Research in Motion Ltd. will sell its BlackBerry PlayBook tablet for under US$500, said co-chief executive officer Jim Balsillie. The touch screen tablet will be launched in the United States in the first quarter of 2011, The Wall Street Journal reported today.

"There's a lot of demand and we are seeing a lot of interest from international retailers," Balsillie said, adding that the Asian market, especially South Korea and Japan will be key.

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According to the Christian Science Monitor, the price set by RIM puts the PlayBook "in direct competition with the Apple iPad," which is currently being at a initial price of $499.

The PlayBook is smaller than the iPad as it has a 7-inch display while Apple's tablet is 9.7 inches, the Agence France Press reported. Furthermore, it will used Adobe Flash video software and will connect to the Internet through Wi-Fi or Bluetooth.

U.S. publisher Southwest Newspapers has launched iMarketplace.mn Mobile, an application and text service intended to assist businesses in the southwest suburbs of Minneapolis in devising a text-message subscriber list, Pitch Engine revealed today.

"The service is a great way to connect with mobile users," said Jennifer Sorenson, Southwest's advertising sales director. "By building a text-message subscriber base, businesses build a bigger customer base."

Businesses will be able to issue weekly offers and deals on iMarketplace.mn. The publisher will then proceed to include them in all 10 of its print titles, build advertising material for companies to attract users towards the mobile feature and finally, to market the app for smart phones across the publisher's websites.

The venture was devised in collaboration with Zip2save.com, a national enterprise that provides coupons, weekly circulars, Internet shopping deals, travel promotions and other deals.

Despite the global economic downturn that has slowed or reversed growth across media industries since 2008, technologies and digital sectors continue to advance and grow, and new media platforms gain market share across the board. Meanwhile, traditional media are seeing limited growth or decreasing shares overall, according to the report, World Digital Media Trends 2010, released by the Shaping the Future of the Newspaper project and the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers.

According to IDATE, the number of mobile customers worldwide has grown from 2.16 billion in 2005 to a projected 5.2 billion in 2012, with the number of Chinese customers far surpassing any other country, with an estimated 915 million customers in 2012. The Asia Pacific region on the whole will grow from 820 million to 2.54 billion customers from 2005 to 2012.

Following China in growth are India, expanding tenfold from 76 million to 704 million, and Japan, from 90 million to 126 million, in the six-year period.

Meanwhile the No. 2 continent, Europe, will expand its customer base from 692 million to 1.04 billion, led by Russia, Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom.

Yahoo plans to unveil a new feature called 'Y Connect' this autumn, emulating the Facebook Connect strategy to allow media publishers, Web developers and other websites to integrate elements of their services with Yahoo, the Wall Street Journal reported.

This move by Yahoo is aimed at helping Internet companies track user engagement and better target advertising offers, while increasing traffic to its site - a strategy already used by Facebook, the WSJ pointed out.

With the Internet service company struggling of late to increase traffic on its site and having recently revamped its search feature, "additional traffic is critical at this juncture," Mashable.com reported. The company has also been rumoured to be fighting off an acquisition attempt by AOL.

Through this Y Connect feature, users can register and log into media sites simply by clicking a Yahoo button and sharing their activity on media sites with other contacts on Yahoo. Content on non-Yahoo sites would be shared via Yahoo Pulse, a hub connected to Yahoo Mail accounts, according to the WSJ.