• The FCC's shot clock order setting limits on the amount of time local governments could take to process wireless facility siting applications was upheld Monday by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. "I am pleased that the court of appeals upheld the FCC's ruling, which removes unreasonable roadblocks to the nationwide build-out of cutting edge wireless broadband networks," FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski said in a statement. The 2009 order set timeframes of 90 days for collocations and 150 days for all other tower siting applications reviewed by state and local governments.
• InterDigital has decided to push ahead with plans to sell off or expand licensing of its intellectual property rights, which included more than 19,500 patents and patent applications at the end of 2011. Existing licensing deals netted InterDigital nearly $3 billion in royalties through last year. Company CEO William Merritt said in the announcement that InterDigital expects its expanded patent business to generate "sustainable annual revenue of at least $800 million in three to five years." Separately, the company issued preliminary results for the fourth quarter, when it made $21 million on sales of $74.2 million.
• Jearld Leonhardt has decided to retire later this year, leaving his long-standing position as CommScope's CFO. Leonhardt has been the company's top financial executive for its entire history and was one of its founders. Mark Olson, who has been CommScope's controller and principal accounting officer since 2009, will take Leonhardt's place on Feb. 1.
• The venture capital arm of Verizon Wireless co-parent Vodafone has led an $11.3 million financing round for Finsphere Corporation, which provides customer identity services for wireless operators. Existing Finsphere investors Mohr Davidow Ventures, Shasta Ventures and Frazier Technology Ventures also participated in the round. Finsphere plans to use the cash to expand its technology platform, which allows operators to use a variety of means to authenticate credit and debit card transactions, new account applications, online banking activities, mobile payments, enterprise access events and personal online identities.
• If new plans from Consumer Cellular are any indication, even members of the AARP are getting on the smartphone bandwagon. Consumer Cellular, the exclusive wireless provider for AARP members, has added a new plan for its heaviest data users and increased the number of megabytes included with its other plans. The new Connect! Max plan includes 500 MB for $30 per month. The prices on the other plans will stay the same but now offer more data.
• Motricity has tapped Richard Stalzer as its president of mobile marketing and advertising. Stalzer joins the company as it is working to expand its products for the North American market and will oversee its mobile marketing and advertising business including sales, advertising operations, ad network, product and technology direction. Stalzer most recently worked as COO of Education Dynamics, which specializes in helping higher education institutions find, enroll and retain students.
• Keynote Systems today announced that Google has selected Keynote Mobile Internet Testing Environment (MITE) as the heart of its new free GoMoMeter tool, which allows businesses to evaluate the performance of their mobile websites. Keynote MITE enables the GoMoMeter to show businesses how their sites look on their customers' mobile devices. MITE also helps the tool assign a mobile-readiness score for each site, delivering results to users with consistent, near real-time performance.
• Azuki Systems announced the availability of the next-generation managed and optimized over-the-top (OTT) live and on-demand video delivery solution framework for the Azuki Media Platform. The new platform will allow service providers to augment their existing managed networks and monetize on their own OTT content delivery to multi-screens, including TVs and mobile devices, without having to build a new network infrastructure.