In November, Yahoo replaced Google as the default search provider for Telefonica subsidiary O2 Germany—and now it’s closed the loop with its deal in Telefonica’s home country.

Still unclear is what will happen to Yahoo’s 80-plus mobile distribution deals once its search partnership with Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) goes into effect. Yahoo will use Bing as its exclusive search platform for PC-based searches. However, the mobile search relationship isn’t exclusive, with Yahoo allowed to choose other partners if it wants to. Discussions are ongoing.

Here’s the announcement.

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NYT’s flagship app lit the blue touch paper for iPad, Wired also got in on the act early, both Denmark’s Information paper and Penguin Books have imagined themselves on the tablet, even The Economist is getting excited.

Now Holland’s De Telegraaf newspaper has published a concept video, showing how it’s thinking of approaching the gadget…

Another Dutch publisher, Sanoma Magazines, says publishers have been having “secretive” talks with Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) about supporting iPad’s roll-out.

But, for all the iPad concepts we’ve seen lately, many are still only that. De Telegraaf’s video is a corporate montage designed to depict a forward-thinking multi-platform publisher, but it doesn’t exist.

In fact, it only renders Telegraaf.nl’s existing website on the gadget - and, as Apple watchers will know, Telegraaf’s Flash news videos seen in the clip won’t even work on the iPad.

Via Emerce.nl.

The company plans to use the new funds to set up five new sales offices in New York, Los Angeles, Toronto, London and Bombay. Todacell boasts that it only works with a small number of mobile publishers, including Fring, MobiLuck, Mocospace and TuneWiki, and that it allows them to better optimize the respective pubs’ ad inventory.

That said, Todacell is also looking beyond the smartphone. Its ad network extends to placement on non-phone devices, including hand-held gaming consoles by Nintendo, Playstation and Sega. Todacell is now planning to make ads available for the Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) iPad and Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) Kindle. The Kindle’s broadband service is hardly used by the majority of its owners, though MediaMemo speculates that Amazon may be revamping its approach, making it more appealing to users, publishers and advertisers that Todacell caters to.

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Springer-owned tabloid Bild’s “Shake the Bild Girl” app allows iPhone users to undress a model. Each time the user shakes the phone, the girl strips an item of her clothing. While Bild features naked women daily in its pages, Apple ruled that the girls in its iPhone app should wear bikinis.

The Association of German Magazine Publishers (VDZ) asked FIPP last week to approach Apple over the issue. FIPP is debating the issue, but has no further comment at the moment.

The VDZ chief executive, Wolfgang Fuerstner, has warned that Apple’s move might represent a move towards censorship. In an interview with the German magazine Der Spiegel he said: “Publishers can’t sell their soul just to get a few lousy pennies from Apple.” Bild Digital CEO Donata Hopfen agreed: “Today they censor nipples, tomorrow editorial content.”

Apple asks publishers of general interest apps to respect its US “no nipples” policy. In November, German weekly Stern’s app was dropped from the App Store due to an erotic photo gallery.

When Apple approached Bild in January, the publisher censored the PDF version of the paper programmed for the iPhone.

According to Doepfner, Springer is Apple’s second biggest client worldwide after Google (NSDQ: GOOG). And Springer makes good money via Apple. The “Shake the Bild Girl” app costs €1.59 a month and can be topped up with a PDF of the printed Bild for €3.99 a month. Springer’s head of public affairs, Christoph Keese, said that the iPhone apps launched Bild and its other newspaper Die Welt have sold a total of more than 100,000 units.

Apple’s intervention has made it clear to publishers that they find themselves in a new role in a digital world.

When Apple announced at the end of Feburary that it would “remove any overtly sexual content from the App Store”, publishers had to follow that request. It is Apple that has final control over its platform, not the publishers.

Lazar marks one of many recent departures from Yahoo’s mobile group. Over the past year-or-so, departures range from all the way at the top, like Marco Boerries, Yahoo’s EVP of the Connected Life Division, to its Chief Scientist Marc Davis to Steve Boom, SVP of Connected Life. And, only ten months after being promoted to global head of Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) Mobile, David Ko gained the additional responsibility for all of Yahoo’s content sites in North America.

Yahoo continues to operate its mobile search technology on its own despite the company’s search partnership with Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT). However, Yahoo has the ability to tap Microsoft for mobile if it decides that makes sense in the future.

In a letter sent to friends and colleagues, Lazar says he does not know what he will do next, but is taking time off and is considering moving back to the U.S. Lazar credits Yahoo for accomplishing a lot while he was there: “We didn’t have much of a business when I joined, but we now have over 100 mobile search and ad deals around the globe with the genesis of those beginning right here in the UK. Between those and the distribution deals with Nokia (NYSE: NOK) and the OEMs we really created an exciting leadership position for the company.”

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In January 2009, THQ conducted a significant restructuring that included focusing on building games for smartphone platforms, closing its San Diego, UK and Germany offices, and designating Universomo as the center of its wireless business. However, today, a THQ spokesperson confirmed to ME that the Finland office is in liquidation, and that going forward, it will tap into a global network of external developers to make mobile-game titles.

The news was first reported by Pelaaja, a Finnish games magazine. The spokesperson said they still plan to release 15 mobile games this year despite the closure. “We are very excited about digital gaming and have increased our investment in this area.”

Last month, when THQ released its fourth-quarter earnings, it said it was realigning several of its studios to emphasize its digital operations. It said two of its eight studios will now focus on developing digital titles based on “THQ’s core game brands and new original intellectual properties,” as well as “the implementation of a portfolio-wide community platform to connect consumers to all of THQ’s core games.”

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Your eyes deceive you, sadly. What looks like an Information.dk iPad application was actually the front page of yesterday’s printed edition, whose cover story, was devoted to examining which digital paths might lead news economics out of its gloomy uncertainty.

While the piece itself ran the numbers of Danish media decline and an accompanying piece heard Liberal party calls for for state handouts to be widened from print publishers alone, the mock-up allows us to imagine how first-wave publishers might approach the iPad…

Information.dk’s fake app holds to a principle I forecast recently - that iPad apps will look a lot like their print forebears - but pares down front-page stories and ads to one apiece. That’s unlike the New York Times (NYSE: NYT) app, which will load its front page with stories; another move that’s not unlike its printed counterpart.

Via Innovations In Newspapers and TUAW

This continues is expansion beyond its core TV franchise in the recent years, into cable, satellite and now telecom. It can now bid jointly with Nextel for new wireless spectrum, up for auction later this year, reports WSJ.

The multimedia event was held off site in a large room, where the walls served as giant video screens. Crashing waves and and over-sized images of jellyfish made it feel like an aquarium. On stage, dancers kept rhythm to loud techno music and a trapeze artist hung from the ceiling. But more important than all of that was the message that Samsung was there to deliver. For months, the South Korean handset maker has provided an often muddled and confusing explanation for what bada is, but tonight President of Samsung’s mobile communications division JK Shin explained how it fits into the company’s view of the future.

The message was essentially this: all phones should be smart. Most of Samsung’s handsets today are considered feature phones, which run on the company’s proprietary OS. The bada smartphone OS will change that. And while, it will face competition from Apple (NSDQ: AAPL), Google (NSDQ: GOOG), Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) and Symbian, Samsung has the distribution power to make a project like this a reality. Not to mention, it will give developers and content companies access to a much larger and global market. Shin: “We are committed to bringing the smartphone era to everyone, and making it a true democracy for billions of people on all continents in all corners of the world. This is Samsung’s vision to advance the democratization of the smartphone era, regardless of cost, or lifestyle or geographic location.”

The event was considerably light on details. The first phone, being called The Wave, was unveiled and was on display to play around with, however, Samsung didn’t address many of the basics, such as cost—which will be the primary factor in developing countries, where users pay the full price of the device and often do not have a lot of spending power. As for the legitimacy of Samsung’s argument that one day all phones will be smartphones—it’s not too far off. After all, even many feature phones today have access to the internet, email and applications. How’s that so different from a smartphone? The technical definitions are definitely blurring.

Instead, Samsung focused on the hardware and software:

—Hardware: While most feature-phones have low-end hardware, the bada vision is completely different. The Wave is thin and light and thas a “Super Amoled” screen, meaning that it is very bright and responsive to the touch. It has a super speedy 1 Ghz processor that Samsung built itself.

—Software: The Wave is a bit of a hybrid between the iPhone, Android and a feature phone. It comes with Samsung’s own Touchwiz user interface. A clock widget mergers information with an analog clock, like the weather forecast for the next 12 hours, or stock quotes or your calendar items. In the contacts app, you can see a lot of information about your friends in one place, such as all the emails, text messages and IMs they’ve sent to you, but also your pictures and their latest social networking updates. A pull down bar, lets you access things like the music player, or Bluetooth connectivity.

—App Store: The third prong of this strategy includes developing an application store, where developers can sell their products and services to end-users. Given that the bada OS was developed entirely by Samsung, applications running on other platforms, like the iPhone, Android, or Brew, won’t be compatible. The app store launched in three countries—Italy, France and the UK last year—and will be in 50 by the end of the year.

The phone is expected to be available globally in April. Shin addressed just how committed Samsung is to bada: “Those of you who know Samsung, you know that when we dedicate ourselves to a new opportunity, we are serious and like to win. It [bada] is a key driver of our smartphone strategy. Samsung is advanced, but at the same time very accessible…Our revenue streams don’t compete with operators. We are proactively supporting operators with products and value-added solutions, which drive revenues for everyone.”

Samsung said that this is only beginning, or the first episode of the novel. Samsung will unveil the second episode, possibly as soon as CTIA in March.

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SinglePoint said the acquisition enables it to enter the Indian mobile advertising market, by serving content owners, mobile operators and brands agencies. M2Junction is based in Dallas with significant operations in Hyderabad, India. In a release, SinglePoint’s new CEO Gowri Shankar, said: “India is the fastest growing SMS market in the world with an incredible mobile advertising opportunity…M2Junction has been SinglePoint’s preferred global partner and is a perfect collaborator for our entry to India.”

Last week, SinglePoint sold its assets that enable it to send premium and standard text messages in the U.S. to Ericsson (NSDQ: ERIC) in order to better focus on the mobile advertising opportunity in text messages. At the time, SinglePoint pledged to get into international markets, where it did not currently have a presence, so it can scale the business. Shankar reasoned that mobile advertising in text messages will continue to be a big opportunity in developing countries: “Especially, once you have a global footprint, smartphones won’t penetrate some markets very quickly—there in lies the opportunity for us.”

Dayakar Puskoor, Chairman of M2Junction, will join the SinglePoint board of directors as a strategic advisor and help guide the company’s strategy in India. Raghu Kumar, M2Junction’s former CEO, will lead the Indian subsidiary of SinglePoint and report to Shankar.

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The investigation was ordered by SpinVox’s board in July, when, after paidContent:UK lifted the lid the company’s financial troubles and heard such claims from staff, a dossier of complaints was handed to the board by shareholders, advisers and suppliers.

The SpinVox accounts released by Nuance are brutal; they are a sea of red ink, showing little inclination to protect the managers of the company it acquired in December. Amongst other things, they reveal the conclusion on CEO’s unaccounted expenses: “The company did not adequately capture all necessary information to administer PAYE properly and to identify expenses that were personal to the CEO.”

That meant it failed to pay UK tax properly on “benefits in kind for employees including the CEO, benefits and expenditure that could fall to be treated as personal for the CEO and incorrect application of taxation to bonuses for the CEO”. Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs fined SpinVox, but fines could keep coming, the documents warn. The company was without a full-time CFO for 15 months while this went on—filling that gap might have helped make the accounts more transparent.

The documents concede that: “Bonuses were satisfied partly by the company meeting the cost of various personal expenses of Ms Domecq. Employment taxes withholding PAYE was not deducted on bonuses declared. The effect of these matters was to create a current account between the company and Ms Domceq.” The company even owed Domecq £72,000 at one point.

—Transfer of company funds: (1) SpinVox had paid £96,032 in 2008 to Ojala Ltd, “a company owned by a trust of which Ms Domceq is a discretionary beneficiary, in respect of its purchase and sale of shares in the company”. (2) SpinVox also paid up £38,400 in rent for a property used by Domecq, under an Ojala rental agreement, between February and January 2009.  (3) SpinVox had paid a total £153,000 for translation services to Celtic Communications, a company of which Domecq and co-founder Daniel Doulton were former directors.

As well as paying back £125,000, Domecq also agreed to “revise certain of her employment terms” after the investigation, the documents state.

—Staff’s stock-for-salary was worthless: Much of this started to go public when we reported that staff were being offered share options in place of salary while SpinVox weathered financial woes in July and August 2009; the offer was accepted by most. But those options were useless: “During the nine months ended 30 September 2009, the company granted 104,000 stock options to employees of the company. The 2009 stock option grants were valued using a Black-Scholes option valuation model and determined to have an insignificant value”.

Indeed, by the time the owners of SpinVox’s massive debts were paid off in Nuance’s acquisition, there was literally nothing left for employees.

—Company defaulted on loans: Management admitted in September that they failed to comply with loan covenants.

—Massive losses: January-to-September losses hit £56.4 million - a quarter higher than the year before.

—Nuance got a bargain: Although the acquisition price was $102.5 million, after debt repayments, Nuance only paid a “nominal consideration” for SpinVox. But it now plans to “rationalise and reduce” combined SpinVox-Nuance staff.

While the launch is limited to one phone, the deal is significant for SurfKitchen as it tries to help the carriers compete with app stores from other handset makers and providers. SurfKitchen’s CTO Dave Evans told mocoNews: “It’s pretty exciting and indicative of the overall ecosystem. We are seeing carriers be much more aggressive with what they do with app shops, as a way to differentiate themselves from OEMs. We are focusing how we support that.”

Last year, SurfKitchen decided to refocus its efforts more on application services as Apple’s iPhone took off. One such deployment was with the UK’s Orange, which wanted to create an application store to compete with Nokia’s Ovi, Google’s Android and other channels. The Orange store runs on a wide variety of phones, including Java, Android, Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) and BlackBerry.

Evans said while carriers find it important to invest in these services, the economic downturn over the past year hasn’t helped. Also, carriers are feeling pressured to invest heavily in network infrastructure, leaving less cash for other projects.

Still, he believes SurfKitchen is prospering. The privately held company has 55 employees and is profitable on a quarter-by-quarter basis. It has not raised capital since 2004, and has no immediate plans to do so. Contrast that with one of its U.S.-based competitors, Motricity, which is trying to raise $250 million in a public offering. Evans: “There’s a lot of opportunity. This will be a $13 billion marketplace in 2012. We continue as a viable concern, but I think we’ll see the number of players consolidating and potentially some will disappear over the next few months.”

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.”

The company said some of the initial customers in the U.S. include Artix Entertainment, Boomerang Networks, Gambit, gWallet, Merscom Games, OLX, Peanut Labs, Quepasa, Sometrics, Sonico, TheBroth, Viwawa, Viximo, and Wadja. The platform is called Allopass.

Preena said there’s a couple of benefits of its platform, most of which come from being a well-established company. He said they can cut merchants a check every ten days, rather than other competitors that may take a month or two. The other major advantage is that it offers more than mobile payments. In the U.S., Hi-media said it can offer mobile billing from the major U.S. operators, and also billing via 900-numbers and prepaid cards.

Preena said Hi-media has about 500 employees worldwide, and of that, 140 are in the payments business. “We have fairly aggressive growth plans in the U.S., Latin America and other parts of the world.” Right now, there’s six U.S. employees, which are backed up by a technical group in Europe. It also has customer service reps in three time zones that speak 11 languages. Prior to Hi-media’s expansion to the U.S. its mobile billing platform Allopass sales were up 10 percent in the third quarter 2009 to €21.3 million.

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In the first report released today, preliminary results found that 16 million people in the UK accessed the Internet from their mobile phones in December and viewed a total of 6.7 billion pages. The sites that received the most unique visitors include Facebook, Google (NSDQ: GOOG) and carrier portals including Telefonica (NYSE: TEF), Orange and Vodafone (NYSE: VOD). The data was based on information from three carriers, by January they expect to include data from four operators, and all five should be up and running in the second quarter. Release.

The two leading the charge, ComScore and the GSMA, are clear in saying the user data is “anonymized” to maintain the subscribers’ privacy. In a release, Rob Conway, CEO and Member of the Board of the GSMA, said: “The underlying principle of Mobile Media Metrics is to deliver valuable and actionable reporting tools to the media industry, while respecting the privacy of individuals. Access to transparent measurement is essential in establishing mobile as a legitimate advertising medium, and Mobile Media Metrics is a critical element in advancing this process.”

Earlier this month, a similar report was released in the U.S. by a Seattle-based startup called Ground Truth. It operates a little different from comScore and the GSMA. It has not revealed which carriers it is working, and has also chosen to get data from infrastructure companies. But the goal is the same: to get real information rather than to rely on customer surveys, analyst estimates, or other third-party reports. In a sample size of 2.5 million unique U.S. mobile web users, they viewed nearly 1 billion page views and downloaded 27.8 trillion bytes of data.

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While the company doesn’t typically breakdown iPhone sales by country, Apple’s COO Tim Cook said he would make an exception for China. He said that since the iPhone went on sale there in late October/early November, they’ve sold about 200,000 units through their partner China Unicom. The number seems fairly impressive given that only 5,000 phones were sold during opening weekend and they cost around $1,000 each. Not to mention that 1.5 million iPhones are estimated to have already been sold on China’s gray market.

Cook said sales will improve as they increase the number of places where the iPhone can be sold. But they aren’t in a rush to add more locations. “We are focused on the quality of the point of sales experience for the customer. We would prefer to move slow because we are building the brand for the long-term and we are very much focused on the long-term in that market because we think there is significant potential there.” Cook declined to forecast sales, or whether they would partner with more carriers in the country. “We are happy working with China Unicom and I’m thrilled we are underway and have two and a half months of experience under my belt,” he said.

iPhone sales are also starting to ramp up in Japan and Asia-Pacific. In Apple’s first quarter ended Dec. 26, it said that it launched the iPhone with 17 new carriers, including China Telecom and KT in South Korea. The company said it is seeing rapid growth in these markets despite critics who wondered if the iPhone would perform well where 3G networks and data access had been around for a long time.

In Japan, Apple’s net sales increased $285 million or 57 percent in Q1, mostly due to increasing iPhone revenues. Cook said iPhone sales are up 400 percent year-over-year in Japan. It “has been a runaway hit.” The iPhone was up over 400% year-over-year during the quarter. Likewise, Apple’s net sales in Asia Pacific increased 142 percent in Q1 compared to the year-ago period, mostly because of the iPhone and increased carrier distribution. Cook said iPhone sales were up 500 percent in Asia Pacific. Overall, the company sold 8.7 million iPhones, which broke a company quarterly record, but fell shy of analysts’ steep expectations of selling 9 million devices.

Our Q1 Coverage. | Release. | Webcast. Transcript (via SeekingAlpha).

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The fourth round of capital was led by Globespan Capital Partners; existing investors Charles River Ventures and Helion Venture Partners also participated. To date, the company has raised $37 million. SMS GupShup will rely on advertising from brands such as Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT), Puma, Cadbury and others, to bring the company to profitability this year. The money will be used to expand into the Philippines and Indonesia, and to grow the organization to 150 employees by adding another 20 positions in marketing, engineering and sales.

“The launch we have been working on with [mobile carrier] China Unicom has been postponed,” said a Google spokesperson.

Informed observers said that Google had decided that it could not launch a handset which relies on Google’s services – particularly its web and email services, which would be “baked” into the handset’s operating system – at a time when it could not be sure whether those will continue to be available in China.

Google last week accused Chinese hackers of compromising its internal networks to try to access the Google-operated webmail accounts of human rights activists, who have been repeatedly targeted by the Chinese government. As a result, Google said it will seek to end its self-imposed censorship of its search results there.

Though Google has begun talks with the Chinese government to see whether it will be allowed to lift its censorship, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman said on Tuesday that the search giant must obey China’s laws and traditions. That implies that Google will have to close its google.cn site, which would mean most of its 700 employees there would be out of work.

Although there are mobile phones sold in China which use Google’s free Android operating system, none so far has incorporated its Gmail and web search apps as the proposed one would. Sources familiar with Google’s thinking said that they decided that launching the phone and then withdrawing the email and search service would “seriously compromise the user experience”.

Google has not yet set a date when it will stop censoring its search results inside China. The Chinese government insists that internet searches are censored to remove material deemed “subversive or pornographic” – with human rights and dissidents’ work deemed to fall into the former category.