When news leaked in January that Facebook was allowing iPhone users in the U.S. and Canada to make free phone calls through its Messenger App the technorati speculated the service could become a Skype killer.Read more

Way back in 2003 Nokia held an outdoor party in a trendy Milan neighborhood to show off its new N-Gage handsets. It was part of a European tour to fete the launch of a phone that was supposed to open up the untapped mobile gaming market for the Finnish behemoth. At the time many in the mobile phone industry thought a dedicated handset was the best way to access the mobile gaming market, a flawed assumption borne out by N-Gage’s flop. Other attempts proved only marginally successful until the 2007 arrival of the iPhone and its App Store.Read more

Joanna Shields, Facebook’s Vice President and Managing Director of Europe, the Middle East and Africa, has played an important role in Europe’s Internet scene for over a decade.After moving to the UK in 2000 to run Real Networks International, she served as Google’s Managing Director of Syndication and Partnerships for EMEA.  She left Google to become Chief Executive at European social networking site, Bebo, and spearheaded its successful acquisition by AOL-Time Warner for $850 million in March 2008.Read more

Sometimes you have to make painful decisions in order to survive. Charlie Kindel, who runs the Windows Phone 7 developer ecosystem at Microsoft, likens the company’s mobile makeover to the true story told in the 2010 film 127 Hours about an American mountain climber who gets trapped by a boulder and saves his own life by amputating his lower right arm with a dull knife.

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Once again, politics torpedoed two emerging markets’ telecom behemoths from walking down the aisle. The proposed $24 billion deal between India’s largest mobile player Bharti Airtel and South Africa’s flagship MTN was called off on September 30.
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