Mobclix has partnered with Nielsen to be able to deliver more targeted mobile ads, giving it some name-brand recognition to stick out from all the competition.

The deal allows the ad network aggregator to resell Nielsen’s research products, which categorize consumers into roughly 150 segments based on a user’s age and gender as well as location, or other more lifestyle-like qualities, such as spending power and tech awareness, reports GigaOm. The benefit of this partnership is that typically more relevant ads are more successful and therefore fetch a higher price. Mobclix says there’s also a benefit to developers: they’ll be able to tell what kinds of apps resonate with their audience, and how they can increase user engagement, downloads and better rankings.

Google (NSDQ: GOOG), which shook up the e-mail industry when it integrated chat with e-mail, is now trying to catch up to its rivals by letting Gmail users share status updates. The WSJ reports that Google will soon add a “new module that will allow Gmail users to view a stream of status updates from people they choose to connect with.” If it catches on, that could potentially add a new force to the Twitter-dominated microblogging world, considering that Gmail had 132 million unique users worldwide as of last March (the last figures I could quickly get my hands on).

Mobile phones in the future will translate languages in real-time, enabling people from around the world to understand each other—that is, if Google (NSDQ: GOOG) can figure out a way to do it.

The internet giant, turned mobile phone inventor, thinks it can make a fairly operational system within a couple of years, reports the UK’s Sunday Times. The process will meld together its text translation services on the computer with its voice-recognition technology on the mobile phone. The end product will likely be inundated with challenges, considering that both services are fairly buggy and inconsistent today.

Motorola (NYSE: MOT) Ventures is leading a round of funding in social music startup TuneWiki; HillsVen Capital, Novel TMT, Benchmark Capital and Intellect Capital Ventures (the venture fund of Nordic phone company TeliaSonera) also participated in the funding. TuneWiki, which started out as a desktop app and site nearly two years ago, has since also launched several mobile apps for Android, the iPhone, BlackBerry and Symbian, which have gained significant traction.

The legal guys over in Finland must be clocking up a lot of overtime these days: on top of the Apple ITC battle over patent infringements, now Nokia (NYSE: NOK) has another legal wrangle over in the U.S., this time over a class-action lawsuit around delays and discounts in its line of handsets.

The news comes as Nokia says it will be laying off 285 people as it “develops” one of its plants to boost smartphone production.

—Tapulous rolls out Riddim Ribbon game: Tapulous, the maker of the popular music-based iPhone games, like Tap Tap Revenge, has launched its latest creation—Riddim Ribbon. The game, which is now available in the iTunes app store, lets users create their own unique mixes to hot tracks while they race down down a track. The track is really “a crazy ribbon,” in which users must pick up pebbles, and choose various forks in the road, land jumps and avoid obstacles.The co-producer of the game is The Black Eyed Peas frontman will.i.am. Songs in the game include The Black Eyed Peas hits: Boom Boom Pow, I Gotta Feeling, and Meet Me Halfway. The app costs $3, and each additional level is 99 cents.

—Loopt goes hyper-local for ads: Location-based mobile social networking service, Loopt, has started to integrate local advertising into its mobile service that allow users to receive offers, coupons and discounts at a neighborhood level. The service is being powered by a company called Mobile Spinach, and will be limited to San Francisco at first with Los Angeles and New York coming in months. An example is an ad for Blowfish Sushi, a San Francisco Sushi restaurant, which is offering one of their signature rolls for free. No word on whether the ads will conflict with a new Apple policy, which states that if an ad is served based on a user’s location it must serve a “beneficial” purpose.

—Social media iPhone app for skiers: Digital agency Phonevalley has created a social media app for the iPhone that it claims is the first dedicated to the European skiing community. Ski Challenge - Prove it, features 3D maps and guides for 45 European resorts. It lets users record and share tricks, publish geo-localized photos and videos on those 3D maps (or send them to Facebook), and send messages to other skiers. Users can also record their runs and chart them with other stats like alitude, distance and speed. The free app, which is available in English, French, German, Italian and Spanish, is sponsored by Nissan.

Someone at Macmillan has a sense of humor. When I landed on the site Saturday night to check on e-book pricing and availability following Amazon’s one-week banishment, the book being promoted at the top of the front page was Priceless: The Myth of Fair Value (and How to Take Advantage of It) by William Poundstone about pricing as a “collective hallucination.” More than fitting as Macmillan and other publishers challenge Amazon’s mission to sell most e-books for $9.99.

Among the current collective hallucinations about e-book pricing: Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) stands alone in trying to keep prices lower and publishers can’t set rates. Publishers haven’t been able to set Amazon’s rates but Macmillan is selling books online for the price it prefers—while linking to other sites with lower or sometimes similar pricing. Case in point: best-seller Sarah’s Key disappeared last Friday during a power play between Amazon and Macmillan. (See our chart Pricing E-Books: A Snapshot.) Macmillan said it was switching to an “agency” or commission model where it sets the rate and e-tailers get a commission (usually 30 percent) and by the beginning of March would be pricing new books and bestsellers higher. Amazon retaliated by removing all Macmillan from its print and Kindle stores, but within days went public with its plans to follow the new pricing scheme. Late last week the print versions started to return; paidContent can confirm the Kindle downloads are back, too.

Courtesy Hulu. Lotsa digital this year, including from Google (NSDQ: GOOG), Motorola (NYSE: MOT), Monster.com, HomeAway, GoDaddy, FloTV (all three), Boost Mobile, Cars.com, MetroPCS, Careerbuilder.com, E*Trade and Vizio Internet Apps.

Paris-based Hi-media, a publicly held company that operates an ad network, a publishing business and a payments platform around the world, has opened a San Francisco office to expand its micropayments business to the U.S. Release.

The office will be headed by Pooj Preena, Hi-media USA CEO, who previously helped Skype enter the U.S. market. As the micropayments industry has heated up recently, the company will compete directly against startups, such as Boku and Zong, and hopes to help merchants sell mainly virtual goods using various payment options, including mobile phones, gift cards, pre-paid cards and home-phone billing.  Preena told mocoNews: “We’ve been doing this for eight to nine years. We started with selling content, before social gaming took off—it’s only been in the last 18 to 24 months where there’s been a substantial shift into digital and to content again.”

Google (NSDQ: GOOG) CEO Eric Schmidt tipped Twitter followers to watch the third quarter of the Super Bowl carefully Sunday for a sign that hell’s frozen over. It seems the search company is making a move that Schmidt insisted it didn’t need and wouldn’t do: brand advertising. John Battelle’s source says the ad being aired is Parisian Love, embedded below. Cute online but will it fly during live football? I’ll be watching the meters for that response.

Update: As expected, my HD set was just taken over by a giant white Google search screen showing Parisian Love. Got chuckles in my living room from the viewer seeing it for the first time. What did you think? Was the 60-second ad worth as much as $5 million?

Correction: Bruce Braun was actually CEO of Agent M, a division of Hyperfactory, not CEO of Hyperfactory as originally reported.

—Hipcricket: The company has hired Doug Stovall as SVP of sales. Most recently he worked with Acuty Mobile’s sales and business development teams and was part of the exec team that sold the company to NAVTEQ (NYSE: NVT) in 2009.

—GoldSpot Media: Bruce Braun is joining as SVP of sales and marketing. The former Hyperfactory CEO The former CEO of Hyperfactory’s Agent M will now be responsible for growing relationships with publishers, app developers and carriers.