In a recent video interview with Mobile World Live , Markus Breitbach, VP of global sales and marketing at Deutsche Telekom’s M2M Competence Center, said the German operator was looking to leverage its European M2M assets and expertise to expand its North American presence and then make more inroads into Asia.

“M2M is already a huge multi-billion Euro business,” said Breitbach, pointing out the current strong demand from the European automotive sector. The health sector in the US, too, is showing keen interest.

Breitabac emphasised, however, that M2M customers were not only looking to operators to provide cellular connectivity. Watch the interview to find out more, as well as hear Breitbach’s views on Deutsche Telekom’s M2M alliance with other European operators.

The new charge was announced by the country’s Finance Minister Maria Kiwanuka (pictured) as part of its 2013/14 budget.

The tax will be imposed on mobile operators who, it is expected, will pass on the charges to their subscribers.

There are 8.9 million subscribers who use four mobile money services in Uganda -  MTN’s Mobile Money, Uganda Telecom’s M-Sente, Warid’s Airtel Money/Warid Pesa and Orange’s Orange Money – according to the Daily Monitor.

The government hopes to raise UGX32 billion ($12 million) annually through the new tax.

In addition, it is proposing another tax on incoming international phone calls which it hopes will raise $16.5 million annually, according to the BBC.

The charges are part of an attempt by the country’s government to fill a hole in its budget after its aid budget cut was cut by foreign donors over allegations of corruption.

There are signs of a trend with Uganda’s new mobile money tax, which follows the introduction of a similar charge in Kenya at the start of this year.

In February, dominant operator Safaricom passed on a ten per cent tax imposed by the Kenya government to its 16 million M-Pesa subscribers. The operator introduced the fee for transactions above $1.1. Transactions of a lower value avoided the charge.

“Although [Huawei is] a relatively new player within this marketplace, the product is absolutely competing at really the top level,” he told the audience at the Ascend P6 launch in London.

And with Huawei’s background in building networks and its own chips, Dunstone said there’s “a massive depth of knowledge and understanding behind the product”.

Dunstone added that through his work with Huawei as chairman of broadband provider TalkTalk, he has seen that the company is “the most extraordinary engineering organisation”.

“I’ve seen people come and I’ve seen people go and we’re taking this incredibly seriously. Because if you look at the resources they have, if you look at the determination of the organisation and you look at the quality of the products that are being delivered, I think Huawei are going to be a very, very big player in the smartphone marketplace for many years to come,” Dunstone said.

The new card reader plugs into Apple or Android mobile devices (phones and tablets) and allows small businesses to accept both chip card and magnetic stripe card payments.

“Starting today [18 June], anyone selling anything in Mexico can take card payments – chip or magstripe – quickly and safely using their smartphone or tablet,” said Jacob de Geer (pictured), co-founder and CEO of iZettle. “This is the start of big change for Mexico, where accepting card payments has never before been an affordable option for new or small businesses.”

Mexico has proven a tough market in which to whip up excitement about making or receiving payments on mobile devices. And while big names, including Telefonica and MasterCard, have attempted to crack mobile payments services in Latin America, the emphasis has generally been on enabling payments by consumers, rather than their acceptance by merchants.

This clearly hasn’t put off iZettle, whose entry into Mexico marks the first time the firm has made its service available outside Europe (where it currently has a presence in seven countries).

In fact, Sweden-based iZettle – sometimes referred to as the “Square of Europe” – sees its move into Mexico as a possible launch pad for expansion throughout the Americas.

iZettle says its payment service takes just minutes to set up, and works with all major payment cards. There’s no subscription, set up or monthly fee. Instead, iZettle merchants pay 3.75 per cent of each transaction when using a chip card, and 4.75 per cent of each transaction with magstripe cards. iZettle then electronically deposits payments in the seller’s bank account.

Speaking at London’s Roundhouse venue for the launch of the P6, Richard Yu, CEO of Huawei Consumer Business Group, said the new device innovates in terms of hardware design, camera technology and software functionality.

Referring to the Chinese company’s new slogan announced at Mobile World Congress in February, Yu said: “We want the ‘impossible things are possible’ spirit to challenge the market, to challenge ourselves, to challenge the innovation of the industry.”

The Android-powered P6 features a 4.7 inch HD screen and 1.5GHz quadcore processor and has an 8 megapixel rear-facing camera and 5 megapixel front-facing camera. The smartphone supports HSPA+ 3G at launch but Yu promised an LTE version will arrive in the autumn.

With a recommended retail price of €449, the P6 will be launched in 19 countries by the end of July, including the UK, Spain, Germany, China and Australia. Huawei plans to make the P6 available in more than 100 countries by the end of the year.

The camera features the IMAGESmart engine with automatic scene recognition for different light conditions and photo types. It also has HD video recording capability and 4cm Macro View, which allows objects to remain in focus from just 4cm away.

The P6 features the latest version of Huawei’s Emotion UI which was first launched a year ago. The new version includes more than 300 enhancements, which UI design director Dennis Poon said “makes it more usable, powerful and fun”. Poon also touted the range of data permission options available as part of the UI.

Nick Woodley, head of Huawei’s London design office, said the company used the simplicity of paper as an inspiration for the design of the new smartphone: “With the P6 we truly believe we’ve achieved world class design. We tried to keep simplicity key to the whole thing,” he said.

Eun, who also mentioned communications and education as other areas of interest, said acquisitions could add unique features to the vendor’s handsets.

The company is looking at several possible targets.

“We have an early investment group that invests in early stage companies and we are doing acquisitions as well. In addition, we’re setting up incubators in Silicon Valley and New York to incubate our own startups,” said Eun.

Samsung hopes to gain access to customised content through such deals that will differentiate its devices from rivals.

The idea would be to spread content across all the vendor’s devices, including TVs as well as its high-profile handsets such as the Galaxy S4.

Eun was speaking at the Bloomberg Next Big Thing Summit.

The US mobile operator adds that the satellite broadcaster has repeatedly tried to “fool” Clearwire shareholders into believing its proposal to acquire the spectrum of the US wholesaler was actionable.

Sprint was miffed when the Clearwire board recently recommended an upped offer from Dish for the 49.8 per cent equity it does not own in the US wholesaler. Sprint previously had the backing of the Clearwire board for its own bid.

But in a statement on Monday (17 June), announcing it had filed a complaint against Dish and Clearwire in the Delaware Court of Chancery, Sprint is scathing about the Dish tender offer and the Investors Rights Agreement (IRA) and Note Purchase Agreement (NPA) put forward by the satellite broadcaster.

Sprint argues that they all violate the rights of both Sprint and Clearwire’s other strategic investors.

Under Clearwire’s charter and the Equity Holders Agreement (EHA), Sprint maintains that the Dish tender offer (together with IRA and NPA) cannot be completed without the approval of holders of at least 75 per cent of Clearwire’s outstanding voting securities and a thumbs up from Comcast. Neither of these approvals have been obtained and completion of the tender offer without them, argues Sprint, would be unlawful.

Sprint adds that the IRA requires Clearwire to place and maintain a number of Dish designees on its board of directors in breach of the provisions in the EHA permitting Sprint to nominate seven directors; the Significant Investors Group to nominate several other directors; and the nominating committee to nominate the remainder.

Without mincing words, Sprint alleges the Dish offer is “unlawfully coercive because it threatens to leave non-tendering shareholders holding shares in a company subject to governance deadlocks or substantial damage awards to Dish if Clearwire is unable to deliver on the unenforceable promises set forth in the IRA and NPA”.

As well as trying to block the tender offer, “Sprint’s lawsuit seeks to rescind certain parts of the tender offer agreement and seeks declaratory, injunctive, compensatory and other relief”.

Sprint’s lawsuit against Dish comes on the eve of a deadline today (18 June) for the satellite broadcaster to make a “best and final” takeover offer for Sprint.

Dish has been in competition with Japan’s SoftBank since April to take a majority holding in the US mobile operator.

However, the Sprint board, on 10 June, approved a revised offer from SoftBank while claiming that Dish had not put forward an actionable proposal.

Dish has until today to convince the Sprint board otherwise.

Unlike television, which sees low usage during the day and a dramatic increase in evenings, mobile app usage increases steadily during the day.

In order to reach app users consistently, media planners must alter the weighting of their budgets away from the evening focus of TV to a more evenly-spread distribution during the day.

With mobile devices becoming ever more prevalent, Flurry said marketers and advertisers “need to learn how to make mobile a central part of their marketing and media plans, not just an afterthought.”

Flurry’s research also suggests that gaming is becoming a less dominant category for app users, with social and photo sharing apps catching up in terms of time spent in apps.

In addition, some categories, such as shopping and lifestyle, are used consistently during the day while other apps see the majority of usage in a narrower timeframe.

Kabel confirmed it had received an offer from Liberty, which also owns a cable network in Germany. Liberty is owned by John Malone (pictured).

The intervention could complicate Vodafone’s strategy in Germany. It is seeking to match incumbent Deutsche Telekom with an improved fixed-and-mobile package of its own. Acquiring Kabel is a key part of that strategy.

The mobile operator confirmed last week it had made a preliminary approach to Kabel Deutschland.

Vodafone now faces a potential bidding war.

People familiar with the situation said Liberty had made an indicative offer that would value Kabel Deutschland at about €7.5 billion, according to the Financial Times. This would trump Vodafone’s initial offer, thought to be worth €7.2 billion.

However, one analyst interviewed by Bloomberg questioned whether Liberty’s interest was genuine.

Heike Pauls of Commerzbank suggested the Liberty offer was a tactical move to push up the price for Kabel and “make it more difficult” for Vodafone.

“Liberty is aware that the cartel office would at best approve their deal under very tough conditions,” he said.

Square Enix Smileworks will create games for iOS, Android, Windows Phone and Nokia Symbian.

The studio has 23 staff, with three developers from Japan and the remainder from Indonesia. The studio is being headed up by Hiroaki Kanamaru.

According to Canalys, Indonesia, along with South Africa and Brazil, saw some of the strongest growth in app downloads and revenue in the first quarter of 2013.