Mobile accessory vendors strike gold with high end products
Accessories for mobile phones are a huge and very profitable business. According to the latest ABI Research forecasts, aftermarket accessories are expected to generate almost $35 billion in revenue in 2011, rising to more than $50 billion in 2015. But it is a market that has changed dramatically over the past couple of years, transformed by the rising cost and greater capabilities of the devices that the accessories serve. Today’s smartphone probably includes Bluetooth and a camera nothing new there but it may also incorporate WiFi, Near Field Communication, GPS, multimedia, speech recognition and more, said senior analyst Michael Morgan.
Mobile Business Magazine

New Bebo’ launches video chat to attract users
bChat’, will allow Bebo users to talk to each other via their webcams and hopes to introduce new people to one another who have similar interests. Bebo, the former one-time darling of social networks, was off-loaded by AOL earlier this year to Criterion Capital Partners for less than $10 million, despite paying $850 million for it only two years earlier, to UK developer Michael Birch and his partner Xochi. AOL admitted that Bebo was a business in decline, requiring significant investment in order to compete in the crowded social networking space, largely dominated by Facebook.
The Telegraph

JUST Mobile and Data Select bring new phones to Ireland
JUST Mobile is something of an anomaly: it’s a newly launched, independent Irish mobile operator. It’s the first pre-pay only mobile operator in Ireland  and today it has announced it will be the first operator in Ireland to support devices from Data Select. We interviewed JUST Mobile at the start of November, and you can see the full thing here. But here’s the short version: JUST Mobile does pre-pay and nothing else. It keeps things simple by only having one price plan. You can call any phone in Ireland for 20c per minute, and text any mobile in Ireland for 9c.
GoMo News

One billion SMS, one billion answers: ChaCha
ChaCha, the #1 free, real-time answers service, today announced that it has answered the billionth question submitted by its rapidly growing user base of 25 million online and mobile users. The record-breaking question was How do you say friend in Elvish according to the Lord of the Rings? to which ChaCha responded, ’Mellon’ is the Elvish word for ‘friend’ in Lord of the Rings. ChaCha! The Company is in the process of notifying the winner, who is a fourteen year old boy from Northern Minnesota, who will be awarded an iPad, an iPod Touch, and a $100 iTunes gift certificate to celebrate this historic ChaCha landmark.
GoMo News

Shazam passes 100m users milestone
Shazam has announced that it has passed 100 million users - a target it previously aimed to break by the end of this year. 25 million users have signed up in the last six months, although it's important to note that the 100 million figure relates to people who have used Shazam in the ten years since it launched - rather than 100 million active users right now.Even so, it's a helluva milestone for the company, which this year has broadened out beyond music to allow users to tag TV shows and adverts.
Mobile Entertainment

BSkyB closes Sky Songs music subscription service
BSkyB today closed its music-subscription service, Sky Songs, little more than a year after its high-profile launch.The music-streaming service, similar to the iTunes store, has been "unable to reach a large enough customer base", the company admitted today.Sky Songs offered a premium service of advertisement-free streaming of up to 5m songs for £4.99 a month, a price steadily reduced since its ambitious launch in October last year. Neil Martin, then Sky's business development director, said at the time: "We want millions of homes using this regularly."
The Guardian

Loopt Offers Auto Check-Ins For Those Facing ‘Check-In Fatigue’
Check-in apps have come on thick and fast in the mobile world: there are those that let you track where you are going (the Foursquares and Gowallas), those that let you track what you are consuming (GetGlue, which just picked up $6 million in funding yesterday), those that track your runs (DailyMile), where you drive (Waze), and so many more. One of them, Loopt, today added some new features that it hopes will make it stand apart from the pack.
Moco News

New study links mobile use to child misbehaviour
A new study links misbehaviour in children to mobile phone use among pregnant women.
Researchers at the University of California in Los Angeles looked at data from 28,000 seven-year-olds and their mothers who had participated in a long-term Danish study tracking 100,000 pregnant women between 1996 and 2002. The researchers indicate that there could be a link between heavy mobile use amongst pregnant women and behavioral problems in their offspring.
Tech Radar

Virgin Media Business lauds IP CCTV
The technology can help to catch fuel thieves, the broadband provider said.
Virgin Media Business has recommended the use of Internet Protocol (IP) CCTV to petrol station owners.The business broadband provider's commercial director Andrew McGrath said fuel theft has become a "serious problem" over the past few years, with estimates claiming £14 million of diesel and petrol was stolen from forecourts in 2009.As a result, Mr McGrath advised these firms to invest in IP CCTV, which is designed to record high-quality footage that can be viewed by several people at once from a central location.
Cable.co.uk

HP bags $80m service contract from TOPS
Mainframe, midrange server and web hosting services. HP Enterprise Services has been awarded a seven-year applications and infrastructure technology services contract valued in excess of $80m from TOPS Friendly Markets, a New York-based supermarket chain with stores in New York and Pennsylvania. Under the agreement, HP will provide a full suite of applications management via a multitiered platform, including mainframe, midrange server and Web hosting in support of TOPS' business. HP will also provide applications management services to maintain the TOPS environment, including its retail, supply chain, marketing and merchandising applications.
CBR