No deal terms were announced. It’s understood Data Explorers owner Bowmark Capital had been looking to sell the firm for the last year.

The company claims to track more than 85 percent of global securities transactions.

Markit wants to inject Data Explorers’ services in to its own, including adding new services for exchange securities, dividend forecasting and quantitative research.

London-based Data Explorers says it quadrupled revenue and tripled profitability over the last four years with global expansion.

Market also acquired Wall Street On Demand, which provides visualisations for financial data, in 2010.

Payouts via PRS For Music from online services surged 45.3 percent to £38.5 million, overtaking pubs and clubs, which must pay PRS for playing recorded music, as an earner for the artists. Many UK bars closed last year.

PRS For Music credits both existing services like iTunes and emerging streaming and subscription services like Spotify, Deezer and We7 for the growth.

Ringtones’ contribution continued to fall, to just £600,000 for the year.

Online royalties are only six percent of the total collected by PRS For Music but are nonetheless welcome because payouts from sales of CDs and DVDs fell by 13.3 percent.

PRS CEO Robert Ashcroft: “The licensed digital market is now delivering a significant income stream for our members. This goes some way to replacing revenues lost from the declining CD market although online piracy continues to be a problem.”

PRS For Music confirmed that it renewed Spotify’s licensing deal in 2011.

The highest royalty growth came from collection deals PRS signed in overseas countries.

Turnaround firm OptCapita, through Baker Acquisitions, will buy its UK assets, comprising the 333 out of 609 that weren’t closed last week and almost 3,200 staff.

“This is good news for Game and for UK consumers,” says games industry umbrella group TIGA’s CEO Dr Richard Wilson. “This deal should save many jobs and stores and will buy Game breathing space during which it can develop a new business strategy.

“Game has suffered from physical and online competition, the shift from physical to digital games, and the decision by big global publishers not to stock Game with new releases.

“Given the rapid transition to digital gaming with consumers spending money on platforms such as Steam, Origin, the App Store, PSN, XBLA and Android market, Game will have to develop a digital strategy – fast.”

Last week, paidContent:UK reported how Game Group, several years ago, declined to adopt a proposed strategy that identified a 2012 tipping point from physical to digital sales and that could have given it a viable digital strategy.

It has since been pointed out to us that Game tried a digital strategy a decade ago when it bought online multiplayer gaming service BarrysWorld, to create its own such service, which it later closed.

OpCapita managing partner Henry Jackson: “We strongly believe there is a place on the high street for a video gaming specialist and Game is the leading brand in a £2.8 billion market in the UK.

“We have assembled a strong team of experienced industry operators to implement the programme of operational change that is needed. There is a huge amount to do but we look forward to the challenge of restoring Game’s fortunes in partnership with its employees and suppliers.”

PwC shut 277 of Game’s 609 UK and Ireland stores and made 2,104 out of 5,126 staff redundant when it was called in as administrator last week.

It is bringing TVCheck, its smartphone app for checking in to TV shows, from France to the UK.

TVCheck asks users to point their phone’s camera at TV screens to identify shows by cloud-based signal processing, so they can share their viewing habit to social networks and interact with shows on the phone.

The app has garnered nearly 100,000 downloads since release in France last year, Orange business development director David Nahmani told paidContent, declining to disclose remaining active users.

In France, Orange has both a popular IPTV service and a mobile network to which it could have allied TVCheck but hasn’t. Neither will the app be bundled with Orange UK handsets, Nahmani said.

The idea is to ensure all comers can use it. To that end, it will be available to non-Orange customers through both iOS and Android. But, minus, the carriage that Orange’s services could have given it, TVCheck may be challenged to compete with GetGlue and Zeebox in particular.

Nahmani told paidContent TVCheck’s USPs over rivals are in-buit gamification, simplicity and show recommendation features. The app can recognise TV ads so the door is open to potential commercial tie-ups – just as Zeebox recently launched – Nahmani added, but Orange wants to try gathering a user base before committing to a revenue plan.

“We can imagine premium=access content, premium voting, advertising – but all those activities will come later,” Nahmani said.

He is trying to strike partnerships with broadcasters which he hopes might want to include interactive features relating to their shows in the app – again, just like some others apps are doing.

“Completely out of the blue, Amazon have told us they have decided to stop publishing any new newspapers on the Kindle indefinitely, worldwide,” says Gannett’s Herald & Times Group of Scotland, which was awaiting approval for its Kindle edition.

The Herald & Times says Amazon has suspended its approval of black-and-white editions submitted by publishers while it works through a backlog of submitted titles and reprioritises resources – a closure that is supposedly not permanent but which may be long-term.

But Amazon tells paidContent: “That’s not true — we are accepting newspapers on Kindle.

“However, we are not always able to immediately launch every publisher who contacts us using our more heavyweight integration method. For publishers that want to add their newspaper onto Kindle in self-service fashion, they can also do so via the Amazon Appstore for Android.”

Herald & Times Group, which publishes the Glasgow Herald, Sunday Herald, Evening Times and integrated HeraldScotland.com, submitted its edition two months ago and had since progressively tweaked it to Amazon’s requests. It is frustrated that, despite this back-and-forth, it received notice the edition will now not go live.

The Newspapers section of the Kindle Store currently carries nearly 200 newspapers.

Many publishers have come to operate a strategy of availability on multiple devices. Across those devices, Kindle is low in publishers’ priority list compared with iPad, but important compared with other platforms.

Somewhere between Herald & Times Group’s claim and Amazon’s statement may lay the truth. It sounds as though Amazon is facing some issues managing an influx of Kindle newspaper and magazines that include both content feeds and digital replicas. And publishers who want their papers to be available for sale immediately may have to publish them as colour Kindle Fire tablet editions for now.

Publishers have also become well used to dealing with Apple’s back-and-forth app approval process.

In the 2011 Bertelsmann annual report released this week, Random House said it has nearly 40,000 titles available as e-books worldwide, and while revenues were down for the year, “operating EBIT was higher year on year, especially in the United States. This rise was helped by continued cost-cutting measures and lower return rates in North America and the United Kingdom due to increased e-book sales.”

Similarly, Pearson’s 2011 annual report shows that Penguin’s sales are roughly flat, while adjusted operating profit rose by 5 percent, again due in part to e-book sales. “Penguin saw e-book revenues in 2011 double on the previous year,” the report says. “In 2011 they accounted for 12% of Penguin revenues worldwide and more than 20% in the US. Since 2008, digital downloads of apps and ebooks across Penguin have totalled approximately 50 million.”

And CBS’s most recent earnings report shows Simon & Schuster (NYSE: CBS) revenues down by 1 percent for full-year 2011, while “publishing adjusted OIBDA for 2011 rose 28% to $92 million from $72 million for the prior year, reflecting lower direct operating costs” due in part to “the decline in expenses resulting from an increase in more profitable digital sales as a percentage of total revenues.”

In other words, e-books are generally more profitable than print books for publishers. In 2012, I hope to see that reflected in higher e-book royalties for authors.

Our updated Publishers’ Digital Revenue chart is below.

• News Corp.’s News International is ready to fight market-leading AutoTrader by launching its own website in the space.

• Mail Online publisher A&N Media last week sold the sector’s number-two player, Motors.co.uk, to Manheim Remarketing, which owns the U.S. Autotrader.com, which is unrelated to AutoTrader of the UK, for an undisclosed sum.

• AutoTrader UK owner Trader Media Group (TMG) is jointly owned by Guardian Media Group and Apax, which each this week said they were splitting their jointly-owned Emap media group in to three. GMG hopes to sell both TMG and Emap for a windfall in the future.

Trader Media Group is a case study in digital transition, having successfully moved its traditional printed Autotrader classifieds newspaper to be a search-centric digital listings business. 2010/11 profit hit £34.7 million on seven percent higher revenue.

News International wants a piece of that pie. It is recruiting for a product and content head with a “start-up mentality” to build a “premier car digital destination”.

To start this business and take share from AutoTrader, News International will need to build relationships with car dealerships as well as individual private buyers and sellers.

That won’t be easy. With 10.8 million monthly uniques at last disclosure in March 2011, AutoTrader claimed to be 16 times more popular than its nearest rival. It hosts over 6,000 dealer websites.

But News International may get to draw on its Times and Sun newspapers’ strong brands in car content; the former takes car reviews from Top Gear co-presenter Jeremy Clarkson.

Via MotorTrader.com.

Disclosure: Guardian News & Media Ltd. is an investor in our parent company, Giga Omni Media.

But looking at the situation in China, amongst Chinese startups and major web companies alike, the picture doesn’t look too good for Google’s (NASDAQ:GOOG) Android OS, with its official app store, now called Google (NSDQ: GOOG) Play, generally being subverted and/or ignored.

Instead, every single one of the Chinese apps we surveyed gave the Android app ‘.apk’ file directly to consumers, with very few app developers even linking to the Play Store from their respective homepages.

Many are still using Google Play (formerly dubbed the Android Market), but seemingly only as a minor distribution channel. The Google Play store doesn’t support paid apps in China and many overseas developers choose not to publish their apps to local consumers on it. As so often occurs in China, local services have sprung up to fill in the gaps – done with a mixture of piracy and legitimate alternative app distribution. That’s the scene with the dozens of alternative Android app stores that have sprung up in the past year or so. A case in point is the newly-released Temple Run game, which is not in the Google Play store, but is easily available on other stores, such as by browsing through the Baidu (NSDQ: BIDU) app catalog which lists items from numerous third-party Chinese Android stores.

But let’s just focus on Chinese-made apps in this survey. I looked at 50 local apps, from tiny startups to well-established independent apps – like Jiepang – to those made by major web companies such as Baidu (NASDAQ:BIDU) and Tencent (HKG:0700). I then noted three things: which apps were given to people as ‘.apk’ files from the app homepage; which apps were available on the Play Store; and which developers actually guided consumers to the Play Store to get their apps:

As you can see, then tendency is to distribute apps very directly, as occurred with all 50 of the surveyed apps. Only in eight out of 50 cases did the app homepage additionally encourage usage of the Play Store and linked to it as well. Generally, developers were more likely to guide users to local app stores instead (not indicated in the graph).

Smaller startups were less likely to have put their apps on Google Play, even though they had done so for the iOS version of their app with Apple’s iTunes app store. The full table (bottom) shows those very early startups listed along with their Chinese names. All the other apps will be familiar to regular readers – and so are given only with their English names – as we’ve covered and/or reviewed all of them before.

One final point. Yesterday we reported that Tencent’s hit group-messaging app, Weixin, had hit 100 million users. To hit such a major milestone, you’d expect the Weixin app to have been downloaded at least twice as many times as that across all four platforms that it’s on. But, looking at the app’s listing in the Play Store, the vague Google stat says it has been downloaded “1,000,000 – 5,000,000″ times. If, say, a quarter of Android users are on Weixin, then that figure ought to be higher. Even the most popular app in the country, QQ instant messenger, has had only the same number of downloads for its outgoing 2011 version on the Play Store. Clearly, Chinese Android users – despite being huge fans of the smartphone OS – are getting their apps elsewhere.

We did contact Google about this; though Asia-based staff showed an interest in the findings, no-one on the Android team in the US could be drawn to comment.

Here are all the 50 Chinese-made apps I surveyed:

» This article originally appeared on Tech In Asia, and is reproduced here with permission.