Mike Butcher

If the rumour that T-Mobile is in the front line to take the iPhone in Europe then the new rumour that the Apple iPhone will also be available on a pre-paid contract is pretty interesting. The Boygeniusreport.com says they got a few screen shots sent to them which show internal AT&T account codes showing the iPhone available to Pay As You Go subscribers with AT&T in the US. This would widen the market for the iPhone considerably, especially in the US where customers are generally locked into contracts for a long time. If the iPhone is pre-paid in Europe then expect a massive run on the phones – and yet more power to the iTunes music store.

The online personalised music streaming service Pandora has signed a deal with US carrier Sprint to be pre-installed or downloaded to handsets. Pandora and other web broadcasters have been heavily hit by recent increases in the licensing fees for web broadcasters in the US. Pandora has also had to stop streaming outside the US. The new Sprint venture means a badly needed extra revenue stream on top of advertising. Pandora says it has 6.9 million registered listeners. Pandora founder Tim Westergren says if the new royalty scheme stays then the business no longer makes sense.

German investors the Samwer brothers have invested an undisclosed amount in Twitter clone Frazr.com, reports alarmclock europe, following a story from a German trade title. Germans are really taking to micro-blogging via SMS using Wamadu, Faybl, 1you, Sloggen, and Partnr.de. Does Germany really need five Twitter clones? Most were launched in March/April. You decide…

T-Mobile is partnering with ARTISTdirect.com, an independent music site, to improve its music and video download offering to mobiles and allows users to access content from live music events and gigs. Customers will be able to download music, videos and photos from acts featured in the site’s Street Gigs series. T-Mobile will also offer gig listings, ticket sales, news, exclusive interviews and backstage footage. The ARTISTdirect network has 40 million unique visitors worldwide, with four million of them coming from the UK.

Interesting times over at Pitch.tv, the mobile entertainment and community service from Pitch Entertainment Group.

Pitch Mobile Social Network is a mobile service that takes the best of sites like Myspace, Flickr and Youtube and mashes them all into a single site you can access via your mobile or the Web.

Tom Gordon a lead developer in this effort has been working on the project for the past 9 months, especially on multiple types of chat, picture and video uploading and downloading, sharing, commenting and rating. Sophisticated stuff.

Tom also happens to blog over at Mobile Weblog and today he writes that:

“the parent company has decided to focus on other aspects of their subscription-based mobile content business, and not on the social networking aspects, which means the time has come for me to move on.”

Tom is now looking for new projects.

What could this all mean? I’ve emailed Pitch for comment, so I’ll update this post when they come back to me.

For now, however it appears that this sophisticated application may no longer be developed. Perhaps it was too early for the market? It’s hard to tell the business reasoning behind this move right now, especially in a market which is buzzing about the mobile social web because of the hype around Twitter and the like.

Mobango, a site for publishing and sharing user-generated content for mobile phones claims it has experienced a 41% monthly growth in the amount of content being downloaded through its mobile portal across Europe, North America and Asia. This uptake has resulted, in part, from a 26% compounded monthly growth rate in the number of people using this function, says the firm.

Moblog.co.uk has relaunched its site with a new redesign and launched a moblog for mobile operator 3′s X-Series handset range.

Co-founder Alfie Dennen says: “The new homepage is geared towards being more inviting to new users, whilst also being a much more easy way to discover new things happening on the site. One of the new elements is something we call “busyness”, which calls those posts which have the most comment activity to the front page.”Featured moblogs are also more prominent now, making it easier to see what competitions and interesting images and video are being posted by bands, charities and other organisations moblogging.

A new tag cloud, displays interesting posts and discovers what tags are common throughout the site. The site’s navigation is now always visible at the top of the page, with the addition of the new ‘featured’ and ‘highlights’ links. Some enhancements have also been made to the search page, improving search results overall.

Moblog recently announced a deal to license its technology to Channel for the for Big Art Mob.

So I got my Virgin Media customer pack today. They must be sending it to everyone who has ever touched Virgin (I had a Virgin mobile number once, plus I was on Telewest at one time). Clearly they are going for the whole "we'll simplify TV, broadband, phone and mobile for you" pitch. There is also a response mechanic: If you got to Knowfirst.co.uk you'll obviously have read their printed marketing material. Not just found it via a blog or something. Oh no. To cap it all, in the small print on the back of their slick marketing material are the tiny words: "Security features not available to Mac users." Hmmn, so much for the Apple-esque marketing material then.

It's mylo, says Joi Ito. The Sony mylo ships in the US September 15. No plans for distribution in Japan. Key quote: "The mylo is a nifty little device that does wifi, Skype (you can hold it up to your ear or use a headset), GTalk (no voice), and Yahoo Instant Messenger. It also has a browser (Opera, no flash), has a photo album, plays mp3 and Windows Media Player music, and plays video formatted in the weird mp4 video format that the PSP uses. (I think. I have yet to successfully convert and play a video file.) I used it for Skype on a conference call today and it worked really well with Skype-Out. For some reason I don't seem my contacts list on Skype. The other IM clients seem to work fine (GTalk and Yahoo IM)." It will be interesting to see if the Mylo takes off on Wi-Fi's college campuses and Universities, give than 'the kids' no longer email, and mainly do IM. Bummer for the mobile networks…

AIS Thailand, the largest mobile operator in Thailand, plans to expand its content discovery service, mLive! to reach 8 million subscribers by the end of the year, according to the firm. Powered by Celltick (headquartered in London), mLive! broadcasts streams of content teasers directly across the idle screen of user’s mobile phones, with subscribers offered “personalized content and promotions”. AIS says that during its first year of operation over 40% of subscribers used mLIVE! on a monthly basis, with over 300,000 downloads a day. The service will become available for 8 million users by the end of the year and then extended to the majority of AIS users.

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