Fixed Mobile Convergence

Blackboard will begin providing smart mobile web access for Blackboard Mobile Central- its campus life and services application, and a new native app for Palm Web-OS devices.

The Blackboard (News - Alert) Mobile Central application gives college communities on-demand access to vital campus information, when and where they need it. Students, faculty and alumni can use it to connect instantly with anyone on campus as well as browse the course catalog; stay up-to-date with the latest news, athletics scores and campus events, and access interactive maps.

The Blackboard Mobile Central application is available for the iPhone, iPod Touch, Android, BlackBerry (News - Alert) and Palm web-OS, as well as in mobile web versions for browser-enabled devices.

Earth Networks, owner of WeatherBug products and services has announced the availability of its WeatherBug Mobile App for Android (News - Alert) 3.0 Honeycomb operating systems.

This new application debuted this week at the 2011 Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, at Google’s (News - Alert) Exhibit.

The App, which was designed specifically for Android 3.0 Honeycomb, includes a number of different features such as immediate access to preferred weather information and views and a large map that provides several contoured weather overlay options – such as satellite, radar, humidity, pressure, wind speed, and forecast highs and lows – to display current conditions and approaching systems.

In other news, earlier this week, Apple (News - Alert) (News - Alert) unveiled its new subscription service for all publishers of content-based apps on the App Store, including magazines, newspapers, video and music. This is the same innovative digital subscription billing service that Apple recently launched with News Corp’s (News - Alert) “The Daily” app.

The new subscription model has raised some questions among law professors, who think that Apple’s subscription policy could draw anti-trust scrutiny. Publishers who use Apple’s subscription service in their app can also leverage other methods for acquiring digital subscribers outside of the app.

Apple said that customers purchasing a subscription through the App Store will be given the option of providing the publisher with their name, email address, and zip code when they subscribe. The use of such information will be governed by the publisher’s privacy policy rather than Apple’s.

For all the latest news in the communications world, visit tmcnet.com.