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Chicago-based automotive journalist Jim Gorzelany has taken his expertise and packaged it up into what he says is the first new car reference guide created specifically for Amazon’s Kindle device and iPhones with the free Kindle Reader software installed.

The Automotive Intelligentsia 2009-2010 Sports Car Guide covers more than 50 sports cars with sticker prices ranging from $20,000 for us everyday folk to $2 million for that rare breed of consumer with a whole lotta extra pocket cash.

Gorzelany pulled together profiles that detail each model’s “heart-pounding performance,” advanced technology, heritage, photos and specifications.

Future entries in the Automotive Intelligentsia series will include guides to economy cars, family cars and luxury cars as well as the first e-book new car pricing guide for the 2010 model year designed for the Kindle.

The sports car guide is available for $5.59 from the Amazon Kindle store.

Australian cellco Telstra has turned to SurfKitchen’s SurfKit Mobile Internet Platform to power its new TelstraOne Experience. The new Telstra portal gives users one-click access to all their favorite mobile services and apps, including widgets, Internet and native applications and Web links.

SurfKit integrates with the phone’s idle screen to provide the easy access. With it, Telstra can “deliver a branded and highly intuitive user experience enabling customers to quickly and easily discover, launch and customize mobile services on the home screen of mass-market devices,” the companies say.

With the SurfKit Launcher, TelstraOne Experience provides a customizable launch pad for whatever services the subscriber chooses. It also uses the SurfKit Storefront app, which streamlines the purchasing and installation of the mobile services, and SurfKit Widget Runtime, which provides a range of on-device widgets such as news and weather.

To promote its new Sweet Deals value menu, Dairy Queen is making its way onto consumer cell phones. The soft-serve ice cream chain and digital agency space150 recently ran a pilot campaign to market the new menu using Mobile Posse’s idle screen advertising platform.

Ads delivered using the Mobile Posse platform are unobtrusive since they’re delivered during the phone’s downtime. Also, all content is opt-in, so consumers needn’t worry about getting spammed.

The DQ pilot campaign ran in March and saw click-through rates of around 22%. The Sweet Deals ads, which promoted meal options in the $3-$5 price range, were delivered at 5 p.m. to reach folks just as they were leaving work and starting to think about dinner plans.

Dairy Queen also pushed the value menu by sponsoring Mobile Posse’s daily weather forecasts with a banner ad. More than half of all Mobile Posse users chose to receive the DQ ad, and more than two-thirds viewed the Dairy Queen-sponsored weather forecast at least once during the campaign.

Revenue from mobile applications will top $25 billion by 2014, according to Juniper Research. The market researcher says this growth will occur because of “a raft of store launches targeting both high-end and mass market handsets.”

In its new mobile applications report, “Mobile Applications & App Stores: Business models, opportunities & forecasts 2009-2014,” Juniper found that the overwhelming majority of mobile app revenues come from one-off downloads, rather than subscription fees. However, in the longer term, Juniper expects operators to see greater benefits from data revenues associated with app usage, rather than money made from selling the apps and content.

Not surprisingly, Juniper expects games to remain the top category both in overall downloads and revenues, but says that multimedia and entertainment apps will soon be responsible for the largest share of revenues from value-added services.

Mobile application and services outfit ROK Entertainment Group and WeFi, which operates an open, community-based global Wi-Fi network, have partnered to launch a co-branded Wi-Fi-powered mobile portal.

Dubbed WeROK, the portal gives users access to ROK’s e-mail and cheap SMS services as well as its free streamed mobile TV and social network services through WeROK’s global Wi-Fi network.

The WeROK app is a free download. At launch it works on all Wi-Fi-enabled Symbian S60 mobile phones and on PCs. The companies haven’t yet divulged their plans for expansions to additional handsets.

Country music superstar Kenny Chesney has signed on with Mozes to encourage mobile interaction with his fans throughout his 2009 Corona Extra Sun City Carnival Tour. During the tour, fans can join Chesney’s Mozes-powered mobile fan club and text to win seat upgrades and VIP passes to the various shows. Once they’re part of Chesney’s “mobile mob,” fans will also receive exclusive alerts such as pre-sale ticket offers, schedule changes, downloadable content and other goodies.

Other artists that use the Mozes service to connect with fans include Rascal Flatts, Britney Spears, Ciara, The Fray and Kelly Clarkson. The company now claims more than 500 artists with a Mozes widget on their MySpace page or Web site.

AdMob has released its March Mobile Metrics Report, with a special focus on the Android and iPhone platforms.

According to AdMob, in the five months since the Android Market for applications launched in the US, requests from Android devices increased an average 47% per month. As good as that sounds, it’s nothing compared with the traffic generated by iPhone; in the first five months after the iTunes App Store went live in the US last July, requests from the iPhone grew 88% per month.

Still, the T-Mobile G1 (HTC Dream) now claims 2% of the US market, based on traffic over the AdMob network. In March, it ranked 10th overall in the US and was the fourth most popular smartphone, after the iPhone, BlackBerry Curve and BlackBerry Pearl.

AdMob’s metrics are based on requests for AdMobs across the mobile Web and in mobile applications.

For more in-depth comparisons of Android v iPhone as well as other metrics, you can access the full AdMob Metrics report for March here.

Beyond.com, a network of niche career sites, has teamed with mobile content platform provider Viigo to take Beyond’s interactive job searches and content to BlackBerry and Windows Mobile smartphones.

Job seekers can download the Viigo application to access the Beyond.com Network of thousands of career sites featuring more than 300,000 jobs. In addition to searching for interesting jobs, users can send postings to themselves or friends who are also looking for a new professional position.

Because the application is hooked into Viigo’s own app network, job seekers can also check news, weather, sports scores, stock quotes and other Viigo-powered info from within the single app.

Web performance benchmarking firm Gomez and dotMobi, the company behind the .mobi mobile Internet domain, have joined forces to determine just how well the Web sites from the top airline, banking and search companies perform on mobile devices.

The Mobile Web Experience Benchmarks from Gomez and dotMobi test five aspects of the mobile Web experience: readiness, discoverability, speed, success and consistency. The initial results show that mobile Web sites are 30% slower than their computer-based counterparts.

Gomez will publish the results on a monthly basis.

Mobile game developer Artificial Life has inked a three-year deal with Warner Bros. and Linkin Park to develop the rock band’s “official” iPhone applications.

Artificial Life intends to release two interactive apps for each year of the deal, with the first scheduled to launch in Q4, provided that it makes it through the App Store approval process in time. The applications will feature the band’s likeness and music in unconventional styles (whatever that means).

“We want to offer our fans every opportunity to enjoy our music,” said Linkin Park member Joe Hahn, who helped design the initial game.

[Image courtesy of Amazon.com]