Juniper Research expects the number of tickets delivered to mobile phones will more than quadruple from last year’s worldwide total of 4 billion tickets to 23 billion by 2016.

Its new report says mobile users are now beginning to adopt mobile tickets as an integrated part of their mobile lifestyle, with m-tickets being used by airlines, transport, sporting events and entertainment.

RIM plans to release a series of updates to BlackBerry apps that’ll make it easier for users to combine social networking with their BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) contacts.

The new versions of Facebook for BlackBerry smartphones and Twitter for BlackBerry smartphones will allow users to automatically share their Facebook status or Tweets with BBM friends from within the app.

Nokia has announced that it’ll be producing an NFC version of the Nokia Lumia 610 smartphone.

The Nokia Lumia 610 NFC has been certified for contactless payments with MasterCard PayPass technology and Visa payWave. It’s expected to launch on Orange networks early in the third quarter of 2012.

This week’s podcast from The Fonecast covers all the top mobile industry stories from the past seven days. We discuss Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram and Microsoft’s plans to buy over 800 patents from AOL - plus the rest of the latest headlines, from free 0800 calls to mobile security plans.

As usual, you can listen to the programme on our website audio player, via iTunes, by using our RSS feed or by downloading the MP3.

There are two billion-dollar deals in this week's show, with Facebook acquiring Instagram and AOL selling hundeds of patents to Microsoft. In addition, we discuss the rest of the mobile industry headlines - from security to virtual reality.