Mobile-based music recognition service Shazam has arranged a new $30 million investment (around £20 million), which values the company at over $1 billion (£663 million).

The company has over 100 million active mobile users per month and has seen its app downloaded over 500 million times.

Shazam, which enables users to identify or ‘tag’ music tracks and learn more about TV shows via a smartphone app, has predicted the music artists that it expects will ‘break’ during 2014.

Overall, more than 400 million people use Shazam worldwide, with more than 15 million Shazam searches taking place every day.

Media engagement company Shazam, which offers a mobile-based music identification service, says its free mobile app has now been used more than 10 billion times to identify and ‘tag’ songs, television shows and TV ads.

The 10 billionth song was ‘Applause’ by Lady Gaga, which was tagged on an iOS device in the US state of New Jersey.

We start this week's podcast by talking about an Android security risk - before moving on to new 4G services from EE, a drop in Nook tablet prices and a couple of quarterly results that disappointed the stock market.

In addition we discuss insurance complaints, Bluetooth Smart technology, a new multi-million investment in Shazam and some research about the future of apps.

America Movil, which is Latin America’s largest mobile telecom network operator, has invested $40 million in mobile music recognition and media engagement company Shazam.

The money will help accelerate Shazam’s growth as well as funding the development of new products.

Mark Windle, head of marketing at OpenCloud, predicts that this year’s reduction in the number of traditional telecoms operators in some countries will provide an opportunity for other operators to innovate and capture market share in 2016.

He says next year will be a year of rapid change for telecoms… whether it’s MVNO disruption, competitive tariff pricing or simply defence from the ‘dark art’ of hacking.

Mark Bridge writes:

The most memorable moments in life often go unrecorded. You don't have your camera in your hands. Your finger is still hovering over the 'pause' button on your audio recorder. Or you were simply too busy experiencing whatever was happening. It's all about the one that got away.

That's where Kapture can help.

Mark Bridge writes:

James Rosewell shows me a colourful roll of paper that's the width of an iPhone but well over three metres long. When I look closer, I can see it's a printed copy of the Wall Street Journal's mobile website. That's a lot of scrolling to do... and a pretty unfriendly user experience for anyone reading the news online. Why does it work so badly?

In this week's podcast we find BlackBerry facing a legal battle, SMS spammers suffering a big fine and EE boosting its 4G data tariffs.

We're also talking about a new iPhone camera accessory from musician will.i.am, rich cross-network communications in Spain, free WiFi in Yorkshire and the year's most-popular mobile search terms.

This week's podcast starts with news that HP is unhappy - but we resist the temptation to include any saucy puns that might spice up the story.

The programme also covers Nokia's new Facebook-friendly phone, plans for white space technology in the UK, shopping on smartphones, Samsung's Chinese suppliers, the demand for mobile data and a new app from Orange that seems to threaten its mobile business.

There's plenty of talk about mobile networks in this week's podcast. We start with a new charity-focussed MVNO before moving on to Ofcom's plans for avoiding a mobile capacity crunch.

There's also talk about WiFi offloading, BlackBerry's free voice calling service, Nokia's map business and much more as well.

In this special feature we're talking about mobile marketing and consumer privacy with Henry Lawson, CEO and co-founder of nFluence.

nFluence offers a technology solution that lets customers use their smartphone to personalise their marketing preferences in less than 30 seconds.

The UK's 4G spectrum auctions are given a start date, while RIM reveals the launch day for its BlackBerry 10 platform.

This week's podcast also covers the patent deal between Apple and HTC, the departure of Windows Live Messenger, the success of the Samsung Galaxy SIII and some mobile payment innovation.