The plants will remain operational now for “smartphone product customization.” The news comes amidst unconfirmed reports that the company is planning to curtail its Symbian lineup after the release of the next model.

Nokia (NYSE: NOK) says that the transfer will result in the loss of 4,000 jobs in total, and the reductions will take place through the end of 2012.

Nokia does not outline how much the move to Asia will mean in terms of money saved, but this is a decision that has been some time in the making: these were plants that were spared in the last round of cuts under CEO Stephen Elop.

Since then, Nokia has reported yet more declines in its smartphone shipments, mainly around its legacy Symbian platform. The company is now gradually moving to making more of its smartphone portfolio based on Microsoft’s Windows Phone platform.

Now, Nokia says that the move is being made to put the manufacturing bases closer to where the different components are being made for those smartphones. That is a move we have seen from many other companies—and was the subject of a series of stories recently concerning Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) in China and the role of Foxconn in that business.

The move to make these plants focused on customization, meanwhile, points to some focus that Nokia does seem to maintain on its software and services for its devices—a crucial part of the company’s differentiation as it moves more and more to a platform being used by its competitors as well. Others that make Windows Phone devices include Samsung and HTC.

The news comes amidst other reports about Nokia that claim the company is planning to curtail its Symbian lineup after the next model comes out.

Symbian is gradually being phased out for Microsoft’s Windows Phone platform, but Nokia had originally said it would support the OS until 2016, and that could still be the case even if it stopped making devices based on it. Nokia transferred the operation of Symbian to Accenture last year.

A spokesperson from Nokia told paidContent that the article was “speculative at best” and would not comment on device rumor or speculation:

“As we have previously said Symbian continues to be an important part of our portfolio and going forward it will play a more focused role as we accelerate our transition to Windows Phone,” he said. “We remain fully committed to the platform through 2016, which means on-going software support as we go forward.”

The company is currently rolling out an update to Symbian, Belle, and the devices remain popular in the Middle East, Russia and India, even as they have lost out to Android-based devices, Apple’s iPhone and even RIM (NSDQ: RIMM) in other markets.

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Alisher Usmanov, who owns almost a third of Mail.ru Group, also owns a majority of DST Global, which took a stake in Twitter itself with a 2011 investment.

Twitter has two million Russian-speaking users after translating its site to Russian last year, according to Yandex (via RIA). But the example of China, where microblogs - or, “weibo” - have exploded, shows indigenous services have gained more traction than foreigners.

Weibo use rose 296 percent to 249.9 million there through 2011, according to China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) data published today (via Reuters).

The growth is beginning to usher in a new era of greater transparency in society, as well as creating a huge new business opportunity for market-leading operator Sina (NSDQ: SINA) and Tencent, although China’s government has lately instructed operators to police messaging.

If Russian groups like Mail.ru can replicate their success, they could have a hit on their hands.

Russian president Dmitry Medvedev has already endorsed the original Twitter when he appeared at the company’s San Francisco HQ in 2010 to send his first tweet on an occasion Biz Stone called “one of the most special days in the history of Twitter” (via TechCrunch). Some citizens used Twitter to protest the re-election of prime minister Putin but their messages were purportedly swamped by a pro-Putin botnet.

Mail.ru Group CEO Dmitry Grishin (announcement): ”We are excited by the opportunity facing Futubra as microblogging is a fast growing segment which fits well into the Mail.Ru Group vision of the growth in internet communications. The focus in the near term will be product development and the building of new online communities.”

Pelting the building with eggs, chasing away security guards, and fighting amongst themselves, eventually the riot police had to get called in to calm things down.

The mass of people, estimated to be in the thousands, gathered in the early hours of this morning—a freezing winter day in Beijing—to get their hands on the very first iPhone 4S devices to go on sale in the country.

According to reports in the Chinese tech blog M.I.C. Gadget, the crowd was a mix of ordinary consumers and groups of scalpers.

In China, as in some other countries like Russia, scalpers can be a formidable lot when retail of popular items is concerned.

Typically, they buy devices in bulk and then resell them for a premium, sometimes blatantly in front of the store itself. Apple’s solution to that was to limit purchases to two per buyer—except that scalpers in this case formed syndicates of 20-50 scalpers to buy them in bulk anyway. Reportedly, the going price for an iPhone 4S resold by a scalper was 5,588 Chinese yuan ($885); Apple’s price is RMB 4,988 ($791).

The M.I.C. Gadget report has it that when the flagship Beijing store did not open at the scheduled time of 7am, a security guard came out to notify people of the delay. That didn’t go down very well, and so when he came out again to cancel the opening altogether, the crowd lost it. The eggs came soon after, and the fighting came swiftly behind.

It seems that other Apple retail stores in Beijing and elsewhere fared much better. The crowds appear to have been the same mix of people—as you can see by the pictures of scalpers selling on iPhones below—but perhaps not as large, and therefore working more harmoniously.

Apple has released a statement in the wake of the event, which noted that stocks at its Chinese retail locations have already sold out. It also confirmed that it would not be selling the iPhone 4S in retail stores in Beijing and Shanghai for now “to ensure the safety of our customers and employees.” It will, however, continue to sell them online, and resellers like China Unicom will also continue to sell them as long as stocks last:

“The demand for iPhone 4S has been incredible, and our stores in China have already sold out,” an Apple spokesperson told the media. “Unfortunately we were unable to open our store at Sanlitun due to the large crowd, and to ensure the safety of our customers and employees, iPhone 4S will not available in our retail stores in Beijing and Shanghai for the time being. Customers can still order iPhone 4S through the Apple Online Store, or buy at China Unicom and other authorized resellers.”

We have contacted Apple to ask if it could give a date for when it will start to sell the 4S in Beijing and Shanghai retail locations, and will update this post as we learn more. You can safely guess, however, that the next time Apple launches a new product in the country, things will be done a little differently.

Update: An Apple spokesperson contacted for this story declined to comment on when those retail stores will start to sell the iPhone 4S.

Research from consultancy Oliver & Olhbaum Associates, which earlier this month published its annual media outlook, shows that TV viewing is still on the rise, despite the growth of so many other, competing ways of watching that same content.

In 2010, the most recent full-year figures available when the report was published, people in the UK collectively watched 93 billion hours of TV, which works out to around 28 hours per person per week. That’s an increase of 14 billion hours compared to 2006.

While services like time-shifted content have definitely contributed to the growth of TV consumption, the basic broadcast service has continued to grow in popularity: it accounted for 80 billion hours of viewing time in 2010, compared to 76 billion in 2006.

The trend for growth in TV viewing, in fact, is borne out across almost all countries surveyed by the UK regulator, Ofcom, in its latest annual report, also released this month. It found that the U.S. watches the most TV, at 283 minutes per day, with the biggest growth in viewing minutes taking place in the UK, rising by 7.6 percent between 2009 and 2010 to 242 minutes. Interestingly, the three countries whose TV viewing declined were the BRIC nations of Brazil, Russia and India.

Advertising, meanwhile, is not exactly keeping pace with this growth in linear. O&O notes that in the UK, the top TV advertisers are gradually (very gradually) shifting their investments in ads online: in 2010 they spent 2.3 percent of their budgets online, compared to 1.9 percent in 2005. Ofcom notes that in 2010, when £239 billion ($368 billion) was made in the TV sector in the UKglobally, £99 billion ($153 billion) came from ads, while £121 billion ($186 billion) came from subscriptions. And, because this is the UK we are talking about,It estimates that £19 billion ($29 billion) came from public funds by way of TV licenses and other subsidies for organisations like the BBC.

Still, while subscriptions are now a bigger revenue generator than advertising for the TV industry in the UK, that £99 billion actually represented an increase greater than the overall growth of TV revenues. Ads grew by 9.9 percent over the year before, while overall TV revenues grew by 7.7 percent.

More details in the slideshow below:

FilmOn says it will be offering the content in partnership with XOS Digital, a company that provides digital asset management services to college sports organizations. It already offers its own sports on-demand service, XOS Sports, in which it offers paid rentals and full downloads of college games.

FilmOn’s channels, already live, offer viewers live games as well as archived fixtures. Users also have the option of recording programs to watch later either over TV, Internet or mobile devices using iOS or Android apps, or to subscribe to HD versions of the channels for a monthly fee. FilmOn offers a combination of free channels and those that require a subscription to watch.

It’s not clear just how extensive FilmOn’s coverage of NCAA fixtures will be—will it include the championships and all divisions?—or how FilmOn’s services work in conjunction with other rights deals between the NCAA and other media outlets: ESPN (NYSE: DIS), for example, extended its rights for NCAA Basketball in the U.S. and internationally earlier this month. That deal included both broadcast and streaming rights.

We have contacted FilmOn for further clarification and will update this post as we learn more.

At the very least, the equal content offering seems to be something that FilmOn is trying to exploit for its own marketing purposes: “We are going head to head with the industry’s top sports programmers,” the company’s outspoken founder Alki David boasts in the news release announcing the deal.

Frankfurt-based, UK/Beverly Hills-operated FilmOn has steadily been building up its catalog of premium sports content: earlier this year the company launched an international soccer channel with the UK Premiership and the Football Association, which will kick off (pun!) with football games from the Russian Premier League.

Last year, it came under some controversy when it was accused by the four major broadcasters in the U.S. of violating copyright by showing their programs. It was served at the time with a temporary restraining order. It then fought back against CBS and CNET with suits of its own (later dropped “put on hold” until November, David tells us.)

The funding underscores how, while Twitter is slowly turning its attention to generating revenue on its social-media platform through advertising and marketing services, it is also still very much picking up huge injections of cash for faster growth.

It also raises the question of whether Twitter may put off thoughts of an IPO for the time being: this latest investment values the company at $10 billion, according to Jack Neele, a fund manager at Robeco Groep NV (via Bloomberg).

The deal follows an $800 million investment taken earlier this year by the Russian group Digital Sky Technologies (DST), and take Twitter’s total investments to just under $1.5 billion.

Not a fly-by-night prince: Kingdom Holdings, in a press release, noted that the deal was the result of several months of negotiations and due diligence on the part of the company.

It could signal a change in strategy for the company, which might be eyeing up other social media brands for further investments. Up to now, it has focused on some key stakes in regional operations, as well as some of the biggest, most established international media and tech properties:

—The company has invested $600 million in shares of News Corporation. Those shares include voting rights and the prince was the subject of some media attention earlier this year when we spoke out in support of the Murdochs during the height of the phone-hacking scandal. That investment has been used as a route to growing out News Corp.‘s footprint in the Arabic world.

—Kingdom Holdings and the Prince also have a stake of Time Warner: that came by way of its initial investment of $145 million in Netscape, which subsequently got bought by AOL (NYSE: AOL). The company made further, unspecified investments in Time Warner in subsequent years, and according to its site, has a similar strategy to the one it has taken with News Corp., to partner with Time Warner on regional investments in the Middle East.

—It also, very presciently, acquired five percent of Apple back in 1997, a steal for $115 million. It’s unclear if that stake has increased or decreased but it seems more of a straight rather than strategic investment.

—Other stakes that it has held include those in Motorola (NYSE: MMI), eBay (NSDQ: EBAY) and HP (NYSE: HPQ).

—Regionally, it has a 29.9 percent stake in the publishers Saudi Research and Marketing Group (SRMG), and Rotana Group, a broadcasting JV with News Corp. The Prince also has plans to launch his own Arab news channel, Alarab.

Given Kingdom Holdings’ emphasis on building out regional operations based on strategic stakes, this could kick off an interesting chapter in the international growth of Twitter.

Twitter had already marked itself out during the “Arab spring” revolts as a key route for communicating not only among people on the ground, but also for communicating developments to the outside world.

Twitter’s platform, in its simplest form of exchanging short messages with a group of followers, is highly scalable, working not only on the web and smartphones but on the most basic of mobile handsets. That gives it a lot of potential in developing markets, as well as those that are more advanced.

In a press release, Nokia notes that it will arrive in further markets in the “coming weeks.”

Nokia says that the Lumia will be selling at a registered retail price of €270 ($360)—not exactly inexpensive, and still well above the fabled “sub-$100” smartphone barrier, but about half the cost of the higher-end Lumia 800, which is selling for about $625 without any contracts. If you buy the 710 via a carrier deal, the price will be significantly lower again.

Nokia, unsurprisingly, claims that the 710 will be the best Windows Phone device available for the price. But it remains to be seen whether the public really has an appetite for Windows Phones, expensive or not. So far, the various devices that have been spun out by Samsung, HTC and others have failed to break the stronghold held by Android makers and Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) in the smartphone stakes.

While the 800, which started to sell about a month ago, was definitely an important first step for Nokia to compete against the heft and weight of Apple and the top devices from Samsung and HTC, it will be the 710 that will be the real test of whether Nokia will be able to move ahead under its traditional business model selling mass-market devices at lower price points.

And the other big question is, will this be the first Nokia Windows Phone device to hit the U.S. market?

Some have speculated that a joint announcement set for next week from Nokia and T-Mobile USA will be to announce the availability of Nokia’s first Windows Phone handsets. The blog wpcentral went one step further and found a document listing at the FCC that seemed to confirm as much. There could well be more devices lined up for launching on the same day.

So far, there have been very conflicting reports over how well the 800 has sold, with some claiming sell-outs and others noting that, given its limited release, even a sell-out would not have had as big an impact as you would think.

Among the differences between the two devices are less on-device storage (8GB compared to 16GB on the 800); changes in camera and screen quality; and a rather different exterior.

While the 800 has the much-touted polycarbonate shell, the 710 has a plastic cover that can be removed and swapped out for covers of different colors. That’s a throwback to the Nokia phones of old that spawned a device fascia/back industry in its own right—and was perhaps, even before annoying ringtones, the first example of phone personalization.

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The news comes at the same time that another big Russian internet property, Digital Sky Technology’s free mail provider Mail.ru, is also releasing a product it hopes will increase its use among mobile consumers in the country: it has partnered with Nokia (NYSE: NOK) to develop a new web browser for Nokia’s S40 feature phones, which remain some of the most popular in the country.

The Yandex deal will see the company launch an iPhone app by the end of this year, with an app optimised or for the iPad tablet in 2012. The news was first reported by the Russian financial newspaper Vedomosti, which cited company spokesperson Ochir Mandzhikov for the launch dates.

Yandex has some 10 apps already published for Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) devices—covering maps, navigation and mail—but this will be the first one dedicated to search, the company’s bread and butter from a revenue perspective, where (like Google (NSDQ: GOOG), China’s Baidu (NSDQ: BIDU) and other search portals) it runs advertising alongside search results. The app will also give users quick access to other Yandex services such as weather and exchange rates.

Meanwhile, Mail.ru is launching a new web browser for S40 feature phones, which remain some of the most popular in Russia today. In collaboration with Nokia, Mail.ru is integrating a number of its services, such as e-mail, news and social networking, into a browser that it says is specially optimized for smaller screens and lower bandwidth use (some of these devices, for example, will not even necessarily have 3G capabilities, or processors to handle heavy data files from the Internet).

What’s interesting about the S40 deal is that these were all the kinds of services that Nokia in the past had tried to develop itself, but is now conceding to other companies that are either stronger players in these areas technologically, that already have strong local presences (mail.ru is the biggest of the free mail providers in Russia today)—or ideally both.

Nokia’s Russia director, Alexander Kopanev, notes that the deal with mail.ru is a first for Nokia in Russia—and it will be interesting to see if Nokia tries to replicate the relationship with other local search giants in other markets, or whether it tries to work with other properties in the DST umbrella (the company is also a shareholder of Facebook, among other holdings).

For Yandex, the move into iOS search apps represents a significant step forward on the platform, where it has so far not gotten very far with discussions with Apple to preload the service on to devices sold in Russia. It has inked some other key deals to preload its services: with Samsung for its connected TVs and bada phones, as well as with Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) for its Windows phones distributed in the market. It also had an existing agreement with Nokia for its Symbian handsets.

The Vedomosti article notes that while Yandex is still the biggest search engine in Russia, the rise of Android devices and other smartphones have put something of a dent in its market share. That’s because the Android devices default to Google’s search services, while on iOS devices Google is the default search on Safari, Apple’s own default web browser.

Google’s Android currently accounts for 27 percent of all mobile devices sold in Russia—a three-fold rise over the last year—while Apple’s share is now five percent (from one percent a year ago). Yandex’s share of the search market is 60.8 percent, a decline of 3.6 percentage points. Google’s has gone up by almost the same amount, 3.5 percent, to a total of 25.4 percent of the market.

Mail.ru, on the other hand, appears to be making more of a play not for the platforms that may dominate more in the future, but for the ones that are strongest today. Nokia currently sells some 27 models of devices built on its S40 platform, which makes it the most popular platform for what is still the biggest mobile device vendor in the Russia.

The new Mail.ru-optimized browser is available for download by existing users, and will presumably be bundled into new devices that will be sold in the future.

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SPB, which has offices in Russia, Taiwan Thailand, develops software for the full range of smartphone platforms—from Android to iOS to Windows Phone—and their content includes games, productivity tools, as well as a product it calls the SPB Shell 3D, which can be used to customize the user interface of particular operating systems.

So far the mobile platforms that SPB covers with Shell 3D include Android, Symbian and Windows Mobile (but not Windows Phone 7), and it has worked with mobile operators as well to customize generic operating systems on devices that they sell to their respective customer bases.

The official announcement of the deal highlights SPB’s Shell 3D as a particular focus for Yandex, which plans to integrate its search capabilities and other mobile services such as news feeds and cloud services into the skin.

The acquisition could also mean that Yandex’s search engine and other services will likely be used as the backbone to any further games or tools that SPB develops in the future.

It is not clear how the acquisition will impact deals that SPB already has in place with other customers, or where the new company will sit within the wider Yandex organization. We have contacted both companies to ask these questions, as well as any details that can be disclosed on the acquisition price. Update: no details on the acqusition, but Olga Steidl, a VP for SPB, says that the company will “definitely continue to work with external clients such as carriers and device manufactures.”

The acquisition of SPB, in any case, is the latest in a number of steps from Yandex to grow its influence with and exposure to mobile consumers: late last week Yandex announced that it would become the default search client on Windows Phones distributed in Russia. In October, Yandex inked a similar deal with Samsung to be pre-loaded on its Bada devices.

So far Yandex has stayed away from moving to an all-out phone launch, as Google and Baidu have done, but if these moves are any indication of its bigger plans, don’t rule it out completely, either.

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Revenue, which comes mostly from text-based advertising, rose 65 percent to 5.15 billion rubles ($172 million) after Yandex attracted 58 percent more advertisers.

But Google (NSDQ: GOOG) has now started to take some of market-leading Yandex’s domestic search share, according to LiveInternet.ru stats…

This basically reverses the trend we reported in June, when we told how Yandex had taken away Google share through late 2010 and early 2011.

Yandex is still investing a lot in additional staff. Costs doubled to a quarter of its revenue, 1.2 billion rubles, and is planned to hit 6.3 billion for the full year, for which Yandex is forecasting profit growth of 58 to 60 percent.

Slides | Release | Webcast

Mail.ru saw 56.1 percent more display advertising sales and a 110.6 percent growth in payments through its community sites.

The company has been doing “integration of social graphs across our communications and entertainment products”. Last month, it introduced interoperability between its two IM services (Agent and ICQ) and has unified activity feeds for its My World and Odnoklassniki social networks.

It also introduced consistent design elements across its services - including My World, Odnoklassniki, e-mail, games, search, and IM - to make the whole package stickier.

Odnoklassniki’s September audience is up 18 percent from last year (source: TNS) whilst the Mail.ru Agent IM service has a 29 percent larger audience.

Mail.ru is reiterating a full-year forecast of 50 percent revenue growth with profit margin in the high forties.

Release.

But while this deal signifies a step towards more ubiquity for Yandex, it is not a sign of more Yandex services per se. The deal covers search as well as several Yandex widgets, including those for traffic, stocks, news and TV listings—but for now it includes nothing in the way of new video services along the lines of those being offered through other internet-based properties on connected TVs, such as Google (NSDQ: GOOG) TV.

Google launched its TV service on devices from Logitech and Sony (NYSE: SNE). Another Samsung TV competitor, LG (SEO: 066570), has a deal with France Telecom (NYSE: FTE) to preload video services on its connected TVs for distribution in France Telecom’s home market.

According to a news release on the Yandex site, Yandex is now the default search engine on Samsung’s “Smart TV” line of products distributed in CIS countries. The Yandex search page also now appears as the default homepage on the TV internet portal. The widgets, meanwhile, are all accessible via the TV screens.

Less specific are details on the mobile deal: it looks like bada devices will also feature Yandex search and widget services, and the agreement may also include default search placement for Yandex. The bada tie-up will start up “in the near future,” according to the release.

While the deal shows that Yandex is on the hunt to build up a bigger audience via non-PC, connected devices, it also underscores a strategy from Samsung to partner locally to enhance its offerings, rather than rely on global agreements with the likes of global players like Google, which is strong in some parts of the world but plays a less prominent role in countries like Russia and China.

In Russia, in fact, Google’s market share has been suffering on the growth of Yandex specifically. Yandex says that its home page is the single most-visited internet page in Russia, with 24 million unique monthly visitors, according to figures from TNS in December 2010 and used by Yandex. Russia has around 140 million residents, of which about 50 million are internet users. The CIS as a whole has a population of around 300 million.

It also shows that Samsung is keen to bring more partners into its bada ecosystem. Although bada was developed by Samsung as a feature phone platform—one that is a huge seller for the company, it should be pointed out—some have been speculating that Samsung has even bigger plans for the OS. They believe Samsung might put a lot more emphasis on bada as its “third way” into the smartphone world, without reliance on operating systems designed by Google and Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) (Samsung’s two smartphone OS partners today).

Samsung announced a partnership with Intel (NSDQ: INTC) some weeks ago that will see it developing a new linux-based platform, Tizen, which could serve as the bridge between bada and a smartphone OS.

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However, Microsoft also noted that the deal has not been approved everywhere. “The acquisition remains under review in a few countries, and will be completed in those countries when such reviews are closed,” noted the release. The countries that have yet to approve the purchase are Russia, Ukraine, Serbia and Taiwan, a Skype spokesperson told paidContent. It’s not clear at this point whether the clearances in these markets are a formality or whether there is still a question of approval, and what that might mean for the bigger picture.

In any case, today Microsoft has taken a moment to proclaim that Skype will now officially become a division of Microsoft. It will be led by Tony Bates, who used to be the CEO of Skype and now becomes president of that division, according to the release.

Now comes the challenging part.

Chief among them will be whether Microsoft will be able to make money out of a company that has seen explosive growth but a challenge so far in converting that to profit.

Skype, founded in 2003, currently has some 30 million users online at any given time, and claims to have 145 million active monthly users, making it the biggest provider of internet-based telephony today, which it offers through its PC-based client and also an array of mobile apps. Although these services have options for revenue generation—among them, the ability to purchase credits to call numbers outside the Skype network, offering users extras like voice mail, and the option to have “real” telephone numbers—Skype’s main traffic comes from free services. In 2010 it reported an operating loss of $7 million.

It will be worth watching to see whether that basic business model changes drastically: for example, incorporating either more metered services, or further forays into advertising and freemium-style services, making the service, for example, a platform for advertising from Microsoft’s own ad network.

But that points to another challenge for Microsoft: integrating Skype into its existing structure. Microsoft says it largely plans to keep Skype’s current corporate structure intact, with offices to remain in countries like Estonia Estonia, the Czech Republic, Russia, Sweden, the United Kingdom, Luxembourg, Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong, and the United States. That speaks to a relatively de-centralized way of working, and one that specifically will not be centered around Redmond with the rest of Microsoft.

Will that lead to a culture clash? It was certainly the case that Skype’s previous owner, Ebay, was never able to figure out a way of working with Skype in a useful-enough way: the company eventually sold Skype to a group of investors in 2009, five years after buying the company.

The one goal that might prove to be the easiest of all to reach will be the company’s growth strategy, Microsoft writes in its announcement of the deal that the goal is to reach 1 billion Skype users daily. That’s a figure that might have been a challenge for Skype as a standalone product, even with its popular apps. But since Microsoft says that eventually Skype will also be integrated into many of its existing products, both for enterprises and consumers, Skype may well become as ubiquitous as Windows or Word in the longer run.

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Some deals were well telegraphed but not the scope of the announcement, made at the Mipcom TV trade show in Cannes Wednesday. The services vary by country, with the bulk available in the U.S. The partners include UK broadcasters BBC, Channel 4, Channel Five (no ITV); online services like YouTube (NSDQ: GOOG), Dailymotion and Lovefilm; Comcast (NSDQ: CMCSA) through Xfinity and NBC Universal, ESPN (NYSE: DIS) and Verizon in the U.S.. (Full list below.)

Xbox Live users gain access to some services through free registration; Xbox Live Gold is a subscription plan. Initially, Microsoft wanted to limit the new services that would be streamed through the Xbox to the Xbox Live Gold tier but that caused problems for the BBC and some other networks required under their charters to be available to the widest tier on a service. Microsoft bent, we’ve been told: those networks will be on the Xbox Live tier, available in their countries for no additional fee while others in the same country—Channel 4 in the UK, for instance—are only on the pay plan.

All of the partners’ announcements are coordinated to refer only to features and not to strategy.

• The BBC is making no comment about any of this. “The BBC is pleased to confirm the completion of a partnership deal with Microsoft that will enable the BBC to make on-demand services available to all UK users of the Xbox Live platform,” a spokesperson tells paidcontent. “We’re not yet in a position to go into any specifics - or confirm a launch date - but we’ll share more details as soon as we can.”
• Lovefilm, which previously was shut out by Microsoft’s seeking a slice of its subscription revenue, has not responded to our questions.
• Channel Four, whose cross-platform 4oD service can only be used by paid-up Xbox Live gold subscribers, has also not responded.

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Gemalto, a company that makes SIM cards for phones on GSM networks, earlier this year announced a service which puts Facebook access directly on the SIM card, making it usable by even the most basic mobile user. Now, Gemalto has announced its first customer, Telecom Argentina’s mobile operator Personal.

Facebook has made significant inroads into targeting smartphone users with apps and mobile web access, and has even been rolling out apps for feature phones. It says it now has some 350 million people using the social network through these mobile channels.

This newest service is something different. It targets those consumers in markets where there is very little smartphone penetration, mobile data is too expensive for the average consumer, and the main use of mobile phones is still for voice and texting. (And yes, there are still a lot of people in those advanced smartphone-loving countries that still fall into that category, too.)

Accordingly, Gemalto’s SIM offering gives users the most basic iteration of Facebook that can be used without a data plan. A user can post status updates, access their contact book and see status updates from their friends, all through the SMS system.

While that could mean services that let users send status updates for the cost of a text, Gemalto says that Personal, which already has 17 million subscribers and will be targeting Argentina’s large prepay customer base with the service, will be selling weekly and monthly “passess” so that users can send and receive unlimited Facebook texts for a fixed fee. Users will need to upgrade their SIMs to the new Facebook-enabled SIM in order to get access.

Vincent Truffier-Blanc, a marketing director for Gemalto who worked on the service with Facebook, says that the pass system, in Gemalto’s experience, is the “most efficient” way of packaging and selling the service: the company also offers access to Microsoft’s Messenger instant messaging service. That service, available with operators in Thailand, Morocco, Argentina and Brazil, has picked up between four million and five million users so far since being deployed in 2009. That’s approximately 15-20 percent of those collective operators’ subscriber basis, he said.

As with several other third-party services that link in with Facebook (including those “Facebook phones” from HTC and INQ), this service has been created by Gemalto, not Facebook.

“Facebook is aware of what we are doing but we are acting as a classic Facebook partner. We sell the service to the operator,” said Truffier-Blanc. He notes that part of Gemalto had to be certified by Facebook, which it did after meeting with Gemalto to develop the app.

That also meant that it could use Facebook’s private APIs for the service, rather than those that are publicly available. That gave the service the added benefit of contact book access and makes the service more sellable to carriers. “With operators you have to provide them with a robust solution,” he said. “You cannot play with APIs that may change from one day to another.”

Truffier-Blanc says that Gemalto is in conversation with more operators to sign on for the Facebook offering, and it is also negotiating with other leading social networks to enable access to their services on the SIM as well. He’s not naming names, but you can see big potential here not just for Twitter but those many nationally-focused social networks in countries like China and Russia that specifically target users in markets with lower smartphone usage.

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The story, which appeared today on Bloomberg, says that the three have already contacted Yahoo and its advisers.

But the discussions are only at an early stage and may never materialize as an actual joint deal. And if it does, it could open a can of worms over foreign ownership of a U.S. communications company, and that might halt the bid.

Bloomberg cited three unnamed people close to the situation as sources for its story. AllThingsD also named the three companies in a list of potential bidders in a post two weeks ago.

Alibaba’s chairman Jack Ma has made no secret of his interest in Yahoo: the two companies are already tied up in China, where Yahoo owns a 40-percent stake in the e-commerce giant. The report today speculates that Alibaba’s interest might partly be down to Ma wanting to get back complete control of his own company.

But that’s not the only pre-existing tie between these four companies. Silver Lake and DST are also currently investing in Alibaba—that deal, for an undisclosed amount, also includes Chinese VC, Yunfeng Capital, as well as Singapore’s Temasek as investors. The investment was announced last month and is currently closing.

Another source noted that Silver Lake’s hope would be to sell off all of Yahoo’s Asian assets (it also has an Internet JV with Softbank in Japan) in order to focus the business better in the U.S. for a potential buyer.

If these three actually end up buying Yahoo, it could catapult the company—which has seen better days and has found it a challenge competing against Google (NSDQ: GOOG) in search and its main revenue driver, online advertising—into potentially different tie-ups with a new set of companies. Silver Lake counts Groupon, Skype and Zynga among its investments (the Skype stake is currently being sold to Microsoft; (NSDQ: MSFT) that deal has not closed). Meanwhile, DST also invests in Groupon and Zynga, as well as being a large stakeholder in Facebook and Spotify.

But even if a deal involving Alibaba, DST and Silver Lake makes financial sense for Yahoo—the company fired its CEO last month and says it is exploring strategic options for the business—it could get scuppered by regulators unhappy with the idea of foreign ownership of a major internet company. Yahoo is the second-largest search engine in the U.S. and provides a range of communications services such as email and messaging. Companies like Huawei have been met with roadblocks in the past when trying to acquire U.S.-based equipment makers.

Yahoo, which currently has a market value of $17.1 billion, could be a great deal for the three companies although from the perspective of Yahoo, the best time for getting bought may have passed. When Microsoft tried to buy in the company in 2008, it made an offer of $47.5 billion.

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In an interview with the BBC for its “You and Yours” consumer affairs program, Daunt said that the company’s e-reader development was “well down the planning line.”

He says that the device will be launched next spring. That’s a short timescale, considering that from the sounds of it, it’s a project that was initiated, or at least progressed, only after the company was bought by Mamut from HMV (LSE: HMV) earlier this summer for £53 million.

“[An e-reader] requires a certain investment and certain confidence in the future, which we have,” said Daunt, who earlier noted, “Luckily we have an owner who is prepared to invest in it.”

(Its e-commerce director actually discussed the possibility of a Waterstone’s e-reader back in May.)

When contacted directly for a response to this report, a spokesperson for Waterstone’s declined to comment.

Daunt believes that a Waterstones e-reader, tied together with its existing e-book store, could potentially provide Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) a run for its money.

“We in Waterstone’s need to offer you a digital reader which is at least as good, and preferably substantially better, than that of our internet rival,” he said. “You will have a much better buying experience purchasing your books through us.”

His template? Barnes & Noble and its Nook line of products, which feature not only e-readers but devices that more closely rival the iPad and other tablets: “They have combined [the Nook] with the physical shop,” he noted, praising the concept of being able to use the Nook in the physical stores to increase footfall, and noting that the concept and the products seem to be working.

“[Barnes & Noble] has enormous and increasing market share. They are beating Amazon in their own backyard.” In its last earnings report in August, B&N said it had a 27 percent share of the U.S. e-reader market. At the end of 2010, it was 20 percent, so while it is definitely growing and the number-two to Amazon, it is by no means dominating at this point.

The news of course raises a whole lot of questions. Among them, who might partner with Waterstones for this project, and does the chain—one of the UK’s largest, but still only a UK chain—have enough capital, scale and digital muscle for such a product to succeed?

“Barnes & Noble spent $50-200 million building the Nook reader + ecosystem. All of Waterstones is only worth $50 million. Challenging,” noted Andrew Rhomberg, founder of the “e-book sharing” service Jellybooks in a tweet.

There is the question of whether Waterstones could partner with a provider of an exsiting e-reader—Barnes & Noble itself, or Kobo—or whether it might work one of the many e-reader device makers not tied to any existing store. The short timeframe and costs involved could point to a licensing deal rather than something built from the ground up.

Some of the digital content deals that Waterstones had in place when it was still owned by the media retail giant HMV have been thrown into question since the sale of the chain to Mamut, but Waterstone’s has maintained that the e-book supplier relationships would continue.

But perhaps the company has not really put its best digital foot forward up to now: “It’s one thing to launch an e-reader but another question to launch a rally great e-reader,” noted Benedict Evans, an analyst with Enders Analysis. “Waterstone’s currently has 90,000 titles on its e-book site, so they’ve got a way to go to building up their inventory.” At the moment Apple’s iBookstore has 260,000 titles and Amazon has over 700,000 titles in their UK storefronts.

Up to now, the closest Waterstone’s has come to selling an e-reading device is retailing Sony’s Reader in its stores. It says it sold one million e-books in 2009/2010.

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The group - which also owns ICQ, Odnoklassniki and a stake of Vkontakte - saw slower revenue growth - up 66 percent to $228.2 million.

But its profit margin jumped from 39.2 percent to 50 percent after it managed to save a heap of money on server hosting, rental and headquarters.

Mail.ru also says the results “validate the group’s strategy of integrating its services: email, social networks, instant messengers and online gaming”. So, in the rest of the year, it will try to save more money through further integration and by growing in both Russia and the former Soviet states.

The group issued heightened full-year guidance of 50 percent revenue growth.

During the half-year, Mail.ru bought another 7.55 percent of Vkontakte for $111.7 million, taking its stake to 39.99 percent and opened its eleventh Russian sales office. Its Odnoklassiniki grew its audience by 44 percent over the year (source: TNS). Mail.ru’s own June audience was 27.5 million.

Release.

Nasdaq-listed Yandex explains: “Using these technologies, we plan to better answer questions about what is discussed in social networks - that is, almost everything that happens around you.” Terms are not disclosed.

The service is a rival to web services like Paper.li and Postano and a range of apps including Flipboard.

Whilst The Tweeted Times appears less popular than Paper.li, it works very well on the web and is also available in app form. Creators Maxim Grinev and Maria Grineva are joining Yandex’s startup team.

Our startup The Tweeted Times (tweetedtimes.com) has been acquired by Yandex ! http://t.co/dFmj6LI
6 months ago

mariagrineva
Maria Grineva

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The idea underpinning each service is to disintermediate professional news editors as the curators of news stories delivered to readers because the news links tweeted by people users follow supposedly present a more relevant “newspaper”.

It’s a hubristic and self-referential notion, and one that a few tweeters appear to be adhering to. Here is the “newspaper” The Tweeted Times created for me based on news links tweeted by people I follow.

Last year, Yandex acquired the WebVisor web analytics startup and bought its Yandex Maps provide GIS Technologies to pull its mapping in-house.

Afisha-Rambler has submitted its proposal to the publisher.

The site had 500,000 unique users in July and could be a good way to buy up technology advertiser relationships in Russia’s fast-growing web market.

Afisha-Rambler already operates the Ferra.ru tech site and this summer it bought gaming news site Kanobu, “IGN.com for Russia”.

Rambler has outsourced its search and ad sales functions to Yandex in what, after the Afisha merger, is a more determined focus on content.

Compulenta is a sibling to Computerra Online.