The Orchard has entered into a marketing and licensing partnership with Chinese mobile infrastructure and services provider, ZTEMT.  Utilizing The Orchard’s top one hundred thousand songs, ZTEMT will program an English language genre section of China Telecom’s newly updated iMusic.  According to The Orchard, this deal makes them the first international digital music distributor to introduce such a large selection of western music to China’s 388 million net and mobile users.

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According to Bango, over 20% of people visiting web sites to purchase content using their mobile phones are now connecting via WiFi. This presents a major challenge to both content providers and operators as these mobile visitors are unrecognized by the networks, making it difficult to sell and market mobile services to them and significantly impacting mobile content revenues. (more…)

Today, mobile phones have become inevitable in one’s life. We’ve seen it grow from a mere luxury to now a necessity. The transformation in the lifestyle of we, the people is a major reason for this change. What started with a several bucks for incoming call has moved on to a plethora of plans which have free outgoing calls today.

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The crushing dominance of the iPhone is broken—at least for now—having given way to the BlackBerry Curve. This just-released report has come in from the NPD Group (www.npd.com), a prestigious consumer research agency. After months of topping the charts, the iPhone acquiesces to what consumers have pegged as their number one choice—the BlackBerry Curve. (more…)

A few random updates of interest from last week’s CTIA Wireless event… CTIA was as interesting and busy as ever, although I would guess that the numbers were likely way down this year for obvious reasons… on the up-side, Vegas is pretty much giving away hotel rooms due to high vacancy rates so if you need to go there for a business trip you’ll be able to do so on the cheap very easily (airfares are also very reasonable). I caught wind of some amazing technologies in the mobile space while there, many providing data sharing solutions using mobile technology that take advantage of the cloud so you can easily share documents with colleagues, interact with your docs via mobile and even communicate and access remote computers at home of office from your phone! If mobile media is important in your job you’ll be pleased to know that some great solutions are coming enabling you to do much more and likely wow your colleagues at the same time.

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Yes you have seen this idea before…

Shades of the nearly-forgotten barcode scanning CueCat, and Japanese business cards, add up to a old yet new strategy for Google. This latest AdWords initiative has to be a 20 percent project at Google.

We picture some techie cleaning out a closet at home, finding a card from a hostess bar in Osaka stuck under a CueCat in a box, and being suddenly struck by a bowling ball falling from an unbalanced shelf.

Tra-la-la! Wait, that’s Captain Underpants. Eureka! That’s more appropriate for California.

We’ll give credit to Joel On Software for making the CueCat connection too. Yes, play spot the oldies, kids, it’s easy and fun!

Google intends to drop square barcodes onto print ads.

With a camera phone and the right software, a person can scan the ad, and the phone’s onboard web browser will bring up additional information related to it.

“2D barcodes have been common in Japan for a number of years,” Google said in its barcode help page. “In fact, Japanese business cards often feature barcodes containing contact information.”

The first ads containing these barcodes appeared in newspapers, and connected to jewelry retailer Blue Nile.

Google promoted these, and other barcode ads, as a way to quickly deliver more information about an advertiser to a consumer.

It’s far too soon to guess at how successful barcoding may be, for Google or anyone else opting to use the technology.

We will make one guess: Google’s Android mobile software will include a barcode reader when it launches.

Google has released their AdSense for Mobile program for a couple of countries now after testing it for some while*. (more…)

The Federal Communications Commission has made its decision on the ground-rules for winning the 700MHZ wireless spectrum.

Remember, Google upped the ante by making a bid provided the FCC agreed to:

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We’ll put aside Yahoo’s CEO woes and turn our attention to their continued expansion of mobile services.

The company has already made many announcements over the past few weeks, and tomorrow they’ll officially make two new mobile announcements.

First up, Yahoo’s announcing new features for Yahoo! Go for Mobile 2.0 including: (more…)

Zec points to an interesting item by Information Week on Google’s Mobile User Experience Strategy, which was the subject at a meeting of the New York City chapter of the Usability Professionals Association.

Google user experience designer Leland Rechis said, bluntly, that the mobile Web is Balkanized, “The Pangaea of the Web is gone.” And don’t expect this to change anytime soon, either. Thanks to carrier portals and off portal applications, there is no one mobile standard to develop for.

In the mobile world developers have to be prepared to optimize for different devices, browsers, languages, carriers, countries and cultures.

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