France Telecom’s half-year net income jumped 45 percent to €3.95 billion ($5.1 billion) after the telco scored a €1 billion ($1.3 billion) one-time gain from merging Orange UK with T-Mobile UK.

—Ovi browser: Nokia (NYSE: NOK) has launched an Opera mini-style web browser for Series 40 phones that compresses webpages before they reach users, in order to slim down on data charges and load heft. —Autosport: The UK motor racing mag says its new £2.99 iPhone app got 1,200 downloads in its first 24 hours, entering iTunes’ paid sports app chart at #1. —Pocket TV: The Sony (NYSE: SNE) Ericsson-branded made-for-mobile music and entertainment show Pocket TV has had its rights snapped up for the living room TV by Channel 4, Guardian.co.uk reports.

UK cable operator Virgin Media’s new web and mobile VOD service will offer premium archive material, rather than the latest catch-up shows, because broadcasters already offer own-brand catch-up services, Virgin Media’s TV and online executive director Alex Green tells paidContent:UK.

Is this the chart that shows us who’s benefiting from The Times’ paid website strategy… ?

O2 UK customer churn came in at just 1.1 percent in the first half of the year, despite a year of data network outages. The telco has 4.5 percent more customers now than last year. Operating income grew 7.7 percent to €883 million ($1.1 billion).

UK satcaster BSkyB (NYSE: BSY) CEO Jeremy Darroch channeled much the same belief in paid content as its its largest shareholder News Corp (NSDQ: NWS). while discussing healthy growth from the last financial year with investment analysts Thursday morning…

BT (NYSE: BT) Vision quarterly sign-ups slowed to their lowest for two years during Q2, as the hybrid Freeview/IPTV service added 14,000 customers, taking it up to 481,000. BT clocked six percent higher EBITDA of £1.39 billion, despite four percent lower revenue of £5 billion.

In the phone call to discuss half-year earnings Thursday morning, a technical glitch prevented Trinity Mirror (LSE: TNI) CEO Sly Bailey from hearing any questions from analysts. That’s unfortunate, given the news publisher is growing profit only from cost cuts at present…

Within a couple of hours of BSkyB (NYSE: BSY) announcing it’s nicked Virgin Media’s UK VOD rights to HBO shows, the cable operator rushed out confirmation of its upcoming web and mobile VOD offering.

UK national and regional news publisher Trinity Mirror’s digital income for the first half of this year is down by £300,000 to £18.6 million ($28.9 million) compared with last year, even though the news publisher is hailing traffic growth.

Digital investor and former Reuters (NYSE: TRI) innovation head Azeem Azhar has shuttered his recently-launched Viewsflow site for identifying the most insightful news commentary, but fed the learnings in to PeerIndex, a service which attempts to rank people according to their authority on subjects.

What will the free-web pundits and anti-paywall brigadiers do when one of their own online poster girls comes out in favour of paid content? Not too much yet. Heather Brooke, the investigative journalist who made her name in the UK by seeking access to House Of Commons expense filings, has this to say on her blog to critics who think writing for the paid-for Times somehow betrays her affection for openness…

The World Cup was shot in 3D, BSkyB (NYSE: BSY) is investing heavily in to 3D. But, despite all the hype, it’s connectivity, and not whizz-bang visuals, that will shift more TVs in the next few years, according to iSuppli. Worldwide, iSuppli reckons 27.7 million internet-enabled TVs will ship this year, against just 4.2 million 3D TVs.

—E! Online: The celeb TV channel has picked Web TV Enterprise to sell ads in to its UK website videos. —888sport.com: The online betting agency is launching a mobile website, aiming to capitalise on a mobile betting market Junpier says could be worth $27.5 billion by 2013. —Shazam on Orange: Shazam has got placement for its music discovery app on Orange’s mobile store (turns out it has one, too). Both the free and the £3 Encore versions are available, on “12 or so Sony (NYSE: SNE) Ericsson (NSDQ: ERIC), LG (SEO: 066570), Samsung and Nokia (NYSE: NOK) models and many…

How many Pink Pounds can you get for Pink News? Publisher Benjamin Cohen may be about to find out. He is looking at sale or equity options for the site, which has published news for *LGBT* readers since 2005, he tells Press Gazette...

European venture funding in Q2 bounced back by 50 percent from a record low a year ago, according to Dow Jones VentureSource. Here’s a breakdown… “The Information Technology (IT) industry, which bore the brunt of the venture market’s losses during the economic downturn, was the star performer in the most recent quarter.

Yell Group’s March-to-June quarter is a classic snapshot of an old print classifieds company - making digital gains, but not enough to offset the declining legacy business, especially coming out of the recession. Online ad sales rose 9.7 percent from last year’s period to £111.6 million; that’s now a healthy quarter of group income.

Lloyd’s List and Datamonitor academic, scientific and business publisher Informa is the latest publisher to post a big profit increase despite slow revenue. January-to-June revenue dipped two percent to £624 million, but profit more than doubled to £66.4 million ($103 million).

—FT Alphaville: Tokyo-based reporter Tracy Alloway is becoming deputy editor of the Financial Times’ live analysis community and blog, working from August from end of August, Gorkana says. —TheBusinessDesk.com: The site founded by a redundant Birmingham Post editor has nabbed Mike Fahy, the deputy editor of defunct Crain’s Manchester Business, to be its own assistant editor. —C4 Online: New Channel 4 online head Richard Davidson-Houston (pictured) is conducting “a month-long review of the range of activities in online products, cross-platform commissioning, 4iP and education”, C21 says.