Google (NSDQ: GOOG) at the moment gets the vast majority of its revenues from its huge advertising business, but today we saw two examples of how its trying to diversify for a later day. It has bought the German Groupon clone Daily Deal and it has started rolling out its…

Nokia (NYSE: NOK) may be rethinking how it delivers mobile music—shuttering its Ovi Unlimited music service—but it is not giving up on digital entertainment altogether. The Swedish VOD and streaming site Voddler has announced that it has picked up an additional $8 million in funding, with this round led by…

Aspiro, the hosted and white-label mobile TV and music provider, today announced that it has sold its remaining mobile entertainment business in Finland to Exsol Oy, for €100,000 ($137,000; £86,000), a holding company set up by games/ringtone distributor Buumi International. This follows a sale of entertainment assets in Norway, Sweden…

A bad day for staff at Swedish mobile handset maker and networks company Ericsson (NSDQ: ERIC), which is making 950 staff redundant in Sweden—about five percent of its domestic workforce—as part of an additional round of cuts on top of its on-going cost reduction scheme. The company still aims to…

It’s traditionally been the home of illegal file-sharing in Europe, but since the introduction of strong anti-piracy laws this year Sweden has become a lot less hospitable to freeloading P2P nerds. The IPRED law—which obliges ISPs to hand over personal details of suspected offenders to rights holders—is credited for a…

British newspapers can’t catch a break when it comes to growing online earnings - just look at Trinity Mirror’s negative digital growth in 2009 so far. But Scandinavian publishers aren’t finding things quite as tough… For the three months to September 30, Norway’s based Schibsted reported a 52 percent lift…

Global Gaming Factory X (GGF)‘s much-hyped and now defunct bid to buy BitTorrent tracker The Pirate Bay was a ship that never sailed. But more bidders could be on the horizon… Swedish games download site Gamersgate.com and, bizarrely, GGF CEO Hans Pandeya are amongst them, according to DI.se (via Thelocal.se).…

The company behind the popular teen-focused Habbo Hotel virtual world is to lay off 40 staff, according to tweets from affected employees and reports in the Finnish media (via Arctic Startup).  Sulake will shed about 20 percent of its global staff, with whom redundancy negotiations start on Monday. The company…

As its hype curve rises and grows around the world, music service Spotify is locking out eager, enterprising users from outside the six countries in which it has launched so far. The service is only supposed to be available in Sweden, the UK, France, Spain, Finland and Norway, but users…

—SunTalk: The audio extension of News International’s leading red-top The Sun, is looking to extend its reach to British tourists and expats in Spain: daily three-hour the show, presented by Sun Jon Gaunt, will be aired on Spanish FM stations Bay Radio and Spectrum at 11am. It’s part of plans…

—Rubicon publisher: UK ad technology company the Rubicon Project has appointed Justin Thomas to the new role of director of publisher development. The former AOL (NYSE: TWX) Europe man moves over from price comparison service Xelector, where he sealed white label partnerships with Telegraph.co.uk and MSN. former MySpace Europe VP…

So how exactly does unlikely Pirate Bay bidder Global Gaming Factory X intend to profit from the scourge of the entertainment industry, and pay content owners? CEO Hans Pandeya, who offered SEK 60 million (£7.4 million) (£4.94 million), tells paidContent:UK he wants to sell users’ unused hard disk space to…

—Merseyside search stats: A Hitwise study of traffic and search terms in the Liverpool area in March found that of the top 1,000 search terms just 83 were local. While the most visited website may not be a surprise—Liverpool FC’s official site Liverpoolfc.tv—it shows the challenges that local sites have…

Sweden is waking up to an unlikely political reality: the Pirate Party, which campaigns for radical changes to copyright law and legalised file-sharing, has won one of Sweden’s 18 seats in the weekend’s European Parliament elections with a remarkable 7.1 percent of the national vote, coming fifth overall. Stockholm-born deputy…

Former MEN Media head of online editorial Sarah Hartley, who left last week after eight years, is joining GMG stablemate Guardian News & Media to work on “online developmental projects”. How-Do is repeating its earlier speculation GNM is planning a Manchester local website - a GNM spokesperson told us: “We…

The music industry may have been pleased with securing a successful criminal conviction of the Pirate Bay’s four operators for assisting copyright infringement in April, but there was one small problem: as the Bay predicted, it made absolutely no difference to the running of the torrent-tracking site (right now, according…

—Gavin & Stacey: What’s occurring? This: Vodafone (NYSE: VOD) is giving away season two of the BBC sitcom on board its Nokia 5800 handsets from Monday. Nokia (NYSE: NOK) has previously marketed its N96 along with BBC’s iPlayer, but a bundled video deal is rather unique. The DVD is currently…

A warning for any newspapers thinking of going online-only - one Finnish daily that tried it has fared so badly it’s now being merged back in to a printed title in its parent’s stable. Business paper Taloussanomat stopped printing to focus on digital in December 2007 and quickly saw its…

Entertainment companies in Spain have a novel idea for recouping revenue lost to piracy: get ISPs to impose a surcharge on customers’ accounts. The Coalition of Creators, an umbrella group supported by the General Society of Authors and Publishers (SGAE), argues it’s ISPs’ “civic duty” to help cover its members’…