It’s taken ten years, and a last leg up by way of an acquisition of a competitor, but Rhapsody says that it has finally reached one million subscribers for its music services in the U.S.

Spotify CEO Daniel Ek took the stage at Spotify’s first-ever press conference to expand the music streaming service’s Facebook integration to a wider world of social networks and devices, arguing that sharing is the only thing that can save the music industry and stop piracy.

A big bump in business for bricks-and-mortar mobile shopping app Shopkick: the company has signed a significant deal with Old Navy clothing stores to add another 1,000 retail outlets to Shopkick’s network, bringing the total number of stores served today to 4,000.

Best Buy is one of the biggest and most influential retailers of mobile phones and other gadgets in the U.S.—impacting pricing for other retailers and influencing what products people buy—but it has stumbled in its effort to take that formula and repeat it elsewhere. Carphone Warehouse, the UK retailer that…

There were such high hopes for the Motorola (NYSE: MMI) Xoom when it was first unveiled at the beginning of this year: meticulously crafted, souped up with new features and… selling for the princely sum of $799. Up against the best-selling iPad, so full of content and almost half the…

Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) has been working hard at promoting its new and improved mobile effort, the Windows Phone 7 platform, in the past year. It’s chalked up new device partners, including a veritable biggie, Nokia; (NYSE: NOK) It’s updated the OS to cover initial shortfalls; and it’s made sure the…

Rhapsody yesterday announced the acquisition of long-term rival Napster from U.S. retailer Best Buy.  Rhapsody will retire the Napster brand and migrate the customer base over to its own service, with Best Buy gaining a minority stake in Rhapsody. It is a somewhat poignant end to one of digital music’s…

Even without the added pressure of a very inexpensive Kindle Fire tablet from Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN), the tablet market is bound to see some more contenders fall by the wayside joining HP (NYSE: HPQ) and its TouchPad. And so it came as little surprise today to see a report that…

A look at some of the big stories in mobile today: » Google has started to quietly distribute its own SIM cards with Nexus S devices in Spain. Signs of an operator strategy ahead? (9to5Google)

Growth in sales of mobile devices wasn’t enough to offset declines in television and gaming at Best Buy, whose second-quarter results indicate that U.S. demand for consumer technology is tepid amid broader economic worries.

		EPS*	Rev. vs Q210	Net Inc. vs Q210
Best Buy	Release		Flat	30%

* vs. Analysts' Estimates: Beat Met Missed

A look at some of the big stories in mobile today: » Best Buy is gearing up for a special “Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) fixture installation” on October 21: some believe this could be another signal that the much-anticipated and rumored iPhone 5 will launch then. Meanwhile, Deutsche Telekom (NYSE: DT) is…

HP’s fire sale on the TouchPad lasted less than 24 hours, as a decision Friday to steeply discount the price of the cheapest model to $99 was followed by the abrupt removal of TouchPads from Best Buy’s Web site and at its retail stores, although it is still available at…

A short-lived piece of computing history could soon be yours at an aggressive discount. Even though Best Buy continues to put HP’s “dead-tablet walking” TouchPad at the center of its redesigned tablet floor display area, it probably won’t be priced at its current level for much longer.

Apparently premium placement at the nation’s most ubiquitous consumer electronics store isn’t enough to boost demand. Best Buy is sitting on an amazing number of unsold HP (NYSE: HPQ) TouchPads, according to a report, in what would be a very bad sign for the fledgling WebOS tablet.

“Showing your phone to redeem a deal sucks,” said Tristan Walker, Foursquare’s director of business development, today at BIA/Kelsey’s Deals 3D conference. “We wanted to completely fix it and make it completely seamless, frictionless and magical.” Foursquare, Yelp and Shopkick are rolling out new mobile tools and launching new partnerships…

Intellectual Ventures, the world’s biggest patent-holding company, has sued a second set of companies, claiming its giant cache of intellectual property includes patents that give it the right to collect royalty payments on DRAM, the most common type of computer memory. That means IV is attempting to collect licensing fees…

Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HPQ) learned at least one thing from the other companies who have tried to challenge the iPad with their own tablets in 2011: if you don’t have your own retail chain, put your product front and center.

Not to be outdone by Google (NSDQ: GOOG), Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN), Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) and the rest of the cloud bandwagon, Best Buy is also expanding its own services up in the sky. Today it has launched a new music streaming offering—appropriately enough called Best Buy Music Cloud. On the…

A look at some of the big stories in mobile today: —iCloud: The good news for Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) is that 76 percent of iPhone owners say they will be using iCloud and 30 percent will even give iTunes Match a spin. The bad news is that Apple seems to…