— MNA Digital to add more mobile content: MNA Digital, the online arm of Midland News Association, publishers of regional newspapers the Express & Star and Shropshire Star newspapers, are expanding their mobile offerings, according to its tech provider Wapple. After launching mobile sites for the two papers in August, MNA Digital is working on bringing out music and video, job and property listings and alerts; and branded mobile micro-sites for local football clubs and bands. It is also exploring introducing mobile advertising and sponsorship opportunities (release).     

— Half a billion ad spend to promote mobile broadband: Sixteen global IT and telecoms giants, including Vodafone (NYSE: VOD), Telefónica, Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT), and Qualcomm (NSDQ: QCOM), have come together to create a new gadget category—the always-connected mobile broadband device—which they’re backing with a $1 billion marketing campaign. The new initiative will see SIM cards pre-installed into laptops that will allow consumers to easily surf the net “out of the box.”

— Samsung embeds Shazam: Shazam Entertainment has signed a distribution deal with Samsung Electronics that will see the mobile music discovery application embedded into the handset makers’ Beatb (model: M3510) and the Beats (model: M3200) music phones. T-Mobile UK will be the first to offer the phones, with Shazam’s application integrated directly into its Mobile Jukebox service. Customers who buy the phone will be able to identify music by holding up their mobiles to the song for a few seconds and to purchase the track directly from the operator’s store.

— SMS declining: SMS was Western Europe’s biggest mobile data services revenue generator in 2007 raking in €16.42 billion (£13 billion), but operators are keen to push MMS and mobile instant messaging, as SMS revenues begin to decline. Research group Frost and Sullivan writes that SMS revenues have already begun falling, and will continue to drop 2.9 percent from 2007-2011, bringing in €14.59 billion (£11.6 billion) in revenue. In comparison, MMS and other data applications generated €7.40 billion (£5.9 billion) in revenues in 2007, but is predicted to grow to €24.28 billion (£19.3 billion) in 2011, with a CAGR of 34.5 percent from 2007-2011. The growth, though, will depend on whether European operators can resolve interconnectivity issues, as well as cutting MMS charges. Mobile IM could be trickier for operators, especially as many see it as cannibalizing SMS revenues.