In the latest installment, Apple today sued Motorola (NYSE: MMI) Mobility in an attempt to force the Google subsidiary to stop using its patents against Apple in Germany. Or more simply, Apple filed an American lawsuit to stop a German lawsuit. Got that?

This latest ripple in the smartphone sagas grows out of Motorola/Google’s decision to sue Apple over one of its German FRAND patents.

For the uninitiated, FRAND (Fair Reasonable And Non-Discriminatory) rules are used when a group of companies decide to create an industry-wide standard. To prevent one company in the industry group using a patent to extort the others, all the companies will agree that any patents related to the standard must be shared at a fair price.

In the Apple case, the FRAND patent at issue relates which to a broadband processor made by Qualcomm (NSDQ: QCOM) that Apple uses in the iPhone 4S and other devices.

Motorola claimed the Qualcomm chip infringes one its patents and briefly obtained an order to stop Apple from using the chips. That order was suspended and today it appears to have been overturned.

In the action filed today in San Diego, Apple seeks a declaration forbidding Motorola from suing over the Qualcomm patent in Germany. The company also wants to declare that Qualcomm has a license to the Motorola patent in question and that Motorola breached a contract when it sued Apple.

Here’s the complaint:

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Back in November when Penguin stopped offering new e-books to libraries, it also stopped offering e-books to library patrons using Kindles. A few days later Penguin restored Kindle access, but also noted, “Penguin informed suppliers to libraries that it expected them to abide by existing agreements to offer older digital titles to libraries only if those files were held behind the firewalls of the suppliers.”

I noted at the time that if you have a Kindle and check out a library book on it, clicking “Get for Kindle” sends you straight to Amazon’s website instead of having you check out the book from within the library’s site. Kindle borrowing is done over the air, so if you check out a library book on Kindle it will be delivered wirelessly to your device, just like a book you buy from the Kindle Store.

That wasn’t how it was supposed to be. “OverDrive does NOT have permission to first authorize the lending of an ebook to a library end user and then forward the request for actual distribution and tracking of the title to Amazon.com or ANY other retailer,” writes InfoDocket today. “Similarly, in most situations, publishers do not permit retailers to lend e-books directly to end users.”

Libraries that already have Penguin e-books and digital audiobooks will be allowed to keep them and patrons will able to keep borrowing those books. But there’s no more wireless borrowing. InfoDocket reports that OverDrive sent this e-mail to its library partners last night:

Starting tomorrow (February 10, 2012), Penguin will no longer offer additional copies of e-books and download audiobooks for library purchase. Additionally, Penguin eBooks loaned for reading on Kindle devices will need to be downloaded to a computer then transferred to the device over USB. For library patrons, this means Penguin eBooks will no longer be available for over-the-air delivery to Kindle devices or to Kindle apps.

Let’s be honest: The over-the-air delivery of library e-books to Kindle is incredibly convenient. It’s just about as easy as buying an e-book from the Kindle Store. From the point of view of the publishers, that is too easy.

So what happens now? Penguin said yesterday “it is vital that we forge relationships with libraries and build a future together.” That future is likely to make the e-book borrowing process a little more complicated, a little less convenient—in other words, less like shopping and more like, well, going to the library.

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• Penguin Ends E-Book Library Lending And Relationship With OverDrive
• Random House Will Keep All Its E-Books In Libraries, With A Price Increase
• New Stats: 2011 Libraries' Digital Checkouts Up 133% Over 2010
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• Which E-Books Are Most Borrowed From Libraries, And Why?
• Updated: Penguin Restores Library Lending To Kindle, But Not For New Ebooks
• Why Might A Publisher Pull Its E-Books From Libraries?
• Penguin Pulls New E-Books From Libraries
• Amazon Kindle Users Finally Can Check Out (Some) Library E-Books

Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) is using two new patents for touchscreen technology, obtained in December, as the basis for yet another lawsuit.

In documents filed Tuesday in San Jose federal court, Apple revealed it is using newly-granted US Patents 8,074,172 and 8,086,604 to seek a temporary injunction against Samsung.

The first of the patents appears to cover the spelling and auto-correct feature, used in iPhones and iPads, that results in a proposed word hovering over letters that a user is typing. Here is what the patent says:

One aspect of the invention involves a method that includes: in a first area of the touch screen, displaying a current character string being input by a user with the keyboard; in a second area of the touch screen, displaying the current character string or a portion thereof and a suggested replacement for the current character string [...]

It is harder to discern what exactly the second patent covers as its description is in the form of lawyer-language gobbledygook (perhaps one of our engineer readers can offer a plain-English translation?) :

The present invention provides convenient access to items of information that are related to various descriptors input by a user, by means of a unitary interface which is capable of accessing information in a variety of locations, through a number of different techniques. Using a plurality of heuristic algorithms to operate upon information descriptors input by the user, the present invention locates and displays candidate items of information for selection and/or retrieval. Thus, the advantages of a search engine can be exploited, while listing only relevant object candidate items of information.

The new lawsuit comes after Apple suffered a setback in the same court in December when U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh refused to grant a preliminary injunction that would have barred the sale of Samsung’s Galaxy tablet. Apple is appealing that initial ruling and continuing to seek a permanent injunction to bar the tablet which it says Samsung “slavishly” copied. That lawsuit also concerns three Samsung smartphones.

The new lawsuit differs from the earlier one in that it turns on utility patents not design patents which protect only the ornamental aspects of an invention. Apple has so far been using design patents to protect the iPad but its efforts are unlikely to succeed; Judge Koh appears to have agreed with Samsung that the iPad’s design was preempted by an earlier proto-type from 1994.

The new suit, based on the utility patents, gives Apple a fresh kick at the can.

Apple has been engaged in a worldwide effort to use its intellectual property to keep Samsung out of the market but has so far come up short. Its most recent setback came yesterday in Germany where a court said Samsung can sell a reworked tablet that Apple had briefly banned.

It is not clear whether the new California lawsuit is aimed at Samsung’s tablet, its phones or both. The complaint has been filed under seal so, for now, the only public information available includes references to the new patent numbers in the docket and a filing (embedded below) that says the new case is connected to the prior one. The docket also shows that Apple is once again seeking a preliminary injunction.

The complaint and other documents are likely to be unsealed in coming weeks or months. The news agency Reuters (NYSE: TRI) has recently called attention to federal courts’ questionable practice of reflexively sealing documents, which are normally public, on a corporation’s request. In response to the story, Judge Koh herself issued new guidelines to make the practice less pervasive.

Apple’s feud with Samsung has reportedly cost it more than $100 million in legal fees and may be driven in part by a personal vendetta of its late founder, Steve Jobs.

Apple Samsung

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With the debut of the “consumer preview” version of Windows 8 now expected later this month at Mobile World Congress, Microsoft’s Steven Sinofsky wrote an epic blog post Thursday on Windows 8 and ARM chips. After Microsoft introduced Windows 8 last year confusion rose over whether or not applications for the ARM versions of Windows 8 devices would be able to run in the legacy “Desktop” mode, and Sinofsky used the opportunity to explain why Microsoft included that Desktop mode on the ARM version of Windows.

“Some have suggested we might remove the desktop from WOA (Windows on ARM) in an effort to be pure, to break from the past, or to be more simplistic or expeditious in our approach. To us, giving up something useful that has little cost to customers was a compromise that we didn’t want to see in the evolution of PCs,” Sinofsky wrote.

But only Microsoft will be able to write applications for that Windows Desktop experience on ARM tablets and PCs: all other developers who want to write applications for Windows ARM devices will have to write them in the Metro style, which also means they’ll have to distribute those applications through Microsoft’s Windows Store. Windows-on-ARM devices will be able to access the legacy Desktop mode from their Metro “Start” menus, but the only things they’ll be able to do in that legacy Desktop mode is run a new version of Microsoft Office (Office 15) designed for touchscreen devices and manage files in the old familiar way.

It’s sort of the best of both worlds for Microsoft. This approach allows it to postpone the creation of a Metro-style of Microsoft Office—perhaps the most useful set of Windows applications—until a later date while encouraging those who want to target Windows 8 devices to focus on Metro.

Windows 8 devices that will run on Intel (NSDQ: INTC) and AMD’s chips will be able to run applications written for the legacy Desktop mode, but developers will be able to use the same development tools to create Metro-style user interfaces for devices using either Intel or ARM (the back-end code, of course, would need to target a particular chip). Given the trends in the computer market these days, focusing just on the Desktop user interface means you’ll be concentrating on the slow-growing portion of the market.

But this is a classic problem for Microsoft; during each technology transition it finds it very difficult to make a clean break from the past given the huge installed base of consumer and corporate applications that run on older technologies. Windows 8 on ARM is an important step forward in that regard, in that anyone who wants their app to run on those devices will have to suck it up and move forward at Microsoft’s speed because older applications written for Intel’s chips won’t run on the ARM devices.

But it seems that even Microsoft can’t do all the heavy lifting to move Office to Metro, at least not right away. That means users will have to switch back and forth between Metro and Desktop in order to access some of Microsoft’s most valuable applications, and that could be jarring, although the Office 15 preview shown off Thursday does indicate that Word and Excel, among others, have been tweaked to more closely resemble the Metro design language.

The company also said that its partners plan to release Windows-on-ARM devices at the same time Windows-on-Intel devices are released, dispelling some fears that the ARM version of Windows might be delayed due to the technical complexity of the project. Most industry observers think those devices are scheduled to arrive around the end of the year, perhaps in time for the holiday shopping season, but Microsoft hasn’t directly addressed a launch schedule.

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From Thursday, Zeebox is starting to include “click to buy” slots in its iPad and iPhone app and to sell second-screen ads to brands, so that each generates money from people watching TV shows with Zeebox on their laps.

It works like this…

Thanks to speech-to-text, subtitles and other metadata including from Philips’ Civolution fingerprinter spin-off, the Zeebox iPad app already shows users a live stream of info “tags” corresponding to material in shows they are watching on their lounge TV. Right now, they link to Wikipedia articles.

But Zeebox also had always hoped to leverage them to start linking to marketing messaging as well as to purchase options during the commercial breaks between shows.

So, during those breaks, Zeebox will denote actionable tag links with icons for songs, products, travel services etc. Those links will send users through to merchants like iTunes (for music), Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) (for DVDs), Tesco (for food) and Boots (for cosmetics) via Zeebox affiliate codes, so that it generates a percentage commission of any subsequent sales.

Zeebox is running the system so far on about 20 percent of UK TV’s commercial break ads, mostly for ITV (LSE: ITV) hcnanle.s

Will it work?

“Our consumer research told us that people want an easy way to buy things they see on TV,” Rose’s co-founder Ernesto Schmitt says in a press release.

Do affiliate links add up to a business model? Not in isolation. Shazam claims to make a percentage of music purchases worth $100 million a year that its app sent to stores last year. But it has tried to diversify its revenue streams.

Using just the affiliate commission model, Zeebox will need to generate click-throughs and actual purchases at a large scale in order to clock up significant total income. But the startup appears to be seeking other streams, too.

The prospect of selling specific second-screen tag ads to advertiser brands is exciting as an innovation. But brands would likely consider this experimental until such time as Zeebox is being used by large numbers of TV viewers.

Zeebox last month claimed “250,000 users” - but simultaneous prime-time users metrics are not publicised.

One route to scale for Zeebox is through BSkyB (NYSE: BSY). The UK pay-TV platform leader in January took equity in the startup with a deal through which it will leverage Zeebox features in a social-centric upgrade revision to its EPG app for its Sky+ PVR.

But, still, the whole prospect, for all such operators, depends on the usage scale of tablets or smartphones as engagement facilitators during TV shows. On that hinges the very notion of the second screen but, so far, much research points to a growing trend there.

IndieCommerce is a for-profit subsidiary of the American Booksellers Association. It’s a web platform that lets independent bookstores have e-commerce websites without creating them from scratch. About 350 bookstores are currently using IndieCommerce to run customized sites with shopping carts and content. IndieCommerce provides a database of 5 million print books and a database of about 500,000 e-books through Google (NSDQ: GOOG). This allows shoppers to search for and buy print books and e-books through their independent booksellers’ websites and means individual booksellers don’t have to input titles by hand.

IndieCommerce announced this week that it is removing Amazon Publishing titles from its database. That means if you visit your local bookstore’s website and type in an Amazon Publishing title, you won’t be able to find it—unless the bookstore chooses individually to stock it. “All retailers using the IndieCommerce platform are free to stock any published books from any publisher in their stores and/or to fulfill any customer orders through another source,” the ABA notes. “This policy change in no way affects that ability.”

It’s not a “boycott” but a “protest,” Matt Supko, ABA technology director told me, because Amazon does not currently allow other retailers to sell its e-books. “If [independent bookstores] are expected to be listing and marketing print titles that Amazon is publishing, and we’re not allowed to sell the e-book version of the title, that just seems unfair,” he said.

If Amazon makes its e-books available across all etailers, Supko says IndieCommerce will change its policy and start listing the books again.

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You could argue that 2011 was the year of Android, given that the number of Android devices activated daily doubled from 350,000 to 700,000 between April and December 2011. Or perhaps it was the year of the mobile operating system war, with Nokia’s strategic shift to Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) Windows Phone OS. So what are the trends that will shape the mobile landscape in 2012? Let’s look at them in four categories: business, ecosystem, consumer expectations, and technology.

Mobile Is A Key Business Enabler

Professionals who hope to increase the sophistication of their mobile strategies will need to:

»  Develop a scalable approach to delivering mobile services. Organizations will need a strategic approach to building and spreading institutional knowledge as well as governance for the development of mobile services. It will be increasingly important to define key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure the success of mobile initiatives.

»  Craft a mobile strategy that extends beyond phones. The emergence of tablets in particular will require a different approach than smartphones.

»  Differentiate on the delivery rather than the content of mobile services. In 2012, “how” mobile services are delivered will differentiate them—not what they offer.
 
Success In The Mobile Ecosystems Will Elude Incumbents And Embrace Newcomers

Expect incumbents across a range of industries to look to hold or gain share as mobile revolutionizes their business. Key 2012 mobile ecosystem trends include:

»  The emergence of mobile digital wallets and their ability to go beyond payment. New technologies are converting mobile handsets into digital wallets that combine not just payments but also receipts, vouchers, and loyalty schemes. As well as gaining the convenience of using the phone for payment, consumers will benefit from post-transaction elements such as location-based coupons and enhanced product information at the point of sale.

»  The continuation of the smartphone OS bloodbath. If you need a native application, iOS and Android are “must-haves.” However, there is still room for a third major OS platform. Windows Phone is a good candidate, but Nokia (NYSE: NOK) and Microsoft will have to execute perfectly to stay in the game longer term, even with a larger portfolio of devices in 2012.

»  Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) and Facebook becoming disruptive distribution forces. We don’t expect Amazon to succeed in replicating its Kindle approach in the crowded smartphone space—nor do we expect Facebook to invest in hardware. While their respective roles in the mobile space are still unclear, they could become disruptive forces that enable the distribution of products and services in new ways. Think about the use of social recommendations and personalization tools to facilitate the discovery of mobile services.
 
Consumer Expectations Will Be Both High And Conflicted

Professionals developing mobile services should take the following into account:

»  Consumers will expect more contextual experiences. Phones will have the ability to collect a phenomenal amount of information about a consumer. They will offer new product and service opportunities, both on their own and when combined with others. Mobile phones will be the hub of consumer interaction—not only with other people but also with other services and machines, such as TVs, cars, and even medical devices like heart monitors. Physical products will increasingly ship with companion mobile services.

»  But they will also worry about privacy and security. When the press realized that several players were tracking user location to improve services, there was a public outcry. Location is the least of it. The mobile phone will know everything about an individual. Consumer concerns here will center on: 1) the commercial use of this information, and 2) security issues, given the increased use of mobile devices for banking and buying.

Emerging Technologies Need Standards And Scale To Succeed

New native technologies will enable new services, products, and navigation techniques that are unimaginable on the PC. Professionals excited by these new technologies should note that:

»  HTML5 has made phenomenal progress, but it is not a panacea. Adobe’s abandonment of Flash at the end of last year and support for HTML5 from heavyweights like Apple, Google (NSDQ: GOOG), Amazon, and Microsoft are elevating HTML5’s potential as a solution. Two key things continue to hold back this potential cure-all: 1) the experience and performance differences between native and web applications are noticeable, and 2) realizing the full benefits of HTML5 requires device- and OS-specific optimization.

»  Near Field Communications (NFC) will fail to live up to the hype. We expect dozens of millions of NFC devices to ship from a wide variety of device makers — including, eventually, Apple (NSDQ: AAPL). We expect events like the 2012 Olympic Games in London to serve as marketing catalysts and help showcase the numerous potential uses of the technology. However, a poor out-of-the-box experience, minimal consumer education, and the lack of NFC infrastructure will inhibit growth.

»  The cloud is still too congested or too thin. The consumerization of the enterprise IT notion of cloud computing is already a reality, with services such as Dropbox, Spotify, and Apple’s iCloud. The cloud will grow in importance, enabling cross-device services, but will be inhibited by limited network capacity and congestion.

Thomas Husson is a Principal Analyst at Forrester Research serving Consumer Product Strategy professionals. Follow him on Twitter at @Thomas_Husson

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The Wall Street Journal, citing those all-knowing “people familiar with the matter,” said the DOJ might approve the deal as early as next week. Google (NSDQ: GOOG) has pledged to operate Motorola as a standalone company, and so the government’s main focus on Google has been whether or not it will use the patents acquired from Motorola in an offensive fashion.

Mobile rivals are already complaining that Google plans to uphold Motorola’s patent-licensing strategies on what have been deemed “essential” patents by asking for a royalty rate above what they consider fair as well as its willingness to leave the threat of an injunction on the table, which other companies have pledged not to employ for standards-essential patents. The report said regulators will watch closely to see how Google uses the Motorola patents post-acquisition.

And in related news, the DOJ plans to approve the $4.5 billion purchase of Nortel’s patent portfolio by a group of mobile companies that included Apple (NSDQ: AAPL), Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT), and Research in Motion (NSDQ: RIMM), denying Google a chance to solidify its patent holdings for far less money than it will pay for Motorola. That event prompted Google to open talks with Motorola and to lash out at its rivals for playing the patent game more effectively than Google.

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AllThingsD didn’t have an exact date, but said Apple has settled on the first week of March to introduce what most people are calling the iPad 3. Less is known about the device itself, but it’s expected to feature a more powerful processor and a higher-resolution display than its predecessor.

This will be the company’s first major launch event since Jobs’ death last October, as January’s iBooks launch event was a much smaller type of introduction. Apple continues to dominate the market for modern tablet computers, and despite upstarts like Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) finally getting traction for tablet other than the iPad, Apple sold 15 million of the current model in the fourth quarter, far more than any other company.

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Amazon Publishing is launching Pearl’s line at a time when many in her community—independent booksellers, librarians and some authors—are very angry at Amazon for what they see as predatory business practices, relentless discounting and attacks on independent bookstores.

“By aligning herself with Amazon, she’s turning her back on independents,” Seattle Mystery Bookshop owner J.B. Dickey told the Seattle Times. “Amazon is absolutely antithetical to independent bookselling, and, to many of us, truth, justice and the American way.”

The New York Times (NYSE: NYT) says, oddly, that the amount of money that Pearl is getting from the deal with Amazon “is not enough to fill a tin cup.”

Also, “Her agent, Victoria Sanders, shopped a rediscovery line to 20 publishers. None were interested.” Sanders elaborated on this to the Seattle Times: she approached “every major publisher in New York” and “inevitably, the publishers bowed out after deciding it wasn’t worth the effort, particularly because negotiating the rights to so many books was involved.”

Sanders also told the Seattle Times that she’ll make “a couple of hundred” dollars per book. In a statement unlikely to endear her to anyone who does not regularly eat $200 lunches, she said that is “enough to buy me and a guest lunch in Manhattan at a nice restaurant, and I mean lunch.”

Pearl told the NYT it’s “a hard question” if she’d do it all over again, “but I would still want these books back in print.” Many in the book publishing world respond by asking why Pearl didn’t just decide to self-publish the books. Presumably, the reason she did not want to do so is the effort required to negotiate the rights to what the Seattle Times calls “so many books” but which, according to the original announcement, is about six a year.

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Sponsorship on the license-funded BBC in the UK is strictly forbidden. But the workaround, for Accenture, was to build a mobile app…

Back in January, the RBS 6 Nations tournament anointed Accenture with “official technology partner” status. That’s a relatively new trend, but not entirely - 12 months ago, the Barclays Premier League gave Electronic Arts (NSDQ: ERTS) the same status.

To earn the status, technology partners must each provide a service to the tournament. EA provided match data. Accenture built the official Six Nations mobile application, with tournament news, live scores, squad lists, tables and video highlights.

Broadcasters are frequently bound, by the terms of their contracts with tournaments they air, to show the brands of these supposedly integral tournament partners. EA got to show its logo alongside live on-screen match facts on Sky Sports. Accenture’s logo is displayed along with rugby scores broadcast to by the BBC, Ireland’s RTE etc. Many other broadcasters do the same for many other sports.

What’s interesting here is Accenture is not just providing a private partner service to the tournament but, through the mobile app, is itself providing to the tournament’s end audience the same kind of content media consumers might expect to obtain from an organisation like the BBC

BBC Sport gave paidContent this statement…

“Accenture are the official data supplier for The Six Nations and as a technology company are responsible for providing the statistics for The Championships. This ‘facility’ is available to all partners/media covering the event.

“The relationship is between ‘Six Nations Rugby Limited’ and ‘Accenture’. In accordance with BBC and EBU guidelines (which provide for the crediting of official data processing and timing suppliers) the BBC credits Accenture as official data supplier on a number of occasions throughout the match.

“For television, a corporate logo accompanies a select number of statistical match graphics. This is common practice, industry wide, and should not be confused with reflections given to event title sponsors.”

We run this story in the interest of clarification and curiosity and not necessarily as a BBC-bashing piece.

How come the BBC are allowed to show the Accenture logo during the stats coverage in the rugby? #sixnations #England

— Toby Morris (@tobym20) February 4, 2012

How did Accenture advertise on BBC Sport, when the Editorial Guidelines specifically prohibit it? More: mediauk.com/tv/discussions…

— James Cridland (@JamesCridland) February 4, 2012

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 core conviction about practicing truth and fairness in our journalism. We also both happen to believe that you can build very profitable businesses if you can execute on those principles.

We have other things in common, too: Both companies’ founders—in our case, Rafat Ali, in GigaOM’s case, Om Malik—turned influential one-man blogs into vibrant media companies by being way ahead of the curve. (A side note: The two founders have also long been close friends.) The chance to work with Om is one that anyone would leap at. He is a true visionary with a unique understanding of technology and a gift for communicating that knowledge. He’s also stacked GigaOM with talented writers and editors who, like him, have a deep curiosity about the intersection of technology and business, particularly innovation. (You can read Om’s post on the sale.)

At a time when so many content companies are groping for sustainable business models, GigaOM has a dynamic approach to making money. Its multiple revenue streams extend from site advertising to conferences to subscription products and beyond; from its online audience of more than 4.5 million monthly unique visitors, to its leading events like GigaOM Structure and GigaOM Roadmap, to GigaOM Pro, which provides research on emerging technology markets from over 110 independent analysts. GigaOM has built a suite of products that can serve a variety audiences, all of which congregate under the GigaOM brand. And now that will expand to include our sites, newsletters and conferences.

For readers of ContentNext’s sites—paidContent, MocoNews, paidContent:UK and ContentSutra—there’s nothing not to like about this deal. You’ll still be able to attend our stellar conferences and enjoy our trenchant posts about the industries we cover. You’ll still be getting all the content you know from the writers that you’re used to getting it from. But now you’ll be getting something else, too: more smart voices on different and vital topics, and even more news and analysis.

Under the terms of the purchase, Guardian News & Media (GNM), which bought ContentNext Media in 2008, will take a minority stake in GigaOM. GNM joins existing GigaOM investors including Reed Elsevier (NYSE: RUK) Ventures, Alloy Ventures and True Ventures. The sale is the culmination of a process that began back in the fall, with multiple bidders for ContentNext. The New York investment bank Coady Deimar Partners advised GNM on the deal.

“With our shared commitment to journalistic ethics, GigaOM and paidContent are a natural fit,” said Paul Walborsky, CEO of GigaOM. “paidContent is the leading voice covering the evolution of media, an area that is very important to us. Integrating our teams will enrich our editorial coverage and expand our footprint immediately in two markets that are critical to our growth – New York City and the UK.” GigaOM, which was founded in 2006, is based in San Francisco. ContentNext, whose roots go back to 2002, is based in New York.

The sale ends ContentNext’s three-and-a-half-year run as part of Guardian News and Media. When GNM had bought ContentNext, part of the idea was that it could help the UK publisher gain mindshare in the U.S. as the Guardian expanded there. In recent months, GNM has been focusing its investment activity in the U.S. around the buildout of a new site. “paidContent has a fantastic presence in the tech/media space, and the match with GigaOM, itself a really smart and pioneering company, is a good one. We are delighted to become shareholders in GigaOM as part of the deal,” said Andrew Miller, CEO of Guardian Media Group, the parent company of GNM. “The Guardian’s focus in the U.S. is on building guardiannews.com, but we look forward to seeing paidContent thrive and grow in its new home and wish its staff all the very best for the future.”

We thank the Guardian for their stewardship, and can’t wait to start working with our new colleagues at GigaOM. 

See GigaOM’sannouncement of the deal for additional details.

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After an explosive 2011, in which seemingly everyone involved in the mobile industry sued their counterparts, 2012 is shaping up as more of a slog. As weary companies start to strongly consider patent licenses instead of patent trials, the notion of FRAND patents—patents essential to tech standards that are required to be licensed on a “fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory” basis—is becoming more important, and different people have different ideas concerning what it means to be fair.

As a result, Apple has asked the European Telecommunications Standards Institute to clarify exactly what royalty rates its members can seek on so-called FRAND patents, according to The Wall Street Journal. Concern has surfaced regarding a royalty proposal made by Motorola (NYSE: MMI) to Apple that some consider exceedingly high, although the exact details of that proposal were not made public.

Meanwhile, Google is planning to send a letter to standards bodies that makes clear its intention to follow FRAND principles with Motorola’s patents should it be allowed to acquire the handset maker, according to Bloomberg. Google needs Motorola’s patents to help fend off attacks against its Android partners, but its rivals have speculated that Google could be planning offensive moves as well.

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The deal brings “thousands” of Viacom episodes to Prime Instant “over the next several months,” including MTV’s The Hills, Jersey Shore, The Hard Times of RJ Berger and several Real World episodes (what, no Teen Mom?);  Comedy Central shows like Chappelle’s Show and The Sarah Silverman Program; and Nickelodeon episodes of iCarly, Dora the Explorer, SpongeBob SquarePants and Yo Gabba Gabba.

In Amazon’s Q4 earnings report, the company said it had 13,000 episodes available through Prime Instant Video, so the Viacom deal appears to add around 2,000 episodes.

The company also said that that in Q4 of 2011, “the number of Prime Instant Video streams increased nearly 300 percent” compared to Q3.

Since launching Prime Instant Video about a year ago, Amazon has added content from Disney-ABC, PBS, NBC, CBS, Sony (NYSE: SNE), Warner Bros. (NYSE: TWX) and Fox.

release

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This is a significant deal for Facebook on two separate fronts:

—It ties Facebook up with one of the bigger companies in the area of mobile billing: Bango is the payments provider for RIM’s App World, which yesterday once again laid claim to being the second-most profitable app storefront after Apple’s—largely because of the fact that it has a strong business in paid apps and that those apps are billed directly to users’ mobile bills in 34 countries. RIM (NSDQ: RIMM) yesterday claimed that 13 percent of its App World developers earn in excess of $100,000, which is massive considering how many developers earn next to nothing.

In December last year, Bango also secured a deal with Amazon.

Like the Facebook announcement that deal provided no detail about what it was that Bango would do for the company—although that, too, could be an opportunity for Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) to build carrier billing into its mobile apps. A spokesperson contacted today declined to comment on the details of either the Amazon or Facebook deals, although she did confirm that Amazon was an active customer.

The use of carrier billing also begs another question: for what? That could point to Facebook offering richer mobile services on its web platform. The could include paid content apps or the ability to pay for other goods and services, perhaps linked up with location-based deal offerings. As the FT points out, that’s something that Bango itself started to promote, coincidentally just when news began to leak out of Facebook’s own HTML5 push, code-named “Project Spartan.”

It could also mean Bango working alongside or in place of other billing partners: Bango competes directly with Facebook partners Zong and Boku.

—The other significant side of Bango’s business is in the area of analytics for mobile web sites as well as apps. This is a service it already provides various high-profile publishers like CNN, Fox (NSDQ: NWS), and EA Mobile, among others—as well as to mobile ad agency AKQA—to help track how mobile content is used and consumed. That helps the publishers not only track what content “works” but also can be used to build profiles to sell advertising and marketing services.

If reports are true, that is another area where Facebook is going to have to start doing some serious tracking, too: the company is reportedly going to start inserting “sponsored stories” into mobile users’ feeds, which would represent Facebook’s first big foray into offering marketing services to brands since filing for its IPO last week—where it pointedly mentioned it had yet to start offering such revenue-generating services.

Facebook is holding an advertising confab at the end of this month—its first high-profile foray into wooing Madison Avenue—where it may well announce more details about how its mobile plans are progressing.

The other point to be made here is that it is interesting that Facebook is taking the road less traveled by companies like Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) and exploring routes to align itself with carriers as it expands what it does on mobile. It’s not the first time: Facebook has a whole swathe of non-smartphone users that can update their statuses by mobile; many of those feature phone Facebookers are using SMS, which also require carrier interconnections to operate.

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The plants will remain operational now for “smartphone product customization.” The news comes amidst unconfirmed reports that the company is planning to curtail its Symbian lineup after the release of the next model.

Nokia (NYSE: NOK) says that the transfer will result in the loss of 4,000 jobs in total, and the reductions will take place through the end of 2012.

Nokia does not outline how much the move to Asia will mean in terms of money saved, but this is a decision that has been some time in the making: these were plants that were spared in the last round of cuts under CEO Stephen Elop.

Since then, Nokia has reported yet more declines in its smartphone shipments, mainly around its legacy Symbian platform. The company is now gradually moving to making more of its smartphone portfolio based on Microsoft’s Windows Phone platform.

Now, Nokia says that the move is being made to put the manufacturing bases closer to where the different components are being made for those smartphones. That is a move we have seen from many other companies—and was the subject of a series of stories recently concerning Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) in China and the role of Foxconn in that business.

The move to make these plants focused on customization, meanwhile, points to some focus that Nokia does seem to maintain on its software and services for its devices—a crucial part of the company’s differentiation as it moves more and more to a platform being used by its competitors as well. Others that make Windows Phone devices include Samsung and HTC.

The news comes amidst other reports about Nokia that claim the company is planning to curtail its Symbian lineup after the next model comes out.

Symbian is gradually being phased out for Microsoft’s Windows Phone platform, but Nokia had originally said it would support the OS until 2016, and that could still be the case even if it stopped making devices based on it. Nokia transferred the operation of Symbian to Accenture last year.

A spokesperson from Nokia told paidContent that the article was “speculative at best” and would not comment on device rumor or speculation:

“As we have previously said Symbian continues to be an important part of our portfolio and going forward it will play a more focused role as we accelerate our transition to Windows Phone,” he said. “We remain fully committed to the platform through 2016, which means on-going software support as we go forward.”

The company is currently rolling out an update to Symbian, Belle, and the devices remain popular in the Middle East, Russia and India, even as they have lost out to Android-based devices, Apple’s iPhone and even RIM (NSDQ: RIMM) in other markets.

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Digital circulation and advertising revenue growth of 51 percent from the previous year came thanks to Future having pushed 65 of its titles to iTunes Store upon Newsstand’s launch early in October.

The result is finally an encouraging sign of light at the end of the tunnel for legacy media businesses which have spent years attempting to transition their efforts from analogue to digital.

Future CEO Mark Wood: “We are starting to see a significant change in the shape of the business as our digital innovation enables us to reach entirely new consumers in global digital markets.”

Future’s UK revenue for the quarter still fell by two percent, but that was mostly from the loss of a separate customer publishing contract, Future reported in Wednesday’s interim earnings disclosure.

Now, for some, the reality may be dawning that, despite many digital products reaping owners dimes rather than dollars when compared with print equivalents, publishing them at scale can nevertheless return a company to pre-digital revenue growth rates.

As paidContent reported in January, Future’s free container apps for its tablet editions have been downloaded nearly 10 million times since Newsstand’s October launch, generating individual sales of over 430,000 magazines during the period.

Forty percent of tablet edition sales are subscriptions, but some of them may be short-term renewals.

“Print sales will be challenging, but we expect digital revenue to maintain a vigorous growth rate,” the company added in its market disclosure on Wednesday.

In the U.S., Future has been more challenged by the more rapid evaporation of print magazine circulations. But, after the board jettisoned CEO Stevie Spring and its finance director in October, replacement Wood has tackled the problem by selling Future’s U.S.-facing music magazines for up to $3 million and by committing to launch U.S. versions of its Radar web portals, starting with TechRadar. Cost cuts have now offset U.S. revenue falls, Wood reports.

The company did not specify print circulation trends.

Google announced the new browser in a blog post Tuesday. It’s available only for Android devices running Android 4.0, also known as Ice Cream Sandwich.

Ever since Android was released Google has used a different code base for the browser at the heart of Android, although both Android’s browser and Chrome are based on the Webkit open-source platform that powers almost all mobile browsers these days. But Android’s browser was not considered as agile or stable as others in the Webkit family, while Google’s Chrome browser has been steadily winning converts on the PC.

It will probably take a while before Chrome on Android turns into the default browser, however, given the beta nature of the product and the fact that virtually everyone using Android is running an older version of the operating system. In an interview with AllThingsD, Chrome leader Sundar Pichai confirmed that Chrome will take over as the default browser on Android eventually.

That could mean trouble for companies like MoboTap, which develops the Dolphin browser as an Android browsing alternative. The majority of Dolphin users are on Android, and they’re the type of users that want a more powerful and stable browser: something that Chrome for Android might provide.

So what now becomes of Chrome OS, Google’s bid to redefine the computer as existing entirely within the browser? Google didn’t comment on that project in a few of the interviews it granted to discuss Chrome for Android, but Chrome OS has been a clear disappointment ever since it was announced, with very few people adopting Chromebooks as interest in the netbook concept has plummeted alongside rising interest in tablets.

Here’s a video explaining the features of the new browser:

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It all started with a report from last weekend, penned by a developer on the Touch Arcade forums, alleged that that some app publishers are using download bots to boost their rankings.

The services, it said, are being offered by third parties who will give your app the download bot treatment for as little as $5,000, and that many apps in the top rankings are using them already—pictured here. Some were also offering services to place favorable reviews on apps.

While Apple yesterday at first issued a “no comment” to paidContent when asked about it yesterday, overnight the company changed its tune and posted the following on its developer site, cautioning developers against manipulating rankings on its charts.

Notably, it doesn’t mention download bots specifically, but what it does do is suggest that the practice of using them, and any other services that inflate an app’s standing, will get that app the boot:

Adhering to Guidelines on Third-Party Marketing Services
Once you build a great app, you want everyone to know about it. However, when you promote your app, you should avoid using services that advertise or guarantee top placement in App Store charts. Even if you are not personally engaged in manipulating App Store chart rankings or user reviews, employing services that do so on your behalf may result in the loss of your Apple Developer Program membership. Get helpful tips and resources on marketing your apps the right way from the App Store Resource Center.

The question is, however, how hard it will be to substantiate who, exactly, uses these kinds of services, and who is ultimately culpable for how marketing is implemented.

One of the bigger app developers named in the original report, CrowdStar, spoke up in the Touch Arcade forum comments twice. With the name of the company offering the service redacted in the original report, the company never firmly denied (or confirmed) whether they used that marketing company’s services, but it did deny creating or using “farms or bots for downloads or reviews.”

Later, co-founder and CEO Peter Relan later told paidContent in an email that his company allocates “significant six- and seven-figure budgets on advertising through channels such as iAds, Flurry, Chartboost and many others, and also do direct developer cross-promotion partnerships.”

But he also admitted that some of this is slightly out of its control (the italics are mine): “Ad networks keep their ad partner information confidential, but we hope that none of the partners ever use farms or bots. If there are policy issues identified by the mobile platform, ad networks should adapt… We ask all our ad partners to uphold platform policies and stay abreast of changes.”

He also said that CrowdStar has had to resort to terminating relationships with marketers who cross the line only once before. “We found that an ad partner could not satisfy our queries about bots and we stopped using the partner,” he wrote.

It remains to be seen whether Apple will actually start to take down apps that it deems to have used these tools—and how, exactly, it will be able to track that the practice.

It’s also worth wondering how and if Apple will go after the numerous companies offering these services.

One that I contacted (as a would-be potential customer), says that his services to add reviews and ratings to apps range in price from $99 to $499; he also offers 100 iTunes accounts for $499 to be used for “data entry” and potentially other services, like downloads. He’s just one of many, a developer told me.

The discovery issue is a thorny one for the world of apps, and with the total number of apps now standing at over 1 million, that problem’s only growing. App stores like Apple’s are becoming increasingly harder to navigate and for users to discover apps, and some developers will be looking for any opportunity they can to game that situation.

There have been some examples of other practices that result in boosting downloads—namely Tapjoy offering users free credits in a game in exchange for downloading another, which Apple also forbade—although this was a much more open system, never hiding what it was doing, and was arguably was also good for app discovery and advertising revenues.

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On a wider-market level, there is good reason for RIM to be hosting a developer conference in Europe: it’s a market where it has had some mixed success of late, but that includes some key wins: data from GfK last week indicated that, in fact, BlackBerry is the most-purchased device brand at the moment in the UK. (Others say Android was the most popular, and still others claim the iPhone ran away with the market.) Thorsten Heins, in his keynote today, noted that 65 percent of the population of Europe, Middle East and Africa are still using feature phones. And that, despite everything, still spells opportunity for RIM.

RIM today said that it now has 60,000 apps in its App World applications storefront—still miniscule compared to the millions that live collectively on the Android Market and Apple’s App Store—but a significant improvement on the 17,000 that were in App World last January. Collectively, the store has seen 2 billion downloads as of last month, with 6 million downloads per day.

The company’s VP of developer relations, Alec Saunders, also repeated a claim we’ve heard before from the company: after Apple (NSDQ: AAPL), AppWorld is the “most profitable” of mobile platforms. This is based on the company claiming to have more paid downloads than Android’s Market, where the vast majority of popular apps are free to download. Part of RIM’s approach has been to enable carrier billing to pay for app downloads—meaning that the apps get charged directly to a users’ bill. That is something that is still nascent on the Market. (Apple handles billing itself via iTunes.) RIM says that it has now enabled carrier billing in 34 different countries

What’s interesting is that Saunders also spelled out a bit of detail on how much money developers are making on the platform: apparently, 13 percent of all app publishers have made $100,000 or more through AppWorld. That detail sparked off some responses:

“On the other platforms, virtually no one covers their investment as anything more than a hobby,” one developer, Matt Baxter-Reynolds, tweeted to me earlier. “That metric is just not believable.” That kind of thinking underscores the idea that apps and app stores are really just there to drive more stickiness to a platform and encourage more hardware sales.

But another raised the point that in fact RIM most likely attracts a different kind of app maker than those who have swarmed to iOS and Android. “I’d say [that is] reasonable,” noted another developer, Shaun Austin. “BB doesn’t seem a platform as likely to attract hobbyists in the way Android/iOS does.”

Of the apps that are selling best, four out of the top 10 on App World are games for the PlayBook tablet, RIM said. You can read that as a vote for engagement for a tablet that has been less than successful against the iPad and Android-based tablet makers.

Last week, RIM released an updated SDK for the BBM Social Platform, a newish area the company has been exploring, leveraging the wide usage it already has for its BlackBerry Messenger service. Today it noted that it now has 50 million people engaging on that platform through various apps, with the most-used of them being the BlackBerry version of Wikitude, an augmented-reality search app.

Looking ahead, it’s products like the BBM Social Platform that are perhaps where RIM should be putting more of its focus: it is, after all, an experience that is unique to RIM and helps set it apart from other handset makers. The company is gearing up for two significant platform updates in the months ahead, with BlackBerry 10 for handsets and PlayBook 2.0 for the tablet, and all eyes will be on how dynamic and easy these will be to use in creating services. RIM has already said that it will be looking for close integration of the BBM Social Platform with BlackBerry 10, which will the see the company doing more in social gaming on the OS.

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