Facebook Deals reach Europe
Facebook, the social network, is introducing its Places Deals service in several key European countries, allowing marketers to send tailored offers to mobile phone users.
Places Deals, being launched in Germany, Italy, France, Spain and the UK, promotes discounts and incentives from retailers, restaurants and similar outlets to nearby Facebook members using wireless handsets. It was unveiled in the US during November 2010, attracting organisations like H&M, Macy's and Gap, and is accessible via iPhone, iTunes and Android apps.
"The wisdom of friends has taken over from the wisdom of crowds, through a highly personal experience in the real world," Emily White, Facebook's director of local, told the Guardian.
Warc

Google and Twitter launch service letting Egyptians tweet by phone
Google and Twitter have launched a service to allow people in Egypt to send Twitter messages by leaving a voicemail on a specific number after the last internet service provider in the country saw its access cut off late on Monday.The new service, which has been created by co-ordination between the two internet companies, uses Google's speech-to-text recognition service to automatically translate a message left on the number, which will be sent out on Twitter with the "#egypt" hashtag.
The Guardian

Researchers receive £7.2m broadband boost - Fibre Cables
Companies which currently use fibre cables to access the internet could soon be using a different connection altogether, after the government invested £7.2 million into faster broadband research.The University of Southampton will host the Photonic Hyperhighway project, which aims to harness the speed of light and could improve the performance of internet infrastructure by 1,000 times, the Telegraph reported. Professor David Payne, leader of the initiative, commented: "Now is the time to look ahead to develop the UK infrastructure of the future.
Comms Express

Blackberry 'the top UK smartphone'
BlackBerry was the UK’s number one smartphone vendor in 2010, Research in Motion claims. With a market share of 28.2 per cent, the handset just outsold all other major manufacturers, and sold over half a million devices sold during December 2010. In that particular month, research from GfK indicates that it captured a record high of 36 per cent share of the smartphone market, as well as being the top pre-pay device in December with 51.1 per cent market share. The data represents sales to customers and excludes enterprise and part of small and medium business sales.
The Telegraph

Mobile NFC payment ready to take off
Near field communication (NFC) systems on smartphones will be the dominant system of mobile phone payments by 2015, according to analysts Frost & Sullivan.
The group’s report, ‘NFC - When Will Be the Real Start?’, predicts that by 2015 NFC payment systems will be built into 53 per cent of global smartphones. The report suggests that traditional areas of conflict between mobile operators and banks have been broken down and the two industries are planning a coordinated push into NFC.
V3

Tablets: Apple Loses 20 Percent Market Share To Android In Just One Quarter
Someone at Samsung must have been a little red-faced today, when the mobile giant got called on how it reported its figures for the Galaxy Tab. What was originally portrayed as two million units sold turned out to actually be only two million devices shipped a big difference in terms of how many of those devices were actually getting into the hands of consumers. Yet some would argue that the number of shipped devices can be an adequate enough gauge of market demand. If so, Android has made some incredible headway into this still-new market with volumes growing 2,000 percent sequentially even if Apple’s iPad is still on top with a 75 percent market share.
Moco News

4G upgrades will drive mobile backhaul revenues to $8 billion
In a newly released market forecast report by Dell’Oro Group, the trusted source for market information about the networking and telecommunications industries, Mobile Backhaul market revenues are expected to exceed $8 billion by 2015. This new report tracks two key market segments: Transport, which includes microwave transmission and optical transport equipment, and Routers and Switches, which includes cell site devices, carrier Ethernet switches, and service provider edge routers used for IP-based mobile backhaul.
GoMo News

Intel warns of $1bn cost of chip fix
The chipmaker Intel has halted shipments of its new "Sandy Bridge" processors and says it will have to spend a total of $1bn (£600m) fixing a fault, delaying hundreds of new PC models for up to three months and potentially stifling growth in the personal computer market.
Launched early in January, the Sandy Bridge chip combines standard processing and graphics units on a single die. But Intel said today it had found flaws in a support chip, called Cougar Point, which would have led to failures over time in connections to hard drives and DVDs.The fault will upset production on more than 500 computer models that were to have used the processors.
The Guardian

LG Optimus 3D: glasses-free 3D smartphone headed to MWC 2011
LG will be unveiling its first glasses-free 3D smartphone at Mobile World Congress 2011 in two weeks, where we’ll be getting a live demo of the LG Optimus 3D, which has a glasses free screen and a 3D camera.The LG Optimus 3D camera is dual lens for 3D recording, and the LCD screen is a glasses free 3D panel, much like the Nintendo 3DS screen. The LG Optimus 3D has a HDMI output and DLNA for sharing your 3D content.
Electric Pig

Assange traveled in drag to evade gov spooks
Julian Assange's wariness of government spooks ran so high that the WikiLeaks founder resorted to disguising himself as a woman when traveling, according to a profile published Monday by The Guardian.As Assange's entourage moved from London to the village of Ellingham, the battered red car they rode in periodically pulled off the road with lights killed to make sure it wasn't being followed. You can't imagine how ridiculous it was, James Ball, a one-time volunteer for WikiLeaks, said of the 6-foot-2-inch Assange. He'd stayed dressed up as an old woman for more than two hours.
The Register