Bono on your Blackberry. Could there be a cooler combination?

If you’re a U2 fanatic, today is an exciting day. Research In Motion is reportedly teaming with superstar recording group U2 for the release of a new mobile album.

For now, all reports are light on details. A blurb on BlackBerry.com, however, gives a quick synopsis of what appears to be a “U2 App” with music, photos, tour info and a few other morsels of insider information. As soon as more details are made available, you will be among the first to know if you sign up for an email notification on the status of the project.

Earlier this year, U2’s band manager Paul McGuiness foreshadowed “new and innovative ways to enhance the mobile music experience on the BlackBerry platform for U2 fans.”

The comments heightened speculation that a mobile album was in the works and we can now confirm the accuracy of those earlier suspicions.

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It seems like a match made in mobile heaven.

Monitise has announced a “global strategic alliance agreement” with Visa International Service Association, a subsidiary of Visa Inc.

The reported five-year agreement combines “Visa’s unmatched reach, payments expertise and trusted brand with the Monitise Mobile Money platform and toolkit.”

Basically, Monitise will be an enormously helpful vehicle for Visa’s already teeming offering of mobile services (including payments, transaction alerts and special offers) by providing support and even greater reach to the millions of Visa customers with mobile phones.

Although not many details have yet emerged, the news of the partnership is considered significant and an incredibly beneficial arrangement for Visa, which in recent months, has found increased competition in the mobile marketing realm from both Mastercard and American Express.

According to the announcement by Monitise, the five year contract value amounts to $13 million dollars.

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Just in time for the benchmark holiday of summer, Independence Day, Verizon Wireless is getting patriotic.

And we can join in the fun thanks to their patriotic ringtone and ringback jukebox. Verizon Wireless unveiled the two new ringback jukebox bundles this week, which will be available through the operator’s VZW Tones Deluxe service.

Customers can now choose from hundreds of patriotic, customizable tracks to prepare for whomever may ring for the Fourth of July:

· “American Pie,” by Don McLean
· “R.O.C.K. In The U.S.A.,” by John Mellencamp
· “Born In The U.S.A.,” by Bruce Springsteen
· “American Girl,” by Taylor Swift
· “Summertime,” by Herbie Hancock
· “You’re a Grand Old Flag,” by U.S. Military Academy Band
· “American Soldier,” by Toby Keith
· “Only In America,” by Brooks & Dunn
· “Good Vibrations,” by The Beach Boys
· “God Bless The U.S.A.,” by Neal E. Boyd
· “Star Spangled Banner,” by Jimi Hendrix
· “1812 Overture,” by U.S. Air Force Band
· “The Star Spangled Banner,” by Beyonce

Ringtones are available for $2.99 per ringtone, while individual ringback tones are available for an annual fee of $1.99.

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A mobile services company dubbed Grapevine Interactive has developed what they’re calling MMS Lite, a hybrid SMS/MMS solution that aims to fill the niche between simple text-based SMS and more complex and expensive MMS.

Created for mobile marketers, Grapevine Interactive CTO Cliff Court states: “Mobile marketers, in particular, have been asking for a product offering more than text-only SMS but with less of the complexity and high cost of MMS.”  To answer that need, Grapvine’s “MMS Lite” solution combines a notification message with a larger rich message.  This rich message includes a heading of up to 500 characters of text plus two images with optional captions.  In addition, recipients can send a 250-character reply at almost zero cost.

An example of when MMS Lite could be used instead of SMS or MMS is when a company or brand would like to attach a simple logo or graphical brand name to a marketing message.  This obviously isn’t allowable with SMS, and would normally render poorly on most handsets with MMS.  Think of it as an SMS with very limited graphical capabilities.

Details are still somewhat limited on how exactly it works, but my first impression is that it’s simply not needed.  If the solution would bring limited MMS-like functionality to handsets that can only facilitate SMS, than it could be very useful, but I doubt that’s the case.  I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.

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It didn’t last long.

After much controversy, the iPhone app store has dropped “Hottest Girls,” the first Apple-approved iPhone and iPod touch application to offer adult content.

The application, which serves up a host of topless models and other mature content, caused an uproar when news broke that Apple was breaking its somewhat squeaky clean reputation by including the application in its offerings.

The negative press, however, must have been too much to handle.

“Apple will not distribute applications that contain inappropriate content, such as pornography,” said Apple spokesperson Tom Neumayr. “The developer of this application added inappropriate content directly from their server after the application had been approved and distributed, and after the developer had subsequently been asked to remove some offensive content. This was a direct violation of the terms of the iPhone Developer Program. The application is no longer available on the App Store.”

Despite claims from TechCrunch, the developers of “Hottest Girls,” that they were the ones to pull the app from the store, it is becoming evident that Apple was the deciding force that ultimately pulled the plug.

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Barnes & Noble has unveiled a new B&N Bookstore application for the Apple iPhone.

Providing access to millions of books now at the touch of your finger, Barnes & Noble worked with software partners Evryx Technologies and Spotlight Mobile to design, customize, and launch the new app, which is a red-hot download so far this week.

The app lets users take a photo of a book cover and, seconds later, the user gets all the information his or her heart could possibly desire about the title, author, publisher, etc.

More importantly from a business standpoint, however, consumers can use the app to purchase or reserve a copy of their desired title directly from the application.

The decision to plunge into the mobile realm isn’t new for the book giant. B&N recently bought digital book retailer Fictionwise for close to sixteen million dollars.

Given that Barnes & Noble operates nearly eight hundred bookstores in all 50 states, there is huge potential for this seemingly long-overdue app.

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The death of Michael Jackson nearly stalled the world wide web.

Unlike anything seen in recent memory, entertainment and social networking websites experienced near crashes and exploding servers as a result of millions of hits that congested web traffic to an unprecedented extent.

The mobile web in particular was tested like never before and came through shining on the other side.

Even before Michael Jackson’s death was confirmed, celebrities took to Twitter to comment on a day of celebrity death (first Farrah Fawcett, then Michael Jackson). Throughout the evening, other celebrities tweeted to similarly express their reactions to the King of Pop’s death at the age of 50.

Several pranksters then released false stories on Twitter about Harrison Ford and Jeff Goldblum also dying today in freak accidents. None were true. But all caused such a flurry of mobile web searches that the internet as a whole had to fire on all cylinders to keep up. Read the rest

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