If print book costs major on distributing boxes of dead trees, what price the e-book fulfilment sector?

Amazon’s Kindle Fire today is only on sale in the U.S., but according to one report that Fire could be spreading to the UK as soon as January of next year.

As the Black Friday shopping opportunities continue to pile up, the mentions of mobile payment services get ever more frequent, too: in just the last two days, no less than four major mobile players have been linked with new initiatives around NFC technology, the wave-and-pay system that its supporters hope…

Big funding round for the digital content subscription and billing specialist Zuora: the company has raised $36 million in a Series D round that it will use to expand internationally and commercialize new products.

Netflix (NSDQ: NFLX) is picking up some more momentum for its UK and Ireland launch, scheduled for early next year. The streaming video company has now added film studio Miramax to its list of content partners, joining Lionsgate and MGM in providing films for the service. But unlike the other…

Telefonica (NYSE: TEF) has put its digital eggs into one basket—centralizing all its global digital operations into one new unit—and with today’s results it’s easy to see why: the company today released some dismal results for some of its legacy businesses—namely in its home market of Spain—which have resulted in…

Irish developer Ideal Binary has raised €750k (around £642k) to fuel its ambitions in the increasingly competitive book-apps market. The funding includes €500k from the AIB Seed Capital Fund, managed by Enterprise Equity Venture Capital, and €250k from Enterprise Ireland.

Netflix (NSDQ: NFLX) is laying some content groundwork for its launch in the UK and Ireland, expected in early 2012: today it announced a deal with MGM to stream first-run feature films in the two countries. The deal,  exclusive to Netflix for new releases, will mean that more established players…

A new twist today in the battle of media companies trying to stop their content from being distributed by illegal means online: the UK’s main music trade body, the BPI, has today teamed up others in the creative industries to request BT (NYSE: BT), the UK’s leading broadband provider, to…

New initiatives from Open Road Integrated Media and Wattpad hope to draw teen readers in with webisodes, music videos, “triggered events” and other digital goodies. The strategy for Open Road’s project: Everything is new. The strategy for Wattpad’s project: We’re taking something old and making it new and free.

Here’s an acquisition that has come unexpectedly, but not surprisingly: BlackBerry and PlayBook maker RIM (NSDQ: RIMM) has bought New Bay, an Ireland-based mobile social networking and cloud-services specialist NewBay for a sum believed to be in the region of $100 million.

The rise of smartphones has meant a big boost in data use and data revenues, but in many cases that is still not offsetting declines for mobile operators in other areas, a trend illustrated by Vodafone’s quarterly results, issued today.

Our look at some of the big stories today in mobile: Google’s Android in-app payments service gets some early users—and maybe some confusion; Gartner says tablets drive up worldwide IT spend; and Hutchison’s Three posts a profit.

Despite the big stories about the iPad 2 selling out in the U.S., and the question marks over how events in Japan might affect consumer electronics supplies, Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) is going ahead with its scheduled launch of the iPad 2 outside the U.S.

Sony (NYSE: SNE) subscription service Music Unlimited launched in the United States, New Zealand and Australia on Thursday, entering a competitive sphere already cluttered by the likes of Apple’s iTunes and Microsoft’s Zune.

—Apple: The App Store hit its ten-billionth download on January 22. Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) had turned the occasion into a contest, with an $10,000 iTunes gift card going to the person who downloaded number ten billion. That turned out to be Gail Davis, from the London, England suburb of Orpington.…

—HP: Has EVP of HP’s mobile business Todd Bradley confirmed that HP (NYSE: HPQ) will be launching, at a press event in February, a tablet using Palm’s WebOS platform? Some speculated that the device would be debuted during CES last week—it wasn’t, although the company did show off a prototype…

Not great news around the holidays, but at least some of the consultations won’t begin until January: UK mobile operators O2 and Everything Everywhere—the merger of T-Mobile and Orange in the UK—are separately preparing layoffs that will, in total, number in the thousands. O2 is focussing primarily in the area…

The first phone that Hutchison Whampoa-owned INQ Mobile built was known for its tight integration with Facebook, and drove 65 percent of users to use the social network regularly—a figure more in line with the iPhone, but much higher than phones in that price range. Nine months after launching the…