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Voice and mobile phones go together like ice cream and cake, so it’s no surprise to see that BubbleMotion has scored $14 million in second-round funding for its voice-to-text-message voice SMS service for carriers. It’s one of several players racing to deliver services that bypass the mobile keyboard to make everything — from finding a restaurant to sending a text message — easier. The service drives up text message use revenue for carriers, but BubbleMotion still has to educate the market on its services still playing in a crowded market.

Earlier today some blogs reported that Sequoia Capital had invested in Cotendo, a content delivery company based in Israel. The reports didn’t offer much details in terms of technology and the people involved with the project.

Thanks to some helpful friends in Israel and in the CDN business, we found out that the co-founders of the company are Ronni Zehavi and David Drai. Zehavi is the CEO and Drai is the CTO of the new company. They both worked for anti-spam and security software company, Commtouch Software.

Their profiles on LinkedIn describe Cotendo as a company “developing a sophisticated innovative infrastructure which provides an efficient and low-cost CDN service. Cotendo new approach open the ability for new services which help content providers to get the maximum benefit from content acceleration.” The company has 10 employees, many of them from Commtouch. It is not clear what kind of technology they have developed and how much funding Cotendo has raised.

WiMAX in the U.S. has been a bit on the ropes, but it isn’t dead yet. And if you believe The Wall Street Journal, a miraculous comeback maybe in the offering, thanks to some deep-pocketed cable companies’ willingness to write megamillion-dollar checks.

The WSJ reports that Comcast, Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks are contemplating investing $1.6 billion in a new company that would be operated by Sprint-Nextel and Clearwire. This is in addition to $1 billion that Intel is rumored to be putting into the new company, along with hundreds of millions of dollars coming from Google. The new company is aiming to raise about $3 billion. Here is how the total rumored funding for the new company breaks down:

1. Comcast: $1 Billion
2. Time Warner Cable: $500 Million
3. Bright House Networks: $100-$200 Million.
4. Intel Corp.: $1 Billion
5. Google: Undisclosed Millions.

Just to recap the back story, WiMAX has been in trouble since Sprint-Nextel hit the skids. Clearwire, another WiMAX proponent, has seen its shares plummet in recent months. The two companies were contemplating a joint venture but then dropped the idea. I proposed perhaps Silicon Valley companies could get Sprint to spin off its WiMAX business, and then fund what essentially would be a wholesale network. Apparently someone else was thinking along those lines.

A few months ago it emerged that Sprint-Nextel and Clearwire might throw their WiMAX lot together and create a brand-new company backed by some heavyweight Silicon Valley investors. The reports/rumors of this NewCo have been floating around for a few months now, but now there seems to be an urgency around the idea.

WSJ reports that new CEO Dan Hesse has been pushing all involved and wants to get things wrapped up before the CTIA show next week. He also wants to get the network up and running so they can upstage AT&T and Verizon in the 4G race. (Read: LTE vs. WiMAX) Sprint did quite well when it launched its PCS network before its rivals and won market share by touting its better quality in the early days of the cellular boom.

Cable companies have previously bought spectrum and dabbled in ill-conceived (and equally poorly executed) joint ventures with Sprint, with little or nothing to show for it. This time, it seems they might be serious about fighting the phone companies in the wireless arena. Verizon and AT&T are sitting on 700 MHz spectrum that can be used by those companies to steal cable companies’ customers.

Whatever the reasons, I hope this new company is established, and adds as a competitive counterweight. And I hope they call it Xohm!

How did We Get Here? A Sprint/Clearwire Timeline:

• Oct. 25, 2004: Intel pushes WiMax by funding Clearwire
• July 5, 2006: Clearwire nixes planned IPO, raises $900 million
• Aug. 8, 2006: Sprint says it will go with WiMax for 4G
• Dec. 19, 2006: Clearwire files to go public again
• March 8, 2007: Success! Clearwire raises $600M in IPO
• June 14, 2007: A troubled Sprint mulls its WiMax plans, ponders a JV or spinoff
• July 20, 2007: Sprint and Clearwire combine for WiMax rollout
• Aug. 2, 2007: Sprint bails on spectrum partnership with cable companies
• Oct. 9, 2007: Sprint CEO Gary Forsee gets the boot
• Nov. 8, 2007: Sprint and Clearwire have second thoughts and kill JV
• Jan 29, 2008: Sprint and Clearwire need each other, maybe more partners
• Feb. 28, 2008: Sprint posts a $29.5B loss after writing down Nextel acquisition

SiRF Technology (SIRF), a San Jose, Calif.-based maker of GPS chips, this morning said it was cutting jobs and trying to restructure its business due to softening consumer demand. Already the worst performing tech stock for the year, shares of SiRF nosedived in early trading this morning.

“SiRF experienced greater-than-expected softness in product demand from its customers, especially in the PND, or Personal Navigation Devices market,” the company said in a press release.

SiRF is the canary in the GPS coal mine. In other words, the GPS device market has hit the skids and we should expect more bad news, and more dominoes to tumble. Why? Look at SiRF’s customers: Tom Tom, Magellan, NAVIGON, Sony and European white-label GPS maker, Binatone. If the macroeconomic trends are putting a damper on SiRF and its chip-buying posse, it isn’t hard to extrapolate and see trouble for Garmin as well.

Looking further out onto the horizon, I think the standalone GPS device market is going to get cannibalized by mobile phones, which are getting increasingly sophisticated when it comes to personal navigation functionality. GPS devices were among the hottest-selling consumer items this past holiday season, with sales up 214 percent and revenues up 488 percent, respectively, year-over-year.

The Wall Street Journal today writes about AOL’s survival strategy and how it revolves around Platform A, the online advertising platform/division that the company hopes will help it recover from the loss of its dial-up business.

AOL has spent nearly a billion dollars to put together Platform A, buying Lightingcast (online video ads provider, for $100 million in 2006), Third Screen Media (mobile ads, for $105 million in 2007), AdTech (ad serving, 2007, price undisclosed), Tacoda (behavioral targeting, for $274 million in 2007), Quigo (contextual targeting, for $347 million in 2007) and Perifilliate (click-per-action marketing, for $125 million in 2008).

But as the WSJ points out, things haven’t been going well for the division. Personally, I would give them a failing grade. In its first six months, Platform A has:

1. Missed sales targets
2. Become rife with political infighting
3. Dismissed its president, Curt Vebranz
4. Lost most of the senior managers that came with the Quigo and Tacoda deals
5. Appointed Lynda Clarizio as new Platform A chief

In addition, AOL has seen its ad revenues growth slump, to 12 percent in 2007 from 37 percent in 2006. AOL’s deal with the University of Phoenix, which brought in $215 million, is over. It was one of the big contributors to AOL’s ad revenues last year. At the same time, more competition is coming. The Google-Doubleclick combo isn’t good news for Platform A by any means.

Interestingly, the article doesn’t really touch upon what ails AOL and, to a larger extent, Time Warner: A culture that accepts mediocrity and believes they can buy their way out of trouble. All you get is a company that is plodding along — and is almost always behind the times. The Platform A plan, however great it might seem, is just further proof of just that.

Disclosure: I am a former employee of Time Warner.

Motorola has announced the spinout of its handset division, continuing a history of divesting itself from troubled business lines and isolating its potentially attractive networking and equipment business for a future buyer.

Details about the spinout are few and far between, but Greg Brown, Motorola’s CEO, plans to stay with the network and equipment division, which posted profits of $192 million in the set-top-box arena and profits of $451 million in the two-way radio and scanning divisions last quarter. A new CEO is being sought for the handset unit, which lost $388 million last quarter. The key question of who will get the Motorola brand is uncertain, but I think it should probably go to the handset business, if only because it’s the most consumer-facing one. (I will miss my Moto walkie-talkies, though.)

Brown believes the spinout will create “two industry-leading companies,” while the rest of the world recognizes this as an attempt to put a dog of a business unit out, in order to keep shareholders happy. The split comes after activist investor Carl Icahn spent months pressuring the Motorola board to sell off the handset division, which never rebounded after RAZR phones stopped being the next new thing. Motorola rode that wave all the way to the shore and, after trying to sell the division for the last few months, is now spinning it off into a new public company. I’ll pass on those shares, thanks.

A similar fate befell Freescale Semiconductor, formerly Motorola’s semiconductor products sector, back in 2004. As a spinout, the chip company went public in a tax-friendly deal for Motorola. Freescale got certain intellectual property, a new name and Motorola as a customer. But it also had to deal with a bloated management structure and find the attitude needed to fight it out in the tough chip industry as an independent player. Frankly, it was a mediocre business and managed to get bought out by a private equity firm a little more than two years after its IPO. The handset business will face the same challenges.

The networking and equipment business, however, might soon find itself a target for another buyer. The RFID business, which Motorola expanded after a $3.9 billion acquisition of Symbol Technologies, is growing. Additionally, the set-top-box business has proven attractive to information technology companies eager to get into consumers’ living rooms.

There’s also continued M&A activity in the telecommunications gear business, which is still too big to support the smaller number of carriers in the world today. A deal with Nortel, Alcatel-Lucent, Tellabs or Ericsson might one day make sense. If WiMax takes off, the network division might find itself in a good position relative to other equipment vendors who have turned their back on the standard.

Given all this, I wonder who Brown will find to take on the handset business.

Jeff Nolan, reformed VC sums up the current Valley situation perfectly.

As I survey the landscape of consumer and business focused software and service providers I am struck by how much incrementalism there is at the moment. Something like Twitter is ground breaking in terms of break out adoption, but what about the other 10,000 startups? There are few bold “ah-hah” ideas, lot’s of social this or that, and mostly a bunch of companies hoping to draft on the perceived success of a few gorillas. Will we suffer through yet another “year of the mobile web” or “the semantic web”? [From Incrementalism and The New New Thing]

My sentiments exactly. Though I have often wondered if the ignominy of having lived through an over exuberant time at the turn of the century had jaundiced my point of view. The quality of start-up pitches I receive on a daily basis has been on a decline, and the story lines have started to blur.

5 Sites That Want Your Janky Gadgets: Amidst the flurry of carbon credits, lead-free electronics and green everything, the truth of the matter is that folks who are truly green don’t buy a lot of stuff. At least the tech industry’s providing online communities and services aimed at keeping consumption down and recycling activities up. Check out Earth2Tech’s handy guide to five web sites devoted to electronic reuse and recycling.

Tracking Texas Truants: Consider it a win for surveillance and the Midland County Justice Court in Texas. The courts popped GPS and cellular tracking anklets from Omnilink onto 15 juveniles that had been sentenced by the courts for truancy and other crimes. All but one of the participants ended up back in school and one was kicked out of his gang because it’s not cool to rat out the gang’s movements to the feds.

Cool at the Core: Intel’s new quad-core Xeon chips for servers are cool. Seriously. The chips operate at about 50 watts per chip, or 12.5 watts per core, and are 37 percent more efficient that previous Quad-Core 5400 chips. That’s good because I’m pretty sure we’re using more computing power, meaning electric bills for data centers might stay about the same.

Sleepless on DirecTV: Boston RedSox fans had a rough night. No, the BoSox didn’t lose miserably to the Oakland A’s in Japan. Instead DirecTV somehow stopped broadcasting the game. ESPN and NESN were among the channels that went dark before coming back online in the sixth inning.

Web 2.0 Expo returns to San Francisco April 22-25, at Moscone West. Now in its second year, the Expo will feature nine tracks, over 100 sessions, more than 150 exhibitors, Web2Open — an “unconference” — and more. Recent additions to the lineup include keynotes from Mitchell Baker, chairman of the Mozilla Foundation and Mozilla Corp., and Aristotle “Ari” Balogh, chief technology officer at Yahoo.

As a media partner, GigaOM is giving away tickets to the four people who can best answer the question, “How has Web 2.0 changed your daily life?” Just leave your answer in the comments section of this post, along with a valid email address. The tickets are valued at $1695 each, so make those answers good ones! The entry deadline is April 1. GigaOM readers can also get a $100 off conference registration or a free Expo Pass, simply enter the code websf08ob15.