BARCELONA (Reuters) – For Facebook it must look like a no-brainer – exploit its huge consumer loyalty and half a billion mobile phone users as a way of opening up the mobile market to blue chip advertisers.

Trouble is, there are reasons for the limited success so far of mobile advertising and none of them have completely gone away. Even if Facebook succeeds, others eyeing this potentially massive market may still struggle to cash in.

BARCELONA (Reuters) – For Facebook it must look like a no-brainer — exploit its huge consumer loyalty and half a billion mobile phone users as a way of opening up the mobile market to blue chip advertisers.

Trouble is, there are reasons for the limited success so far of mobile advertising and none of them have completely gone away. Even if Facebook succeeds, others eyeing this potentially massive market may still struggle to cash in.

BARCELONA/SEATTLE, Feb 29 (Reuters) – Microsoft Corp
released an incomplete version of Windows 8 for the
public to download and try out on Wednesday, looking to rev up
excitement for the slick, new-look operating system that it
hopes will restore its fading tech supremacy.

Windows 8, as the first Microsoft operating system
compatible with low-power microprocessors designed by ARM
Holdings Plc, will run on tablets as well as desktops
and laptops, in an effort to counter the runaway success of
Apple Inc’s iPad.

BARCELONA/SEATTLE (Reuters) – Microsoft Corp opened up an incomplete version of Windows 8 for the public to download and test on Wednesday, looking to rev up excitement for its slick, new-look operating system which it hopes will restore its fading tech supremacy.

Windows 8, as the first Microsoft operating system compatible with low-power microprocessors designed by ARM Holdings Plc, will run on tablets as well as desktops and laptops, in an effort to counter the runaway success of Apple Inc’s iPad.

BARCELONA, Feb 27 (Reuters) – Facebook said it could
team up with mobile operators on payments, in an offer that
would give them back part of the revenue and influence they have
lost in recent years to Apple and Google.

Speaking for the first time at Mobile World Congress, the
industry’s biggest gathering, Facebook said operators could help
it make money from its hundreds of millions of mobile users
buying games or music on the social network.

LONDON, Feb 24 (Reuters) – Consumers’ increasing love
of using services like Facebook and YouTube on their smartphones
is leaving many telecoms carriers sidelined while bearing the
costs of ever-growing demands on their networks.

As users lap up mobile Internet services, the Web giants are
strengthening their relationships with consumers, while the
telcos are finding their connections with customers reduced to a
monthly bill and an occasional handset upgrade.

LONDON (Reuters) – The new Sunday edition of Rupert Murdoch’s British Sun tabloid, to be launched with a huge advertising campaign and a print run of around 3 million this week, is expected to be more family-friendly and less salacious than its predecessor, The News of the World.

Amid the fall-out of a phone-hacking scandal that triggered the arrest of a string of Sun journalists, industry insiders believe The Sun on Sunday, whose launch is being personally led by Murdoch himself, looks likely to be heavier on fashion and football and lighter on the sex and scandal for which the News of the World was renowned.

LONDON (Reuters) – Everything Everywhere, Britain’s biggest mobile carrier, expects to start building a next-generation LTE network by the end of the year, catching up with the United States and parts of Scandinavia and Asia that already have more advanced networks.

Everything Everywhere, a joint venture of France Telecom and Deutsche Telekom, is likely to be the first of Britain’s carriers to deploy LTE, as it already has radio spectrum it can use for the new, faster services.

LONDON, Feb 21 (Reuters) – The London Stock Exchange
Group is to provide real-time market data to Google
, bolstering the search-engine’s Google Finance offering
with free access to London share prices previously only
available with a 15 minute delay.

The move, aimed at retail investors, demonstrates the
growing power of the internet to deliver data that used to be
only available to subscribers of specialist services such as
those provided by Thomson Reuters and Bloomberg LP.

LONDON (Reuters) – Twitter and Russian search engine Yandex have agreed a partnership that will allow Yandex to show new tweets in its search results almost instantly, as Twitter becomes an increasingly important source of real-time information.

Twitter will give Yandex access to its so-called firehose of all public tweets, the two companies said on Tuesday, in an agreement similar to the one the social short-messaging site has with Microsoft’s search engine, Bing.