It looks like the death spiral that was the Bitbop mobile video service is finally no longer. PaidContent understands that the service—once built and owned by News Corporation (NSDQ: NWS) and sold, along with the rest of Fox Mobile, to IT services company Jesta when News Corp. couldn’t make a…

This week saw a number of developments at Twitter and Facebook, two of the world’s biggest social networking sites, that are signs of them looking to capitalize more on their already-hefty user bases by creating services that keep them on their sites for longer.

Over the years, the Associated Press has made a profile for itself by syndicating its news across thousands of newspapers both in the U.S. and abroad. Now as newspaper readers move to new platforms like tablets to consume their news content, the AP wants to make sure it is syndicating…

Last week, the paidContent staff analyzed the sectors we cover most, highlighting the key people, companies and trends to watch in 2012. Some key topics: Apple (NSDQ: AAPL), internet TVs, publishing, advertising, legal and the age of ubiquity. Below, links to our coverage:

This is the fifth in a series of posts this week that will highlight key people, companies and trends to watch in 2012 in the sectors we cover most, from publishing to legal, and from mobile to advertising. According to figures from ZenithOptimedia, global advertising revenues will reach $486 billion…

Digital music is now mainstream, thanks in part to the MP3. Will the e-book market be next to produce a one-size-fits-all format—a format that is universally readable, freely sharable, and with a reasonably good reproduction quality? The answer to this question, for at least in the foreseeable future, is: not…

Rolling Stone magazine will release an iPad app companion this week for its The Beatles: The Ultimate Album-by-Album Guide book this week, as its parent Wenner Media prepares to launch full digital magazine replica apps on the Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) tablet next year for its flagship title and US Weekly.

The New York Times is ready to start extending sales of its “all access” digital subscriptions across tablets and smartphones to companies and organizations with more than 50 employees. The introduction of a new structure of paid digital circulation comes as the promotion that gave 100,000 NYT digital subscribers access…

The latest installment of the Twilight movies, Breaking Dawn, enjoyed one of the top-grossing opening weekends of all time (for some inexplicable reason) following its Friday debut. The movie also shared another distinction: it generated the highest percentage of mobile ticketing purchases in Fandango’s history, paidContent has learned.

So a changing of the guard at mobile ad company 4INFO, which announced a funding round of $14 million just last month: Zaw Thet, the company’s outspoken founder, has left his role as the CEO and is getting replaced by Tim Jenkins, who has worked for a number of tech…

E-bookseller and e-reader company Kobo is being acquired by Japanese e-commerce company Rakuten for $315 million. The company says it will continue to expand in the U.S., while growing its international market share through Rakuten. Look for upcoming partnerships with fellow Rakuten-owned company Buy.com, as well as a Japanese-language Kobo…

Digital publisher Open Road Integrated Media is getting into e-singles with a new program, “Short Shots,” which will publish short-form fiction and nonfiction.

Teenagers who founded their own start-ups could find themselves featured in titles from Backlit, a new young adult e-book publisher based in Santa Monica. While bestselling YA series like Gossip Girl have centered around the Manhattan elite, Backlit is a product of Silicon Valley and Hollywood—with a first-look agreement from…

While Nokia (NYSE: NOK) is busy courting developers with free Lumia devices to promote its new mobile OS of choice, Microsoft’s Windows Phone, a timely infographic from Israel’s Inneractive demonstrates that the company’s legacy OS, Symbian, is actually doing quite well when it comes to consumer responsiveness to apps—specifically, one…

After years of employing an ad-hoc community-driven approach to mobile, one of the world’s biggest Web sites is going mobile in a much more organized way. Wikimedia Foundation is currently pitching deals involving a new mobile version of its ubiquitous Wikipedia site that it hopes wireless carriers will offer to…

Book and magazine publisher Rodale is looking to some of its most popular magazines for content as it introduces e-originals this week. First up are a Runner’s World “Essential Guides” series and a Grete Waitz title, to be followed by a Kindle Single on the Afghanistan War by Men’s Health…

Flipboard may have raised $60 million and counting, and Zite may have just been bought by CNN, but another popular reading app, Pulse, sees its growth coming from being on as many platforms as possible, as quickly as it can. This week, the startup plans to go live as a…

Lonely Planet has created a separate technology startup in San Francisco to develop next-generation social mobile travel guides together with competitors.

Twitter has not been very forthcoming on user numbers, but today it gave a shower of stats and data to mark a milestone in its growth: 100 million monthly active users. It’s a measure, perhaps, of which social networks see each other as the key competition: the news comes just…