Press releases from Virgin and Square do not give any indication of how much money Branson has invested in the company, which was started by Twitter founder and (current) executive chairman Jack Dorsey. We have contacted Square, Dorsey and Branson to ask and will update this post as we learn more.

Square raised $100 million at the end of June in a round led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. At the time, that valued the company at $1 billion.

Square built a business initially on an iPhone-based mobile payments service that is now avaialbe for both iOS and Android devices. It provides a square-shaped dongle to merchants, who can plug the device into a phone to make instant card transactions. Some 800,000 merchants in the U.S. are now using the dongles, and there are around $2 billion in payments processed annually through the platform. At the standard 2.75 percent commission that Square charges merchants, that works out to annuals revenues of $55 million from those transactions going to Square.

Last week, the company upgraded its payment app, Card Case, which now uses geofencing technology built into smartphones to let a user make purchases without even presenting the device. About 20,000 merchants have signed up to work with the Card Case app to date.

How will Richard Branson’s investment in Square figure in the company’s strategy? It seems unlikely that Branson has taken an interest in Square as a simple financial investment. Rather, Branson could prove to be a key figure for Square as it looks to make its payment services more ubiquitous.

Square has said it plans to launch in international markets in 2012, and Branson’s international Virgin empire could help with that.

Not only does Virgin operate national and international airlines, but it has a number of other travel interests, including train services in the UK. It also runs a number of financial services, as well as gyms, mobile operators and a pay-TV company: all opportunities to increase the number of Square transactions and give more exposure to the brand on a global basis.

Related

• The NFC Dance: One Step Closer With PayPal; One Step Further With Square
• Not So Square Anymore: Dorsey's Payment Startup Gets $100M, Valued At $1Bn

Aspiro—the Swedish music streaming service that is not Spotify—today announced that it had signed a deal with a “new partner” in one of the Benelux countries. Aspiro doesn’t say who the customer is but from its past track record for customers it may be an ISP or a mobile operator. Under the terms of the agreement the partner will sell Aspiro’s streaming service, called WiMP, under a new brand name. Aspiro says that agreement will give it a revenue bump to the tune of 8 million-30 million Swedish Kronor ($1.2 million-$4.6 million) over the next four years.

It says the new service is expected to launch in the next three to six months.

The white-label route is one that we may start to see increasingly from Aspiro as it looks to expand its customer base and subscriber footprint. Currently, it has only one other agreement of the kind, in Portugal. “Although launching WiMP-branded directly to consumers is our main strategy, we are also flexible towards partners who want to use their own branding. This agreement could generate a substantial growth for us,” the CEO of Aspiro, Gunnar Sellæg, said in the company’s statement.

At the end of October, Aspiro announced that it was selling a 6.5 percent stake in the company to Norwegian music and entertainment retailer Platekompaniet for SEK 16 million ($2.5 million).

As of June, WiMP had some 300,000 paying users in Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Portugal, in addition to another 700,000 via an agreement with Norway’s Canal Digital, whose subscribers can opt for WiMP to be bundled into their pay-TV subscription packages.

The route of offering music services via a local ISP is one that is being tested by Virgin Media with its Spotify deal in the UK. Other partnerships of this kind have seen a lot of success: TDC in Denmark has been offering a music streaming and downloading service, TDC Play, since 2008 in partnership with the company 24/7, and in June it said it had seen 340 million downloads on the service (but no details about actual subscribers).

Aspiro is due to present its interim report for Q3 on November 10, when it might give out more up-to-date details on subscriber numbers and the new customer.

Meanwhile, the music download company 7digital has launched an app optimized for Android tablets—with perhaps the most unique feature being an enhanced graphic interface for browsing new and downloaded music.

The move is part of 7digital’s wider strategy to offer its service via more of its own-branded apps, which it is doing on top of the many deals it has in place to power music download services for a range of companies that include handset makers like Samsung and online music providers like Last.fm.

7digital in September noted 500,000 installs of its Android handset app and 600,000 downloads of its BlackBerry app. It has not said, however, how many music downloads have been made via those apps.

Now Everything Everywhere—the JV of Orange and T-Mobile in the UK—is looking to take another stab at the medium.

It has announced plans to launch a new live mobile TV platform that its hopes will increase the number of its customers using mobile TV six-fold over the next three years.

The as-yet unbranded service will be produced in conjunction with Red Bee Media, the digital entertainment technology company that was spun off from the BBC. Red Bee will be powering the service using its RedPlayer digital TV delivery platform. Before today, the operators were using in-house solutions for their video services.

This is only the announcement of the changeover: no date yet on when services using the platform will come online.

One of the big gating factors in mobile TV services up to now has been the quality of the broadcasts: they have been too dependent on shoddy network connections, have only worked on a limited range of devices, and don’t necessarily give consumers the choice of content they want to justify the price for the service.

Everything Everywhere looks like it is trying to address that issue head on: it says that the new platform will be able to deliver mobile TV services to a much bigger range of devices than ever before, including tablets, and content will be automatically optimized for the device that is being used. The service will automatically seek out the best network connection for the service, whether it is WiFi or 3G.

Will a redoubled effort on improving quality be enough to drive customer usage? It’s not clear yet—but since those early days of mobile TV a lot has changed, including the rise of apps and the mobile web and how they get used by consumers on their smartphones and tablets. Today, a user can get a range of apps for iOS, Android and other devices—or go right online—to not only view live television but also get on-demand video content.

In terms of actual content, the focus of Everything Everywhere’s service looks like it will be live broadcasts: covering more than 40 channels, including premium channels like Sky Sports and National Geographic. The company says it is also looking at how to implement new TV technologies, such as 3D content.

This is not Everything Everywhere’s first foray into mobile TV: Orange was the first operator in the UK to offer these services, in a partnership with the US-based MobiTV, back in 2005. In those days before the smartphone boom and limited 3G access, though, the service failed to attract a critical mass of users. T-Mobile has been offering mobile TV since 2007.

Everything Everywhere declined to give mocoNews any numbers on how those current services are faring: no details on subscribers nor on how much they actually get used.

The announcement from Everything Everywhere comes on the heels of several other news developments in the realm of mobile TV and mobile entertainment offerings from operators:

Last week, MobiTV last week filed documents with the SEC to announce its intent for an IPO, from which it hopes to raise some $75 million.

Virgin Media inked a £100 million ($160 million) with the Mobile Broadband Network Consortium (Everything Everywhere and Three’s network joint venture) to beef up mobile data backhaul, aimed specifically at improving the delivery of data-intensive services like mobile video.

And just yesterday Orange announced that it would be launching a new mobile music service in partnership with Deezer.

But it also comes after some high-profile closures, such as Qualcomm (NSDQ: QCOM) deciding to ditch its FLO-TV mobile TV service after finally admitting low subscriber takeup.

Related

• MobiTV Files For $75 Million IPO To Fund Its Growth [Video]
• Orange Duets With Spotify Competitor Deezer On New UK Mobile Music Service
• Qualcomm Sells FLO TV Wireless Spectrum to AT&T For Nearly $2 Billion

The announcement follows on from last week’s news that Deezer would be extending its service to the UK, headed up by new MD Mark Foster, who has had a long career in the music industry, with executive positions at Warner Music and other labels.

According to the release from Orange, Orange will be the exclusive partner for Deezer Mobile, a service that gives users unlimited access to the whole of the Deezer catalog of 13 million tracks on their phones.

Orange will be using the service as an incentive to would-be customers: those who sign up for Deezer independently will need to pay $9.99 per month to access music tracks, albums, radio channels, recommendations and supplementary content. But those who sign up for Orange’s Pay Monthly “Panther” tariffs—price: between £25 and £80 per month on a 24-month contract—will get a mobile-only version of the service bundled into those phone deals. It’s not clear whether T-Mobile, as Orange’s partner in Everything Everywhere, will have access to offering the service as well.

As it does in France, Deezer will also offer its radio station service—where a user cannot choose which specific tracks are included—free of charge.

Will this deal bring in the masses? We have seen a number of partnerships between mobile operators and streaming music companies—Music Station was an early mover with deals with Vodafone (NYSE: VOD) and others (and has more recently moved into a music streaming service with RIM (NSDQ: RIMM) on the BBM social network); and Spotify works with 3UK, Telia and Virgin Media (NSDQ: VMED)—but it’s unclear whether any of these have hit the high notes everyone was expecting.

But given the current buzz around cloud-based media services and the growing ubiquity of smartphones, we are likely to see more partnerships anyway.

This is not the first time that Orange and Deezer have worked together. In 2010, Orange took a minority stake in the company and the two have been offering a music service since August 2010 in France. While the two have not revealed how many subscribers they have today, the partnership picked up 500,000 in the first six months of operation—a number that is likely to have grown, as the service is bundled into Orange’s broadband and mobile content offerings in France, where it is the most dominant player on both platforms.

Deezer says that overall it has a total of 20 million subscribers worldwide, with services not only across France, but also Germany, Italy and Spain. Of that 20 million, there are 1.2 million taking premium packages. The rest listen using the Deezer’s free radio stations.

Related

• Deezer Streaming Music Service Launching In UK
• Orange Bets Big On Video, Buys 49Pct Of 'French YouTube' Dailymotion
• French Music Streamer Deezer Adding Premium Options, Mobile Streaming
• French Music Streamer Deezer Raises €6.5 Million Second Round

According to a news release from the operator, Tom Alexander is resigning “for personal reasons and to pursue other interests.”

Asked if Alexander’s resignation was in any way connected to the phone hacking scandal, and the answer from a spokesperson was a flat, strong no.

The news appears to have been rushed out: it’s unclear whether Swantee is an interim solution to run the business on short notice or whether he will be permanently installed in the role, nor is it obvious whether he will keep his existing role as head of all mobile operators for France Telecom in Europe (excepting France).

Update: A spokesperson tells us the appointment is permanent, and will begin September 1, when Swantee will give up his other responsibilities.

Officially, Swantee’s role at the moment is “Executive Vice President of European activities and Sourcing for France Telecom-Orange and board member of Everything Everywhere”—and these are still indicated on the release sent out today.

Alexander had been instrumental in the tie-up between the T-Mobile and Orange, who both needed significantly more scale in terms of customers and network to better compete against Vodafone (NYSE: VOD) and O2 in the country.

But since the merger, Everything Everywhere has been struggling to capitalize on that critical mass.

At the company’s last quarterly results, from the end of April, it reported a 28.1 percent decline in net adds for contract-based customers. And it also reported a decline in overall revenues compared to the same quarter in 2010: down 2.7 percent to £1.704 billion. ARPUs were also down for prepay and contract users.

Prior to the formation of the JV, Alexander had been CEO of Orange UK, a job he had held since 2007. He had also been founding CEO of Virgin Mobile (NYSE: VM) and before that an executive with O2, when it was still owned by BT (NYSE: BT) and called Cellnet.

Mobile roaming: A big set of proposals were put forward today recommending huge cost reductions on the price of roaming, covering voice, text and data services across Europe. (via European Commission)

Spotify: The music streaming service Spotify has inked a big deal with Virgin Media (NSDQ: VMED) in the UK that will offer Virgin Media subscribers bundled offers covering music delivered online, via mobile, and through Virgin’s TV service. (paidContent:UK)

HTC: The Taiwanese handset maker has bought S3 Graphics, a maker of processor platforms, from VIA Technologies for $300 million. (via VIA Technologies)

Nokia: An expose in a Finnish paper puts Nokia’s current problems down to generation-long problems around staff retention and innovation. (via GigaOM)

Meanwhile, Nokia (NYSE: NOK) has announced it would reduce the prices on certain smartphone models, but one of its newest, the X7. (via Reuters)

Microsoft: More reports about Microsoft’s alleged negotiations with Samsung over royalty payments linked with Android devices. (via Reuters)

“We’ll continue to explore the metro wireless opportunity which could give customers (the ability to watch content) outside the home,” CEO Neil Berkett told analysts Wednesday lunchtime, saying Virgin had been trialling the technology in Kent.

In January, BSkyB bought The Cloud, Europe’s largest public WiFi network with 50,000 hotspots, which had been O2’s WiFi partner of choice, to gain an out-of-home network over which its TV subscribers will ultimately watch Sky content using tablets and smartphones at locations like bars and hotels. BSkyB calls it “Sky Anywhere”.

“Our customers will be able to use many different mobile and fixed devices to consume their content,” Berkett said, albeit cryptically.

Despite owning its own virtual GSM mobile network since its forebear NTL swallowed Virgin Mobile (NYSE: VM) UK, mobile remains an elusive piece of the quad-play puzzle for Virgin Media, which also provides broadband, TV and fixed-line phone…

The company finally now wants and needs to get serious about leveraging mobile in its cross-sell. But its delivery of VOD to its smartphone customers is nascent and rudimentary.

Virgin Media will likely offer the TiVo (NSDQ: TIVO) iPad app for subscribers to Virgin’s high-spec new TiVo box, for which 65,000 pre-registrations were received and which is now being offered to new customers but for which loyal existing customers must wait until May.

That box could be a step-change, and Virgin continues touting its fixed-line cable network advantage - many customers now take 30Mbps and the company today announced a flashy, phenomenal 1.5Gbps trial in Shoreditch, London.

Perhaps a hedge against the possibility of slow growth for its GSM network, could an out-of-home WiFi network be the next big network Virgin looks toward? Right now, it looks like just an idea - in company slide decks today, there is, quite literally, a question mark over the possibility. If it does not buy or build its own, Virgin may still have the option of riding an existing WiFi network, like BTOpenzone.

In earnings, Virgin Media reported 5.7 percent higher Q1 revenue, with average monthly cable customer spend rising 2.6 percent to £46.16 thanks to 1.2 percent more cable customers being added since last year.

In official announcement on the homepage of PushLife, financial terms of the deal are not disclosed. But a report in the blog StartupNorth, which broke the news before the official announcement, said its sources put the value at around $25 million (not clear whether that figure is U.S. or Canadian dollars).

PushLife’s service currently allows users buy and synchronise music on their phones with music libraries on their PCs, using iTunes or Windows Media Player as the primary storage centers. PushLife also enables users to manage playlists from their phone; and share what they’re listening to through social networks like Twitter and Facebook. PushLife’s service currently works on Nokia (NYSE: NOK) (S40 & S60), BlackBerry, LG (SEO: 066570), Samsung, and other Android devices. But not those based on iOS from Apple.

How will PushLife fit into Google’s wider plans? The news comes as speculation grows what Google plans to do with its own music service, dubbed “Google Music”, which was reportedly scheduled for a late-2010 launch but is still a work-in-progress.

Something could be coming soon: in late March, reports emerged that Google has already been testing out a music service among its employees.

But a simple music download service may not be Google’s focus: One of the key areas for digital (and specifically mobile) music, given the storage limitations of handsets and the growing use of multiple devices to consume music, is the idea of consuming music on a mobile that is actually stored somewhere else, be it in a cloud or your PC at home.

Earlier in the month, someone on the XDA Developers forum noted that installing Android Honeycomb onto a mobile device (yes, just as Google doesn’t want you to do) he was able to “turn on” a synching function in the Android music player that had until then not worked. (That loophole apparently closed down after a while.)

It may well be that PushLife will be able to provide Google Music with the synching technology, and the other bells and whistle that come with it.

In any case, this seems to be more of an acquisition of technology rather than customers: PushLife says that as a result of the acqusition, it will be “eventually discontinuing” its service as it integrates into Google’s engineering team in Canada.

Not that much is known about how many customers PushLife had for its own business before the Google buy: In addition to selling its service directly to consumers, its two publicly revealed customers were Virgin Media (NSDQ: VMED) in Canada and the UK although there may have been others.

We have reached out to Virgin Media in the UK, which started to work with PushLife in December, for an update and to ask what the news will mean in terms of its own service. We will add to this post if we learn more.

Google’s Canadian headquarters are in Toronto, and the company has bought two other Canadian startups in recent years: Bumptop and SocialDeck.

A spokesperson for the UK cable company tells paidContent:UK: “It’s helping us deliver services like Virgin Media Player and our ecare tool to mobile customers.”

But there are not yet any new services as a result of the partnership.

Virgin Media Player was the VOD service Virgin Media quietly launched on PC and mobile in summer 2010, with shows from Living, Disney (NYSE: DIS), Cartoon Network, Nickelodeon, National Geographic and ITV (LSE: ITV), free to Virgin Media mobile customers.

It’s been patchy and slow-burning since. And mobile, for Virgin Media, has underperformed as a leverage for bundling - right now, only 12 percent of customers take mobile as well as TV, broadband and telephone.

“We’re a triple-play and we have a bit of mobile on the side,” CEO Neil Berkett conceded to analysts last month, saying quad-play ARPU could hit £80 ($129.01) per month. “We haven’t truly implemented the smartphone and tablet in to our offering. Therein lies the huge opportunity that exists for us.” He will start offering free mobile-to-landline calls for Virgin-to-Virgin households.

TiVo users must pay £199 ($320.9) for the broadband-enabled TV box and an extra £3 ($4.84) per month on top of the most costly, XL TV package. Right now, only 12 percent of customers take mobile as well as TV, broadband and telephone.

“We’re a triple-play and we have a bit of mobile on the side,” Berkett conceded to analysts Thursday, saying quad-play ARPU could hit £80 ($129.01) per month. “We haven’t truly implemented the smartphone and tablet in to our offering. Therein lies the huge opportunity that exists for us.” He will start offering free mobile-to-landline calls for Virgin-to-Virgin households.

Berkett reckons Virgin has “a long-term sustainable network advantage” because its cable network beats copper-wire telcos with the UK’s fastest broadband speeds and integrated TV, in wired areas at least.

That already means VOD succes on its existing boxes - 64 percent of customers now use their VOD programmes regularly. But many of those existing boxes are horrible pieces of technology, using archaic software from Virgin’s ntl legacy (mine has malfunctioned since I got it a year ago). So Virgin is taking on the more powerful, cleverer TiVo Premiere for the long term.

It will charge customers a hefty one-off fee and an ongoing monthly premium, but the company expects TiVo to become its standard box in some years’ time. Existing customers are being preferenced in a staged roll-out, coming to new customers in Q2. But many die-hard users of TiVo Series 1 devices are livid that, whilst throwing in with Virgin, TiVo is ending support for their boxes, which they bought about nearly a decade years ago.

Berkett thinks TiVo could even help tick Virgin’s “mobile” box. “In the second half of the year, we’ll start running TiVo applications on remote devices,” he said. “There is a (TiVo) iPad app available today which we will launch in the second half of the year.

“It will be our middleware in a few years time, It will be the glue that brings the PC, TV and mobile screen all together.”

The TiVo can host third party services’ apps and Berkett says he wants “no walled gardens”. “We have no fears about bringing a Blockbuster (NYSE: BBI) or a Lovefilm in to Virgin.

“The application and content is the key to the wallet but, in our case, it is not the wallet.” Translation - unlike BSkyB (NYSE: BSY), Virgin is no longer an integrated network-and-content company; it’s just a network. “It allows us to be completely open versus our competitors, who need to be closed.”

Virgin has been talking with Spotify about hosting its music player on TiVo. If Berkett’s openness about his TV platform extends to his other devices, that could also yield a cross-sold mobile and broadband deal for Spotify through Virgin.

Q4 revenue broke £1 ($1.61) billion for the first time, swinging Virgin Media (NSDQ: VMED) in to profit of £37.1 ($59.83) million.

Results | Release

Dave Moreau, the CEO of Fonestarz, will become the COO of the global operation. Fonestarz will keep its offices in the UK.

Both companies primarily sell services in white-label agreements with mobile operators and content brands, rather than via app store storefronts—collectively working with operators like Sprint (NYSE: S), Cricket, Vodafone (NYSE: VOD) and Virgin Mobile (NYSE: VM), as well as content publishers such as Disney and major music labels, although there may be more apps on the horizon.

In an interview, Moreau said that the merger of the two companies would be complementary: LiveWire focuses mainly on music services, while Fonestarz has built up a business in all of the furniture that people use to personalise their handsets: ringtones, wallpapers, and so on, which can also potentially extend into merchandising around the music services that LiveWire already offers. But Fonestarz, too, has moved into music services—it has a deal to manage the mobile music service of Vodafone New Zealand and Moreau says it plans to announce a similar deal for a major European operator in the next two months.

Music deals like these, however, will require Fonestarz to scale up, something that is hard for a small company to do organically, and much easier to do by acquisition, says Moreau: “We needed to be bigger and joining with LiveWire gives us the ability to deliver more products. If you’re small and niche you can make a living but you just can’t keep growing.”

Moreau says that traditional services, bought by people who use featurephones, still make up more than half of Fonestarz’s revenues, which were £3.2 million ($4.9 million) in the last fiscal year. He admits this part of the business isn’t growing like it used to, although it is still seeing growth particularly in developing markets where feature phone use remains high.

Meanwhile LiveWire Mobile had turnover of $16.8 million (£10.8 million) in 2009. Release

The deal represents PushLife’s first foray into the UK market: the company was founded in 2008 by Ray Reddy, an ex-RIM (NSDQ: RIMM) executive who is now the CEO of PushLife. The company sells its app direct to the market and also works with mobile operators that have moved into offering music content to subscribers. PushLife also lists Virgin Mobile (NYSE: VM) Canada as another customer.

One of the key aims of the free PushLife app will be to drive music buyers to Virgin’s pre-existing mobile music service, which was launched in August 2010.

There are other features, too: users will also be able to sync their iTunes and other music libraries from their PC to their mobile; manage playlists from their phone; and share what they’re listening to through social networks like Twitter and Facebook. (And yes, it’s curious that although the app syncs with iTunes it won’t work on an iPhone, but that device does already have an in-built sync function, so PushLife perhaps decided to look for other gaps in the market.)

According to Virgin Media’s release, the PushLife app also recommends songs based on existing tracks in the user’s library—recommendation being a big area in mobile music apps—and offers other information on the artists in the playlists.

Virgin’s wider mobile music service, which currently has around 1 million tracks in its catalogue, is based on IMImobile’s DaVinci Music product. It’s a mobile web-based service that offers mobile customers five downloads per month for £4 ($6.30), or for £3 ($4.75) to existing Virgin Media (NSDQ: VMED) mobile subscribers.

It’s unclear how well Virgin Media’s music service has done since launch. It does get promoted on Virgin’s home page on mobile, but when I tried to access it on an iPhone 4, I couldn’t get past the promotional banner. We’ve asked for some sales numbers, or any other metrics, for the service since launch, and will update this post with any details when we get them.

Virgin Media’s continued push into music services comes at a time when its arch rival, the News Corp.-controlled BSkyB (NYSE: BSY), has pulled back from its own music service, Sky Songs. Earlier this week, it announced that it would close after poor takeup from users.

It should be noted too though that Virgin Media has yet to announce any more on its wider strategy to launch a wider music downloads service—reportedly named MusicFish. This service had been announced as far back as June 2009 but has reportedly been stalled because record labels are unhappy with Virgin’s plans to offer music via an all-you-can-eat package for a single fee.

Perhaps mobile music will be the way ahead instead?

A new unit dubbed Virgin Digital Publishing has tapped Anthony Noguera, the former FHM UK editor-in-chief and editorial director of publisher Emap/Bauer’s mens division who left in 2009, to produce the mag.

Note the “magazine”‘s “cover” - the publisher tells us:: “We can’t think of any other mags whose front cover is a video.” In fact, there was at least one such mag in our rundown of nu-wave tablet magazines earlier this year, in which we said that introducing such non-standard features is likely to increase magazine production costs considerably. But then, Project is a totally new launch and will seemingly work this way from the get-go.

News of the mag emerged this summer. Though some onlookers have written about Project in the same breath as News Corp.‘s upcoming The Daily tablet-only mag, the differences are clear - the latter’s a newsy, daily edition; the other’s a mostly-monthly, feature-led title focusing on “design, entertainment, technology, entrepreneurs”. In fact, Project seems to have more in common with GQ or Wired, the tech mag whose own iPad edition turned out less whizz-bang than Adobe’s initial demos, than with a News Corp (NSDQ: NWS). newspaper.

Says Virgin Digital Publishing: “Project is what we like to think of as a ‘living magazine’ – evolving and updating throughout the month and taking advantage of the iPad’s capabilities to deliver a really innovative reader experience. Unlike a regular magazine you won’t just read Project once and then forget about it. The idea is that Project will be something that readers treat as a daily destination, offering breaking news, reader polls and blogs. That, and it has all the interactivity, responsiveness and immersion you would expect from the iPad experience.” An accompanying blog is live at projectmag.com, prepopulated with several posts about fashion, internet, movies, games etc.

—NTT Docomo LTE: The Japanese mobile operator today made it in just under the wire, announcing that it will launch its LTE service on December 24, seven days short of the deadline it set for itself earlier this year. Branded “Xi”, initially services will be data-only and dongle-based, with voice services and handsets expected in April 2011. Xi will be sold via metered data plans, rather than unlimited data usage, and will be the first LTE services in the country. [Release]

—Carphone Warehouse: Smartphone it ain’t, but it won’t set you back very much, either. U.K. retailer Carphone Warehouse is now selling a basic handset that costs 99 pence ($1.60) when you buy a £10 ($16) prepaid card from Virgin Mobile (NYSE: VM). The Alcatel OT-209 offers only voice, texting and an FM radio tuner. [Telegraph]

Sprint lost $911 million, or 30 cents a share in the quarter, which is much worse than the $478 million, or 17 cents per share loss from a year earlier. Analysts were expected a loss of 28 cents a share, Bloomberg reports.

While most of the company’s loss was attributable to tax effects, it actually suffered from adding 644,000 new subscribers because they are given heavily subsidized phones that can cost Sprint hundreds of dollars over the life of a two-year contract. Demand was particularly strong for smartphones, like the Samsung Epic 4G and the HTC EVO 4G, which both leverage Sprint’s partnership with Clearwire (NSDQ: CLWR). The third quarter marked the the fourth consecutive period of adding overall subscribers for the carrier, which has spent the past two years rebuilding its reputation and brand identity.

Sprint said operating revenues totaled $8.2 billion, increasing 1 percent compared to the year-ago period when revenues totaled $8 billion.

Other figures:

—Nextel losses: Its Nextel network continues to lose subscribers. In the quarter, the company gained a net 471,000 prepaid subscribers, which includes net additions of almost 1.2 million prepaid CDMA customers, offset by net losses of 700,000 prepaid iDEN customers.

—Overall subscriber figures: In all, the company has 48.8 million. This breaks down as: 33.1 million postpaid subscribers (26.6 million via CDMA, 6.1 million on iDEN, and 440,000 who use both), 11.6 million prepaid subscribers (7.1 million on CDMA and 4.5 million on iDEN) and about 4.1 million wholesale and affiliate subscribers on CDMA network.

—Prepaid focus: Its various prepaid brands, like Virgin Mobile (NYSE: VM), continued to boost additions.

Release | Webcast.

The two new hires are: David Messenger, former chief administrative and corporate development officer at Virgin Mobile, who joins as executive VP and head of our new Online and Mobile business unit; and Peter Lurie, the former general counsel at Virgin Mobile, who will act as SVP of strategic partnerships and business development. Additionally, Jason Alexander, is joining the company from Nokia (NYSE: NOK), where he was VP Strategic Program Management and responsible for portfolio management and planning.

Bloomberg first reported on the hires, but the Shulman’s vision for the new team was laid out in a memo sent to employees and posted online. The lengthy report outlines the dozens of members that will join the team, which is split up into four business units and three strategic teams reporting to Schulman. It also summaries the huge opportunity that American Express believes rests in mobile payments, including forming relationships with companies, such as Facebook, Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN), Google (NSDQ: GOOG), Apple (NSDQ: AAPL), AOL (NYSE: AOL), Zynga, Twitter and others.

Schulman writes: “The growth opportunities for payment forms outside of our traditional charge and credit products—such as prepaid, payroll cards, remittances and virtual currencies—are expanding quickly, due in part to changing consumer behaviors, rapid economic development and evolving cultural norms across the world. In total, the market for these payment forms is well in excess of $1 trillion and generates disproportionately high growth rates. Capturing even a small market share represents the potential to add billions of dollars of revenue in the coming years.”

American Express bought Revolution Money in January for $305 million, and has since renamed it Serve Enterprise. Jason Hogg, who founded Revolution Money in 2005, will be president of Serve Enterprise and establish standards to open up the company’s payments platform to third-party developers.

The variety of phones is really where this offer stands apart from the rest. It works with a dozen of smartphones, ranging from BlackBerry devices, and a handful of Android devices. It also supports some of the upper-end of feature phones, like the LG (SEO: 066570) enV Touch, or the Samsung Alias.

Verizon Wireless says unlimited data will cost $30 a month for smartphones, and that these lower-end devices will also have the option of a $10 monthly data package for 25 MB per month ($.20/MB overage). The offers will be available beginning Sept. 28. Users will have to sign up for a minimum voice plan of $45.
       
The decision by Verizon Wireless to begin offering new prepaid data plans coincides with other carriers offering enticingly low prices on a plethora of service offerings. For instance, Virgin Mobile’s “Beyond Talk” plan charges $25 for unlimited messaging, email, data and Web with 300 voice minutes a month. For $40, you get 1,200 minutes, and for $60, you get unlimited calling and unlimited data. Boost Mobile offers a $50 unlimited plan, which includes calling, texting, data and even unlimited 411 calls. While that sounds great, you only have the option of one smartphone: The BlackBerry Curve. And, that service costs $60 for unlimited access to everything.

Related

• Sprint Launches A $25 Voice And Data Plan That Even Kids Can Afford
• T-Mobile Prepaid Prices Drop Lower And Emphasize Texting
• Clearwire Confirms New 'Pay As You Go' Service Is Coming

Typically with pay-as-you-go, consumers don’t have to commit to lengthy contracts and have the flexibility of using it one day or month, but not the next. The pay-as-you-go segment, which compares to the prepaid market, will be welcomed by some stiff competition. Just recently, Virgin Mobile (NYSE: VM) (owned by Sprint) rolled out a $40 unlimited monthly prepaid plan, which is half as much as what Verizon Wireless charges for prepaid mobile broadband, and about $20 less than what the carriers charge under a long-term contract.

Given that Sprint (NYSE: S) owns more than half of Clearwire, the plans being announced on Monday could be fairly aggressive and include both Clearwire’s 4G service and Sprint’s 3G. The call will begin at 8:30 a.m. Pacific and be hosted by Clearwire’s Chief Commercial Officer Mike Sievert.

Virgin Media Player will carry “hundreds of hours” of on-demand TV from Living, Disney (NYSE: DIS), Cartoon Network, Nickelodeon, National Geographic and - marking its long-awaited first online syndication deal - also from ITV.

(Update: ITV (LSE: ITV) tells paidContent:UK it is only licensing Virgin Media (NSDQ: VMED) Player for “archive” TV shows - in other words, don’t expect to watch last night’s Coronation Street on the new Virgin site.)

All Virgin has announced is a “beta trial”, which only XL TV subscribers will be able to register for - at time of writing Thursday morning, registration was not available (so why make the announcement?).

This is Virgin Media’s attempt to replicate its existing role of channel gateway or platform, from the cable TV world, in the on-demand world - its equivalent of Sky Player.

It already has a significant VOD advantage over BSkyB on the TV, with catch-up catalogue from all the main public broadcasters and others besides.

Virgin tells us: “Mobile versions of popular shows will be available to any mobile phone owner via the Virgin Media mobile portal. It’s 60p for 15 minutes, £1 for 30 minutes and £1.75 for 60 minutes.”

Despite competing efforts by YouTube, SeeSaw, Hulu, MSN and others to aggregate catch-up TV online in this way, right now it’s broadcasters themselves who control the online market. The likes of ITV, C4 and Five each keenly sell their own video ads on either their own sites or - in the case of C4 and Five - on YouTube and SeeSaw.

It’s notable that Virgin Media’s set of on-demand rights is not carrying over from its TV service to the web- and mobile-based Virgin Media Player. This would have been very helpful. And, though Virgin carries BBC catch-up under the iPlayer brand on TV, I think it’s unlikely to get BBC shows as on-demand, because the corporation is refusing to syndicate its shows to third parties.

Right now, Virgin Media and BT (NYSE: BT) Vision hold non-exclusive VOD rights to HBO shows - but, as part of the deal under which Sky will take exclusive HBO linear rights, it will also get exclusive VOD rights when those contracts expire, Sky tells paidContent:UK.

Schulman will be leaving the company effective Aug. 23, and both Messenger and Lurie are expected to stay on board until after September.

In the past year, Sprint has rolled out a number of new prepaid brands targeting different demographics. In addition to both the Boost and Virgin brands, it has launched Common Cents Mobile and Assurance Wireless. Sprint’s prepaid business has been one of the only growth stories the carrier has had.

The spokeswoman confirmed that Sprint’s prepaid CFO John Feehan will be staying on to help the entire go-to-market team that runs sales, marketing, advertising, branding and customer care. In addition, Sprint’s president of the consumer organization, Robert H. (Bob) Johnson, will working on Sprint’s prepaid strategy.

At American Express, Schulman will be a member of the firm’s operating committee, reporting to CEO Kenneth Chenault, according to Bloomberg. Chenault said they were looking for someone “whose expertise cut across online and mobile technology, who has built new businesses, who knows how to work with great brands and who could help us leverage our existing assets and build new ones.”