eBay’s mobile reach in Europe is about to expand exponentially. The e-commerce giant has just announced it first ever mobile pre-load deal with Telefonica, which will equip most smartphones and feature phones sold by the Telefonica via its O2 brand with eBay’s mobile app or a link to eBay’s mobile page pre-loaded.
The company says the deal will include most Android, Windows 7, Symbian and Bada devices sold by O2 in the UK over the next two years. Telefonica will actually work with device manufacturers to pre-install the application. → Read More
Considering the immense fragmentation that characterizes the mobile apps industry, it’s good to see decent research help us try and make sense of what’s going on in that particular part of the digital economy, one that is consistently growing in size and importance across the globe. Hence, I invite anyone with a vested interest in the mobile developer ecosystem to check out VisionMobile’s extensive research report (sponsored by Telefónica Developer Communities) on that very subject, because it’s easily one of the most profound I’ve read to date.
Dubbed Developer Economics 2010, the free research report delves into all aspects of mobile application development, across 400+ developers from around the world, segmented into eight major platforms: iOS (iPhone), Android, Symbian, BlackBerry, Java ME, Windows Phone, Flash/Flash Lite and mobile web (WAP/XHTML/CSS/Javascript). → Read More
[Spain] Is Telefonica buying Tuenti, the leading Spanish social network – or not? The subject comes up regularly in Spain.
And so it was that “Telefonica is rumored to be acquiring Tuenti for €80 million” ($104 million) was the latest rumour buzzing around Spanish blogs and Twitter timelines this weekend. The trouble is that Tuenti vehemently denies it.
Yesterday, vociferous Carlos Blanco wrote that Tuenti was in negotiations with Telefonica (with a very suggestive URL, reading something like “telefonica-buys-tuenti”). Thus setting off a vertibal gossip bomb.
But in actuality Tuenti has said that is is making an announcement tomorrow morning that involves Telefonica… but it’s a relatively small commercial announcement that has nothing to do with a sale. → Read More
There appears to be a good old bidding war going on for another VoIP startup, Jajah, following yesterday’s news about the acquisition of Gizmo5 by Google, a source in Silicon Valley with knowledge of the talks informs us.
Details are scarce at the moment, but Microsoft, Cisco Systems and Telefónica Europe (O2) are said to be looking to buy the venture capital-backed company for a price ranging from $200M to $400M. We’re digging for more information. → Read More