Research In Motion Buys Mobile Storefront Platform Cellmania.

"Cellmania’s mFinder product offered a white label content system with content management, digital rights management, and over-the-air delivery for browseable media, Android, Java, Symbian, MS Smartphone, wallpaper, ringtones, music and video content to mobile phones. The company counts T-Mobile and Sprint as customers. "

Interview with Motricity CEO Ryan Wuerch.

"This transaction [acquisition of InfoSpace Inc.'s mobile business unit], when it closes, gives us 11 of the top 13 carriers. We will be powering five of the top six carriers' portals. For four of the top six carriers we power the storefront, and for four of the top six carriers we also power the search. That breadth and that coverage enable us to do the most important thing, and that is to deliver a great rich experience to the end user...

We handle ringtones, games and graphics for AT&T. We have 15,000 developers and over 5 million digital media products integrated into our platform. We believe it's through segmentation and demographic analysis that we as a company understand that user, and understand what they are looking for and deliver it for them...

When we are talking about where the market is going--with advertising and search and different types of media that will be harnessed--you have to think about companies from a competitive standpoint like Ericsson, IBM and Hewlett-Packard. I'd be naive to not mention Google. Those are all companies that I believe we will see in a competitive environment in the future...

This industry is very complex and a very expensive industry to be in. This is very different from the web environment, which is very static. The industry we are in today has billions of users and thousands of handsets. Multiply that times the millions of pieces of digital media. And every day there is new content added and new technologies created. All this adds complexity.

Consolidation has occurred because it takes a lot of capital to make even a single point solution. That's why you see companies like Motricity, Ericsson and others acquiring key companies."

Microsoft chooses Limelight for content delivery.

"Microsoft has geared itself up for an explosion in the delivery of content over the internet with a multi-year outsourcing contract with content delivery network provider Limelight Networks... Microsoft said its internet services serve over 460 million unique users per month worldwide. By working together, Microsoft and Limelight aim to deliver content to any device in any format."

FutureDial and Sun Corporation acquire Cellebrite.

"Established in 1999, Cellebrite offered contact synchronization and content transfer tools for mobile phones, for use by wireless carrier sales support staff in retail stores. Its UME-24 and UME-36-Pro series are widely adopted by many carrier stores due to their simplicity and ease of operation."

FutureDial enables content transfer among 1,000 mobile phone models.

"George Huang, CEO of FutureDial, explains: 'Last year more than 400 million subscribers visited retail stores in Europe and North America, and about 50% of them required some type of content transfer, backup, or erase service. Since many stores had limited or no capability to do these services, the negative effect on customer satisfaction was quite high, and it became a hurdle for carriers and the store front to upgrade subscribers to the latest models. FutureDial’s solutions and broad support of numerous handset models address this obstacle by making the transfer service simple to operate, and by supporting all the valuable content which a subscriber has on the handset.'"

Motorola to acquire Leapstone Systems.

"Motorola, Inc. has signed a definitive merger agreement to acquire privately held Leapstone Systems, Inc. Leapstone is a leading communications software developer that provides a unified platform for rapidly creating, managing and delivering converged video, voice and data service bundles across multiple networks and devices."

And from the Leapstone website:
"Operators need a solution that allows them to deploy new services in a timely and cost-effective manner. CCE contentMANAGER presents a single point of integration between third-party content and both the business and network infrastructures of the operator...

CCE contentMANAGER is used by operators to acquire, package and price content. Content can be acquired from multiple sources, including third-party application repositories and vendor catalogs...

Data pertaining to the devices an operator supports (e.g. device manufacturer and model, display characteristics and KB of memory) is received and processed by CCE contentMANAGER. Each piece of content is mapped to the devices on which it operates, and each subscriber is associated with one or more devices. This ensures subscribers are only presented with content that will execute properly on their device be a mobile, personal computer or a set-top-box...

Content activation involves the association of a subscriber with one or more subscriber classes - which in turn activates any price-plan packages previously associated with the subscriber class during price plan packaging. Activation requests may be received from back-office systems or self-subscription portals. CCE contentMANAGER also manages the customer account hierarchy including child accounts for kids and other family members. It manages the subscriber's individual profile for preferences, opt-ins (Sci-Fi Fan, home building, ads, special promotions, etc.), pin resets, configuring spending limits, etc. "