Since Apple's acquisition of Quattro Wireless in January, both parties have been keeping mum on plans for Madison Avenue domination, but now MediaPost claims to know a thing or two about the newlyweds. According to the report, Apple will apparently unveil "a new personalized, mobile advertising system" which will go by the underwhelming name of "iAd" on April 7th. The article speculates that the service could be heavily focused on location-aware advertising, though that angle could hit some snags as apparently coffee-partner / arch nemesis Eric Schmidt and a little company called Google hold patents on said functionality. Of course, something that drives a wedge between these two players wouldn't exactly be a surprise at this point -- and we'd be happy if Apple doesn't cash in on those ad-supported OS ideas it's recently had.

Really, we're not surprised to hear this may be coming, as a tipster just pinged us with info that an "AdKit" reference has shown up in a special file on Apple's public "Phobos" server. This file, which is called StoreBag, provides a public XML interface into iTunes. That interface describes how applications and web browsers can "call home" to either retrieve iTunes information pages or to request that iTunes jump to a given product listing.

What you see here is a key-value pair from that file. The URL string that follows after the "adkit-product-url" key suggests that Apple is about to introduce a way to link ads with product URLs. How will this URL work exactly? It's hard to say without any further details, which are regrettably sparse on the ground, but it suggests that ad sourced product links can be used in a similar way to affiliate-driven links.

adkit-product-url
http://ax.itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/adkitProduct

Not much else is known about Apple's first venture into the ad business at this stage, but Steve Jobs has allegedly told some executives that this will be "revolutionary" and "our next big thing." Frankly, we're starting to get a little concerned with just how often the folks in Cupertino are bandying around the word "revolutionary" -- but we'll hold our judgments until after this announcement happens (if it happens at all).

MacRumors

MediaPost

WiMAX-enabled HTC Supersonic rumored to debut on Sprint at CTIA

There's hardly anything here that we didn't already know, but an unveiling date of "next week" sure catches our eye. A new report over at The Wall Street Journal confirms earlier details that were fed to us over Sprint's first-ever WiMAX smartphone, and now we're learning that the HTC Supersonic will be officially revealed to the world at CTIA next week. We've heard before that the carrier anticipates selling a 4G phone "this summer," but you can bet we'll be digging for a hard ship date and price tag when we hit the scene in Las Vegas in just five short days.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

Wall Street Journal

Nexus One shipments headed to Verizon, Vodafone soon?

Not much here in the way of verifiable detail but we're hearing that a CDMAified Nexus One is en route to Verizon (or Google's warehouses, anyway) from HTC's factories. The Economic Daily News (EDN) adds that Verizon will begin to "market" Google's superphone this month or in April at the earliest which lends some credibility to that March 23rd date tossed about previously. As for the Vodafone branded handset; EDN says HTC will ship it "soon" -- something we've been hearing since January.

DigiTimes