Location-based social network Gowalla is to close at the end of January, having been acquired by Facebook.

User data isn’t being transferred; Gowalla says it intends to provide an easy way for users to export this information.

As we approach the end of the year, so next year’s predictions start. We’ll be offering our own mobile industry predictions in a special podcast later this month.

Meanwhile, market intelligence company International Data Corporation has been looking at the growing areas of mobile computing, cloud services, social networking and data analytics - and has made its own 2012 predictions.

Research company comScore has published details of mobile social media usage across France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom; the ‘EU5’.

The information, which comes from comScore’s MobiLens service, shows that the number of people accessing social networks on mobile devices in the EU5 region grew by 44% in the last year.

Earlier this year, Google launched a beta version of Google Music to a number of customers in the USA. It allowed users to upload their personal music collection to ‘the cloud’ and stream it to any of their Android mobile devices or their computer, with some offline playback available as well.

The company has now launched a public version of Google Music, which includes a music store offering over 13 million tracks.

The BBM Music service from Research In Motion has gone live in the UK, charged at £4.99 per month after the 60-day free trial ends.

The downloadable app, which was revealed in August, lets users save up to 50 music tracks on their BlackBerry device.