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Mobile operators will invest globally up to $72 billion in mobile broadband technologies in 2010, according to the GSMA, citing figures from Deutsche Bank.

The operators’ association says high-speed mobile rollouts and upgrade will account for 52% of operator investment in mobile infrastructure worldwide.

The forecasts do not include investment in next-gen LTE equipment. Rather, it covers current technologies HSPA/HSPA+, W-CDMA and EV-DO/CDMA technologies only.

Mobile broadband investment is set to soar as HSPA connections pass 200 million, according to the GSMA.

“”The forecasted investment in Mobile Broadband technologies reflects the importance the mobile industry places on enabling consumers to access any type of content on the move – whatever they want, whenever they want, wherever they want,HSPA and HSPA+ have become the dominant global mobile broadband technologies and are set to benefit from a significant proportion of this capex investment,” said Michael O’Hara, GSM chief marketing officer.

Asia Pacific is expected to account for the biggest investment in mobile broadband in 2010, with predicted capital expenditure of up to $34 billion in 2010. North America follows with up to $19 billion, with Europe expected to invest up to $14 billion.

North American operators will spend the greatest percentage – 80% – of total mobile capex investment on mobile broadband.

Research firm Wireless Intelligence predicts HSPA connections will reach almost 13 million a month in 2010, up from 9 million in 2009.

Europe is expected to account for 120 million HSPA connections in 2010, with Asia Pacific accounting for 116 million and North America 58 million.

The equipment suppliers’ industry body, GSA, says 80 operators have committed to deploying HSPA+, with 41 systems launched.

GSA president Alan Hadden said: “By the end of 2010, we predict there will be at least 100 HSPA+ networks in service around the world, and this figure will include systems with 42 Mbps peak downlink capability.”

[via GSMA]

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Aamir Khan is on a roll. After the runaway success of 3 Idiots, news is out that Bollywood superstar has signed up as the brand ambassador of UAE’s Etisalat, India’s latest telecom entrant.

The deal was reportedly inked before the release of 3i at Rs 30-35 crore for a period of 3 years. Etisalat will follow Aamir’s other endorsements – Coca Cola, Tata Sky and Samsung.

Etisalat has been the telecommunications service provider in the UAE since 1976, while Etisalat DB Telecom India, previously called Swan Telecom, is a new telco set up jointly by Etisalat and DB Realty, headquartered at Mumbai.

Dhabi Group recently sold its 70% shareholding in Warid Bangladesh to Indian Telecom giant Bharti Airtel in line with its strategy to bring reputable and strong operators to run its telecom ventures in the region. Dhabi Group also sold its shareholding to Essar in African countries of Uganda, Ivory Coast and Congo. It is worth noting here that Singtel is 30% shareholder in Warid Pakistan.

As part of its management control, Bharti Airtel has appointed Chris Tobit, director of sales and operations, enterprise
business of Bharti Airtel, to head the newly acquired Bangladesh unit. Mr Tobit, who has been with Bharti Airtel for over a decade now, and has held several senior positions, such has heading the telco’s operations in Maharashtra & Delhi, will be the new managing director and CEO of Warid Bangladesh.

When contacted, the Bharti spokesperson confirmed that Mr Tobit would be heading its Bangladesh unit.

Bharti, thwarted twice in its effort to acquire South African telecom giant, MTN, announced on Tuesday that it had made its first foreign acquisition by acquiring Warid Telecom Bangladesh, a move that signals a new strategy, whereby it would scale up globally through a string of small and medium-size acquisitions in developing economies.

After its failure to merge with South Africa’s MTN to create the world’s fourth-largest telco, Bharti has been rumoured to be in talks with several operators, such as Kuwait’s Zain and Egypt’s Orascom. Both these players have significant presence in markets across Africa and Asia.

Currently, Bharti’s international operations outside South Asia are minuscule, covering Seychelles and Jersey Islands in Europe. Bharti has also said the newly-created international business group would comprise a team of seasoned and experienced professionals, including some from within the Bharti Group.

[via]

In a reminder notice this week, Microsoft said that it will stop providing end user support for Windows 2000 and Windows XP Service Pack 2 on July 13, 2010. After the said date, end user support for these products ends and Microsoft will no longer assist for any problems or provide security updates through its official support channels whereas the self-help online support would be available.

Apart from this, Windows 2000 Server will move out of Extended Support while Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2003 R2 will move from Mainstream Support to Extended Support, which will end on July 14, 2015. For most of its software, Microsoft provides Mainstream Support, followed by Extended Support, and finishes with just Self-Help Online Support.

[Via Ars Technica]

Zynga, the developer of some of the famous games on Facebook, has come out with yet another game for its fans i.e FishVille. Zynga trademarked the name FishVille recently and it was widely expected that they will soon launch the game. Mashable has the follow to say about the actual gameplay of FishVille:

The game itself is fairly simple, like many of the Zynga’s other titles including YoVille (Yoville) and Cafe World along with FarmVille. You’re given a virtual aquarium with a few starter fish, that you feed and then harvest and sell to invest in new fish eggs. In a similar revenue mechanic to other Zynga games, you can either pony up real money to get credits to buy more eggs, or complete ad-related surveys and offers in exchange for credits — a practice that has recently come under some scrutiny as a host of less than reputable ads have been finding their way into social games from several companies

However, according to another blog site, the game is a late contender to the arena as there are already other famous titles. InsideSocialGames has to say the following on the launch of FishVille:

FishVille, in particular, is taking aim at recent winners like Happy Aquarium from CrowdStar. That game has recently surged past a number of big Zynga titles to reach 24.0 million monthly active users, and it is now the fifth largest app on the entire Facebook platform, according to AppData. Others, like Fish World, have also gotten millions of users. In fact, we’re not quite sure how many big fish games there are on Facebook — there are a few significant ones made by Asia-based developers, for example. Virtual aquarium games, from our understanding, first got big in China, before they got big as apps on Facebook.

Zynga will use its clout on Facebook to market this new addition to their list of successful games. However, it is the response of players of the game that will decide the final outcome. If you have had a chance to play this game, do give us your feedback.

Its the season of new Operating Systems (OS). We all recently saw the release of Windows 7 and Snow Leopard and now we have this latest addition to the list of new OS i.e Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala. The new OS Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala is the 11th build of the popular Linux-based distribution and promises a new stable environment to it’s users. The famous features of Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala are well explained in a blog post by Mashable in the following words:

Named Karmic Koala, the new Ubuntu (Ubuntu) – as always – promises to be faster and easier to use, bringing version 2.6.31 of the Linux (linux) kernel, latest version of GNOME, and Firefox (Firefox) 3.5. The biggest news, however, is Ubuntu One, a web sync service that gives you 2 GB of online disk space and lets you synchronize notes and contacts, as well as share files between several computers.

Boot time has been significantly reduced, claims Canonical (the company behind Ubuntu); accessibility has been improved (Ubuntu is now translated into 23 languages), and the OS comes packed with open source software, with more available through Software Center. Finally, netbook owners can download and install a version specifically created for them, called the Ubuntu Netbook Remix.

Another famous Pakistani tech blog site has also very well described the Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala. According to Saad:

The most noticeable two new additions to the Ubuntu platform have been the Ubuntu One and the Ubuntu Software Center. The former is an umbrella name for an exciting suite of online services which provides an enhanced desktop experience, simplifies backup, synchronisation while the later is a repo that provides better information to users about all the software.

For developers, Ubuntu now have a simplified toolset called ‘Quickly’ which makes it fun and easy by automating many of the mundane tasks involved in programming. Pidgin has been replaced by Empathy as the default IM client on all flavors of Ubuntu Karmic Koala.

To find more details about the features of Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala, click here for the official site of Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala

Download Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala

Barnes & Noble, the global giant bookseller is planning to expand its business outside United States.  Although B&N has not said anything about it themselves or in their press releases, the author and founder of TechCrunch has guessed it after getting to know about their plans to hire Head of B&N International Business. Michael Arrington has revealed the details in his blog post in the following words:

Recruiting firm Russell Reynolds Associates is representing Barnes & Noble in a search for the “head of their international business,” according to a source who was contacted about the position. The job entails building the international business for BN.com from scratch, hiring the team and “building the infrastructure outside the U.S.” They prefer the executive live in New York, but Europe is ok, too. Global ecommerce experience is preferred.

We have yet to see the Barnes & Noble much hyped e-Book which is expected to give tough time to Amazon Kindle.

Facebook has finally unveiled their super lite version titled “Facebook Lite“. Everyone has been awaiting its arrival and the site is now finally made public. I personally gave it a try and found it super fast and very lite for users who love sites with simple interface and easy to open with even slow internet connections. The Facebook Lite has made few changes in the traditional version to make it super light. According to Artuji:

“The news feed only includes a simple top toolbar and buttons for posting status updates and media uploads”

According to a Facebook Live, another dedicated blog for facebook:

There’s also no feed filters included in this more simple version. While I’m not sure about how this new version appears on mobile devices, there are numerous features which are absent from this new version. One interesting aspect of the Lite version of the homepage is that Facebook opted to display “People You May Know” over friends’ birthdays. While it doesn’t appear that Facebook will be promoting this new service domestically for now, it’s available for anybody that wants to use it.

The New Facebook Lite has got a very positive feedback from the users who gave it a try.  However, Artuji has raised a very well point that even though it is making the users happy with this super lite version of Facebook, the app developers are not happy at all as Facebook Lite don’t display any apps. The users switch over to the new version means loss of potential target base for  apps developers. According to Artuji:

A few days after its launch, many users are giving it positive reviews. The removal of third-party applications and the inclusion of only a handful of Facebook’s own applications made using the social network less complicated.

Those who are only there to take a quick look or is not really into apps but more into “socializing” finds the lite version more friendly. However, Facebook app developers seem to be not too happy about this.

When users fully transfer to Facebook Lite as their preferred platform, they could potentially lose the big income they’ve been enjoying since.

Do give it a try and let us know

Sony Computer Entertainment Europe has launched $134 million marketing campaign for their new version of PlayStation 3 titled PS3 Slim. The new campaign is set for the upcoming Christmas season to rival Xbox360 and Nintendo Wii. Even Sony has decided to part ways with its previous style of ads and the new ads are more straight forward and bright that focus on the capabilities of the PS3 instead of games only.

According to GamaSutra:

The TV portion of the campaign is breaking away from the abstract nature of earlier PS3 ads in Europe, instead going for a more straightforward, bright approach that explains the game console’s home entertainment capabilities, according to a report in the Guaurdian. The TBWA agency handled the TV ads, which debut this evening.

It will be the first major PS3 ad campaign in Europe since Sony launched the original PS3 two years ago, the report said.

“Two years after launch, PlayStation 3 is realizing its full potential. The console is moving beyond gaming and gaming is moving beyond discs,” said Alan Duncan, UK marketing director for SCEE.

The new ad campaign comes a week after Sony announced a redesigned PlayStation 3 that is both cheaper for customers, and cheaper for Sony to build. The new console dropped to £250 ($408) from £299 ($488) in the UK, where SCEE is committing £6 million ($9.8 million) towards marketing.

According to Guardian story, the forecasts for gaming industry as as following:

SCEE is desperate to win the Christmas sales battles against Nintendo and Microsoft this year. The campaign comes on the heels of a price-cut announcement at the European games trade show Gamescom.

Screen Digest has forecast that Sony will sell 4.3m PS3 consoles in Europe this year and a total of 11.16m across the lifetime of the product to date.

Nintendo’s Wii will sell 7.5m consoles in Europe this year, bringing its total sales to date for the region to more than 21m, according to Screen Digest. Microsoft’s Xbox 360 will hit just below 3m this year, a total to date of just under 11m across Europe since the console went on sale.

Google Maps keeps adding new things to its world class mapping software “Google Maps”. I never imagined that Google will integrate so many things into it that it will eventually become the world best detailed map. It has added so many features that it is hard to count them.

Today, Google has announced on its site an addition of a new feature i.e Traffic conditions on the back roads. Back Roads are generally the alternative roads which you can take to avoid the highways. Since highways tend to get the major chunk of the traffic, you can take the back roads to avoid it. Google will aid you in this by providing you with the traffic situation on those back roads.  This software can really come handy since its available on the mobile version of Google Maps.

The 100 million dollars question is that how Google collect this data? It seems Google has shared a bit of the answer to this questions as i found out on a blog post by Leena Rao on TechCrunch. Below is what she added:

Google says that this feature can also be accessed on Google Maps for Mobile, which is particularly useful when trying to figure out the best route on the go. Google also shed a little bit of light as to how they crowdsource traffic info via Google Maps on mobile phones. When you enable Google Maps with My Location, the phone sends anonymous bits of data back to Google describing how fast you’re moving. When Google combines your speed with the speed of other phones on the road, across thousands of phones moving around a city at any given time, they can get an idea of traffic live conditions. They continuously combine this data and send it back to you for free in the Google Maps traffic layers.

Google assures users that they only use anonymous speed and location information to calculate traffic conditions, and only do so when the user has opted to enable location services on his or her phone.

International students or Foreign students as they are known, are no more interested in US universities, as revealed by a recent survey. According to the survey, 3% decrease has been witnessed in students coming to the US universities.

According to Business Week,

The 3% average decline is the first in five years and would have been far worse if not for increases in China and the Middle East. Educators are now worried about foreign student enrollment this fall and diversity in graduate programs in years to come. Depending on how many accepted students actually show up on campus in coming weeks, international enrollments could stay level or plunge. “The declines this year were steeper than I expected,” says Nathan Bell, the author of the report and the council’s director of research and policy analysis. “It is very unlikely that we will see any increase at all in first-time enrollment of international students this fall, and that will be a shift from what we’ve seen.”

Though the report found a 4% increase in international applications, the total number of international applications received this year is still below 2003 application levels at many of the 253 schools that responded to the survey.

The findings come a time when international students are increasingly getting cold feet about coming to study in U.S. graduate schools. Many are worried about their job prospects and the daunting challenges associated with obtaining an H-1B visa to work in the U.S. after graduation. A number have had trouble securing financing to study in the U.S., a problem exacerbated this year when many graduate schools lost the contracts for the co-signer loan programs on which many international students had depended, and had to scramble to find replacements

Image by Spierzchala on Flickr

The TechCrunch, a famous technology blog also terms it an alarming situation and call it a result of Xenophobic behavior shown by American officials towards the people from developing world. That is one reason evident from the huge decrease in number of applicants from India and South Korea.

Sarah Lacy is particularly concerned about the impact of this latest trend on the future of Silicon Valley and says the following in her blog post:

It’s happening: Lou Dobbs’ dream come true and Silicon Valley’s worst nightmare. We’re already seeing the reverse brain drain as smart immigrants take their US educations and experience building companies and creating technology back to their home countries. But now, xenophobia and the lack of any sensible H-1B visa policy is keeping the world’s brightest minds from coming to the U.S. in the first place.

She further ads the following in her concluding remarks,

You know that American dream and American spirit of innovation we always talk about? Turns out, the bulk of it was built by people who came to America from somewhere else, not people born American. We have no birthright or natural lock on these things. Money and talent are fungible assets that flowed to the U.S.—and specifically the Valley—because that is where they were supported and rewarded.

Some people have blithely dismissed growth in markets like China and India saying Silicon Valley will always be the hub for tech; that everyone will come to us. Wake up: Because the numbers are showing money and talent is increasingly going elsewhere.

Indeed, very well said Sarah, we all agree that America has traditionally benefited from its policies of welcoming merit and not color, religion and race but alas that is no more the case and its impact will soon be evident.

The top 20 gaming list for july, 2009 has been released by NPD and i just came across it so thought to share it with our readers. The interesting thing about the list is that EA and Nintendo games got the maximum hits.  According to Gamasutra:

As previously revealed, Nintendo and Electronic Arts dominated the top 10 with six and four titles, respectively, and that strength continued throughout the expanded list.

On the Wii, Nintendo’s mini-game and peripheral combo, Wii Play, took the #11 spot and its update to the classic boxing game, Punch-Out!!, claimed #15. EA’s Tiger Woods PGA Tour 10 for the Wii ranked 12th when sales of the standalone game and Wii MotionPlus bundle were combined.

In addition, Nintendo’s The Legendary Starfy for the DS returned to the chart for a second month in precisely the same slot, #19.

Two more EA titles made the list: Fight Night Round 4 for Sony’s PlayStation 3 at 13th and NCAA Football 10 for the PlayStation 2 at 20th, the ninth iteration of that series on Sony’s older console.

Other than EA and Nintendo, the publishers THQ, Activision Blizzard, and Take-Two Interactive filled out the remainder of the top 20 list.

Elsehwere, THQ’s hit brawler, UFC 2009: Undisputed for the Xbox 360, made the top 20 for its third consecutive month, this time at position 14.

Activision Blizzard’s movie-tie in game, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen – Autobots, slipped in at #16 while Prototype for the Xbox 360 dropped from the #1 spot in June to #17 in July. Finally, Take-Two’s baseball sim Major League Baesball 2K9 (also for the Xbox 360) finished the month at 18th.

Nintendo platforms dominated with 12 titles in the top 20. Five titles on the chart were for Microsoft’s Xbox 360. Sony’s PlayStation 2 and PlayStation 3 each claimed 1 and 2 titles respectively.

The detail list is below:

AMD is proving the fact that it is leading the race by churning out the fastest browsers in the market. No other company is able to match its speed. According to PC World:

On the plus side, the newest version of AMD’s Phenom II processor won’t cost you a penny extra over what you’d currently pay for the company’s top-of-the-line CPU, the $245, 3.2-GHz Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition processor. Consider the company’s newest and fastest-ever CPU a free upgrade of-sorts–if you ignore the slight drop in price that will undoubtedly hit all Phenom II processors once this new Phenom II X4 965 Black Edition processor hits the market.

If you’re a little put off by the slight variance in numbers between AMD’s two top chips, that’s understandable. The two processors are nearly identical in form and function. Both CPUs contain the same amounts of cache, the same compatibility for both DDR2 and DDR3 memory types, and the same unlocked multiplier that can lead to substantial overclocks, amongst other attributes. If you’re looking to slap this processor on an AM2+ system, know that AMD has boosted the CPU’s TDP to 140 watts and that might be incompatible with your current setup.

Test systems have been able to push the new processor up to 4.6 GHz with third-party air cooling; AMD itself claims that the chip can go further, on average, than its 955-edition brother. For the general user, however, the actual benefits delivered by the extra 0.2 GHz over the 955-edition processor’s speed will remain almost imperceptible. That’s only a six percent increase in CPU frequency, after all.

PC World swapped the two processors in and out on an identical system setup and ran its WorldBench 6 suite of benchmarks. The results revealed a meager 3.5-percent increase in overall general performance. Gaming performance remained virtually unchanged on the 2560 by 1600, high-quality benchmark runs of both Unreal Tournament 3 and Enemy Territory: Quake Wars. Running the titles at a resolution of 1024 by 768 delivered a difference of around four to five frames-per-second.

One can’t help but wonder if AMD is trying to nail as much performance onto its processor lineup as it can before the storm that is Intel’s Core i5 lineup hits shores. Extreme overclocking aside, the Phenom II X4 965 Black Edition doesn’t reinvent the wheel–it just adds a little polish.

Samsung and Sprint officially announced the smartphone that takes its inspiration from being Green. This upcoming mobile phone in the U.S. is made of bio-plastic material.

This ecologically fit phone, Samsung Reclaim, is made from 40 percent of bio-plastics, that is extracted from corn. Wow, that’s amazing! On top of this, the Reclaim is also equipped with eco-centric packaging and accessories; the outer and inner boxes are made from fully reccycled material. It also accompanies an Energy Star approved charger with visual alarm when the phone is fully charged. It is available in 2 colors: sky blue and earth green

Sprint is launching Reclaim starting 16th of August so visit a nearby Sprint store or visit their website. A review at pcworld site states following info on its Green aspect:

In part composed of corn-based bio-plastics, the Reclaim is 80 percent recyclable. Samsung configures it for quick access to popular social media sites and to environment-related Web content. And the company donates $2 from each sale to the Nature Conservancy’s Adopt an Acre program.

I am liking Samsung strategy on sales for donating petty amount of charity with each special model they bring out. Previously, they announced some proceeds out of revenues from the sale of Mr. Cartoon Branded Samsung Messager will go in to promoting Art.

Here are some images of this green phone:

How did you like  this?

MetroPCS and Samsung Mobile collaborated with SA Studios Global, a multicultural marketing agency, to offer a limited edition of SCH-r450 labelled as Mr. Cartoon branded Samsung Messager^TM. The LA based tattoo artist Mister Cartoon, Mark Machado, known as Mr. Cartoon, is a Mexican-American tattoo and graffiti artist, who has worked with numerous celebrities including Eminem, Beyonce, director Brian Grazer and most recently Lance Armstrong with Nike for the Livestrong Foundation.

The phone will have all the collection of Mister Cartoon wallpapers, ringtones and animations with additional downloads available from the MetroPCS website. Since it is a limited edition, metroPCS intends to start auction in four days and they have also announced that the revenue from first 10 devices will go to funding community art centers, out-reach programs for at-risk youth, and art supplies for local LA schools.

So, if you’re a die hard Mr. Cartoon fan then jump in to auction that starts exactly after 4 days 12 hours and 53 minutes . Here are some images of the Mr. Cartoon branded phone: