Now, Vodafone Germany customers can download MusicFinder with a free 30-day trial and use it to capture music on their handsets, share their finds with friends and buy music and related content through the Vodafone Music Store. All of this can be accomplished through the app, which carries a 2.99-euro-per-month fee after the trial period. It's also offered on a per-use basis for 49 euro cents per use.

The $4.99 download lets you create custom ringtones and audio messages by combining your voice with sound effects using the app's audio mixing engine. So, if you've been waiting to change your iPhone ringtone until you could make your co-worker sound like a chipmunk, now's your chance.

YouTones for the iPhone is powered by FunMobility's FunMo.com Web site and can be downloaded from the iTunes App Store. Folks with other types of phones can download YouTones directly from FunMo.com.

With Apple hoping to have 10 million iPhones on the market fairly soon, and Nokia's number-one position in worldwide cell phone sales, those two platforms alone to have the potential to provide a real boost to a game publisher's market share.

Since launching six months ago, Nokia has only pre-loaded its N-Gage service on a few of its top-end handsets, but intends to start putting it on most multimedia phones in the future. Otherwise, consumers have to download the service to their phone, which hasn't resulted in much traction.

"Merchandising has been a primary pain point for the mobile games industry, and the introduction of new platforms gives consumers a really simple way to discover and download games," Glu Mobile CEO Greg Ballard told the news service.

WeatherBug, the weather services and information provider with desktop and mobile offerings, just announced an agreement with Mobile Posse to display the weather and other related data as part of the mobile idle-screen content provider's service, according to FierceMobileContent.

The article said that the new partnership will open the doors to a range of ad-supported sponsorships that will let advertisers brand localized weather coverage via cell phone idle-screen messages. Nielsen Mobile reports that 18.4 million U.S. mobile subscribers accessed weather-themed mobile websites in August 2008 alone, according to the report. It's certainly one of the most common uses of cell phone data plans (along with news, sports scores, and of course texting and e-mail).

The report said that the greatest bump for U.S. video ad spending will come from large brand marketers placing TV-like commercials—"mostly ads that run in the beginning or middle of the video, alongside professional content from large media companies." Prerolls, essentially, which don't work well on the mobile side due to the shorter usage window; most folks typically don't have time to sit through a 30 second commercial. If that's the case, advertisers will have to keep working to come up with acceptable mobile advertising—which they are.

(Image credit: Clipart.com)

"VeriSign acquired German mobile content company Jamba in 2004 for $273 million. The acquisition was part of a strategy by former CEO Stratton Sclavos that stretched far beyond infrastructure to mobile entertainment, the real-time web and more."

Jamba shot to prominence a few years ago through its "Crazy Frog" ringtone series, but the report said that now that the company is essentially a European play, they wouldn't be surprised to see News Corp unload the whole thing to someone else down the line.

U-verse TV customers in Atlanta, Austin, Dallas-Fort Worth, Indianapolis and San Diego can now get the feature at no extra charge by tuning in to channel 227 at home and adding their city to the "My Cities" list. AT&T plans to make the feature available to all U-verse TV customers in 2009.

Weather On Demand is AT&T's latest addition to U-verse TV, which launched back in June 2006 and includes features such as Total Home DVR; the ability to program DVR recordings from mobile phones; personalized, on-screen weather, sports, traffic and stock information via AT&T U-bar; and more. AccuWeather, meanwhile, has several mobile initiatives in play, including downloadable apps, a mobile WAP site, and home screen icons (depending on the phone).

"We're getting close to the one-year mark on Amazon's gadget—Nov. 19, to be exact. And while we can't say for sure that it's the 'Future of Reading'—as Steven Levy's Newsweek cover proclaimed on launch day—it's certainly feeling less like a UFO sighting when someone pulls one out."

It remains to be seen what Amazon has in store for an encore, particularly in light of Sony's shrewdly updated eReader.

The report said that aside from updating members about online friends and the news, companies can also use eNotify to deliver targeted brand messages to the app's users. The new product will hit the iPhone first by the end of the year, and then be followed by more general cell phone-compatible versions later on.

On Monday AT&T launched its new Online Experience Mobility store, which lets consumers browse the latest handsets as if in a virtual 3-D world like Second Life or other avatar-based environments. RCR Wireless News has now taken that site for a spin, saying that it represents online shopping "at its most difficult"—in part because the store almost never mentions the price of anything, in typical used-car-dealer fashion.

The store only presents six handsets, which is far less than what AT&T carries. Once you endure the online visual presentation, you're forced to go back to AT&T's regular site to get any detailed pricing; which of course is buried there, too, as it has always been. "Though visually appealing, AT&T Mobility's virtual store comes across as more of a marketing gimmick than a shopping utility." So much for that idea.

YouTube has rolled out "click-to-buy" ads that give viewers the option to buy the digital products featured in them, according to MediaPost. The ads are part of YouTube's new eCommerce platform, which gives content providers a new revenue stream for videos by letting viewers buy digital music or games from Amazon.com and the iTunes Store.

The report said that certain authorized clips will show the links, which appear as a small bar at the bottom of the video while it plays back; if a user clicks, they'll be transported to the artist's Amazon MP3 or iTunes Store page in order to buy or download the music. It will work the same way for games such as Electronic Art's Spore, which is available for download on Amazon, according to the report.

In addition, the company just picked up $7 million in a second round of funding, which the report said will go towards international expansion, including Asia, where the company's investors "particularly have strong ties to mobile networks and devices." Back in February, Melodis launched the Midomi app for Symbian S60-based devices.

Telefónica o2 Germany will launch a new mobile flat rate charge on October 15, 2008 with a minimum contract period reduced to six months, according to SlashPhone.

The report said that the price per month of EUR15 includes calls to the German fixed network and the German o2 mobile network, and that calls to other German mobile networks cost 19 cents per minute or per SMS message. After the six-month period is up, customers can either choose a different contract or continue the flat-rate deal.

A six-month contract period one-ups just about everything offered to us here in America, aside from low-end, prepaid options from a few carriers. Unfortunately, all of this is before the various monthly extras required for mobile media access.

Apparently the deal would include AOL's content, services, and advertising businesses—in other words, everything except the dial-up portion, which would be just fine considering that Earthlink has already indicated interest in that side of things.

If Yahoo does an AOL deal, and then continues along the Google ad agreement path as well, it gives the struggling portal a stake in the fight and proves that there is indeed another option aside from the failed Yahoo-Microsoft merger. Whether or not that option will ultimately lead to success over Google is a different question.