Most notably, the company has rolled out the brand on Verizon (NYSE: VZ) Wireless’ network as part of an exclusive five-year deal it with the carrier to provide search and advertising services on the phone. Microsoft was rumored to pay $500 million for the opportunity, which was likely necessary given that Google (NSDQ: GOOG) and Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) dominate the rest of the U.S. wireless market.

The match-up was announced in January, and Microsoft started rolling out search to subscribers in the past few weeks. So far, many subscribers are currently accessing Bing from Verizon’s portal page, and through high-end browsers, such as Opera, where it’s the default engine, Microsoft said. Later this year, it “will be preloaded on the majority of Verizon feature and smartphones,” according to a spokesperson. Microsoft’s GM for mobile media Charles Johnson told Bloomberg that in the first 20 days as Verizon’s default search, Microsoft’s handled 19 million queries, or 10 to 15 times the previous rate.

Not only has Microsoft been aggressive about rolling out the so-called “decision engine” for mobile, it has also made progress on the advertising front. Microsoft has signed a deal with Hyatt to put the hotel chain’s ads on Verizon phones, where users will be directed to the hotel’s mobile web site.

Scott Howe, corporate VP of Microsoft’s advertiser and publisher group told Reuters he expects mobile phone advertising to be a significant opportunity going forward and “five years from now mobile will be 5 to 10 percent of media spend.” Howe cautioned it won’t happen all at once: “The question is when does it really hit mainstream? That’s probably still a year or more away.”

In addition to Verizon phones, Microsoft has launched a Bing for Mobile client for Windows Mobile phones, and of course, people can go to m.bing.com from any mobile browser, including the iPhone and Android phones. Microsoft declined to say whether it was developing applications for those two platforms, however, it did say that the current Blackberry and Sidekick apps will be re-branded to Bing from Live later this summer.

“You’ve got to remember that if I get another two or three deals like this—which will inevitably happen in the next few months—I’m going to have to scale up my business to support that,” co-founder Daniel Doulton told me.

“The nature of the beast is that you have forward-invest to support that.” The company’s $100 million second round funding last March was one of the biggest European VC deals of 2008. Doulton says Spinvox is fine for now, but will “probably” need more cash sometime soon—it all depends on how fast it grows in next nine months.

—Where next for Spinvox?: The horizon may look sunny for Spinvox, but, despite 27 international deals it still doesn’t have a carrier on board at home in the UK and is still at the stage where it’s “shaping and defining” its own segment, Doulton says, but: “We’re now at the stage where networks see the benefit of this for all of their users. It’s become a standard feature for everybody and that’s a real tipping point for change.”

Doulton says Spinvox carriers like Vodafone (NYSE: VOD) in Spain have seen SMS and voicemail rise by between five and 25 percent annually. What next? Expect some paid-for add-ons from next year: “We are working on a whole roadmap of additional features… this is only the beginning—you have to build out the platform before you can do the other things you want to do.” Possible new features may include social network integration for carrier services and enhanced B2B voice products.

—UK deal?: One market Spinvox hasn’t quite cracked is its native UK. What chance is there that customers of O2—the exclusive iPhone carrier in the UK and a Telefonica subsidiary—could get Spinvox SMS built in? Doulton won’t comment specifically but says: “There will be similar deals. I don’t mean this as sitting back after the Telefonica deal: this gives the other networks proof points of the value of the network at scale. In Europe and other parts of the world you’ll see similar deployments, whether it’s email, SMS, applications on the iPhone or Android, IM or Facebook. That will happen.”

—Recession: There aren’t many companies expanding at quite the rate Spinvox is—it’s begun expanding its 350-stong staff both in the UK and abroad to keep up with its carrier deals. Could the recession have helped it? Doulton: “Well, it has: timing is everything and in terms of the recession and where networks are we are tapping into SMS and voice—it’s not a big 3G, 4G risky product that involves a lot of investment... it’s an EBITDA pill.”

»  Shock and horror in Twittersphere: followers can be bought. [BBC]

»  More interesting mobile patents from Apple: haptic tactile feedback. Finally coming to iPhone soon? [MacRumors]

»  AT&T (NYSE: T) sent 65K messages per second when MJ died. Plus their best iPhone sale day ever. [MacDailyNews]

»  Blackberry browser gaining share, but Nokia (NYSE: NOK) and opera have to work a lot harder. [ATD]

»  Akamai’s getting serious about mobile video, and has launched an iPhone version of its adaptive rate streaming tech. [Gigaom]

»  Iran lifts block on SMS texting, the first time since elections. [BBC News]

»  RealNetworks’ new player a week after: 1.5 million video downloaded. But wil it go beyond a nice-to-have feature? [RNBlog]

Initially, Blyk’s plan was to sell service directly to consumers and piggy-back on Orange’s network in the UK, however, in May it said it was shelving plans to roll out MVNOs in new markets, and instead was focusing on forming partnerships with mobile carriers to resell their service. Orange would mark the first deal of its kind.

Virgin Mobile USA (NYSE: VM) already offers something similar in the U.S. called Sugar Mama. For a minute of ads online, they get a free minute of airtime. Or, for filling out a five-minute survey about brands or products, they get five minutes of airtime. On the phone, texts and picture messages also earn airtime.

Monitise will be responsible for helping Visa build out a suite of mobile services, ranging from payments to money transfer, alerts and mobile marketing. The first products will be available to Visa users by early next year. While Monitise just landed a deal with one of the largest bankers in the world, it said revenues for the year ended June 30 would be slightly lower than forecasts. Still, revenues will jump 80 percent over last year. Analysts estimate Monitise’s revenue to be around GBP3 million or $4.9 million, according to FactSet.

IDG News Service reports (via MacWorld) that AT&T (NYSE: T), in particular, has been sued by the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, asserting that ringtones qualify “as a public performance under the Copyright Act.” The group wants mobile operators to pay royalties, not individual consumers.

The fight is playing out in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. In the operator’s defense the Electronic Frontier Foundation, joined by The Center for Democracy and Technology and Public Knowledge, argued that copyright law exempts performances that are conducted without a commercial purpose, such as ringtones in a restaurant. The EFF said in a blog post: “These wrongheaded legal claims cast a shadow over innovators who are building gadgets that help consumers get the most from their copyright privileges.” The ASCAP said ringtones don’t fall under the exemption because these so-called “performances” can still infringe even if there is no commercial gain.

Possibly, this argument may have had more support back when ringtones were in their heyday, but now with decreasing interest, it seems artists would be happy enough to have someone purchase a ringtone, let alone play it in public since it can be considered publicity for an upcoming album.

Research In Motion has identified music as one ways to increase the BlackBerry’s popularity among consumers. The company is sponsoring U2’s 360 Tour, which kicked off Tuesday and is being used to promote the album “No Line On The Horizon.” In addition to a partnership with U2, RIM (NSDQ: RIMM) has an exclusive with Ticketmaster, which allows people to buy tickets to shows. Other BlackBerry apps that allow people to listen to music includes: Slacker, Pandora and Shazam, iheartradio and Will.i.am’s DipDive.

Over that first weekend, Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) said it sold 1 million iPhones in eight countries, including the U.S., so you can assume a fairly large portion of those went to AT&T (NYSE: T). The memo said: “On this year’s launch day, iPhone sales exceeded sales recorded on 2008’s iPhone launch day, Black Friday 2008 and Dec. 26, 2008 — all heavy-volume sales days. In fact, this year we surpassed 2008’s launch day sales at about noon Central time, and sustained our previous peak hour record, also set in 2008, for 11 straight hours.”

Here’s the other notable achievements:

—Best-ever sales day in retail stores
—Second-largest traffic day in retail stores
—Most transactions processed via IT systems in a single day
—Most upgrade eligibility checks in a single day
—Largest order day in att.com history
—Largest features sales day in att.com history

Seattle-area tech site TechFlash reported last week that Ground Truth had hired Wilson as its CEO, news that is also confirmed in the filing. At the time, TechFlash also said that Ground Truth was close to raising a venture round from Voyager Capital. Not much is known about Ground Truth, although TechFlash said it was in the mobile analytics space.

New T-Mobile CEO Richard Moat only started his new job last week and officially DT has yet to put anything on the table. But consolidation of the UK mobile is a long-running problem and fewer competitors would be an obvious route to higher profitability for the remaining players. Or, as Ovum senior analyst Emeka Obiodu puts it (via Reuters): “Everyone agrees consolidation is needed and seemingly T-Mobile will fall first.”

The Pre is hoped by some to be a serious iPhone rival and according to analysts it’s sold more than 300,000 units since its US launch last month. That’s impressive but not compared to the one million iPhone 3GS units Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) sold in three days last month. And as far as O2 is concerned, it profits no matter who wins in that fight.

Fueps has over 520,000 registered users and over 100 little web games on its site, and provides games to portals on a white-label basis. It claimed 2008 revenue of €635,000. Dada says the deal “presents interesting development opportunities and significant potential synergies ... in the community and entertainment services via web and mobile”.

Indeed, Dada already operates its social network and music site Dada.net, its Blogo vertical blog network, user blog host Splinder and US mobile media engagement provider Upocnetworks, which facilitates Rock The Vote’s mobile efforts.  Fueps is planning a mobile offering and further ad-supported options. Dada is buying out the 51 percent held by RCS Digital. Over the last couple of years, it’s bought stakes in Upoc, Blogo and Italy’s Music Box TV channel. Release.

Founded in 2007, Bling Nation says its proprietary technology is attractive to banks and retailers because it is cheaper to use than traditional credit or debit card networks. Its first customer, Colorado-based The State Bank, started using the payment system in May. To go mainstream, Bling will have to convince consumers to adhere special stickers on their phones to conduct the purchases. The bigger hurdle is likely on the merchant side, which will have to upgrade their readers, according to a story in American-Banker.

Apple has said it hopes to enter the very large market within the next year, and is rumored to be in talks with China Unicom to offer the iPhone. But the similarities of the two names would make it illegal to sell the phone under that name in China, said Wang Hao, general manager of BSFD, an intellectual property law agency in Beijing. Apparently, Apple applied for the iPhone trademark in China in late 2002, but its application only covered computer hardware and software—not phones, according to the Web site of China’s trademark office. Two years later, the Chinese company, called Hanwang Technology, which makes electronic devices and Chinese handwriting recognition systems, registered the i-phone trademark covering phones.

A spokesperson for the Chinese company said it is not in talks with Apple over the rights to the name and declined to say what Hanwang would do if Apple announced plans to sell the iPhone in China. An Apple spokeswoman declined to comment.

Evidence Surfaces That iPhone May Be Coming Soon To China
Report: Fake Phones In China Account For 20 Percent Of Sales
China Unicom CEO Confirms iPhone Talks

To do so, it will cost $1,875 a day, according to Adwhirl, which aggregates a handful of ad networks to help publishers monetize their apps on the iPhone. (If you remember, Adwhirl recently got attention for sparing with AdMob about its policies on aggregators).

Since paying that big sum is not practical, Adwhirl has another suggestion: develop a free iPhone app that will generate a large user base, and then leverage those users it to drive traffic to your paid app. The idea is not super original. Game companies commonly offer free versions to get people hooked in hopes of converting them over to paying customers. However, Adwhirl does a good job of explaining why. More on that after the jump….

Adwhirl writes in its blog that this approach works because it takes about only 2,500 downloads a day to become one of the most downloaded free apps for a particular category—which is more attainable than becoming a top paid app. “For us, the solution was simply to release a few free apps, which quickly gain many “throwaway” users and offer an effective channel to advertise the apps that were important to us.” But why are free apps easier to get users for? Because right now, only a quarter of all apps are free, even though they generate 95 percent of all downloads.

Adwhirl hopes to start helping developers with this soon by opening up its platform to cross-promote each other apps.

»  If you didn’t learn all the iPhone 3.0 tricks yet, it’s too late because a 3.1 release is right around the corner. [QuickPwn]

»  Sprint (NYSE: S) promises it will update offer 3G femtocells before AT&T (NYSE: T) does. [Unstrung]

»  A pocket-sized satellite phone might be available soon… if they get the actual satellite into space. [Washington Post]

»  Is Android a big enough mobile OS to have two browsers? [PC World]

In the past six months, the number of overall transactions fell to 300 compared from 426 in the same period 2008. Even worse, the total value of those deals plummeted to $5.4 billion from $22.5 billion. But when it came to mobile, deals increased 46 percent and the value of those deals jumped by 38 percent. In total, there were 16 mobile deals in the first half compared to 11 a year ago.

According to mocoNews archives, some of those deals include: RIM (NSDQ: RIMM) buying Dash Navigation; Good buying Intercasting; Velti buying Ad Infuse; SmartReply buying mSnap; and LimeLife buying Tapatap. Those companies represent a wide range of categories from navigation to mobile advertising and social networking.

Going forward, the firm predicts that mobile advertising will grow 28 percent in 2010 and 30 percent in 2011. It also feels that the general environment for M&A has started to turn, and several noteworthy transactions will close in the second half of the year.

The knock-offs, which typically produced in China, are thin, boast a large display with the one iconic button and all the telltale markings on the back, including the Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) symbol. Even the packaging looks the same. The improvements are considerable with clones of years’ past being bulkier, featuring more buttons and having other easy-to-spot inaccuracies. The fakes will make it more difficult for consumers to confidently buy the device on secondary markets, like eBay, but because they don’t function well, it probably won’t cut into Apple’s real sales.

In the video, even after the phone is turned on, it continues to look like the real deal with the familiar globe and the application icons on the homepage. The big difference comes in functionality and accessories. The video shows how difficult it is to use. When playing music, it’s difficult to pause or get out of the application. The accessories are comical, too, and include things such as stylus, a cheap pair of headphones and docking station with a pair of speakers.

With counterfeits getting better, CultOfMac offers this piece of advice: “How can you tell if the iPhone you’re bidding on is a knockoff? Easy: the price is too good to be true.”

The founders of two of the biggest and most well known gadget sites Engadget and Gizmodo have finally launched their gadget site, appropriately titled Gdgt, after announcing it a year or so ago. The site was founded by Peter Rojas (pictured, founder/editor of Gizmodo, co-founder/editor of Engadget)  and Ryan Block (editor of Engadget), and is a social community site for gadget lovers/geeks where users can discuss everything they do in the comments section of the gadget news sites anyway, only a lot more organized. What it isn’t is a news site, but will use links to news about gadgets as a jumping point for discussions, a big departure for the founders who thrived on reviewing and breaking in this sector before. It has all the latest social tools you would expect a geeky site like this to have. Users can create profiles and a list of gadgets they had, have or want to have. Each gadget has detailed specs and discussions off those specs. The specs is where the data comes in, and that, including the interlinks between data is where the power of the site may lie eventually.

The company has raised some funding, but the founders won’t disclose it yet; TC says it has raised about half million from True Ventures and Betaworks, plus a number of angel investors, including their former boss (and mine too) Mahalo’s Jason Calacanis.

There are a bunch of gadget and electronics buying guide sites including from ConsumerReports.com, CNET, Retrevo and other gadget-specific fan sites (like to Apple and Blackberry users), but Gdgt is purely aimed at the geeks and fanboys, with the hope that the audience is big enough to develop a revenue stream around, though referral fees and advertising. It also plans to develop a secondary marketplace for gadgets down the line, reports NYT. With some amount of humility, Block tells NYT: “We view this as the final act…Gizmodo was the prototype. Engadget extended the idea. This could possibly be the last great gadget site.” Some more about the site’s philosophy in intro notes on the site from Rojas and Block.

So, what is gdgt? from gdgt on Vimeo.

Don’t worry, we’ve got Veronica Belmont to tell you what’s up.

http://gdgt.com/

The figures are being reported today by “the ChubbyBrain database,” which keeps a running tally of venture capital investments in the U.S. So, is that a lot? That question was too difficult for ChubbyBrain to wrap their minds around, but likely the answer is that the pace is falling somewhere between exorbitant and on par with the opportunity.

Given that the U.S. is facing what has been called the worst downturn since the depression and that the iPhone and App Store are completely unproven, the bets are definitely risky. But at the same time the iPhone ecosystem is receiving a lot of hype. The market has been flooded with more than 50,000 apps and more than 1 billion have been downloaded.  The two biggest proponents are the Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers’ $100 million iFund aimed at iPhone application developers, and RIM’s $150 million Blackberry Partners Fund created with Canadian firm JLA Ventures and the Royal Bank of Canada. Given that kind of attention—and dollars—it can be interpreted that investors are actually showing some constraint.

Breakdown of companies by industry: The top three areas of application investing falls into the categories of Social Networks (31 percent); Gaming and Entertainment (22 percent); and tied in third is SMS (13 percent) and diversified application development (13 percent).

Breakdown of money invested by industry: The top three areas of application investing by dollar amounts are Social Networks (27 percent); Gaming and Entertainment (22 percent); and Monitoring and Security (20 percent).

Average funding: The average level of funding was $4.7 million, the median was $3.5 million. The largest deal garnered $15.5 million, and the smallest deal received only $15,000. The most active VC was the iFund with six companies (in eight rounds) totaling $50 million.