BlackBerry has appointed Marty Beard as Chief Operating Officer with immediate effect.

Until last month Mr Beard was Chairman and CEO of cloud-based customer service specialist LiveOps.

Apple’s financial results for the third quarter of its 2014 financial year - the three months until 28th June - show iPhone sales of 35.2 million devices worldwide, a 13% increase from the same quarter last year.

However, iPad sales were down 9% year-on-year to just under 13.3 million units.

We start this week's podcast with news that thousands of Microsoft's ex-Nokia employees are losing their jobs.

Other topics for discussion include the new Apple and IBM partnership, Yahoo's acquisition of Flurry, regulating mobile games, improving rural mobile coverage, BT's new phone service and some management movements.

Office stationery retailer Staples and mobile card payment provider payleven have set up a distribution agreement that’ll see the payleven Chip & PIN card reader made available in all Staples stores across the UK, Germany and the Netherlands.

payleven offers a Chip & PIN card reader that can be used via Bluetooth with an Apple or Android smartphone. Businesses simply pay a 2.75% transaction fee whenever they use payleven to process a credit or debit card payment.

Yahoo! has agreed to acquire Flurry, a US-based business that provides mobile app developers with information about the people using their apps as well as providing insight to advertisers and publishers.

Flurry currently sees activity from more than 540,000 smartphone and tablet apps on over 1.4 billion devices worldwide. At the moment it’s used by 170,000 developers.