New York - Skype, the Internet telephone service unit of eBay (NASD: EBAY), plans to launch an application that make its service available to users of Apple's (NASD: AAPL) iPhone tomorrow at a mobile industry trade show, and another in May that will enable its service for RIM's (NASD: RIMM) BlackBerry, Reuters reported. "The No. 1 request we get from customers is to make Skype available on iPhone. There's a pent-up demand," Skype COO Scott Durchslag told Reuters.

Dallas - AT&T (NYSE: NWS) announced on Thursday that it is provided free Wi-Fi access to first- and second-generation iPhone (NASD: AAPL) owners and select BlackBerry (NASD: RIMM) owners at its 17,000 hotspots, which can be found in locations including Starbucks and Barnes & Noble. The company said it also plans to make the offer available to more mobile devices in the future.

The recent release of the G1 (aka Google phone) through T-Mobile and soon to be released Blackberry Bold & Storm prompted me to compare search activity among the new handheld devices. We often compare the search volume on new products to gauge the strength of consumer interest and how that may translate into sales. The Blackberry Storm was the most commonly searched product with 3.5x the volume of searches for Blackberry Bold and 3.9x the volume of the G1.

Redwood City, Calif. - Shortly after announcing the release of a live mobile streaming application for the Apple iPhone, Qik on Monday introduced live streaming video support for Research In Motion's (NASD: RIMM) BlackBerry smartphones. Qik will initially support live video streaming on the BlackBerry Pearl and Bold models.

Los Angeles - The BlackBerry Partners Fund, established with $150 million to be granted to developers working on applications for BlackBerry smartphones, has awarded $150,000 each to three companies -- two of which are developing music applications for the platform, MocoNews reported.

Cupertino, Calif. - Apple (NASD: AAPL) is now the third-largest mobile phone company in the world, behind Nokia and Samsung, and its iPhone outsold RIM's (NASD: RIMM) BlackBerry in the recent quarter, the company revealed in its earnings statement. Apple said it sold 6.9 million of its iPhone 3G devices in the quarter ended Sept. 27, compared with 6.1 million BlackBerry units sold by RIM.

Waterloo, Ontario - BlackBerry smartphone maker Research In Motion (RIM) (NASD: RIMM) on Thursday announced new partnerships with TiVo (NASD: TIVO), MySpace (NYSE: NWS), Microsoft (NASD: MSFT) and Ticketmaster (NASD: TKTM) that will bring new content and services to its devices. Under the deals, BlackBerry owners will soon be able to view TV listings and schedule recordings on their TiVos; access an optimized version of MySpace with integrated push-based messaging; and access Microsoft Live Search. BlackBerry was also named the official smartphone of Ticketmaster, and the companies are developing an application that will facilitate browsing and purchasing of tickets.

A lot of the iPhone launch coverage last week included references to the alternatives to Apple’s latest mobile phone. It looks like the competitor that benefited most from these comparisons in Britain was Blackberry – ironic, considering that many are touting the new 3G iPhone as a ‘blackberry-killer’. As you can see from the table chart below, UK Internet searches for ‘blackberry’ reached their highest ever level last week.

Toronto, Canada - Jim Balsillie, Co-CEO of Research in Motion (NSDQ: RIMM), maker and developer of Blackberry devices, outlined his vision for the company as leveraging the convergence of social networking and multimedia in a morning keynote at the Canadian Music Week's digital music & media summit. His vision involves moving beyond facilitating text-messaging and email communication to bringing multimedia content and social networking together on mobile devices. He also challenged the music industry to embrace social networking to reach fans of all genres and sub-genres of music:
"Don't disintermediate yourselves as hit machines", Balsillie said to the room of music industry professionals.

Google has been quietly rolling out social features across all of its services based on Gmail contacts. While Google still has to overcome some of its social tone-deafness (e.g. automatically adding contacts without asking), this move makes perfect sense. For people over 30 (and probably even over 25) email IS the social graph.

This weekend we drove from our home in Leesburg, VA to visit my wife’s family in Staten Island, NY. Along the way, we passed through rural areas of Maryland, Delaware, and New Jersey. I had my laptop with me, which we used while we were driving. I used my Blackberry 8830 as a tethered modem, and we enjoyed UNINTERRUPTED high speed internet access.

This is a picture of my copy of Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days. It has broken my record for the “book with most stickies.” My system is that the stickies on the top edge are ideas for my next book, and the ones on the side are ideas for this blog. As you can see, it’s a gold mine for great stories about entrepreneurship. Here is a list of some of my favorites. The major lesson: Entrepreneurship is all about tactics, hootspah, not knowing that things are not done “this way,” and making do with not enough money.