Vodafone Group PLC (VOD) said Thursday it will launch a set of new internet services for mobile and PC that draws on the growing popularity of social networking on the move, as the company tries to carve a niche in the mobile services market against a growing tide of competition from the likes of Apple Inc. (AAPL), Nokia Corp. (NOK) and Google Inc. (GOOG).

The new services, called Vodafone 360, will bring together a customer's mobile and messaging contacts with their online social networking information, and will be launched by Christmas on two exclusive, and over a hundred non-exclusive, handsets.

The core service on Vodafone 360 is its address book, which draws together mobile, messaging and social networking contacts, and customers can share some of their information with their friends.

In amongst the social life that Vodafone aims to encourage on its phones though, the company's new mobile services are also designed to get customers to buy applications, music or digital content through its own billing system, a move that directly pits Vodafone against the powerful handset and operating system owners who currently have a strong-hold on mobile e-commerce.

Apple started the trend with its hugely popular App Store, which offers a massive range of free and chargeable application downloads for which Apple takes a cut, selling the items through its established iTunes channel.

Google has since opened up an application store for phones that use its Android operating system, and Nokia's incarnation is called the Ovi store.

This effectively leaves the network operators like Vodafone, France Telecom SA (FTE) and Deutsche Telekom AG (DT) running huge amounts of internet traffic along their networks but with little benefit from these extra services being sold around them, effectively becoming a 'dumb pipe'.

While most applications are developed specifically to work on certain phones, depending on which operating system they use, Vodafone announced earlier this year that it was developing its own application platform, which would be operating system agnostic, and allow games and applications to work across almost all of Vodafone's handset range.

This will launch at the same time as Vodafone 360, with a catalogue of over 1000 applications available to different handsets, for sale through its Vodafone Shop, allowing the company to share in the increasingly lucrative application and services market.

"Customers can stay in touch and share experiences through social networks, instant messaging, email, apps, maps, music and buying digital content on their mobile bill, with the personalised address book at its heart," said Pieter Knook, Director of Internet Services at Vodafone Group.

Vodafone shares, which were flat at 143 pence at 0857 GMT, are up 21% in the past three months.

 
  Company Web site: www.vodafone.com

-By Kathy Sandler, Dow Jones Newswires; 44-207-842-9293; kathy.sandler@dowjones.com