Yes, it’s true: We are joining GigaOM. And the combined group will be a powerhouse, with more than 20 writers and editors, a strong presence on the East and West coasts and in Europe, and coverage of everything from media and big data, to the cloud and mobile, to book publishing and online video—not to mention the startup scene in various markets. It’s a very exciting development for us, as ContentNext and GigaOM share so many of the same goals and have such similar cultures. We both believe fundamentally in the power of breaking news and smart, useful content across different platforms, and we both have a…

All is indeed fair in love and war, but not everything is fair in patent licensing. Google (NSDQ: GOOG) and Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) are working on measures to level the playing field in the mobile patent disputes by clarifying what is “fair” when it comes to patent licensing terms.

Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) is expanding its Prime Instant Video library in a deal with Viacom (NYSE: VIA), bringing the total number of streaming videos available free Prime members to over 15,000.

Is Sprint’s bet on the iPhone paying off, or costing it a pretty penny? In the company’s Q4 earnings, the carrier boasted that 40 percent (720,000) of all iPhone sales were going to new customers, with 1.8 million iPhone users added overall in the crucial holiday sales quarter. But those sales appear to be coming at a price for Sprint…

Last week, we highlighted how Facebook is already using mobile devices for commercial services—enabling people to buy Facebook Credits and charge them directly to their mobile bills. Now, it’s increasingly looking like that may just be the beginning: today, UK-based mobile billing and analytics specialist Bango (AIM: BGO) announced that it had signed a deal to provide unspecified services to the social network.

Today brings news of yet another round of capital-intensive cost-cutting for the challenged mobile phone maker Nokia: the company today announced that it would be transferring smartphone assembly from factories in Hungary, Finland and Mexico, and putting the operation in Asia.

Magazine and web publisher Future has hit a key milestone in the media industry’s great transition - UK digital revenues made up for print revenue falls between October and December.

For years, Google (NSDQ: GOOG) watchers have wondered why the company has used a unique browser on its Android software while maintaining a separate browser project in Chrome. Those days are over: Google has released a beta version of Chrome for Android, uniting two very important projects and raising questions about the future of Chrome OS.

Does three make a trend? In recent months, both former Gawker editor Emily Gould and GigaOm’s Michael Wolf launched their own e-book ventures. Now Lifehacker editor Jason Chen has left Gawker Media to launch an e-bookstore of his own, StoryBundle.

It took one allegation of download bots on a message board, very little in the way of actual confessions, and a whole lot of murmurs, but Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) is showing that it will respond swiftly if anyone starts messing with its App Store. But further investigation into the practices reveals that it may be hard to pin down who, exactly, is to blame for the practice when it does take place.

Research In Motion is undeniably on the ropes at the moment, with the mobile handset maker weathering a decline in global market share, delays on new products, and the departure of its co-CEOs/founders in the last month after several bad quarters. But at a developers’ conference that kicked off today in Amsterdam, the company’s new CEO, Thorsten Heins plus several others put on a brave face and laid out some milestones marking out where RIM (NSDQ: RIMM) is growing—a foundation, of sorts, for how the company hopes to build itself back up in the months ahead.

For the most part, Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) has found the mobile industry willing to bow to its patent-licensing strategy. Barnes & Noble (NYSE: BKS) decided to dig in and fight and it could be poised to score a point.

The Kindle Touch WiFi is now available in some additional countries, but not the biggest international e-reading markets that already have their own Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) sites.

When you read the headlines of how ubiquitous smartphones are becoming, and how in some countries the mobile device is overtaking the PC in terms of internet access, you would think that mobile internet usage would directly follow from these facts. In reality, it seems that it still lagging behind: according to some figures out today from StatCounter, only 8.5 percent of internet visits came from mobile devices in 2011.

Android held on to its title as the most-popular smartphone platform in the U.S. in the last quarter, but when it comes to sales of specific devices, Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) is running away from the competition, with Samsung swiftly behind, according to research out from the NPD Group.

Another bad-news day for HTC, which is sorely in need of one or two killer, new products to turn around its fortunes in the ever-competitive world of smartphones: in a trading update, the company’s sales for the month of January 2012 were down by more than 50 percent compared to a year ago, with the news coming on the same day that the company missed Q4 analyst forecasts.

It’s not digital advertising in the sense of display ads and search results, but it looks like we are getting a bit more color on what it is that Facebook will do first in the world of mobile marketing, and it could be coming online “within weeks.”

Even if you throw the exploding tablet market in with the staid PC market, shipments of smartphones surpassed those of “client PCs” in 2011, a milestone for the computer industry.

The U.S. government likes to do things its own way. Along those lines, it has decided to embrace Android as a smartphone platform for soldiers and other government employees because of the control it can exert over the software, which in turn underscores how much control Android partners have over the software.

Much has been made of the mobile risks that Facebook laid out in its S-1 IPO filing earlier this week. Essentially, it’s seeing/pushing massive growth in mobile, but it still hasn’t tried out advertising, its most effective route to revenues, on this platform. That’s not to say it won’t. But meanwhile, there is another area where Facebook is already making money through mobile.

Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) in the last 24 hours has been dealt not one but two blows in court cases involving Motorola (NYSE: MMI) and patents in Germany, one involving IP licensing on older iPhone models (not the 4S) and one involving iCloud. However, as the day progressed, an injunction on the sale of the older iPhone models was lifted as the cases continue to develop.

Google (NSDQ: GOOG) has a dilemma when it comes to the Android Market: its permissive no-review-necessary policy means that anyone can write nearly any kind of application for the platform, including malware. The company is introducing a new service Thursday that attempts to strike a balance between protecting Android users from malware while still offering developers more freedom than Apple’s app review policy.

Microsoft’s plan for Windows Phone 8—which appears to be moving in step with its overall Windows 8 launch strategy—has been leaked, and the company is planning to take some big steps forward in terms of overall performance, mobile payments, and voice calling.

In a new business-oriented social media site, Reuters (NYSE: TRI) aims to index “the most talked-about news, companies and influencers across the Web.” A better definition might be “what people are doing on Twitter.”

Do Kindle Fire owners still like their devices now that they’ve had a few months to kick the tires? A new survey indicates that for the most part, they’re more pleased with their purchase than those who bought other Android tablets last year but less satisfied than iPad owners.

Two European companies are this week taking venture capital in the games space…

Mobile advertising may not yet be something that Facebook has explored in its strategy to monetize its massive user base, and given the growth we’ve seen in the space, you can argue that it might be missing a trick.

It was five years ago that Nokia (NYSE: NOK) executives brushed off the idea of Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) as “not a threat” to Nokia’s top position in mobile sales. After all, Apple was only making smartphones and Nokia was still leading in that still-niche category, as well as mobiles overall. Fast forward to today, and the swift rise of Apple underscores (once more) how short-sighted that view really was.

Facebook‘s nearly 200-page S-1 filing appears to have crippled the Securities and Exchange Commission’s Edgar website with the mass of people going there to take a peek at the social network’s numbers. That traffic may well be matched by the weight of numbers in the filing itself. Here’s a look at some of them: