Alcatel-Lucent is bolstering its offer in the Service Provider Information Technology (SPIT) department with the launch of a range of customer experience management (CEM) products through its Motive division, which it acquired in 2008. Marketed under the "Motive CXS" umbrella, the announcement includes CX Consulting, a dedicated team that seeks to identify and exploit potential CEM "touch points" within service providers. (See AlcaLu Gets Motivated About CEM and CEM Set for Center Stage.)

RIM's new President and CEO Thorsten Heins gave his first public keynote today at the BlackBerry DevCon Europe conference in Amsterdam. He said the EMEA region was "key" to the company's future strategy and growth. Already, he said, BlackBerry is the top-selling smartphone in countries such as Kuwait, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, South Africa and UAE, and it's the best-selling pay-as-you-go smartphone in the Netherlands, Spain and the U.K. Heins also boasted some BlackBerry apps stats: More than 2 billion BlackBerry apps have been downloaded to date and more than 6 million apps are downloaded from the company's App World every day. All of the more than 2,000 attendees at the Developers Conference in Amsterdam will get a free Playbook tablet too. (See New RIM CEO: We Must Execute Better , RIM CEO Says No 'Seismic' Change Coming and Analysts: RIM's New CEO Is Just Window Dressing.)

Swedish operator Tele2 is on the right track, its fourth-quarter results showing an 8 percent rise in revenues year-on-year, to 10.84 billion Swedish Kroner (US$1.61 billion). Strong growth on the eastern outposts of its empire -- such as Russia and Kazakhstan -- helped to drive the numbers up. (See Tele2 Q4 Sales Grow 8%, Tele2 to Buy Norwegian Operator and TeliaSonera v. Tele2.)

U.K.-based Avanti Communications Group plc is looking to raise £73.8 million ($116.6 million) to design, build and launch its proposed Hylas 3 broadband satellite, which will provide Ka band services. The company says that the first two Hylas satellites confirmed that demand for such services is high. (See Avanti Agrees Satellite Deal With BT and Avanti Launches Broadband Satellite.)

U.K. broadband provider TalkTalk is touting what it claims is a new approach to the implementation of parental controls on broadband connections. Under its "active choice" policy, new broadband customers who have children will have to tick boxes to say they are happy with their children being able to access, say, porn- and gambling-related websites, if they (the paying customers) want access to such sites too. TalkTalk's parental-controls system, billed as the U.K.'s only such system that works on the network level, is called HomeSafe. (See TalkTalk Offers 'Active Choice' , Ofcom Counts the Complaints (Again) and TalkTalk Revenues Down in H1.)

— Paul Rainford, Assistant Editor, Europe, Light Reading