Verizon (VZ) quietly announced last week that it was done seeking out new markets for Fios, which means that cities like Boston, Baltimore and Alexandria, Va., won’t ever get access to the service. But the company will continue to expand its footprint in cities it’s already in, like New York.

The telco says it had always planned on winding down its expansion after spending $23 billion to upgrade its network. But its competitors are certainly treating this as a victory, and the halt will fuel speculation that Verizon will end up buying satellite broadcaster DirectTV (DTV) in order to compete with cable guys like Comcast (CMCSA) and Time Warner Cable (TWC) coast-to-coast.

More from The Wall Street Journal:

FiOS is Verizon’s counter to the cable companies’ Internet phone service, which has been successful in nabbing away telco customers. Despite FiOS’s presence, cable providers such as Cablevision Systems Corp. have weathered the competitive storm. The other telcos have also been upgrading their networks to deliver more services, but they haven’t been as aggressive…

For Verizon, it’s still unclear whether the bet will pay off. Mr. Kula said that in markets that FiOS is available, it has achieved 25% penetration for television service and 28% for Internet.

Growth in FiOS appears to be slowing. In the fourth quarter, Verizon added 153,000 customers each for FiOS Internet and TV, which was down sequentially and from a year ago. In total, the company has 3.4 million FiOS Internet and 2.9 million TV subscribers.

Although it has also been rumored to be an acquisition target, after the recent sales of AdMob to Google (GOOG) and Quattro Wireless to Apple (AAPL), mobile advertising firm Millennial Media is doing some buying of its own.

That would be its just announced acquisition of TapMetrics, a San Francisco-based mobile analytics firm.

Baltimore-based Millennial is one of the larger mobile ad networks in the U.S., but will surely need more scale in the current period of consolidation if it is to stay independent.

Millennial has raised just over $37 million in venture funding, including a $16 million round in November, from firms such as Bessemer Venture Partners, Columbia Capital, Charles River Ventures and New Enterprise Associates.

Terms of the transaction to buy TapMetrics–which has only raised a seed round–were not disclosed.

Here’s the official press release:

MILLENNIAL MEDIA ACQUIRES TAPMETRICS
Adds Deep Cross-Platform Mobile Analytics Capabilities to Existing Developer Program

SAN FRANCISCO, CA, and BALTIMORE, MD, February 23, 2009–Millennial Media, the largest independent mobile advertising network, announced today that it will acquire TapMetrics, a San Francisco-based mobile analytics firm, focused on application usage and behavior.

TapMetrics software suite provides detailed analytics to enable developers to better manage their application sales and revenue in a sleek, intuitive dashboard. By adding TapMetrics, Millennial Media will offer developers more capabilities across mobile platforms:

• Real-Time, Highly Detailed Analytics
• User Interaction Information
• Feature and Version Adoption
• Device Types
• Crash Reporting
• Competitive Ratings System
• Buzz Tracker & Reviews

“The market has recognized Millennial Media as the leader in mobile advertising. As a result of their deep commitment to advertisers, they deliver the best business partnership and monetization for mobile companies–particularly developers,” said Chris Brown, Co-Founder and CEO, TapMetrics. “What is exciting to us is that Millennial Media now has the only scalable solution for developers that doesn’t contain an operating system bias, making Millennial Media the natural partner for us.”

“When we raised our growth round of financing in November, we stated that we would make investments to accelerate our growth,” said Michael Avon, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, Millennial Media. “We are acquiring TapMetrics, because the company shares our approach to serve the needs of developers, regardless of mobile platform. In addition, TapMetrics’ data and analytics capabilities complement our company’s own focus and development plans. We continue to actively evaluate other potential acquisitions to further expand our business.”

Millennial Media operates the leading mobile advertising platform worldwide. Since adding $16M to its strong cash position in November, Millennial Media has expanded its offerings to key customer segments, to include OEM and platform partnerships that seek to access its strong base of developers and publishers. Additionally, Millennial Media’s employee base has grown by more than 20%, as it continues to expand operations in the U.S. and Europe.

On February 16, 2010, the company released other key 2009 year over year mobile advertising growth figures, including:

• Brand business grew 756%; Performance business grew 171%
• Average deal size increased 353%
• Non-U.S. impressions increased 175% year over year
• 357% increase in Apple OS impressions
• 90% increase in RIM OS impressions
• 81% reach of the Mobile Web users

For more information on growth statistics, please visit www.millennialmedia.com/research and download the full 2009 Year in Review.

Millennial Media is headquartered in Baltimore, Maryland; and has offices in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Atlanta, and London. TapMetrics will continue to be based out of its San Francisco headquarters. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

Hagan Blount, a 30-year-old food blogger based in Baltimore, had been listening to the chatter about Wave and hatched the idea to auction his invite on eBay. “I figured there’s a whole lot of buzz. I wonder how many hits this would get?” he said.

Of course, Mr. Blount hadn’t yet received his invite, but he said that a software developer friend of his who did not wish to be identified had promised to procure one for him. Mr. Blount commenced the auction on Tuesday night, and by the time he had woken up at 6 a.m. Wednesday, the day that Google would be releasing Wave invites, his auction had already received 12,000 hits.

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Back on April 7, Tim Armstrong sent a memo to the long-battered troops of AOL about a 100-day vision quest the new CEO and chairman was going on to find out “how to bring back the magic of AOL.”

It is now Day 86, and Armstrong is closing in on the end of a Where’s-Waldo commitment that he made then to visit all of the far-flung offices of the Time Warner (TWX) online unit globally.

More importantly, as it is almost over, Armstrong also has to make good on another promise he made in that memo he sent to the staff on his first day:

“The culmination of the 100-day process will end in Dulles with an All-Hands meeting in mid-July. At that meeting, we’ll review the feedback we’ve received–both internal and external. We’ll also discuss our strategic direction for the coming years, and highlight areas that will bring AOL and AOL properties into the next decade of digital leadership. Most importantly, we will set a course and focus all of our resources to make that course a success.”

BoomTown is eager to see what Armstrong has found out on his trip and what path it will ultimately put AOL on.

So far, the broad outlines of his strategy seem to center on expanding AOL’s content assets, strengthening its advertising network and getting out of businesses the company cannot compete well in, such as social networking.

What other pearls of wisdom Armstrong has gleaned are to still to be revealed, presumably.

His corporate version of “The Amazing Race” is certainly a novel idea, born at his first all-hands meeting in Dulles, Va., which used to be the world-wide HQ of AOL and remains its heart.

There, Armstrong (pictured here) joked to the crowd:

“I know that work goes on across the globe and, in the first 90 days, I’m going to try to visit every office we have and sit down and talk to every employee and that will be something that my wife has actually agreed to let me do so.”

Thus, spouse-approved, the former Google (GOOG) exec has circumnavigated the globe and has held meeting with employees in a wide range of places: Dulles; New York; Baltimore; San Francisco; Mountain View, Calif.; Toronto, Lancaster, Pa.; Denver; Hamburg; London; Paris; Bangalore; Dublin and, this week, Tel Aviv.

But it has not been all tourism, in search of innovation.

During this time, Armstrong has also dispatched employees and top execs, such as advertising head Greg Coleman and communications and communities head Joanna Shields, and hired a few key staffers of his own; announced a pending spinoff of the company; and bought some stuff (including a company he funded).

It will be interesting to see what comes next–after the 100-day gathering in Dulles, which should come sometime after Armstrong’s July 15 deadline, of course.

Party on, Tim.

Still, it sounds promising. With downlink speeds in the 2-4Mbps range, Xohm is about twice as fast as current cellular broadband networks. Sprint’s service plans include a $25 monthly home subscription, a $30 “on-the-go” plan and a $10 day-pass program. All three require a PC card or modem and a subscriber agreement permitting Xohm to “use various tools and techniques designed to limit the bandwidth available for certain bandwidth-intensive applications or protocols, such as file sharing.”

So much for that “open network” promise. Well, at least Xohm is up and running, right? Sprint Nextel (S) first announced plans to deploy a nationwide WiMax network in August 2006.

This is a video that is getting a lot of play, which shows a really agitated policeman haranguing a 14-year-old kid, who was skateboarding at Baltimore’s Inner Harbor.

The officer–a 17-year veteran named Salvatore Rivieri–went verbally ballistic without, as you will see, a whole lot of cause from the boy, who was pretty well behaved and exhibited very minor lip. Calling someone “dude” is not really deserving of the rage he got in return from the policeman.

While it is not known what went on right before this video and most cops do not act like this, it is pretty appalling and a perfect example of chronicling bad behavior all over using the powerful tool of viral online video.

The person who took the video and posted it on YouTube is unknown as yet, but has a lot of guts to keep rolling, until he or she was almost found out.

Rivieri has been suspended, according to the Baltimore Sun.

Here’s the video: