Written by Ken Young, whose own blog is called The UK Mobile Report.

The Mobile World Congress, formerly known as 3GSM, will bring 13,000 companies and some 100,000 visitors to Barcelona next week. The show, which runs Monday through Thursday, is the mobile equivalent of the CES show in Las Vegas. There will be hundreds of announcements, but as ever, the big vendors are likely to grab most of the headlines.

Yahoo will be there to talk about its mobile strategy. Microsoft will be there too, and may be in spin mode for reasons other than its Yahoo bid — it’s about to announce an alliance with Nokia that will put its operating system on some Nokia devices, according to Tech.co.uk.

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Written by Ken Young, whose own blog is called The UK Mobile Report.

With offices in Lithuania, London and shortly L.A., Getjar is a small mobile software portal with big ambitions. And it recently took in funding of $6 million from Accel Partners, which should go some way to see it retain its strong position amongst web sites that bring mobile phone software to the attention of millions of users.

But one might wonder how Accel plans to make money out of its investment. Getjar, which has just 12 employees, is primarily a destination site for hundreds of developers and volunteer beta testers who co-mingle in one big, open-source soup. “We attract developers because they can immediately get their software tested by thousands of beta testers, who do it for the fun of it and give more than just feedback,” explains Getjar CEO Ilja Laurs. “They even give ideas on how the software could be improved to their liking.”

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Written by Ken Young, whose own blog is called The UK Mobile Report.

BT has stopped marketing its Fusion handsets to consumers and is now testing a service that uses the same technology but would allow BT broadband users to access the web on the move using handheld devices made by HTC, according to the Daily Telegraph.

Fusion is a convergence service that allows subscribers to make cheap or free calls via Wi-Fi into a BT broadband hub at home and then make calls via the Vodafone network or through BT’s Wi-Fi hotspots when outside. Three dual-mode phones, including the Motorola Razr, are Fusion-compatible. It was first marketed to home users and later to businesses. Om had his doubts about Fusion when BT unveiled it in June 2005, then called BluePhone.

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