The rising popularity of streaming video services is causing a knock-on effect for companies serving ads around that content. And here’s another example of that in action: today UK-based video ad platform Videoplaza is announcing a new $12 million round of funding.

Kyobo, South Korea’s largest bookstore chain, is launching the first e-reader to use Qualcomm’s Mirasol technology. It has a color screen that can apparently be read even in bright sunlight, with a long battery life. E-books make up around 15 percent of trade book sales in South Korea, second only…

Mobile TV has for years been one of the great white hopes for mobile operators looking for new lines of revenue from their data networks—a sentiment that they have held on to despite some high-profile services having failed to meet expectations. Now Everything Everywhere—the JV of Orange and T-Mobile in…

Intel’s CEO, Paul Otellini, made no secret of his reaction when Stephen Elop called him last week to break the news about Nokia (NYSE: NOK) going with Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) instead of MeeGo for its smartphone strategy: “I used the same [four-letter] word that Carol Bartz often uses,” he said,…

Israeli handset maker Modu—which developed the concept of a super-light, super-small smartphones that can be customised with different outer “jackets”—is understood to be shutting down. In its heyday, the company had received at least $107 million in backing from investors that included Qualcomm (NSDQ: QCOM) and SanDisk.

MediaFLO said it launched a special TV station today called EURO to broadcast live video coverage of the 2008 UEFA European Soccer Championship until June 29 (The programming will be provided by ESPN (NYSE: DIS), which Qualcomm (NSDQ: QCOM) alerted me to today). The channel will feature 21 games and…

Adding to its patent woes in the US, Qualcomm received a setback in Europe, too, last week, when the European Commission endorsed DVB-H—and not Qualcomm’s MediaFLO technology—as the single standard for mobile television deployments in the region, and said it would start to mandate rollouts, including spectrum allocation, for the…

UK satellite player BSkyB, which has been doing trials with MediaFlo on mobile TV service, has completed the second technical trial, which would suggest it is leaning towards choosing the technology to launch the service. This second technical trial, conducted in Manchester during winter 2006, featured BSkyB content delivered to…

UK operators are worried that BSkyB will launch its own mobile TV network, cutting them out of the equation, according to The Guardian. Mind you, any effort by BSkyB will be a lot more successful if done in partnership with the operators rather than competing with them, and it’s already…

Operators may differentiate on their mobile content offers, but they compete – and win – on the quality of the end-user experience they deliver. And it’s not enough to delight the customer once; operators must deliver users a consistently satisfactory experience. It’s a tall order, particularly as operators must also…

“Telefonica’s UK mobile operation, O2, introduced its own-branded Ice 3G handset Monday - Europe’s first device to use Qualcomm’s BREW-based uiOne interface.” O2 plans to add the interface to a number of its O2 branded handsets, eventually covering 20-30% of its customer base. The uiOne interface allows operators to customise…

Of course, everyone wants to know how to win the mobile TV war, but the answers not going to be known until the war is actually won. Still, this in-depth article based on a “media gathering” by the DVB-H crowd for the World Cup demo has some interesting tidbits… The…

Nokia and Qualcomm have been fighting over patent licensing for a while now, and UBS analyst Maynard Um thinks Nokia is getting the upper hand… “The Finnish handset behemoth’s IPR position within the industry is “strong and getting stronger” due to significant IPR in GSM and W-CDMA. Further, Um wrote,…

(reg. req) We did the Qualcomm Mediaflo trial tie-up with BskyB yesterday..this explains why MediaFlo might have a tough going in Europe: “The essential problem is finding enough spectrum, with analysts such as Forrester predicting that Europe will simply have to wait until 2010/2012, when the analogue TV spectrum is…

This is the first time a broadcaster is trailing mobile TV, as opposed to an operator, but keep in mind this is just a trial: UK’s BSkyB will become the first broadcaster in Europe to trial a broadcast mobile TV service, using MediaFlo technology from Qualcomm..this is Qcom’s first such…

Qualcomm is happy for MediaFLO to coexist with MBMS (Multimedia Broadcast/Multicast Standard) but is racing DVB-H for global standardization…hardly surprising since MBMS is a 3G technology and therefore complementary to MediaFLO (or vice versa) but DVB-H is a direct competitor. “We are trying to make it as global a standard…

A detailed story on Qualcomm’s efforts to take BREW to Europe…last month it announced a deal with Nordisk Mobiltelefon in Sweden, its first in Western Europe. And a CDMA operator at that… Qualcomm plans to radically revise the BREW platform this fall, abandoning the end-to-end, all-or-nothing approach that, while popular…

Qualcomm has bought British mobile content company Elata for $57 in cash…Elata’s main product is a content delivery system known as ‘Senses’ which enables operators to bundle different kinds of mobile content and send them over the network. “The types of content which can be unified and managed include ringtones…