Earlier this week European Commissioner Neelie Kroes spoke in platitudes about how the EU would be putting more effort into kick-starting the region’s hardware industry — to create the ‘Airbus of chips.’ Her words seem particularly ironic (and possibly more empty) today, as the world’s largest telecoms company, Ericsson, admitted it would have to take a writedown of $1.2 billion (8 billion Swedish crowns) related to the decline of its European chip JV ST-Ericsson, as it tries to figure out what to do next with the loss-making business.

In a statement, Ericsson also said that it would not acquire the 50% of ST-Ericsson that it does not already own. “To acquire the full majority of ST-Ericsson is…not an option,” it said. That will, however, mean some $458 million more to keep propping up the company anyway in the next year. “Ericsson’s current best estimate is that the implementation of the strategic options at hand will require approximately SEK 3 b. of Ericsson funding, of which the majority in 2013,” it said.

Ericsson and STMicroelectronics first entered into their JV in 2009 with the aim of using their combined size to lead the market in wireless equipment chips. The aim was to be “fabless” — that is, designing the chips but outsourcing the making to other foundry companies — to beat down some capex and opex. But earlier this month, STMicro said that it would divest itself of its stake after ST-Ericsson failed to achieve break-even.

Veteran music streaming service Rhapsody has been around for over a decade. It’s managed to survive in a turbulent (and oftentimes) crowded market, even as it has been eclipsed in popularity by services like Rdio and Spotify. In fact, Rhapsody was the first on-demand service to offer unlimited access to a substantial catalog of music for a flat monthly subscription fee, paving the way for startups like Spotify.

On the other hand, Rhapsody is far from first-mover status on the tablet front, as it finally debuted its native iPad on Monday — long after its competitors. (Rdio hit the iPad in August of last year, MOG in March and Spotify in May, for example.) However, while lagging behind on the iPad, Rhapsody is hoping to get a beat on its competitors by creating value-add via other, developing channels.

Aside from iHeartRadio, it’s the only one of its competitors to have an app on Xbox Live, and today, Rhapsody expanded its carrier billing support, announcing a joint billing agreement with AT&T. The agreement allows Rhapsody subscribers to pay for the subscription service by way of their wireless bills, and follows a similar agreement the company already has in place with Verizon, giving it carrier billing support for over half of mobile users in the U.S.

Now that Tumblr’s blackouts are behind it, the company is back to focusing on its product — particularly its mobile one. Days after adding support for Android tablets, the company has announced that it updated its iOS app, adding compatibility for both the iPad and iPad mini.

Tumblr’s mobile channel is growing and, by the way, has recently helped to propel the blogging platform to more than 20 billion monthly pageviews. The company last updated its iOS app in November to improve user experience, speed, and engagement on the iPhone by making the app “native” — i.e. integrating it more deeply into the iOS experience.

For those who’ve already been Tumbl-ing on the iPhone, the new support for iPad will be familiar. First and foremost, because the app has “native” support for the iPad, it means that you no longer have to deal with the slow load times of your local browser. So, because of that, the user experience is more frictionless, more responsive and just feels more, well, native.

Seattle-based Appnique, a new startup from mobile industry veteran Jai Jaisimha, is focused on helping app developers achieve higher rankings and make their mobile applications more discoverable in both the iOS and Android app stores. It’s the latest company to target the ASO (App Store Optimization) space specifically, a new breed of optimization which looks at things like app keywords, titles and descriptions in order to make an app appear higher in app searches than its competitors, which in turn helps an app climb the charts in a given app store.

ASO is the new SEO, as you already know. But the recent surge of interest in tweaking keywords comes about thanks to the changes Apple introduced with the new iOS 6 App Store this fall. Because Apple’s new app search uses card-style results pages instead of lists, as it did before, it’s even harder for the longer tail of app developers to get their apps seen by potential customers. For developers in especially crowded spaces like games, the challenge is even tougher. The only real solution is hone in on what keyword combinations will work to surface the app higher for very specific app store searches.

Understanding what those keywords are, however, is easier said than done. That’s why services like SearchMan and AppStoreHQ’s MobileDevHQ are becoming increasingly popular with app developers and publishers. Used alongside analytics offerings and other competitive measurement and intelligence tools like those from Distimo or App Annie, for example, app developers and marketers can figure out what works, what the impact of those changes may be and what other developers in their space are doing.

CloudOn, the popular free productivity service that brings Microsoft Office to mobile devices, just launched version 3.0 of its mobile app. With this launch, CloudOn is bringing its service to the iPhone, iPad Mini and Nexus 7. This means CloudOn is now available on all of Apple’s mobile devices, as well as on Android tablets running Honeycomb and Ice Cream Sandwich version 3.1 or higher, as well as Jelly Bean tablets running Android 4.1 or higher. A version for the new Kindle Fire HD 7 should also be available shortly.

Today’s launch isn’t just about support for new devices, though. The company is also introducing support for Microsoft SkyDrive in addition to the already available support for Dropbox, Box and Google Drive. Unlike other productivity services, CloudOn isn’t interested in running its own cloud storage service. Instead, as the company told me earlier this week, the team wants to focus on doing what it does best: redefine productivity around mobile. “With CloudOn on the iPhone, iPad mini and Nexus tablet, we’re one step closer to ubiquitous mobile productivity,” said CloudOn CEO Milind Gadekar. “We continue to focus on our mission of reinventing productivity in mobile and social environments.”

To bring Microsoft Office to the smaller screen of the iPhone after mostly focusing on tablets until now, the team had to make a few changes to its interface. The Ribbon, for example, was tailored to the iPhone by simplifying it and by spacing the icons out a bit more in order to make selecting them easier. As the CloudOn team told me, the expectation is that phone users won’t use the tool so much to create documents anyway.

Paystikd, a bootstrapped three-person startup out of a new Stanford co-working space, is starting to power donation campaigns for 6,000 charities this month. The company makes it easy for small businesses and charities to use QR codes for payments.

It isn’t so much a competitor to other payments upstarts like Square. It’s more of a way to make paper billing and direct mail campaigns easier. Charities and businesses can sign-up with Paystik to generate QR codes for their products and campaigns.