Commentary: Java Games from Orange and HMV

At BuzzCity, we were quite interested to see the recent announcement by Orange and HMV that they are working together to launch a new mobile gaming service.

There are some clear benefits to this partnership. The service will be available across any network. And it will work on more than 1,000 Java enabled handsets. A different company would have restricted the gaming platform to Smartphones, so this is a refreshing move by Orange. It will be interesting to see how other operators respond.

At BuzzCity, we also take an open platform approach by providing advertisers, consumers, developers and publishers access to innovative mobile platforms regardless of their access to technology.

The involvement of two major brands also validates our hypothesis that mobile gaming is growing exponentially. Djuzz -- our new gaming platform -- was only launched last month, but it already receives nearly 30,000 downloads a day. Djuzz match-makes a gaming audience hungry for more content with creative game developers across the globe.

Commentary: Infusing Mobile

Yahoo! recently announced that it's disbanding its mobile division and will redeploy employees from this group throughout the company. Rather than giving up on mobile, Yahoo! is recognising that it needs to be part of every activity.

At BuzzCity, we welcome this move. There's a lesson here for businesses everywhere. 

The BuzzCity Mobile Money Survey

We’ve released the results of our fifth global survey investigating consumer mobile behaviour, on the global mobile payments market.

The survey identifies three areas where progress is needed:

1. User education about mobile banking services to increase uptake.
2. Increased partnerships between banks, carriers and merchants to increase the number of products available for purchase.
3. New services need to be developed to enable mobile transactions for those without access to traditional banking facilities.

Commentary: Working Together, Telecoms Can Ease Bandwidth Crunch

By Hisham Isa, Vice President (Marketing)

Mobile networks are facing a crunch. There's just not enough bandwidth for everything right now. So, we're very pleased to see the launch of a new initiative that aims to make applications more efficient:

The Wholesale Applications Community (WAC) -- consisting of 24 major telecommunications operators including China Mobile, NTT DoCoMo, Orange, TeliaSonera and Vodafone -- intends to build the world's first open platform delivering applications to all mobile phone users.