Telenor's - Ericsson

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Attention grabber
Facing competition from “anything
that demands people’s
attention,” Japanese gaming-giant
Nintendo is banking on a new
mobile game machine to regain
momentum.
▶ THE NEW 3DS game machine features
wireless Web access, multiple
cameras, and accelerometers to
sense motion, not to mention the
ability to watch 3d movies without
A different kind of digital divide
48 EBR #3 2010
glasses. But its ability to link players
on the move may be the key to
its success.
The company’s President, Satoru
Iwata has highlighted Nintendo’s
broad competition from far beyond
the traditional gaming world.
Games on Facebook like Farmville
and Mafia Wars, as well games
downloaded from iTunes, allow
people to easily play against both
friends and strangers on mobile
devices like smartphones.
The new 3ds will have the ability,
using a Wi-Fi connection, to find
and link to any nearby 3ds machine
even if the user is not playing at the
time. The machine will launch in
February in Japan and in March in
Europe and the US. It comes as
Nintendo is reporting steep drops
in sales and revenue. ●
French government
gets into the music biz
▶THE FRENCH GOVERNMENT has started selling a youth
music card. The cards sell for EUR 25 but carry EUR 50 worth
of credit to spend on a variety of legal downloading or
streaming platforms, including iTunes, Starzik, Deezer, Fnac
and Qobuz. The government plans to sell up to 1 million of
the cards for two years. Eligibility is limited to people aged
between 12 and 25, and there is a one card per year limit.
The ministry of culture is funding the project.
NOT ALL INTERNETS are made alike, with diff erent cultures and contexts creating wildly diff erent usage patterns.
In places like Uganda, with low internet penetration, most users desperately want to create their own personal
space online and explore the internet’s off erings. In a more established market like France, the market is split but
with more emphasis on things like function and knowledge-sharing and with less enthusiasm for self-expression.
Eastern Europe
drives boom
▶ A BOOMING broadband
market in Eastern Europe
drove European fi ber to the
home (FTTH) subscriptions
up 22 percent over the past
six months, says the FTTH
Council Europe.
Including Russia, almost
4.5 million European
subscribers now have FTTH
or equivalent services.
Lithuania is still the leader
in penetration, just ahead
of Sweden and Norway,
with Slovenia and Slovakia
also near the top. Growth
was also strong in Romania
and Bulgaria.
41
▶… PERCENT OF ALL
North American mobile
data consumption comes
from real-time entertainment
such as streaming
video. The number is 43
percent over fi xed lines,
with one company,
Netfl ix, accounting for
more than 20 percent
of all downstream traffi c
during peak hours,
despite having only
16.9 million customers.
Russians most
social networkers
▶ OF ALL THE PEOPLE in the
world, Russians spend the
most time on social networking
sites. Vkontake.ru
is the leading portal with
27.8 million visitors, says
comScore.
In August Russian
internet users spent an
average of 9.8 hours per
visitor on social networking
sites: more than double
the worldwide average of
4.5 hours per visitor. Israel
came second
with 9.2 hours s
per visitor,
followed by
Turkey, the
UK and the
Philippines.
Facebook ranked just
fifth in the Russian market
but its audience has grown
376 percent in the past
year, faster than any of the
other top sites.