Communicasia, the south east Asian telecoms and broadcasting tradeshow, showed how operators in Asia have a pragmatic view on the telecommunications markets. Unlike many in Western markets, there is a much more sober approach to building a service platform in the residential and consumer market, particularly in south east Asia. These operators typically get less exposure in the industry mainly due to much smaller PR departments than their Western counter-parties. Read more

Microsoft made a slew of announcements at the E3 gaming conference yesterday, most notably in our view is the integration with social networking sites with the Xbox 360 gaming experience. From this Fall, Xbox Gold gamers (paid for network service) will be able to access Twitter and Facebook from the game console. For example, some games will be capable of uploading screen shots to Facebook (using Facebook Connect), and Twitter statuses can be updated from games too. Xbox Live can also access Facebook and Twitter services.

We dedicated a report on this subject, which we released to clients on December 2, 2008, on how gaming will be part of an online social profile. We argued in particular that game console vendors should integrate their games and platforms with third party social networking sites. As the report amongst other points out: Read more

With the release of the Ovi application store, Nokia takes the first step towards becoming a power house in software and services. Ovi enables application developers to release, on a single platform, applications for Symbian-based handsets. Due to differences in Symbian OS platforms, the applications will need to be developed for specific OS versions.

Many have jumped to the conclusion of comparing Ovi with the Apple application store. We suspect that Nokia has much more planned for Ovi than being just a me-too service. Read more