Mobile News reports that staff in the 40 Go Mobile stores owned by Shebang have been told they must either join its franchise program, run by The Purple Partnership, or face redundancy.

Apparently 84 staff are affected; if they don't want to run their own store, they will be offered positions at other franchise stores or a redundancy package.

Mark Bridge writes:

Those quarterly figures keep coming. In our Wednesday podcast we talked about Apple and Nokia – and since then we’ve heard from Everything Everywhere, LG, Motorola, Samsung (with its multi-million selling Galaxy S II), Telefonica and Virgin Media. Each had something positive to stay, although some were more convincing than others.

Online research company comScore has published the latest figures from its comScore MobiLens service.

It shows that 5.8% of mobile subscribers in France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the UK - a total of 13.5 million people - have accessed online retail sites recently. That's an overall 80% increase from 2010.

Swiss watch manufacturer TAG Heuer has announced what it's calling "the first Swiss luxury touchscreen smartphone".

The TAG Heuer LINK runs v2.2 of the Android operating system and follows in the footsteps of the MERIDIIST, the TAG Heuer luxury phone produced by French manufacturer ModeLabs in 2008.

Research in Motion has announced that BBM - the BlackBerry Messenger instant messaging service - is now going to be available from within certain applications.

The new version 6 of BBM will work with 'BBM connected' apps , enabling users to interact with friends from within the app itself. For example, a BBM connected game would let users chat in real-time while the game is being played.