Mexican cell phone giant America Movil, which does business in 17 countries across Latin America and the United States, plans to add another 20 million subscribers this year to its client base. 
Chief Financial Officer Carlos Garcia-Moreno chat with Reuters during the Latin America Investment Summit about keeping the doors open for more acquisitions outside its core region although he said the company is in no rush to do so.

America Movil is owned by Carlos Slim, one of the richest men in the world.

New technologies that enable a wider distribution of basic communications in Mexico are taking longer than expected to take off amid struggles between companies interested in accessing cheaper networks and high launch costs.
   A vast fiber optic network owned by Mexico’s Federal Electricity Commission (CFE), good for transporting data all across the country,  is currently used by just a handful of telephone firms seeking to bypass what they often criticize as very high fees from the dominant fixed-line phone company.
   CFE’s chief Alfredo Elias Ayub told Reuters said during the Third Latin America Investment Summit that in a couple of months there could be news about fiber optic rentals to new companies.
    He also shared his views about why power line communications, which carry information over the powerline, are stalled due to the high price of modems and the lack of sufficient research in countries like Mexico.

 Mexico’s lax regulation has encouraged the unabashed growth of monopolies in the last few decades, ranging from telecommunications to beer empires. Cable television is no stranger to conflict as Televisa, the world’s biggest producer of Spanish-language content, sets its eyes on triple play amid cries from smaller rivals struggling to keep afloat.
   Eduardo Perez Motta, the head of Mexico’s Federal Competition Commission, sat down with Reuters during the Third Latin America Investment Summit to talk about a much-expected decision on a Televisa acquisition that would give the broadcaster a key push in the triple play market, where companies can offer cable TV, Internet and phone services using a single broadband link.
    Perez Motta set a series of requirements that Televisa should meet, including sharing its content with rivals, if it wants to buy a 49 percent stake in Cablemas, one of the biggest cable companies in Mexico.

The heads of two of America’s most popular sports — NASCAR chief Brian France and National Hockey League Commissioner Gary Bettman – are coming to the Reuters Media Summit on Tuesday.

Also expected to show up is Bobby Kotick, chief executive of Activision. The second-largest U.S. video game publisher already is in the news on Tuesday after it raised its earnings and revenue outlook for the third quarter on better-than-expected consumer response to its holiday slate globally. (Reuters)

And look out for appearances from top executives from Blockbuster and Corbis.

The Media Summit’s first day, meanwhile, featured appearances from the chairman of XM Satellite Radio, the head of News Corp’s Fox Interactive Media and the chairman of video game maker Take-Two Interactive.

- Fox Interactive Media’s Peter Levinsohn said the MySpace online social network will launch Facebook-style news feeds in the next month to 45 days. These are the alerts that people use to let their friends and colleagues know what they are up to. (”Robert is blogging,” for example). MySpace also plans to let users create more than one profile so users can have one visage, say, for work and one for friends. 

- Levinsohn also said that the company will launch an online network to sell advertising across sites owned by parent company News Corp. Known internally as FIM Serve, the business could be made available outside of MySpace as early as next year.

- XM Chairman Gary Parsons said the satellite radio company expects car radio sales to remain solid even if the most dire projections of slowing U.S. auto sales come true.

- Take-Two Chairman Strauss Zelnick said games and other media do not encourage real-life violence and that the graphic behavior depicted in games “Grand Theft Auto” and “Manhunt 2″ are even more easily found on the Internet or at the bookstore. As he said: “I could send my 9-year-old daughter to a book store and she can buy any book in Barnes and Noble no matter how vivid the content is.”

Keep an eye on:

• Google Inc is preparing a service that would enable users to store data from their personal hard drives on its computers, the Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday in its online edition. (Reuters)
• The new Imus radio program will premiere next week with “advertisers who are strong Imus supporters and … stayed with him throughout the controversy,” Ad Age says. Ad Age contacted several national advertisers that bought his former show, and several seem to be taking a wait-and-see approach before committing to Imus 2.0. (Ad Age)

(Photo: Reuters)

Is experimentation at risk? Will the economic downturn neuter the anticipated lift the presidential elections and Beijing Olympics were expected to contribute to the estimated $290 billion U.S. ad market in 2008? When will writers and studio chiefs get along?

These are just some of the big issues we aim discuss starting Monday at the annual Reuters Media Summit.Join us this week (Nov. 26 through the 29th) on Reuters.com and our MediaFile blog as we chat with leaders in the media industry to give the market a glimpse at what’s in and what’s out in 2008.

Fox Interactive Media President Peter Levinsohn, MTV Networks CEO Judy McGrath, EA Chief John Riccitiello, IPG’s Michael Roth, and the commissioners of Major League Baseball, Major League Soccer and NASCAR will drop by our offices to share ideas and strategies in what looks certain to be a pivotal if challenging year.

Italy’s Seat Pagine Gialle doesn’t publish all the images it gathers from webcams, in the interests of protecting privacy — but it does pass them on to the police, Seat’s CEO told Reuters journalists in Paris. Asked whether images gathered by Seat, a yellow-pages publisher that is active on the Internet, didn’t provide opportunities for criminals, Luca Majocchi said: “I agree with you. Actually, we show on the image much less than what we have to, to protect privacy. Second, we try not to use webcams on the street.” Asked what information Seat provided to the police, Majocchi said: “The works we do for the government, say for the police, they are not sent online. We don’t make this accessible on the net. They use our system.” 

The unprecedented outpouring of teenage angst on the web isn’t just a way for teenagers to make hundreds of new friends but provides a unique opportunity for advertisers to exploit them, Pierre Bellanger, CEO of French free blogging service Skyblog, told Reuters journalists in Paris. ”Never, so many diaries, so many articles, so many printed words, were online from a generation expressing itself. So you have to know that scientists, sociologists are exploring that mass of data because it has a sociological content of extraordinary value. And it has also an extraordinary value for advertisers. Because what we have spoken of is very profitable,” said Belanger, who runs Europe’s biggest blog. He said Skyblog’s extraordinary growth had happened despite being French-language. “When you look at the data you have very few sites with our growth, with one of the worst languages to speak on the internet, which is French… it’s like being — before Lonely Planet — with Hungarian tourist guides. So it’s strange.” Bellanger said he didn’t believe bloggers would mind if Skyblog linked up with a partner, as it wants to do — even a company like Microsoft. “I don’t think anyone cares, truly, about corporate ownership — I would say 99.9 percent of the audience. Like with MySpace for example. People were saying ‘Oh la la’ — in French — ‘it is the end of the world as we know it!’ But no, nothing happened. What I would say is important is that the brands of the 90s are no longer the brands of the new generation.”