? (NSDQ: AAPL) overtook Windows Mobile to take the third largest share of global smartphone OS shipments in 2009 – but the overall market is sluggish, according to research from Gartner.

Nokia? (NYSE: NOK) is still the clear leader for handset shipments, but its share slipped 2.2 percent to 36.4 percent. In fact, all five of the top handset makers lost a combined 4.4 percent of their share to Apple and others, says Gartner.

Of smartphones, Gartner gives Apple 14.4 percent of the market, just behind RIM’s 14.9 percent. Along with the fall in Nokia’s hardware share, so market share of its preferred Symbian OS, too, slipped 5.5 percent. Gartner gives Android 3.9 percent.

2009 smartphone sales were 23.8 percent up from 2008, at 172.4 million. But they’re getting more and more popular. Q409 smartphone sales were 41.1 percent up from the same period in 2008.

But smartphones continue to play a pretty tiny role in the overall mobile market. There were 1.211 billion mobile handsets sold in 2009, but smartphone sales were only 172.4 million of that.

The popularity of feature phones and cheaper devices is also playing out. Samsung and LG (SEO: 066570), which specialise in both types of devices, were the only two of the top-five to gain ground in the last year. Worth noting that Samsung’s new operating system ‘bada’ is unlikely to have much of an impact here in the next year: Samsung says it will consider it a success if it gets near 10 million units in 2010 (versus 236 million units for Samsung in 2009).

At their current rates, Motorola? (NYSE: MOT) (4.8 percent, down from 8.7 percent) and Sony Ericsson (4.5, down from 7.6) look like they may not even make the top 5 in 2011. The “others” category meanwhile saw a healthy 4.4 percent jump, demonstrating the increasing amount of fragmentation in the market.

It will be worth watching how Android plays out in the year ahead. There were fifty Android devices counted around last week’s Mobile World Congress by one journalist’s count. But is it inevitable that will lead to an explosion in sales in the year ahead? Google’s Eric Schmidt says that more than 60,000 Android devices are currently being shipped a day, and that is just counting the phones out in the market already.

Mobile entertainment companies have scaled back their content sales expectations – but are getting far more bullish that consumers will pay directly for content, according to the Mobile Entertainment Forum’s annual Business Confidence Index, a survey of its members that it produces with KPMG…

—Members still think the content market is growing, but at a slower pace than they originally predicted it would. They now think 2010 global mobile content sales will grow 24 percent, and not the earlier-forecast 33 percent. The MEF says the mobile content market will be worth around $36 billion in 2010.

—Confirming what the market has been demonstrating, MEF members think games and apps represent the best revenue opportunities: they reckon 21 percent of their revenues will come from this in 2010. Mark Harding, director of digital content at KPMG, points out to us that respondents believed that apps revenue would be incremental rather than replacing other mobile content revenue.

—Related to this, MEF members said they think direct consumer purchase revenues will account for 73 percent, compared to 46 precent forecast previously.

The figures are not wholly indicative of the entire industry – the MEF has around 130 members and 68 responded to this survey, says Harding.

Rimma Perelmuter, the executive director of the MEF: “General stability is projected across the global market which indicates a degree of market caution.” Developing markets are still expanding, while those in the Northern Hemisphere regions are in decline. Some of the growth rates: Central and South America are at seven percent (compared to two percent); Africa and Middle East are at 10 percent (compared to four percent); Asia-Pacific is at 12 percent (up from nine percent).

Separately, the MEF has had a shuffle in its EMEA board of directors. Gerrit Jan Konijnenberg, EVP Strategic Development, Comfone, has been reelected as chairman; Mark Kortekaas, FM Controller Audio & Mobile, BBC; and Colin Yeh, Head of Group Product Development, Qtel Gp, have been reelected as co-vice chairman.

Related

• @ MEM: Mobile Biz Expects Content Sales To Keep Growing

Now that the BBC is finally due to develop more of its own mobile apps, it looks like it’s starting to put its foot down to third-party developers that have been using its content to make unsanctioned, unofficial versions.

Camiloo, the developer that was working on and promoting a BBC iPlayer app for the iPhone, has been served with a cease-and-desist order from the BBC, Camiloo tells paidContent:UK.

“We have just received a cease-and-desist from the BBC, and have had to comply,” Mark Newby, the MD of Camiloo, tells us in an email. “Naturally, we are very disappointed that the BBC has chosen not to allow our project to continue, but we vow to bounce back immediately with new and interesting apps.”

Though commercial counterpart BBC Worldwide has released mobile apps, the BBC’s main UK public service wing has, until now, remained on the sidelines of the apps boom. Unsanctioned apps carrying the BBC name and BBC content are already on app stores like iTunes.

Some of these are proving to be very popular, which may prove to be a thorn in the BBC’s side. A blog post today from Erik Huggers, the BBC’s director of future media and technology, who had broken the apps news today, had as its first comment: “How does the BBC feel about the currently awesome BeepPlayer app on Android?”

But some of these other “rogue” BBC apps appear to be closing up shop. One app simply called “BBC Sport” that we wrote about last May is no longer indexed in iTunes, and its developer, Relaxaler, now has a blank page when you navigate to its site. But with apps stores like Apple’s at 150,000 apps and counting, how easy is it for illicit apps to hide in there anyway?

These third-party apps are all paid-for, whereas the BBC apps will all be free of charge, and will come accompanied by ads outside the UK. (In the UK, the apps are subsidized by the license fee.) The BBC says that the one exception will be iPlayer apps, which will not be accessible outside the UK.

Related

• BBC: IPhone App Developer Is ‘Not Licensed’
• UK’s Sky News Does Cit-J App As BBC Faces iPhone Dilemma

More details on Sanjay Jha’s compensation around the Motorola (NYSE: MOT) break-up plan announced on February 11. And this will be sure to annoy those shareholders complaining about the vendor’s exec pay packages: the Co-CEO of the mobile devices and home division could end up with an even bigger payout than before.

According to the 8-K filed yesterday, Jha’s “contingent payment”—that is, the payout he gets if the deal doesn’t go through—has been bumped up to $38 million from its earlier sum of $30 million. The terms of Jha’s equity award—which he would get if the separation goes ahead—have also been changed: he will be entitled to a percentage between 1.8 percent and 3 percent, based on the market capitalization of the new mobile devices/homes business. Originally his percentage had been a flat 3 percent.

The 3 percent figure will now only apply if the market cap of the new company is equal to or less than $6 billion, according to the documents.

The equity award would be allocated on a 90 percent/10 percent split between stock options and restricted stock. The filing also makes clear that Jha cannot receive both the contingent payment and equity award.

Jha will be entitled to the $38 million if the deal doesn’t complete by June 30, 2011. Originally, the deadline had been October 31, 2010.

Related

• Motorola To Break Into Two Publicly Held Companies By Early 2011
• Motorola Shareholders Angered At Lack Of Progress, Executive Pay Packages

We’re seeing a slew of social media aggregation plays for mobile, with several of them coming out this week alone. Now one of the biggest social networks, Facebook, is releasing a mobile version it calls “Zero,” which could be its bid to keep its own site as a relevant destination in the aggregation onslaught.

Zero is a light-weight version of the current mobile site that omits data-intensive applications like photos, a spokesperson tells us. “It will launch in coming weeks and we are discussing it at MWC as an option to make Facebook on the mobile web available to everyone, anywhere and allow operators to encourage more mobile Internet usage,” reads an emailed statement from the company.

The news was first picked up by TechCrunch, when Zero was mentioned as an aside during a keynote from Chamath Palihapitiya, Facebook’s VP of user growth, mobile and international expansion, at the Mobile World Congress show in Barcelona.

In the keynote, Palihapitiya described the service as something that will be offered through operators, possibly at no charge, as a way of encouraging users to take the enhanced version that features photos and other multimedia content, which would then be charged at premium data rates.

Since launching as a mobile version, Facebook has become one of the most popular mobile applications around. Last week it announced 100 million people access it via mobile handsets, a five-fold growth in the last year.

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—Shazam: The mobile-music-recognition service provider has launched an interactive ad service. Advertisers using the Shazam Audio Recognition Advertising (SARA) program can put audio “links” into their adverts, which can be accessed by viewers pointing their phones at the ads, sending the audio to Shazam’s service, and getting customised results—for example discount offers or extra content—sent back to their devices.

—New music format: Dolby Laboratories launched a multi-platform digital file format called Pulse, designed for high-quality cloud-based music services. Digital music provider Omnifone is the first customer to encode its 6.5 million tracks with the MPEG-4-based technology.

—Freeview iPhone app: Another mobile service to help people plan their TV schedules. The digital-terrestrial TV service has launched an iPhone app that provides TV listings for its HD and regular channels. It lets users search for and filter programs, as well as pick up recommendations from Freeview’s Twitter feed.

Today, we got the latest in what is quickly becoming a long list of apps that promise to make accessing one’s various social networks and contact lists into a seamless mobile experience…

Orange launched its own version, On, at Mobile World Congress, HTC upgraded its Sense UI and, yesterday, Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) incorporated social network aggregation into its Windows 7 Series’ address book…

But how well are these services – pioneered by the likes of Zyb – working, and how much are they actually getting used? There is takeup, but it looks slow so far…

—Vodafone launched its own social media aggregation platform, Vodafone (NYSE: VOD) People, as part of its 360 initiative. Yesterday it announced it has sold more than 300,000 signature 360 devices (there are two models – the Samsung H1 and M1) since launching in November 2009. But compare that to Vodafone’s iPhone sales, which reached 100,000 in the UK after only being in the stores for a week in January.

—Vodafone has not said how many owners of those 300,000 handsets have actually become active users of the aggregation service. But Pieter Knook, internet services director at Vodafone, points out in the release that “Registrations to the 360 service are increasing, running at a rate of four thousand a day in January.” That’s not many. Vodafone now is aiming to grow that user base by offering 360 as an app – first stop: Android devices. It projects that, by March 2010, it will have shipped over two million devices, covering 50 different handsets, capable of accessing the Vodafone 360 service.

—Operators like Orange and Vodafone are trying hard to play outside their walled gardens. Both Vodafone People and On are free to download by anyone who wants to use them, regardless of what network they’re on. And they are adding more social networks into the services all the time. (Orange already has SMS, MMS, voicemail, Twitter, and Facebook and is soon adding Messenger, for example.) But the services may need to open further, taking a leaf out of Twitter and Facebook’s API playbooks, if they want to become truly mass-market.

And how will they make money from this? Offering the service to their own user bases makes sense—for handset makers, it becomes another service to attract users; and for the operators, it will encourage more data usage, and therefore more revenue.

But, for off-net users, the revenue opportunity is less immediate. It is understood that Orange is looking into using the base for mobile advertising opportunities longer term. This would fit in with its wider ambitions in mobile ads, which has seen it snap up the agency Unanimis and roll out a pan-European SMS/MMS ad service using the ad-serving platform originally developed by Blyk.

Given that these services are free for now, the advertising route looks like it might be the most obvious way for the others to make money, too.

More news apps coming to a phone near you: The Evening Standard and hyperlocal portal LocalPeople, from the Standard’s former owners DMGT, are both launching mobile apps.

The Evening Standard app, which is launching later this month, will be available across “all major smartphone platforms”. At launch, it will be free to download and will run on an ad-supported model, according a spokesperson from the developers, Handmark.

The app initially will concentrate on the “most desired content” from the print edition of the newspaper, says a release. In other words, no indication yet of how or when supplemental info such as real estate or event listings will fit into the mix.

The Evening Standard app will utilise a relatively new but increasingly common feature of automatically updating so that people can read the most recent content when offline. The app also ticks the social networking box: users can share articles on Facebook, Twitter and del.icio.us. Readers can also design their own news feeds around particular subjects.

Handmark has worked on mobile apps for other newspapers including the Wall Street Journal. The spokesperson says it hasn’t revealed any numbers on downloads for individual newspaper apps, but as a whole the company has had 750,000 downloads of its apps in the month of January alone and serves 250 million ads across them every month.

Ironically, the listings info that the Standard app will be lacking, at least in its first iteration, may end up getting presented in nines in another new app from the paper’s former owners. Localpeople, a portal that aggregates a collection of hyperlocal sites across the southern part of England, is launching its own free mobile app for Apple devices, tomorrow.

This move will help further DMGT in its strategy to target local advertising. In an interview with paidContent:UK last year, Roland Bryan, the strategy director for DMGT division AN Digital, said he believed the local ad market could be worth up £2.8 billion. 

Localpeople has 70 sites so far in beta and says that in its first six months of operation has generated over 30,000 pieces of content among them. As for coverage, it claims to have reached 25 percent of local online households in catchment areas served in January. It is this content that will be the basis of the app, which will focus on local news and information, submitted by users, on area restaurants, bars, hotels, tradesmen, shops and other services.

Related

• Interview: AND’s Bryan On The Hyperlocal Profit Search

Total Telecom, a monthly B2B magazine and website that liked to bill itself as “The Economist of telecoms”, has ceased its print operations, paidContent:UK has learned and confirmed. But the online edition will continue publishing.

The magazine’s publisher Terrapinn has not commented on the reasons, but it looks like another victim of falling print advertising income. Three full-time people will be made redundant with the closure of the magazine. Two full-time editorial people, as well as a commercial staff, will stay in place for the remaining business.

The website has been behind a paywall since 2002, but a year ago the site changed its model to make all of its breaking news free to view for seven days. It currently charges between £109 and £499 (the higher rates give more archive access plus discounts on research reports). The print edition, which cost £150 for a year’s subscription, also published a digital replica. These respectively had circulations of around 7,000 and 12,000, according to the auditors BPA. The number of full research subscribers online currently numbers at around 500, according to one person at the company.

The online edition is understood to be covering its own costs, rather than operating at a loss. We’ve tried to contact the publisher of Total Telecom and are waiting for his response to get more detail on this.

Total Telecom had carved out a small but influential role in the online world, partly for its staying power in an industry that saw dizzying heights (the crazy telecoms bubble of the Nineties) and shameful lows (accounting scandals at WorldCom, Enron and so much else).  Published first in Septemer 1988 as CommunicationsWeek International, the magazine used to be owned by Emap, and was part of a stable of four telecoms magazines and websites.

But as the telecoms industry “right-sized”, so did this operation, which eventually dwindled down to one single brand, Total Telecom. Then in 2006, Total Telecom and its affiliated operations (they also include an annual awards ceremony called the World Communication Awards) were sold to Australian events company Terrapinn, as part of the latter company’s strategy to grow out its telecoms events business, following the lead of larger B2B publishers such as Informa and Reed Business.

The evolution of news moving online and becoming much more rapid-fire in its execution would have done no favors to Total Telecom over time. The site went through at least two overhauls in its 11 years of operation. But visually and content-wise, it remained fairly distant from the blog-led approach that has come to dominate telecoms and tech reporting online. The magazine’s features and analysis articles currently sit alongside the online-only content, which mixes original reporting with third-party content from Dow Jones (NYSE: NWS) Newswires.

Full disclosure: I used to be assistant editor at the magazine and had been freelancing with it up until recently.

Mobile data usage is booming, but the rising tide has not lifted all boats. mTLD Top-Level Domain Ltd., the Irish company that sponsored the .mobi domain name, has been sold to Afilias, an Ireland-based provider of internet infrastructure services that has been administering the .info TLD.

Afilias says it intends to continue running dotMobi, the commercial operating name for mTLD, as a wholly owned subsidiary.

Financial records for mTLD filed at Ireland’s Companies Registration Office indicated that in 2009 mTLD had a loss of €3.5 million on a turnover of €6.4 million, compared to a loss of €324,000 the year before on turnover of €9 million. Total assets less liabilities (eg money owed to creditors) in 2009 was €1.7 million.

Although the .mobi domain name has been around since 2006, it hasn’t gained much momentum. Afilias says there are around one million registered .mobi domains, compared to the 187 million that have been registered to date across the internet as a whole. (The latter number comes from the VeriSign Domain Name Report published in December 2009.) Active .mobi sites may have been significantly lower.

Although a separate domain name for mobile sites might have seemed like a good idea to Nokia (NYSE: NOK), Vodafone (NYSE: VOD), Google (NSDQ: GOOG) and the other big-name companies that were behind dotMobi in its early days, clearly things have played out much more differently than expected: Many internet sites—when they even bother to create specific mobile versions of their pages—simply use their regular domains. And apps and other widget-based services have made direct links that render even those .com URLs a little unfashionable.

Afilias had also provided admin services around the .mobi TLD since it was first launched. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

This just in: Skype tells mocoNews.net it will be hosting a joint news conference with Verizon Wireless at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona next week. No word on what this announcement is about, but it will be the first time that a major mobile operator has stood up with Skype.

Will the two announce a deal to route Skype VoIP calls over Verizon’s mobile network? That would be a big move for Skype, of which eBay (NSDQ: EBAY) recently sold 70 percent; it will need to focus harder on its own bottom line now as a separte company.

The only mobile operator that Skype has worked with directly has been 3, the Hutchison-owned operator in the UK. There, they sell co-branded phones and they also have a SIM-only service where they offer free voice calls between Skype users, using 3’s network.

Earlier this week, 3 announced that it had carried one billion Skype calls on its network.

Josh Silverman, the CEO of Skype, has been referring to conversations with other mobile operators for a year now, but this could be the first sign of these talks coming to anything for the VoIP operator.

Tricia will be covering Mobile World Congress proceedings from Barcelona…

—Telefonica: The mobile operator has signed a deal with Genasys to develop value-added location-based services for its 130 million subscribers in Latin America. As part of this, it will be rolling out the Gypsii location-based social network service to customers. Gypsii, which has been marketing itself primarily in developing countries since May 2009, says it picked up one million new users in the last quarter.

—Red Cross: More than $32 million was raised through the charity’s 90999 Haiti texting service. MGive, which powered the service, says it processed more than $37 million in text donations overall for Haiti relief efforts.

—American Greetings: The card company has launched an MMS service for its e-cards, in partnership with video messaging company Mogreet. Users can send e-cards directly from American Greetings’ website; the service works across 2,500 different handset models and with most of the U.S. wireless operators.

—Handmark: The mobile app developer behind Zagat to Go has turned its “hand” to the Winter Olympics. Winter Sports Live provides news, updates on individual events, photos and features, and is free to download from Apple’s App Store and BlackBerry’s AppWorld.

Sprint is taking some another step to up its game in mobile content. A day after saying it would launch an app store powered by GetJar, the mobile operator today announced a deal with RealNetworks (NSDQ: RNWK) to streamline its music services.

The deal will see Sprint (NYSE: S) using RealNetworks’ Media Entertainment Platform to sell ringtones, ringback tones and full-track music. These had been offered as separate services in the past.

For RealNetworks, this fits in with their legacy strategy of selling more wholesale services to third-party companies to deliver media, rather than being the content company itself: the news comes days after Real announced it would be spinning off its digital music service Rhapsody, a joint venture with Viacom’s MTV Networks.

Real works with other mobile operators on music services already. In Europe it’s teamed up with Vodafone (NYSE: VOD) in nine countries for different services: in the UK for the Vodafone Music service; in Spain for a flat-rate music service; and in Germany on a ringback tone service. It also powers a music service for SFR in France.

Enhancing mobile content services builds on an area that Sprint Nextel wants to drive more revenue growth in the future. In yesterday’s quarterly results, where the company announced a $980 million loss, the company said that $19.50 of its ARPU is coming from data on its CDMA network. That may be a healthy 35 percent of its overall ARPU of $55, but that will need to grow quite a bit more before it pulls Sprint into profit.

Related

• Sprint Taps GetJar To Offer Thousands Of Free Apps To Subscribers
• Sprint Nextel Posts $1 Billion Loss, Sharpens Focus On Prepaid
• RealNetworks, MTVN To Spin Off Rhapsody; Real Gives Up Control

—Telmap/4th Screen: The mobile mapping and navigation company Telmap has partnered with agency 4th Screen to offer geo-targeting technology for location-based advertising services. 4th Screen will use the services on its Mpression ad platform as well as in its deals to sell mobile ads on behalf of O2, Virgin Media (NSDQ: VMED), 3 UK and Tesco Mobile.

—iCharge: Yet another app has launched to make the smartphone into a payment device. UK/Germany-based iCharge allows merchants to accept card transactions using a smartphone-enabled card reader, which will work on iPhone and Android devices. The company plans to launch in mid-2010.

—Nimbuzz/Ovi: The mobile VoIP and social network aggregator says it has reached 1 million downloads across 180 countries on Nokia’s Ovi app store. Nimbuzz claims 15 million registrations. (Release via Business Wire.)

—Skype/3UK: More mobile VoIP news…Skype has now reached the 1 billion call milestone on the 3UK mobile network. The free service was launched in May 2009, and 3UK says that Skype users on its network make 3 million minutes of calls every day. (Via 3G.co.uk.)

Opera Software (OSL: OPERA), which has carved out a healthy market share with its Opera mobile browsers, wants to get in on the iPhone now. The developer today said that it now has a version of its free Opera Mini mobile Internet browser to work on Apple’s handset. It plans to reveal the software next week during the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

But will Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) allow the browser to run on its devices? Opera has not yet submitted the software to Apple for approval on the App Store. But ZDNet points out that Apple does not allow third party applications that replicate core iPhone functionality, including the Safari browser. Worth pointing out though that there are other web browsers in the App Store already, such as the Mercury web browser and the Oceanus browser. In its news release today, Opera said the software is not publicly available yet.

According to StatCounter, Norway-based Opera has the largest market share among mobile browsers, at 25 percent. iPhones running Safari have a 22 percent share of the market, ranking it number two behind Opera.

Opera took the opportunity for all the attention it will be getting around this iPhone announcement to also note it will be launching other products during the show. These include new versions of its full Opera Mobile browser for Windows Mobile, Symbian and Android devices; Opera Mini 5 running on a “variety of handsets and platforms”; and a widget manager for Windows Mobile and Symbian S60 handsets.

Yesterday, Opera announced that Huawei would be pre-installing Opera’s browser on its handsets as it pushes further into the mobile device market.

Related

• Chinese Handset Maker Huawei Will Lean On Opera’s Mobile Browser

The number-three wireless carrier Sprint (NYSE: S) Nextel today reported a loss of nearly $1 billion on revenues of $7.87 billion, as it continued to lose customers, albeit at a slower pace than in previous quarters.

Postpaid customers continued their exodus to Sprint’s competitors, with 504,000 leaving the network in the quarter alone. Sprint continued to perform well in the prepaid segment, adding 435,000 customers in that period. Still the WSJ points out that that figure missed expectations of around 626,000 customers added—analysts had thought that Sprint’s acquisition of Virgin Mobile (NYSE: VM) would contribute more growth to pre-paid.

The company is pushing out more devices such as the Palm (NSDQ: PALM) Pixi and Android-based devices in the hopes of retaining more customers in the year ahead. “It’s my hope and our plan that we’ve turned the corner,” says CEO Dan Hesse.

—Data holding up: The company says data revenues contributed more than $16.75 to overall post-paid ARPU in the fourth quarter, with CDMA data ARPU coming in at greater than $19.50; that now represents more than 35% of the company’s total CDMA ARPU. ARPU overall was down though to $55 from $56 a year ago, due to “lower casual text and data usage and lower overage revenues as a result of greater popularity of fixed-rate bundle plans and seasonality.” Hesse also ruled out lowering prices for data on WiMAX: “It’s a lot cheaper to produce a gigabyte on 4G than on 3G,” but said the company doesn’t plan to pass that on in the form of lower prices – instead it will be about raising the caps on usage.

—Brand overload? One analyst raised the issue of whether juggling too many brands and networks—these most recently include Boost and Virgin Mobile and may reportedly get MetroPCS too – is impacting margins negatively. (Margins are currently around 18 percent.) Dan Schulman, the president of Sprint’s prepaid business and former head of Virgin Mobile USA: “The reason we’re launching a multiplicity of brands [in prepay] is that unique segments have different needs. It’s not all about pricing…You’re using sophisticated marketing, not just pulling price levers.” He says there are between 55 million and 60 million prepay users in the U.S.

—On the Nextel iDEN network: Hesse says it is “performing at its best levels ever…We will offer Boost on both iDEN and CDMA to give customers more choice.”

—On Clearwire (NSDQ: CLWR) investments: Hesse did not rule out putting more investment into Clearwire: “We just put a lot of equity in and raised some additional debt…The board of Clearwire will determine if additional funding is needed.” He says he would like to expand its coverage—it currently reaches 120 million people—“but it takes a while to build out a 4G network.”

Related

• Is Sprint Eyeing More Acquisitions To Become The Prepaid Leader?

—InMobi/hi5: Mobile advertising network InMobi has signed an exclusive deal with social media site hi5 to serve ads for its mobile site in Thailand. Hi5 – which bills itself as a “social entertainment” site specialising in games and virtual goods – claims it is the country’s biggest social media property. Overall it has 50 million monthly visitors worldwide. InMobi says it now receives 5 billion ad requests a month from Asia, a growth of 400 percent in the past six months.

—Nexage/CPX Interactive: The mobile ad technology developer Nexage has launched a new solution that lets online ad networks source inventory simultaneously across mobile web sites and mobile apps. The ad network CPX Interactive is Nexage’s first customer for the service, called AdMax.

—O2/Shazam: And another sign of more contextual ads coming to mobile. Mobile operator O2 is sponsoring Shazam’s iPhone app to promote its priority ticket service: customers will be served ads for pre-sale ticket offers for events at O2-sponsored venues, based on music they have tagged through Shazam’s iPhone app. The ads are being delivered by 4th Screen Advertising, as part of a wider deal between itself and Shazam, originally made in October 2009.

—WorldMate/LinkedIn: The travel-planning app that claims to have 5 million customers has integrated with LinkedIn’s APIs, so that users can access their LinkedIn contacts while planning their travels. WorldMate says that this makes it the first BlackBerry app for LinkedIn; it’s also available for iPhones, Nokia (NYSE: NOK) devices and Windows devices.

The legal guys over in Finland must be clocking up a lot of overtime these days: on top of the Apple ITC battle over patent infringements, now Nokia (NYSE: NOK) has another legal wrangle over in the U.S., this time over a class-action lawsuit around delays and discounts in its line of handsets.

The news comes as Nokia says it will be laying off 285 people as it “develops” one of its plants to boost smartphone production.

The suit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York by the City of Roseville Employees’ Retirement System against Nokia’s CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, former CFO Rick Simonson and Nokia’s head of phones Kai Oisamo, alleges that Nokia misled investors between January and September 2008.

It says that, in that period, Nokia gave misleading statements about new product launches and manufacturing problems, about losing market share and about cutting its own prices for products. All of this resulted in the Nokia’s American Depository Shares falling by eight percent, writes BBC News…

Nokia has been quick to put out its own response to the suit, which was filed on February 5: “Nokia has reviewed the allegations contained in the complaint and believes that they are without merit. Nokia intends to defend itself against the complaint vigorously.”

The City of Roseville’s retirement fund is not new to lawsuits against the companies in which it invests. Other suits have included cases against Textron (an aircraft, industrial and services conglomerate) and nuclear energy company EnergySolutions.

Separately, Nokia also announced that it would be laying off 285 employees in Finland as it redevelops one of its smartphone plants, in Salo, to improve production. The plant currently employes 2,200 people.

Related

• Apple Matches Nokia’s Latest Attack By Filing A New Patent Complaint Of Its Own

A company that has built—and is already publicizing—a BBC iPlayer app for the iPhone may get stalled at the gates by the BBC, we have learned.

If it goes live, the Rewat.ch app, from Manchester-based developers Camiloo, would be the first iPlayer app for iPhones on the market, according to the BBC. But the BBC may have none of it: “Camiloo is not a licensed distributor of BBC content online or on mobile. The BBC routinely looks for unauthorised usage of our brand across all platforms and when we encounter it we work to resolve the issue,” a spokesperson told paidContent:UK. She would not comment further on whether this means it would bar the app. Rewat.ch would sell for £1.19 but would otherwise be free to use.

Rewat.ch, which is in Apple’s approval stage as Camiloo waits for the BBC to give the go-ahead, points to wider questions on BBC content syndication. Mark Newby, Camiloo’s MD, tells us that it is using publicly accessed RSS feeds of iPlayer content, taken from the BBC’s mobile site, and therefore is not doing anything illicit in its app. But last year, IP Vision got banned from putting its own implementation of the iPlayer into its set-top boxes for its Fetch TV IPTV service.The BBC “provided reasonable arguments as to why implementing a self-build iPlayer for IP Vision could have jeopardised both value for money and the BBC’s brand,” the BBC Trust concluded at the time.

Yet there are already apps in the iTunes store that are sourcing BBC content, but are not official BBC apps. This would argue for Re.wind making its way to the store, too.

The BBC has developed a number of mobile-friendly websites for its services, and it provides an iPlayer widget for selected Nokia devices. And there are niche sites on the Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) store for certain products such as its Good Food magazine and site, and Lonely Planet travel guides. These are produced by the BBC’s commercial division, BBC Worldwide. But it has not launched any Apple apps for the bulk of its content.

It’s not quite clear why BBC hasn’t done more on iPhones: some believe that the BBC’s delay on apps is down to Apple’s own T&C’s; others believe it is because of the BBC’s own license terms. The BBC will not comment on the speculation but tells us this: “We are always keen to make our content available to as many people on as many platforms as possible. We are in continuous discussions with a number of manufacturers with the hope of making our services available via their platforms in the future.”

Newby says that Rewat.ch offers a better experience over the iPlayer site that users can access via iPhones. The app works on a combination of 3G and WiFi, and caches content on the phone for when a person is offline. The BBC’s web version of the iPlayer requires 3G bandwidth to run its service, but this can prove to be a bandwidth hog—3UK says iPlayer can use up to 1600kbps (compared to YouTube at 300kbps) on the network. Newby says that, in fact, some mobile operators restrict usage of iPlayer as a result.

The plan would be to enhance Rewat.ch with content from the online edition of iPlayer eventually. The PC site contains more video and audio than the mobile edition, including more local affiliate coverage as well as subtitles for the hearing impaired. Newby says that this would allow Re.wind to be used on the larger iPad format as well.

Related

• IP Vision Won’t Get To Build Its Own iPlayer
• BBC Hovers On iPhone Apps Due To Apple Terms