• Nokia is now offering the Nokia 5800 Comes With Music device in Brazil. TIM will be the only operator selling the solution during the first month of launch.
• Wireless carriers are increasingly losing control of location-based service (LBS) provisioning to Internet companies such as Google and Yahoo and to handset vendors like Nokia, according to a Strategy Analytics report. The report singles out Google and Nokia as significant threats to carrier ambitions.
• The IMS Forum and Aricent announced the launch of www.TestNGN.org, a site hosting an industry-wide collaborative platform of test cases for the validation of IMS and NGN equipment and services.
• American Tower Corporation reported total first-quarter revenues increased 6.9%, to $408.7 million, and rental and management segment revenues increased 5.9%, to $395.9 million. Net income was $58.6 million.
• CommScope reported a first-quarter net loss of $21 million compared with a net loss of $11 million in the year-ago quarter.
• IMShopping launched a Twitter-based shopping service with $4.7 million in series A funding from SK Telecom Ventures. The new service will allow Twitter users to directly ask questions by messaging @imshopping. Shopping guides in the community and trained experts offer detailed responses within a short period of time. Shoppers can then use those responses to instantly make purchases or save to their own folders before making a product decision.
• Quantenna Communications announced that it has received $13.85 million in Series C funding led by new investor Southern Cross Venture Partners, with participation from existing investors Grazia Equity GmbH, Sequoia Capital, Sigma Partners and Venrock Associates. With this latest round, total investment in the three-year old semiconductor company now exceeds $42 million.
• Sorenson Media says its Sorenson Spark video decoder has been licensed by Qualcomm for chipsets targeted at the next generation low-power and multimedia-rich mobile phones, mobile computing devices and other consumer products. The Sorenson Spark video codec will enable devices to play a variety of videos available on the Internet.