– Times: Times Online will launch a mobile website carrying display and classified advertising next week, NMA says. The paper already offers several text alerts and a Java crossword. Now Buongiorno (BIT: BNG) has built a fuller mobile offering with news, sport, business and arts stories. It’s getting links from O2’s portal and counts IBM amongst its first mobile advertisers.
– CN Group: CN Group, the Carlisle-based newspaper publisher, has hooked up with Illinois-based web obituary platform Legacy.com to power its online web obits section. Legacy.com already does obits for over 400 mainly US newspapers including The New York Times (NYSE: NYT) and Houston Chronicle. Its service lets readers place text and multimedia tributes on a title’s website as well as guest books. Obits are moving online because people are less prevalently living within the same newspaper circulation area as do their friends and family. CN Group publishes over 8,000 family notices and 14,000 death notices in its titles each year. (Via HoldTheFrontPage).
– Voeveo: The New Zealand-based mobile content marketplace has opened up shop in the UK. Voeveo allows independent producers of ringtones, games wallpapers and such like to upload and sell their content to mobile users at their own prices (minimum £0.43), taking 70 percent of a 70/30 revenue split. The UK arrival essentially means the company enabling British payment processing backends and doing marketing on these shores. Voeveo has no relationships with networks, reckoning users are tired of operator portals – it is going for the independent producer segment (independently) and asks producers to do some of their own promotion for their wares. The outfit so far claims 6,000 content sellers. Consumers currently buy via the website and a mobile website is coming later.