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In a demonstration of its confidence in the future of HTML5, business newspaper The Financial Times has acquired the development firm that built its mobile Web app. London-based Assanka was purchased by the FT for unnamed sum of money.

The firm will presumably be absorbed into the FT's existing operations, allowing it to build mobile apps internally rather than outsource them. Whatever the price tag may have been, it represents a pretty significant investment in mobile for a newspaper company.

For most print publishers, the transition from ink to pixels has been at least somewhat painful. Over the last few years, the industry has seen widespread layoffs, furloughs, bankruptcies and newspaper closures. The Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News are no exception. The company that previously owned the two daily papers filed for bankruptcy in 2009 and ended up selling them the following year. The new owner, a company called Philadelphia Media Network, has since been trying to reposition its publications for the twenty-first century.

Today, PMN fulfilled a promise it made last year by doing something few would expect a newspaper company to do. Project Liberty, the company's tech startup incubator, is now open for business.

In the ongoing debate over Web vs. native mobile and tablet apps, it would appear the Web just racked up a few major points.

When Apple changed their subscription rules to require that publishers fork over 30% of the revenue generated from apps sold in the iTunes store, many media companies played along, hoping that making their content available on iOS devices would help them survive the transition from print to pixels.

According to Ongo, a curated news service, more than half of Americans go online for news once or twice per day, and nearly one-third check for news three or more times. As we've reported, online news consumption reached a major milestone this year, surpassing newspapers as a preferred news source for the first time.

Fifty six percent of the 726 respondents go online for news once or twice per day, 26% visit three sites, and 24% visit four or more sites. The survey also found that men were more likely than women to visit multiple sites.

Since earlier this year, if you want to read more than 20 articles a month on nytimes.com, you have to either pay for a print subscription, pay for a digital subscription, or figure out another way to gain access. The early results are in, and the Grey Lady is doing well with its paywall, which costs at least $200 a year to.

Google announced last week that it was shutting down its News Archive Project. Akin to the massive Google Books project, this was a plan to digitize the world's newspaper archives and make them searchable online. But if you're worried about the digitization and preservation of British newspapers, fear not. As The Guardian reports today, the British Library is moving forward with its plans to digitize some 40 million newspaper pages from its vast 750 million collection.

Some 500,000 pages have been digitized thus far, and beginning this fall, this material will be available online. By then, the British Library hopes to have over 1.5 million newspaper pages available.

The New York Times has finally announced the terms and pricing for its paywall that will go into effect beginning March 28. The paywall is porous, meaning that you'll be able to read 20 articles a month without having to pay.

But once you click on that 21st article, you'll have to pony up a new subscription fee for online viewing - $15 per month for access to the website and a mobile phone app, $20 for Web access and an iPad app, and $35 for an all-access subscription plan. If you're a subscriber to the paper version (remember paper versions of newspapers?), this digital access will be included.