Mike Butcher

James Cridland, head of new media at Virgin Radio, is leaving after six years to work for the BBC, as Head of Future Media & Technology, Audio & Music. "It’s a massive change for me, and a thrill to work with such a great team," he wrote on his blog today. Cridland has spearheaded Virgin's new media strategy and in many respects has enabled the radio station to use new media to punch above its weight, including overtaking Capital Radio's early lead on the web in the late 90s. The move presages another big change tbites is aware of, where a BBC big-hitter is about to switch to a rival broadcaster. Watch this space: Get our newsletter or our RSS feed

Whatever happened to Angel Gambino, she of “MTV 2.0″? Well she’s been hired by Bebo to a new position of VP-music. Bebo is interested in rivaling MySpace in the music stakes. Until January this year she was VP commercial, strategy and digital media for Viacom in the UK, where she worked across 11 channels, and was previously controller of business development and emerging platforms at the BBC. Gambino announced the move on her blog. Bebo claims to have 450,000 musicians already and last month partnered with online music retailer 7digital to allow independent artists to sell their tracks.

Celltick (the mobile content firm headquartered in London) is to help AIS Thailand (the largest mobile operator in Thailand) to expand its content discovery service, mLive! to reach 8 million subscribers by the end of the year. mLive! broadcasts streams of content teasers directly across the idle screen of user’s mobile phones like a screensaver, with subscribers offered “personalized content and promotions”. mLIVE! users see streams of free news headlines, sport reports, weather updates, music stories, gossip, horoscopes and games as well as prize winning trivia and quizzes directly on their idle screens. The messages appear silently only when the phone is not in use, letting users access a variety of content and data services with a two-click reaction. Sponsored content and cross media campaigns form the main content. 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. Celltick says its services are used by 30 million subscribers around the world already and it has an R&D centre in Israel and offices in China, India, Russia and Latin America.

Technorati Tags: Mediabites

Ian Jindal, lately publisher of EUBusiness.com, is now launch Editor at InternetRetailer.info (looks like they couldn't get the dotcom domain. The site is owned by Retail Events who cannily seem to be getting into Blogging as well. The folks over at subscription only web site/mag Retail Week will be pleased…

Technorati Tags: Mediabites

The Guardian has had some foresight in putting the Changing Media event together. Let's hope it lives up to its ambitions…

Public Enemy’s New Wireless Order: Public Enemy (which pioneered using MP3s) is getting into wireless. On Nov. 28 the group will make the music from its new album, New Whirl Odor, available through wireless phone networks using distribution technology from privately held m-Qube. “It’s like the Internet in ’98, but with a business plan,” says Walter Leaphart, who manages Public Enemy leader Chuck D.