Amazon already sells ad-supported Kindles at a discount. The cheapest Kindle is $79 with ads or $99 without. The Kindle Touch WiFi is $99 with ads or $139 without. The Kindle Touch 3G is $149 with ads or $189 without.

AdAge cites executives who seem uncertain about whether the ads Amazon wants them to buy would be used on a discounted Kindle Fire or just thrown onto the regular version. One unidentified exec says, “You’re already paying a premium for the product and then having that unexpected ad experience makes for a worse consumer experience. There needs to be a value exchange.”

Amazon has likely already thought of that. The company prides itself on customer service above almost anything else, and it probably wouldn’t start including ads on the Kindle Fire without a widely promoted discounted price. The Kindle Fire software is probably already able to support ads (since on the ad-supported Kindle e-readers you can pay $30 to turn the ads off) so Amazon wouldn’t have to launch an entirely new Kindle Fire model to have it be ad-supported.

All the company has to do is decide how much cheaper an ad-supported Kindle Fire will be. The Kindle Fire is $199 now. The company could knock off $30 or go for a bigger discount in preparation for the 2nd-generation Kindle Fire rumored to launch later this year.

Urban Airship (see disclosure below) is investing big in its infrastructure, scaling its push messaging service to deliver 100,000 messages in a single second. As Airship begins to refine push marketing to take into account location, time and context, it becomes of critical that the company not only deliver massive volumes of messages simultaneously, but also to deliver them in as near real-time as possible, according to the company.

In Urban Airship’s blog, Director of Architecture and Delivery Erik Onnen wrote that the company has quadrupled its capacity and is now capable of pushing simultaneous IP missives to huge gatherings of people, a feature that will come in handy when Airship launches its Segments service this quarter. Using technology from its SimpleGeo acquisition last year, Airship will be able to customize push updates based on location and prioritize based on relevancy.

“Specifically, we now have the capability to send a message in one second to every fan seated in the biggest stadium in college football, Michigan Stadium,” Onnen wrote in the blog.

Coincidently ESPN happens to be one of Urban Airship’s biggest customers, so the example is quite apt. At CTIA I sat down with Urban Airship CMO Brent Hieggelke and he explained that context and speed will be both key to both Airship’s future and the evolution of IP push beyond a mere marketing and notification tool. He said AirBnB uses Airship’s push for closing room transactions, so it’s critical that messages move at the speed of negotiation.

In the football example, a sports media brand like ESPN, which sends millions of score and news updates a day, could send you a completely different set of stats and information if the app was aware you were actually a spectator at a game, Hieggelke said. A Michigan fan might have set his preferences to receive updates every time a touchdown is scored. But if actually present at the game the app could automatically feed him play-by-play info and player profiles. Because the customer is experiencing the game firsthand, it’s of vital importance that the update is immediate, Hieggelke said.

“The possibilities are endless,” Hieggelke said. “The New York Times could detect I’ve left Portland and have arrived in New York and start sending me local restaurant reviews. Walgreens can detect you’re near a pharmacy and have a prescription that needs to be refilled. It then sends you an alert.”

Urban Airship just pushed its 20 billionth notification, and its growth trajectory is only getting steeper. To achieve that kind of scale, Airship is doing a lot of tinkering with its HBase and Hadoop database and analytics platforms. It’s rolling out new elements – with codenames like Gooey Buttercake and Metalstorm (my favorite) – that will manage associations between applications, devices and tags; parse location and presence information for millions of users; and assemble that information along with data from multiple outside databases into the notifications themselves. (If you’re curious, Onnen goes into much more detail in the blog post.)

Keeping the push name unsullied

In my conversation with Hieggelke, he also revealed that Urban Airship plans to start an industry education initiative called Good Push with the aim of reining in bad marketing practices using IP messaging technologies.

“For instance, location has been talked for a while as walking through a mall and having offers pushed to you left and right,” Hieggelke said. “That’s a terrible idea. We need to establish a certain level of trust.”

Push messaging is still a relatively new format, and it doesn’t yet carry the negative associations most customers have with other digital marketing formats like e-mail or pop-up ads. When downloading an app and prompted to allow push updates to an app, most customers give permission. But an increasing number of apps are abusing the practice, though Hieggelke wouldn’t name names.

It’s easy to guess at the biggest offenders. There’s been an increasing backlash against companies like Airpush that send ads directly to an Android smartphone’s notification bar, often without even referencing the installed app that’s generating the ad. The danger here is that questionable and covert practices like these will sully the entire push marketing ecosystem. The worst thing that could happen is if consumers start automatically refusing permission to apps to receive updates, Hieggelke said.

“If the consumer starts thinking of this like spam, it’s a shame because it’s such a powerful and useful tool,” Hieggelke said.

So far Good Push is only in its infancy. Airship is working with the Mobile Marketing Association to create a set of best practices for marketers, that Hieggelke hopes will establish a baseline standard for the industry.

Disclosure: Urban Airship is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, the founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

According to a report this week from Open Rights Group and the London School of Economics, many local mobile operators are using aggressive — but haphazard — child protection filters by default, leaving adult customers unable to see perfectly ordinary websites instead of preventing kids from accessing adult material.

As the report says (PDF):

“There are serious consequences to badly implemented, default child protection blocking systems. They include restrictions on markets, censorship, a failure to address young people’s diverse needs and a false sense of security for parents.”

The document outlines more than 60 reported cases where websites have been erroneously flagged as containing adult content — and these are just the small number of cases reported to the Open Rights Group’s blocked.org.uk complaint service.

This really isn’t just an oddity. I regularly run into blocks when browsing news or data online on my phone, which is on a business tariff with Vodafone — surely a product most kids wouldn’t be using.

And in fact, just yesterday we received a message saying that the adult filter for France Telecom-owned Orange was blocking GigaOM.

Now, I know we’re a site for grown-ups, but that’s just silly.

If your operator is deciding on your behalf that what we write is off limits — including now, of course, the fact that we’re telling you that these blocks are faulty — then there’s really no reason to suspect it couldn’t happen to anybody, at any time.

Spreading censorship

And it’s not just in Britain, either. This sort of approach is happening all over Europe, in a variety of ways.

In a piece for Foreign Policy, the author and activist Rebecca Mackinnon outlines some of the incursions being made — and points out that, crucially, none of this is happening because of regulatory pressure.

“This type of problem is serious enough, in enough countries, to have made its way to the U.N. Human Rights Council. Last year, the U.N. special rapporteur on freedom of expression, Frank La Rue, delivered an official report to the council that not only condemned the censorship and surveillance practices of authoritarian countries, but also warned of dangerous trends in the democratic world that threaten citizen rights to free expression in the Internet age.

“One of his major concerns is ‘over-broad private censorship, often without transparency and the due process of the law’. He singled out two examples of how governments are, ironically, using law to delegate enforcement responsibilities and functions to the private sector: Britain’s Digital Economy Act, which could potentially disconnect Internet users suspected of illegal downloading, and France’s similar ‘three strikes’ law.

The result of all this?

In the name of protecting us, mobile operators are now becoming the de facto censors of the web, whether we’ve asked them to or not.

Photograph copyright Shutterstock/Pixel 4 images

If Facebook’s future is mobile, it may not be enough for it to merely secure a piece of the mobile ad market: It might need to make the mobile ad industry figure out how to work with Facebook.

Berg Insight calculated that global spending on mobile advertising was $3.4 billion in 2010. And while it’s growing at rate of 37 percent per year, Facebook’s total revenues in 2011 were $3.7 billion, of which $3.1 billion came from ads. Meanwhile more than half of its 845 million monthly active users accessed the social network through mobile apps or its mobile website, both of which sport no ads.

Of course, most customers are using both platforms, not one or the other, so Facebook doesn’t need to build a $3 billion mobile ad business overnight. But even if Facebook were to replicate a fraction of its Web-based ad business on mobile, it would account for a large portion of the money currently being spent on mobile ads.

Mobile hasn’t been unkind to Facebook

Facebook isn’t losing money on mobile today. Far from it. EMarketer principal analyst Noah Elkin pointed out that 90 percent of Facebook’s customers are crossing between platforms, meaning they’re generating ad revenue in one way or another. They may not see any ads when they’re accessing the network from their phones, but they’re certainly seeing them when they log in from their Web browsers. One of the reasons those customers remain active and loyal to Facebook is because they have the flexibility to network socially from anywhere, so you could argue that mobile drives more ad views, not less.

It’s the remaining 10 percent, or 83 million users, that Facebook is worried about, Elkin said. Facebook doesn’t make a dime in ad sales off them, and while they may be a small segment of Facebook’s customers now, they’re its fastest-growing segment, as they are coming from the developing markets where Facebook’s future growth lies.

“The big concern is the mobile-only audience is growing faster than the multi-channel or desktop only audience,” Elkin said. “The long-term concern is that the mobile-only audience will come to dominate the social network.”

Enter the sponsored story

Facebook’s answer isn’t the display or search advertising responsible for the lion’s share of the mobile ad market today but the sponsored story, which it only recently introduced on the desktop interface and now plans to migrate to mobile. The format is so nascent that it’s not even really factoring into eMarketer’s current ad spend figures for traditional online spending, to say nothing of mobile.

Elkin said the format is promising not only because Facebook can use it to tailor ad content specifically to its users’ interests — which it knows a lot about — but also because it could factor in location and presence data unique to mobile. That means more value for advertisers and more revenue per ad. Ultimately that could overcome the limitations of mobile, where a small screen gets cluttered pretty easily. But it’s also an untried advertising format, and as my colleague Mathew Ingram points out, not even Facebook is convinced sponsored stories will work.

“If Facebook is successful, one of the impacts will be that it will grow mobile advertising overall,” Elkin said. Google, Apple and Millennial Marketing wouldn’t stop growing in the mobile ad space, but Facebook’s mobile ad revenue would be additive. In fact, one of the reasons eMarketer is projecting such huge growth in U.S. mobile advertising — jumping from $1.45 billion in 2011 to $10.8 billion in 2016 — is because it projects Facebook will precipitate a surge in new ads starting in 2014. If Facebook flops, then eMarketer will have to revisit its growth numbers, Elkin said.

Don’t piss off your future customers

Facebook faces some daunting tasks. It can’t just build a mobile ad business. It has to build the mother of all mobile ad businesses. And it has to do so with an ad format that’s still unproven.

Ultimately, its entrenched customers will cut Facebook some slack. They might gripe about ads crowding the limited real estate of their phones, but they’re not likely to abandon Facebook, considering how much of their online lives are embodied in the social network. But then again, those aren’t the customers Facebook is losing money on.

It’s the mobile-only users just discovering Facebook in India and other far-flung countries across the globe that the company needs to please. For many of them their first and only experiences with Facebook will be through mobile phones. If that experience isn’t engaging (and as my colleague Kevin Tofel writes, the Facebook mobile app experience is often subpar) then customers may abandon the social network entirely.

NTT Docomo has tabelled a €224 million ($287 million, 24 billon yen) bid for Milan-based Buongiorno, which began in 1995 and has built up through acquisitions to offer mobile games, music and other services.

The price is 32 times Buongiorno’s €7 million annual operating profit. Buongiorno founder chairman Mauro del Rio (pictured) is selling his 20 percent stake.

Docomo says it wants to grow outside of Asia by adding Buongiorno’s two billion customers in 57 countries. It already invested in Vietnamese mobile content outfit VMG and Germany’s net mobile AG last year.

Buongiorno makes apps and mobile content services for a range of large clients including telcos, operates the Play.me mobile music service, Cashlog mobile payments and online cash gaming under the Winga guise.

The offer price is €2 per share. Buongiorno had been trading around €1.74 and jumped to €1.974 upon the offer news.

Buongiorno release | Docomo release

One month after Facebook announced it bought Instagram for an eye-popping $1 billion, the Financial Times reported that the deal would be delayed due to a probe by the Federal Trade Commission. Here’s what you need to know:

Why is the FTC messing with the deal?

The federal agency conducts a routine 30-day review of any deal over $66 million as a matter of course. If it has concerns, it sends a “second request” and begins a more detailed review. This is what has happened here.

Right, but Instagram has like 10 people and no revenue. What the’s problem?

If Facebook can have Instagram, it will be a leading player in photo sharing both online and on mobile. (See Om’s explanation here). The FTC is concerned Facebook could become a dominant advertiser on these platforms — and hurt competition.

According to Washington antitrust expert Andre Barlow, “the FTC and DOJ are really concerned about tech markets and the internet.” He adds that the agencies also use the review process to get up to speed on fast-moving industries they may not fully understand.

Will the FTC block the deal?

Barlow says antitrust regulators very rarely block a deal altogether but will ask for a “structural remedy” in some cases (this often means requiring a company to divest part of its business before the deal can go ahead). Noting that the FTC has cleared every Google deal so far, he predicts: “The likelihood is that at the end of the investigation the FTC will not require any remedies and the transaction will be allowed to close.”

So when will the deal clear?

Barlow says that a quick FTC  investigation is 3-4 months but that they can take up to a year. “A good middle of the road estimate is 6 months.”

I heard Google and Twitter are behind this. Could that be true?

A Reuters source claims Google and Twitter egged on the FTC to investigate the deal. This is very likely. Competitors are often the ones to instigate an antitrust investigation.

Why would Google and Twitter do such a thing?

Facebook can’t have anything to do with Instagram while the investigation is ongoing. The two firms have to continue to act as “competitors.” If the deal is tied up for even six months (an eternity in the tech world), it will give companies like Google and Twitter a chance to catch up in the photo-sharing space. And there is also a PR benefit — the media attention to the purchase helps signify to the world that Facebook is now a giant company (Google, especially, is likely to relish having the regulatory spotlight on someone else for a change).

So when will we hear more?

The FTC will not say anything until the investigation is done. The news so far has been from leaks — either from Facebook or its competitors (or possibly someone within the government). Things will likely go quiet for months until more leaks appear near the close of the investigation.

Facebook did not respond to a request for comment on the story. The company is in a quiet period prior to its upcoming IPO.

(Photo by Mel Canlas)

Nokia’s app will compete with Amazon’s Kindle and Kindle apps for iOS, Android, Mac and Windows in France, Italy, Spain and the UK.

The Reading app, first announced with the new Lumias at Mobile World Congress in February, will be available for the Lumia 900, 800, 710 and 610 this week. Nokia says, “While e-books are becoming a common sight in countries like the US and the UK, they are still in their infancy – or basically unavailable – in many parts of the world. And this is where the strength of Nokia Reading lies: in local language e-reading content.”

The company doesn’t specify how many titles are available but says there are “a wide range of local titles, as well as a large collection of English titles popular across the world.”

But, whereas Disney got early hits with Micky Mouse’s Plane Crazy and Steamboat Willie and quickly expanded its portfolio to a host of new characters and franchises, Rovio has appeared a one-hit wonder.

It had developed a whopping 51 under-the-radar mobile games and nearly fell bankrupt before finally finding its Angry Birds hit in December 2009.

Now, however, Rovio appears finally to be looking beyond the birds. This video released by the company on Wednesday to mark a billion Angry Birds downloads also promised “more amazing things coming soon”, and a blonde-haired boy who appears to be a new character…

148apps believes that boy to be Casey, star of an existing game, Casey’s Contraptions, a $2.99 puzzler which lacks in-game purchase options but whose players have created and submitted over 325,000 levels themselves…

If Rovio has acquired Casey’s Contraptions from creator Noel Llopis, that means Rovio has not diversified its franchise offering under its own steam.

Oh wow! The cat is starting to get out of the bag! youtube.com/watch?v=tdTZOF… (cc @mysterycoconut)

— Noel Llopis (@noel_llopis) May 9, 2012

Before rumors start flying, Rovio is a perfect gentleman. Not a Zynga at all. Don’t worry, all is well :-)

— Noel Llopis (@noel_llopis) May 9, 2012

But at least it does point to diversficiation – something that investors will demand if Rovio’s IPO bird ever gets off the ground.

“Disney (NYSE: DIS) is worth around $60 billion. That is our goal and there is no reason why we could not build a company that size,” Rovio marketer Peter Vesterbacka told business paper Tekniikka&Talous in Rovio’s native Finland in December.

Rovio’s “archived games” web page lists almost 30 titles it tried making a splash with before Angry Birds.

Currently mSpot’s movie rentals are available on either the day of or the day after the DVD release; Samsung already has its own media hub for movies but it doesn’t have a digital media locker solution of its own. Instead, Android owners of Samsung handsets are likely using Google Music or the Amazon MP3 player app for online storage of tunes. Indeed, Samsung had to partner with Dropbox for cloud storage on the new Galaxy S III handset; offering 50 GB of free space with the phone purchase.

Samsung highlighted the various new options mSpot will bring to smartphones and tablets, saying in the press release.

“The acquisition will provide a cloud-based entertainment experience of music, video and radio services for users of Samsung devices, while extending mSpot’s cloud and streaming solutions to a broader base of global entertainment fans. The combination will extend mSpot’s top class cloud and streaming services while further enhancing Samsung’s mobile and tablet device entertainment offerings. mSpot’s entertainment services will be a key integrated offering on newly announced Samsung mobile devices.”

Terms of the deal were not disclosed, nor were any hints at when mSpot’s platform would be integrated into Samsung’s mobile devices.

According to App-Order.com, “estate planning can be a long, difficult, and overwhelming process.” Its app, however, means you can now take pictures of an item, record its value and assign a recipient.

The company says it created the estate app from an existing tool called “Save Your Booty” that helps clients like comic collectors or jewelers catalogue their possessions.

Trev Gore of App-Order says the tool also has a social component, meaning the writer of a will could let others know in real time what belongs to who. We can only imagine the sibling rivalries that will break out when a teenager finds out on her phone that Dad’s prized Porsche is going to her little sister instead.

The tool is now available only for Android phones but the company says an iOS version is coming soon.

(Photo by Andrey N Bannov)