UK mobile voice-to-SMS provider Spinvox recently won business with Telefonica (NYSE: TEF) in Latin America. It’s easily its biggest carrier deal so far. Any more like that, though, the company may need new growth finance…

“You’ve got to remember that if I get another two or three deals like this—which will inevitably happen in the next few months—I’m going to have to scale up my business to support that,” co-founder Daniel Doulton told me.

»  Dada cutting staff in U.S. a day after announcing an acquisition. It is merging Dad.net with Dada Entertainment. [Billboard]

»  Shock and horror in Twittersphere: followers can be bought. [BBC]

»  More interesting mobile patents from Apple: haptic tactile feedback. Finally coming to iPhone soon? [MacRumors]

»  AT&T (NYSE: T) sent 65K messages per second when MJ died. Plus their best iPhone sale day ever. [MacDailyNews]

»  Blackberry browser gaining share, but Nokia (NYSE: NOK) and opera have to work a lot harder. [ATD]

»  Akamai’s getting serious about mobile video, and has launched an iPhone version of its adaptive rate streaming tech. [Gigaom]

»  Iran lifts block on SMS texting, the first time since elections. [BBC News]

»  RealNetworks’ new player a week after: 1.5 million video downloaded. But wil it go beyond a nice-to-have feature? [RNBlog]

Photo: Blyk

France Telecom’s Orange in the UK may be close to signing a deal with Blyk, which would likely result in price cuts to teenagers, who would view advertising on their phones in exchange for receiving £15 ($25) in credit, reports newmediaage.com.

Initially, Blyk’s plan was to sell service directly to consumers and piggy-back on Orange’s network in the UK, however, in May it said it was shelving plans to roll out MVNOs in new markets, and instead was focusing on forming partnerships with mobile carriers to resell their service. Orange would mark the first deal of its kind.

Virgin Mobile USA (NYSE: VM) already offers something similar in the U.S. called Sugar Mama. For a minute of ads online, they get a free minute of airtime. Or, for filling out a five-minute survey about brands or products, they get five minutes of airtime. On the phone, texts and picture messages also earn airtime.

Photo: Tracy O

London-based Monitise, a mobile banking company, said it has signed a five-year deal with Visa worth $13 million. As part of the deal, Visa will take a 14.4 percent stake in the company and have the option of taking a seat on its board, reports the WSJ. In addition to the contract, Visa will pay ongoing license, service and development fees. Release.

Monitise will be responsible for helping Visa build out a suite of mobile services, ranging from payments to money transfer, alerts and mobile marketing. The first products will be available to Visa users by early next year. While Monitise just landed a deal with one of the largest bankers in the world, it said revenues for the year ended June 30 would be slightly lower than forecasts. Still, revenues will jump 80 percent over last year. Analysts estimate Monitise’s revenue to be around GBP3 million or $4.9 million, according to FactSet.

Photo: AT&T

Already ringtones are more expensive than a full-length song—and pay a higher royalty to the artist than a normal track—but the music industry is trying to make them even more profitable by arguing that someone should pay even more when the 30-second snippet plays in public.

IDG News Service reports (via MacWorld) that AT&T (NYSE: T), in particular, has been sued by the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, asserting that ringtones qualify “as a public performance under the Copyright Act.” The group wants mobile operators to pay royalties, not individual consumers.

Photo: RIM

There’s not a ton of information so far, but BlackBerry has launched a web site that is teasing U2 fans, who own a BlackBerry, that a mobile U2 Album is “almost here,” notes Crackberry.com. In a short video, there’s some vague language set to an inspiring U2 track that says things like, “introducing the U2 Mobile Album,” “show the world what the music means to you” and “experience the tour from all angles.”

Research In Motion has identified music as one ways to increase the BlackBerry’s popularity among consumers. The company is sponsoring U2’s 360 Tour, which kicked off Tuesday and is being used to promote the album “No Line On The Horizon.” In addition to a partnership with U2, RIM (NSDQ: RIMM) has an exclusive with Ticketmaster, which allows people to buy tickets to shows. Other BlackBerry apps that allow people to listen to music includes: Slacker, Pandora and Shazam, iheartradio and Will.i.am’s DipDive.

The new iPhone 3GS may have only offered a small number of upgrades, but that didn’t stop consumers from flooding AT&T’s web site and retail locations to make “iLaunch 2009” one of the largest periods in the company’s history, achieving its best-ever sales day in storesaccording to an internal memo obtained by AllThingsD.

Over that first weekend, Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) said it sold 1 million iPhones in eight countries, including the U.S., so you can assume a fairly large portion of those went to AT&T (NYSE: T). The memo said: “On this year’s launch day, iPhone sales exceeded sales recorded on 2008’s iPhone launch day, Black Friday 2008 and Dec. 26, 2008 — all heavy-volume sales days. In fact, this year we surpassed 2008’s launch day sales at about noon Central time, and sustained our previous peak hour record, also set in 2008, for 11 straight hours.”

Secretive mobile analytics startup Ground Truth, which recently hired former Qpass president Sterling Wilson as its CEO, has raised $2.62 million in a venture round, according to a regulatory filing. The filing does not list the venture capital firms that participated in the funding, although Steamboat Ventures managing director Beau Laskey, Voyager Capital managing director Erik Benson, and Seapoint Ventures managing partner Tom Huseby are listed as directors. Huseby is also a strategic partner at Voyager Capital. Seapoint Ventures general partner Susan Sigl is also listed as an executive officer.

The crowded UK mobile market could be about to get a bit smaller, according to several reports that say a handful of networks are interested in buying Deutsche Telekom’s T-Mobile UK network, the country’s troubled, fourth largest network. Guardian.co.uk, Reuters, Times Online and others all put various names in from—from Orange to Vodafone to O2. DT itself has previously denied rumors that it’s seeking a buyer for T-Mobile, while a spokesman for Telefonica-owned O2, thought to be a favorite in what some newspapers are calling a “bidding war”, told us that the reports were based on speculation but added that the company continues to “monitor the situation with interest.”

Photo: Palm

Telefonica-owned O2 has won the exclusive UK distribution rights for the Palm (NSDQ: PALM) Pre smartphone, according to a report from Guardian.co.uk, which says an announcement is due next week. Reports have linked the two companies to a UK tie-up for the some time and it would be quite a coup for the Spanish-owned company, which would be the exclusive seller of both the Pre and Apple’s iPhone in a key smartphone market.

Italy’s diverse social network, mobile and community operator Dada has resumed its journey on the M&A trail, buying 51 percent of Milan Stock Exchange-listed casual web games publisher Fueps for €1.36 million.

Palo Alto, Calif.-based Bling Nation, a mobile payments company, has raised $8 million in a first round of capital. The company has raised a total of $13.3 million, including a seed round. Investors in the round include Lightspeed Venture Partners, Meck and CampVentures. 

Founded in 2007, Bling Nation says its proprietary technology is attractive to banks and retailers because it is cheaper to use than traditional credit or debit card networks. Its first customer, Colorado-based The State Bank, started using the payment system in May. To go mainstream, Bling will have to convince consumers to adhere special stickers on their phones to conduct the purchases. The bigger hurdle is likely on the merchant side, which will have to upgrade their readers, according to a story in American-Banker.