Nearly one-half million U.S. Cellular customers are at a crossroads.

By summer’s end, at least 420,000 subscribers across the Midwest will be in need of a mobile network. That much became clear on Friday when Sprint finalized a $480 million deal that will transfer all of U.S. Cellular’s spectrum in Chicago, St. Louis and the general surrounding area to Sprint.

This is no mere transfer of network title, though. Sprint plans to shut down U.S. Cellular’s network completely some time in those two metropolitan regions in the next several months (Champagne, Ill., and South Bend, Ind., will also be affected).

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Developers were excited by no shortage of announcements made this week at Google I/O, not the least of which was the unveiling of the new Google Wallet Instant Buy Android API.

“Shopping for physical goods on mobile devices is a difficult experience for consumers,” Google says, “leading to 97% of mobile shoppers abandoning their shopping carts.”

As a result, Google is giving its U.S. developers the new Google Wallet Instant Buy Android API, which makes buying in native Android apps “fast and easy.”

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Facebook isn’t the only company that can pay upwards of $1 billion to acquire a hot digital property.

According to AllThingsD, Yahoo may be seriously considering the acquisition of social networking platform Tumblr.

Earlier this week, Yahoo CFO Ken Goldman spoke at JP Morgan’s Global Technology conference and underscored the need for the aging Silicon Valley Internet giant to attract more users from the coveted 18-to-24-years-old age bracket. Along with more marketing, he explicitly said Yahoo needed to be “cool again.”

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Google is sprucing up its market-leading mobile ad network, AdMob.

“We want AdMob to open up opportunities for many more app developers worldwide to help them build successful businesses,” Google announced.

The ad giant is promising to afford its thriving developer community with an assortment of new tools and resources, including:

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For weeks now we’ve heard rumblings about the mysterious new business venture undertaken by Twitter co-founder Biz Stone.

Simply known as Jelly, no one really knows what Stone’s new venture is all about. There are guesses, but only that – guesses.

What isn’t a guess, however, is whether Stone will launch his new startup with serious cash in reserve.

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Tapjoy continues to grow and thrive as one of the premier mobile ad networks in today’s mobile advertising ecosystem.

This week, in fact, Tapjoy became the first global advertising platform to help Kakao Games developers monetize their apps

The well-respected mobile advertising and publishing platform recently secured an agreement with Kakao, Inc., the largest mobile social platform in Korea, to allow developers on the Kakao Games platform to monetize their apps through Tapjoy’s advertising and monetization tools.

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Millennial Media has produced another must-read Mobile Mix Report.

This month’s report points to some interesting growth trends, including the fact that Amazon increased impressions 125 percent from the previous quarter.

Android tablets now make up nearly 50 percent of tablet impressions. But it wasn’t just Amazon that ruled the day.

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