Motorola has made an investment in Amobee Media Systems, a company which focuses in advertising solutions for mobile operators, but the financial terms of the investment were not disclosed, not even the percentage that Motorola has acquired.

Amobee Media Systems targets mobile phones in forms of videos, music, messaging, games and WAP, using a single, telco-grade ad-serving infrastructure. The company is dedicated to mobile operators, rather than to manufacturers, therefore Motorola will have to tweak the company’s strategy in order to play along Motorola’s needs.

The company enjoys investments from Cisco, Motorola, Telefonica and Vodafone, as well as financial backing from some of the biggest names in venture capital: Accel Partners, Globespan and Sequoia Capital.

The press release is available after the jump.

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Vodafone Portugal has published a Social Responsibility Report where it details the use of 2.4 million Euros invested in the areas of health, safety, environment, education, culture and social welfare, among others by the Vodafone Portugal Foundation.

A detailed breakdown of the projects conducted by the foundation:

• One of the initiaves of the Foundation include the Paediatric Epilepsy Remote Monitoring in conjunction with the West Lisbon Hospital Group which endeavours to improve the surgical operations in children with epilepsy using mobile communications and a software application specially designed by Vodafone.
• The Safe Filling Station System, a spin-off from Safe Taxi System is conducted in conjunction with Foundation, the Ministry of the Interior, National Republican Guard and Public Security Police of Portugal.
• The Healthy Beaches project was repeated for a further year, serving 125 coastal or river beaches in 2007. The campaign planned to raise children’s awareness of safety and environmental rules on beaches. Still on the beaches, the SOS Beaches project, a partnership with Mafra Municipal Council was designed to provide rescue support facilities on beaches without lifeguards.
• The Valongo Municipal Council, Valongo Water Authority and the University of Porto’s Faculty of Engineering,  in partnership with the  Foundation are supporting the environmental clean-up of the River Leça and the improvement of its banks.
• The Mobile School Programme, a partnership between the foundation and the Innovation and Curriculum Development Directorate, helps to drive children of travelling workers (market traders, circus artistes and others) to distant learning school programmes wherever they happen to be.
• The Foundation also met the full costs of producing digital school textbooks for blind and partially sighted students through a project managed in partnership with the Ministry of Education and the publisher Porto Editora.
• The Association for Education of the Blind and the foundation continued to promote access to the new information technologies by people with special needs. To date, 1170 institutions have been helped and over 3700 people have been trained.
• The foundation pretends to cut the CO2 emissions by a half, by implementing sustainable technologies wherever possible, with base stations being powered from renewable sources.
• The company is also helping to raise the percentage of recycled mobile phones. It has 46 tonnes of phones, batteries and accessories in 2007, which is an increase of 21% over 2006.

The press release is available after the jump.

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China Mobile Communications Corporation seems to be working hard at improving coverage for the country. Last week the company had announced that they are planning to expand its TD-SCDMA 3G trials to more cities. Today China Mobile signed many contracts with Motorola for its GSM network upgrades and expansion. The expansion is being quite profitable as the company recognized 50% of the revenue from the contracts signed in the first half of 2008.

Motorola will supply CMCC with GSM network equipment and a range of services. The expanded and optimized GSM networks will then be deployed across 16 provinces and municipalities within the coverage area of CMCC, namely Beijing, Tianjin, Sichuan, Zhejiang, Henan, Hunan, Guangdong, Yunnan, Fujian, Hubei, Shanxi, Jilin, Liaoning, Jiangxi, Anhui and Guizhou. These contracts also enable China Mobile to deliver enhanced and value-added multimedia functionality and services.

China Mobile has already invested US$2 billion on its 3G trial network, which is currently trialling in eight cities: Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin, Shenyang, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Xiamen and Qinhuangdao.

Press release  after the jump.

Source: Motorola, Cellular News, South China Morning Post

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Before getting yourself an iPhone 3G, you should read through some reviews and watch some videos of it. If you are a clumsy person you should perhaps test how far the iPhone 3G can handle accidents, and no network will let you test that, so PC World did the test.

The following tests were conducted:

• Simulated Pocket Test
• Direct Key scratching
• Dropping in Milk
• Washing under Faucet
• Drop Test

In the end, the iPhone did crack its display. So go watch the video and see if the device is enough for you.

Source: MacRumours

Qualcomm completed the first data call at 20mbps via HSPA+ (also known as Evolved HSPA) using a 5MHz band spectrum. The company’s Qualcomm’s MDM8200 HSPA+ chipset is already available to manufacturers who will use it on mobile phones and base stations, as it’s compatible to many existing bands such as 900 MHz band and the 2.5 GHz IMT-2000 extension band.

Several HSPA+ trials have already started, and Australia’s Telstra was the first to enable some features of this connectivity technology which can achieve speeds up to 84mbps, although the latest release, HSPA+ Release 7 can support up to 28mbps.

The advantage of HSPA+ besides being compatible to existing bands, is the backwards compatibility with UMTS, HSDPA, and HSUPA devices.

Source: Cellaz, MyBroadband