The mobile space had seen a lot of activity, updates, rumors and news breaks this past week or so, and it’s indicative of some larger trends taking place within the industry.  As it pertains to user adoption, consumer behavior and business wars, mobile is a hot topic, with plenty to talk about.

The Nokia/Microsoft deal kicks off our list, marking a new era in mobile platform presence and expectations for the future.  The deal had been rumored for the past few days, and has been confirmed with a joint statement released by Steve Ballmer and Stephen Elop.  Looks like the installment of an American CEO has truly taken Nokia in a new direction.  The team-up certainly provides more fodder for Google to fend off, as it pushes Android to become the dominating operating system across mobile devices worldwide.  Android’s dealing with a great deal of backlash, in fact, as Apple spurs its iPad 2 production to stay ahead of the tablet curve in particular.

JiWire’s Q4 Mobile Audience Insights Report offers a look at how that global domination thing is working out, highlighting its OS- and location-specific impact on marketing, distribution and consumer use.  The report indicates location-based ads’ popularity exceeds just about every other type for this segment, and is a key driver of mobile shopping as a whole. More and more retailers and major tech players, including Facebook, are investing in location-based mobile marketing, and HTC has made some investments of its own. The phonemaker acquired multimedia delivery platform Saffron Digital for $48.6 million, and plans to buy a $40 million stake of cloud company OnLive.

Content and content distribution is a rapidly growing aspect of mobile, and online video plays right into this trend. There have been several major mobile updates throughout the past week, including an update to the Libox media sharing iPhone app as well as MobiTV, the launch of Visible Vote 2.2 and the newly added 30-minute video support on Thwapr.

Ads and video are two aspects of mobile which dramatically accelerated over the course of the past few months, but that doesn’t mean the app market has been left behind just yet. We discussed an infographic detailing the status of the Windows Phone 7 app marketplace, as well as ShoutEm’s efforts around app development minus the coding, design and approval hassles. The fresh-baked beta release of Mobilizer is yet another branch to this growing arm of mobile market maturity.

The increasing interest around developing and publishing for mobile also means increased security risks, and that’s where IBM takes its cue to address the mobile world. The company announced 3 new initiatives of its own around mobile security.  It’s part of a larger effort to protect data at every level, as mobile has introduced new interaction points for the cloud.