Disney is now home to more than just the Magical Kingdom. It’s now home to social gaming juggernaut “Playdom,” which has been formally acquired by Disney for a whopping $763 million.

According to a joint press release, Disney agreed to buy Playdom as a way of advancing its goal of bringing consumers its well-known stories, characters and brands in ever more engaging ways.

To be sure, it isn’t an exaggeration in the least to reference Playdom as one of the leading companies in the fast-growing business of online social gaming. Playdom engages an estimated 42 million active players each month.

All told, Disney stands to gain for the expensive purchase by strengthening its “already-robust digital gaming portfolio,” by providing consumers new ways to interact with the company on ubiquitous social networks like Facebook and MySpace.

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QR codes are slowly making themselves known in mainstream applications, with a prime example being its use in a massive campaign centered around Gulf relief.

Activist group Women of the Storm is rallying public support around Gulf restoration through its celebrity-backed Be the One campaign to get signatures for their petition, which states: “I demand that a plan to restore America’s Gulf be fully funded and implemented for me and future generations.”  The primary call-to-action they chose to use is what’s interesting.

Mobile barcode company ScanLife created a QR code that, when scanned, directs users to a mobile site where they can watch the Be the One video and sign the petition.  To boost awareness, the QR codes have been placed on t-shirts as well as on the Thomas Reuters billboard in Time Square.  So far, the campaign has proved very successful, garnering more than 117,000 signatures with the help of the QR code call-to-action.

Campaigns like this not only boost awareness for the mobile barcode concept in general, but also proves how successful they can be when implemented properly.  In this case, they can also prove to be an effective tool for social activism.

It was reported today that Facebook is likely in late-stage negotiations with “social activity” service Hot Potato for an acquisition.

Hot Potato allows users to share what they’re doing using a dead simple Web interface, or through its iPhone app.  User’s can instantly share what they’re listening to, watching or reading, and even check-in to venues to let friends know where they’re at.  This “social activity” is prime for Facebook’s strategy, especially for mobile.

While it’s already been speculated that the acquisition could signal Facebook’s entry into the “check-in” craze, it’s likely a move to acquire the startup’s engineering team, which has built a pretty nice looking iPhone app.  Still, Facebook wants to become a primarily mobile service, with location obviously playing a huge role going forward.

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Sprint Nextel Corp announced its second-quarter results today, and the brightest spot on the third-largest U.S. cellular provider’s quarterly report emanated from the EVO. Thanks to the smart phone built by HTC, the company posted fewer contract losses than expected–and, analysts and the company say, that means Sprint could seriously take on the AT&T/iPhone juggernaut.

“The supply issues on the (currently sold-out) EVO are a big deal because it could have a significant impact on mitigating the iPhone impact,” if it were more plentiful, Chief Executive Dan Hesse said in a press conference call, reports Reuters.

“The introduction of the 4G EVO handset has been a nice catalyst,” Wells Fargo & Co. analyst Jennifer Fritzsche told the International Business Times. “Sprint has continued to capture significant share from T- Mobile and hold its own versus Verizon and AT&T.”

According to Barron’s, Sprint’s revenue of $8 billion was in line with Wall Street analysts’ estimates, while an adjusted loss of 15 cents a share was smaller than the Street consensus estimate of a loss of 20 cents. The number of its contract subscribers fell by 228,000, which was fewer than the loss of 355,000 post-paid subscribers expected by analysts, making for a total of 48.2 million Sprint subscribers at the end of the June quarter.

Of course, one could argue that with such low expectations for the third-rated Sprint, there was barely anywhere to go but up. But one handset having such a positive effect shows that consumers are eager to join the cellular provider that offers what they consider the best smart phone.

I came across a new project from a company called “Lookout” today, which is launching what’s called the “App Genome Project” to identify threats and inform customers what type of data apps are accessing.  The preliminary findings are pretty interesting so far.

The company has already indicated that 29% of free applications on Android have the capability to access a user’s location, compared with 33% of free applications on iPhone.  Nearly twice as many free applications have the capability to access user’s contact data on iPhone (14%) as compared to Android (8%) and 47% of free Android apps include third party code, which is 23% on iPhone.  While mobile users wouldn’t think twice about what the apps they carry around are really doing in the background, the reality is that they hold the power to manipulate your sensitive data in a number of malicious ways.

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While those tuned into the industry know good and well that innovative marketing potential exists in LBS apps like Foursquare, it’s easy to forget the audience for such apps is very small in comparison.  Such is the tone of a new study published by Forrester.

The study found that only 4% of the adult, Internet-using population has used any kind of location-based service, and just 1% of all adults check into a location at least once a week.  By contrast, more than 11% of Online adults have used Twitter, and an estimated 28% of all Internet users have signed up for Facebook.  Diving deeper into the demographics of LBS apps, the study found that users are likely to be 19- to 35-year-old, college-educated males who are “influential among their friends and family.”

These users generally do a lot of mobile-based web research when considering making a purchase, from a refrigerator or a car to a movie ticket or dinner at a restaurant, the report notes.  Their average household income is right around the six-figure mark as well — around $20,000 higher than consumers who don’t use an LBS.  While the audience of such apps may be small, it’s a prime sample to market to based on these findings.

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On Monday, the jailbreak community claimed victory as the U.S. government unveiled new rules that, essentially, legalize the jailbreaking and unlocking of Apple’s juggernaut smartphone – the iPhone. While the decision has most widely been discussed within the context of Apple’s ubiquitous handset, it is now “legal” to unlock any mobile phone so that it can be used through multiple carriers.

On a regular three-year basis, the Library of Congress “authorizes such exemptions to ensure that existing law does not prevent non-infringing use of copyrighted material.” As a result of the extensive lobbying and consumer outcries that have bombarded the Federal Government since the iPhone was released in 2007, the feds effectively authorized the jailbreaking and unlocking of iPhones under the banner of new exemptions from a federal law “that prohibits the circumvention of technical measures that control access to copyrighted works.”

As reported by Bloomberg, however, iPhone users “still may risk voiding their warranties if they make changes to the device in order to get applications not approved by Apple.” The Cupertino-based tech giant announced it’s displeasure with the ruling with a public statement shortly after jailbreaking was, for all intents and purposes, legalized.

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