France Telecom

Regulators in France have put a stop to France Telecom's Orange being the only carrier selling Apple's iPhone in France. The Counseil de la Concurrence, the French Council on Competitiveness, acted after another carrier, Bouyges Telecom, filed a complaint.

The council asked Apple to cease its exclusivity deal with Orange and allow other carriers to offer service for the iPhone while regulators further investigate. Orange offers the iPhone in several countries in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, and had been exclusively selling the iPhone in France since July.

Vodafone announced the reorganization of its business structure and top management Tuesday, splitting in two its emerging-markets division and appointing a new boss for Europe.

Vodafone, the world's largest mobile phone operator by revenue, said it had appointed Michael Combes, the former finance director of France Telecom, as the new chief executive for Europe and said Paul Donovan, chief executive of the emerging-markets division, would leave.

Salesforce.com, based in San Francisco, has acquired its fourth company in the last two years. The provider of customer-service support acquired Instranet, its largest acquisition to date, for $31.5 million in cash, which includes $4.2 million from Instranet's balance sheet. The two companies closed the deal on Aug. 4.

A new marketing initiative in Britain for Orange, a wireless operator owned by France Telecom, captures the subtle but significant shift taking place in the European mobile industry.

Like most other operators in Europe, Orange dangles a piece of free hardware in exchange for a two-year service contract. But this time, to win customers, Orange is including a laptop computer, not a mobile phone.

As part of its ongoing effort to place its services with network operators, telecommunications giant Nokia said today that it had formed a strategic international partnership for content and services with France Telecom's Orange.

The agreement extends a deal first signed by the companies in February of this year, expanding it into a three-year partnership. It will include the addition of ten new Nokia handsets to the Orange Signature range, as well as the addition of music, games, advertising, maps, and location-based services.

Part of Orange Signature

The iPhone's reach is expanding. Orange, France Telecom's flagship brand, announced that it will sell Apple's phone in additional countries in Europe, as well as the Middle East and Africa.

Orange said it will sell the iPhone in Austria, Belgium, the Dominican Republic, Egypt, Jordan, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Switzerland and the African countries of Ivory Coast, Jordan, Cameroon, Botswana, Madagascar, Mali, Senegal, Mauritius and Réunion.

In another step in the worldwide march of Apple Inc.'s iPhone, the top mobile phone operator in Latin America said Wednesday that it has inked a deal to bring the multimedia gadget to more than a dozen countries starting later this year.

America Movil SAB, controlled by Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim, said it plans to bring the iPhone to all of its Latin American operations but didn't offer more details about the arrangement, including whether it would be the exclusive iPhone provider in the targeted countries.

Will the iPhone change Europe? Or will Europe change the iPhone? Two recent newspaper reports published on the Continent say that Europe appears to be exerting the greater influence so far on the iconic device.

Neither report revealed its source, but both asserted that Apple was poised to fundamentally change the way it sells the iPhone in Europe, giving up its demand for a share of data revenue from operators -- which some analysts say is as much as 30 percent -- to accommodate local preferences for less expensive, subsidized devices.