GigaOM

Harbinger Capital today offered satellite service provider MSV/Skyterra $500 million to pay for the company’s launch of its two new satellites. The private equity firm also made clear it’s planning to push for a deal to acquire British satellite company Inmarsat. The acquisition attempt isn’t welcomed by Inmarsat, but Harbinger owns 28.8 percent of its stock, which means Inmarsat will have a tough time keeping Harbinger and the Skyterra deal at bay.

We started to anticipate such mergers back in March after looking at the number of players trying to make it in the difficult satellite services business, as well as the likelihood of U.S. regulators approving the Sirius-XM merger, which took another step further yesterday. Harbinger is apparently confident that the FCC will look favorably on its attempt to provide a 4G satellite and terrestrial network, too.

The combination of Skyterra and Inmarsat makes sense because they both own complimentary spectrum and satellites that work in the L band. According to the Skyterra press release, regulatory approvals for any deal would take between a year to 18 months to complete, which means the $500 million in cash is needed to keep the company — and its birds — afloat in the meantime.

Harbinger could be eyeing other deals as well. The firm has a large ownership stake in TerreStar, which owns spectrum in the same band owned by EchoStar. TerreStar is leasing spectrum from Echostar are already sharing spectrum, so closer ties between those two are likely coming.

photo from NASA

Yesterday, the guys from eBuddy sent me a press release (pdf link) that made me wonder: With the rise of flat-rate data plans for feature-packed mobiles and the high-speed 3G network becoming commonplace, will mobile IM start to eat into the lucrative SMS business?

The data from eBuddy would suggest as much. The company claims that 5 million copies of their mobile IM client were downloaded in the first year the company made the software available. The company is processing a billion messages every month from two million unique monthly users. I am still not clear how it translates into big business, given mobile advertising is still in the early development phase.

eBuddy is quite popular in Europe, where 3G has become pervasive. This explains to some extent the heavy messaging reported by eBuddy. It is also an area where SMS charges are quite high, so it’s cheaper to use mobile IM than sending text messages. Mobile IM is a pretty hot market, with a bunch of players, such as OZ, trying to grab the brass ring. Nimbuzz is another recent entrant. Research analysts at Informa estimate the global market for mobile IM will hit $11 billion by 2011.

Nokia and Qualcomm buried the hatchet this week, deciding to settle matters out of court and become friends. While the details of the settlement aren’t clear, The Wall Street Journal reports that as a result of this settlement, Nokia will pay less to Qualcomm. The deal ensures that Qualcomm continues to get money in the 4G era regardless of WiMAX and LTE technologies.

The deal also paves the way for Nokia to aggressively chase the U.S. CDMA opportunities. The company has been desperately trying to get a toehold in the U.S., but has failed to get carriers to cozy up to its handsets. AT&T will introduce five Nokia phones this year, but it is with the CDMA that Nokia can have an impact.

In order to get going, Nokia has been willing to make concessions to meet the needs of carriers. Verizon recently launched Nokia 6205. Thanks to the truce, it is not impossible to imagine Nokia phones with Qualcomm’s Brew OS.

Nokia, according to some of my sources, feels that a feeble Motorola is ready to be knocked over from its strong position with two CDMA carriers, Sprint and Verizon. Analysts estimate that Motorola sales are going to suffer mostly because the company doesn’t have the handsets to match the onslaught from Apple, RIM, Samsung, LG and even Nokia. And the fact that Motorola is spinning out its handset business…even carriers are starting to wonder if they can count on the beleaguered mobile phone maker. Nokia wants to step into the breach and become a bigger player in the U.S. Nokia’s current share of the U.S. mobile market is about 6 percent.

Fresh off their launch of Facebook Connect at their second developer conference, the social networking company is going to launch a mobile version of the Facebook Connect this fall, Jed Stremel, director of mobile for Facebook, said in a chat today. The Palo Alto, Calif.-based company is going to release the code of their entire “mobile subsystem” he said.

This will allow developers to add Facebook’s social graph into their applications. Stremel said the company was going to release the code first for iPhone, mostly because they have been contacted by various developers who want to build social features into their iPhone and iPod Touch apps. The company will shift attention to other platforms later, he added.

When I asked how it’s different from Facebook Connect for the web, he said that instead of just technical protocols, the company is going to give out the entire code so people can drop it into their applications and have consistency with Facebook’s own mobile applications. Continue Reading

I am hanging out at the MobileBeat conference in Sunnyvale, Calif., today, watching Erick Schonfeld grill panelists on the “Bang or Bust” panel. One of the panelists is Matt Murphy, head of the $100 million iFund at Kleiner, Perkins Caufield & Byers. “We have invested in five companies so far,” he told the room.

He named iControl, which brings home automation to the iPhone, as one of the fund’s investments, and said the names of three more would be revealed sometime between September and November. Given that the iFund was only announced back in March, I am surprised by the number of startups they’re investing in already. I have heard that VCs are currently sifting through business plans for iPhone-related startups. Tapulous is one of the hot iPhone startups out there and has already raised venture capital from well-known angels in Silicon Valley.

More information later after I wrap up my panel, which kicks off in a few minutes.

Without a radio, your cell phone is a small computer that can’t show web pages, check email or even make phone calls. In a sense it’s BrickBreaker playing brick. While it may come as a surprise to learn that it’s radios that do the heavy lifting to keep us connected to GPS satellites, cellular networks, nearby Wi-Fi and in some cases network television, so it is with laptops as well, especially those aiming to be Netbooks or cloud PCs.

In fact there are too many radios, especially on high-end devices. And it’s only going to get worse in coming years as 4G networks using LTE or WiMAX proliferate. Sure WiMAX will begin as a data card inserted into a laptop much like my beloved 3G modem, but in time it will find itself in handheld devices including mobile phones (or so vendors tell me). Meanwhile current 3G and 2G networks will still have to be supported because carriers roll out new networks slowly. Add in radios for other wireless devices, and problems start to emerge. Continue Reading