Verizon Wireless will be one of the sponsors in the reality film-making competition, On the Lot, which is being produced by Fox Interactive Media. The carrier will be sponsoring a moviemaking challenge tied to the series, while also providing behind-the-scenes footage such as bios and outtakes. Verizon Wireless customers will further have the ability to take part in SMS voting during the reality series, which will be run by Telescope, the company that handles the American Idol voting.

Verizon Sponsors Reality TV Show, Gets Content [via mocoNews]

Need to get out of a terrible date? You can have your friend arrange that “rescue call,” or you could have a fake call with Moderati’s Mobile Faker (faux calls are $.99). On the other hand if you want to show off the Faker WAP site, which is accessible for free to Internet-equipped mobile phones, provides pickup and rejection lines, bar dares and other fun facts for a night on the town. The site will let you download photos of faux boyfriends/girlfriends, vacations and pets if you need to provide some props for your phone.

Mobile Faker

Gemini Mobile has announced that it has raised an additional round of financing of $5 million from Japan’s ACCESS Co. Ltd., Aplix Corporation and Normura Securities. This round of financing follows the recent $20 million from Goldman Sachs, which was to underscore the continued support for Gemini’s wireless software.

In addition to the new financing, ACCESS and Aplix are working on efforts to distribute Gemini’s messaging product and its new eXplo software, which is the world’s first 3D community platform for mobile phones. This application allows for users to chat, share photos and shop in a rich graphical world that is located on their phones. The eXplo application is being used as the foundation of a new 3D interface from SoftBank Japan, called S! Town. This mobile 3D site launched late last year.

Gemini Mobile

Third Screen Media has added Hovr to its mobile advertising network reports ClickZ News. The free mobile game publisher, which launched in February as a free ad-enabled mobile gaming network, should enhance the ad network’s efforts to attract the youth market. Until recently Hovr had been selling its own ad inventory, but under the partnership Third Screen Media will sell and manage the ads. Hovr is the first game provider to sell ads through Third Screen Media’s network, which is in the process of being acquired by AOL’s Advertising.com unit.

Third Screen Media Network Gets Game [ClickZ News]

Mobile accessories is where the money will come from, says a new report from ABI Research. This study reports that the market for mobile accessories will generate more than $32 billion in revenue in 2007, which is actually far greater than the $28 billion expected from the sale of smartphones! Around 77% of the revenues of accessories will come from the sale of “after-market” add-ons, and ABI Research further expects the market for mobile phone accessories to grow steadily in the next five years, with the potential to generate more than $80 billion in revenues in 2012. Who knew all those headsets and adapters added up to such sales?

Mobile Phone Accessories Market Will Generate More Revenue than the Smartphone Market in 2007 [ABI Research]

Version 2.0 of Yeigo has just launched according to the South African developer. Yeigo is a new mobile app that uses a handset’s Internet connection to make calls and send SMS or other instant messages. Best of all many of these options are free, such as calls to other people using Yeigo. Calls to non-Yeigo users can be as much as 80% less as well. Yeigo will also lets users send free IM via GoogleTalk, MSN, Yahoo!, AIM, ICQ and Jabber. This service will work with domestic and international calls.

Yeigo

TechCrunch has had running coverage of telephone management startup GrandCentral since their debut in September of last year. MobileCrunch covered the release of their mobile client recently. Today they’ve come out with a useful guide to the service. Here’s our summary:

GrandCentral is telephone management service that connects all your phones and adds some new features. To add GrandCentral to your phones, you don’t need to change the phones you already have, you just need to connect them to a new GrandCentral number. With all your phones connected to single GrandCentral number, you’ll have access to new features like central voicemail, call forwarding, call screening, custom greetings, call recording, and spam filtering whenever anyone calls your new number.

Setup

You can get a GrandCentral number by going to their site and entering an area code or state and choosing an available number from their list. Getting a number also sets up an online management account where you can tweak the individual features. To enable GrandCentral on your phones you’ll just have to enter your existing phone numbers into this account and get your contacts to call this new number.

Management

From you management page you can control how your phone responds based on who calls. For instance, you can set up a business group that always rings through to your business line, or a friends group, that always rings all your phones. For each group or individual you can also control the ringtone an greeting they hear. When a call does go through, callers will be asked to state their name if they’re not already on your contact list.

Voicemail

Voicemail is one of GrandCentral’s strongest features. Whenever a call goes to voicemail, you can wait and listen to the message in real time before jumping in, or let it get logged onto your GrandCentral account. All voicemail is stored in a play list on your GrandCentral account, meaning you can access it from any computer. You can also embed messages onto a website. GrandCentral has said that they will soon be releasing a feature that automatically transcribes voicemails into text and will deliver them to you via email or SMS.

GrandCentral also has a mobile version that makes these features available on you mobile. GC also has a click to call button for your website and can forward calls to your Gizmo account.

Lots of news this week from the Facebook front, including a post over at mocoNews that the social networking site has announced Facebook Platform. This app should allow third-party development of applications with Facebook, including Video. This will let users share personal videos between friends within the site, well also now allowing the creation and sending of video messages to and from the Facebook Inbox. This should mean that users can shot video on a mobile phone and upload it directly into the application, while previously users only post text messages from their handsets.

Facebook Announces Mobile Video Uploading [mocoNews]

French multimedia giant Vivendi could soon be launching a multimedia Web site for the third screen, reports Les Echos. The company has set up a new unit, Vivendi Mobile Entertainment with the goal of developing this new portal, which is being compared to Myspace or YouTube, and will offer music, video, film and game content from Vivendi and other partners. The service will be a paid site, and the story reports that it will likely launch in France this fall with a roll out to other European countries to follow.

Vivendi to launch multimedia site this year to rival YouTube, MySpace – report [Les Echos via Forbes]

Need to check your calendar on the go? Well if you use Google Calendar you’ll be able to check on your events and maintain your schedule from your mobile handset via WAP. The good folks at the Google Calendar team have realized that more people have mobile phones than computers, and now you can visit calendar.google.com from your phone to get see what you have planned. It works just like the Web version so you can see details such as date, time, location, description and guest list.

Calendar for mobile devices [Via Official Google Blog]