• Eric Bader has joined mobile marketing and media consultancy BrandinHand as president and managing director overseeing its New York office.  Bader joins BrandinHand from MediaVest Worldwide, where he was managing director of Digital.  At MediaVest, Bader was responsible for an 80-member team providing planning, buying, execution and tracking investment capabilities across all digital platforms.  Bader's MediaVest Digital Connections team served clients such as The Coca-Cola Company, Continental Airlines, P&G, Mattel and Wal-Mart buying more than $300 million a year in digital media.

• Anritsu Company has introduced test functions for W-CDMA mobile terminal UMTS bands XI (1.5 GHz) and III (1.8 GHz) for its ME7873F Performance Test System. With the expanded test capability, the ME7873F now offers mobile terminal carriers and manufacturers a test platform that supports all UMTS bands for testing the RF performance of user equipment used in North America, as well as Japan and Europe.

• Network planning and optimization service provider Brightcomms has selected ZK Celltest to contribute to its multivendor network planning and optimization services in the GSM/EDGE/UMTS/HSDPA, CDMA EV-DO Rev. A and WiMAX arenas. Brightcomms currently has offices in Venezuela, Panama, El Salvador and Nigeria.

• Purple Labs, supplier of embedded Linux solutions for mobile phones, has opened a new office in Beijing, China, to provide full local technical support and expand its sales in the region. The Beijing office is led by Gordon Tsang, general manager and senior vice president of sales in Asia. Founded in 2001, Purple Labs offers a full Linux software suite to the wireless industry packaged as a customizable software solution or as part of full hardware and software reference design.

• Telefónica Spain is using MACH Cibernet's Data Express and Fraud Protection solutions to achieve Near Real Time Roaming Data Exchange (NRTRDE) compliancy.  MACH Cibernet will monitor and protect Telefónica Spain against roaming fraud.

• Tracking and location services company FindWhere has acquired Web Integration's Livecontacts platform. The platform is a mobile phone based social networking service. As a result of the Livecontacts acquisition, all of Livecontacts 8,000 users will migrate to the FindWhere Mobile platform.  With FindWhere Mobile, individual cell phone users can share their location and related media content from their mobile phones with their social network.

• According to Red Bend Software's Q4 results, its vCurrent Mobile FOTA client software reached 255 million mobile phones, exceeding the company's forecast of 250 million. This achievement represents a growth of 219% since fourth quarter 2006, when vCurrent Mobile was shipping in 80 million handsets. Also, in 2007, Red Bend expanded into new markets such as M2M modules and mobile broadband PC cards, enabling the company to more than double its number of licensees in one year. In Q4, 20 new mobile phone models shipped with vCurrent Mobile, making Red Bend's FOTA solution available in 137 handsets since 2005 from manufacturers including Motorola, Sharp and Sony Ericsson.

• Jasper Wireless has announced Danny Shader as its new CEO. Shader, formerly of Good Technology, takes over for Jahangir Mohammed, who will continue to serve Jasper Wireless in his new role as chairman of the board and remain involved in both strategic and day-to-day operations.

• In the first 30 days since Greystripe and Opera teamed up, Opera users have downloaded more than  1.6 million games and applications. The Opera Mini homepage now includes a GameJump bookmark, allowing users to access Greystripe's free mobile game portal. The GameJump bookmark joins other consumer brands such as Myspace, the New York Times, BBC and Yahoo! on the browser's worldwide-accessible homepage. Greystripe's AdWRAP Catalog Platform enables mobile Websites, Internet portals, social communities and mobile applications like Opera Mini to distribute Greystripe's catalog of more than 900 mobile games. The platform is a hosted and customizable combination of mobile Web and Internet technologies that can be tailored to the look and feel of any site.

• SouthernLINC Wireless added four new Motorola phones to its product portfolio in the Q4 2007:  the Motorola i290, i335, i570 and i876. All phones include SouthernLINC Wireless' push-to-talk service, and all meet the strict military specifications for dust, shock and vibration.  

• LG and Prada will release a new handset, the Silver, across Europe starting at the end of this month. Although the Silver is an update of the touchscreen device launched last Spring, new features include a touchscreen Qwerty keyboard. The LG Prada Silver will be available in 18 countries, including  France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the UK.

• Budget airline Norwegian Air Shuttle ASA announced it will offer mobile phone and wireless Internet services on flights starting in Q4. The airline said it also will provide travel information for passengers, broadband telephone services and mobile banking. The on-board services will be provided by a new subsidiary Call Norwegian AS.

• Alcatel-Lucent announced plans to open its WiMAX Application and Interoperability Testing (IOT) Center to local Taiwan customer premises equipment (CPE) manufacturers, working with the Ministry of Economic Affairs (MOEA). In October, Alcatel-Lucent signed a memorandum of understanding with the MOEA in which both parties agreed to jointly promote the development of WiMAX products in Taiwan. The Taiwan center will provide an end-to-end interoperability testing environment for local companies producing communications equipment for businesses and residences.

• Broca announced that its SMS-based data capture product, Acquire, is being used as part of a Sony Ericsson's customer services pilot.  The service measures satisfaction among mobile phone users that have had their handsets repaired.  The pilots are being undertaken with T-Mobile in the UK and independently in Sweden. After a customer has been using the repaired handset for a pre-set period, a survey appears automatically on the screen. Unlike standard SMS, which simply offers plain text, Acquire presents questions to the customer in fields using Broca's patented technology. This allows users to complete questionnaires via SMS by selecting answers from a short series of drop-down menus. 

• Ulocate communications announced that its GPS widget platform Where is now available with metroPCS. Where costs $3 per month and is currently compatible with five metroPCS phones. This is the fourth U.S. wireless operator signed by Ulocate after Alltel, Boost Mobile and Sprint.