Handy or Not Handy
HandyGames, a German market leader for mobile gaming, has introduced what CEO Christopher Kassulke is calling the first Casino Lounge WAP and i-mode handsets. The titles are: "American Roulette," "Black Jack," "High or Low," "Hold'em Poker," "Horse Race, "Scratch Card," "Sic Bo" and "Slot Machine." Kassulke said each portal is integrated by request of the partner, as they are doing with all mobile Internet games (WAP, i-mode and xhmtl). "Price winnings etc. have to be defined by our partners," he said, "because, as you know, the legal issues are partly not that easy."
Dot-EU
Since the introduction of ".eu" Internet domain registrations, more than 165,000 European companies have submitted applications, with registrants in Germany accounting for over a third of the total number. Latest statistics show that out of 166,232 applications so far, 34.7 percent are German, followed by Dutch with 15.6 percent and French with 13.4 percent. Only one out of 10 applications are from the United Kingdom. Sex is the most disputed application: Two hundred thirty-six separate applications claim the applicants' rights to the name "sex.eu." "Hotel.eu" is the second most sought-aftter domain, with 123 applications. There has been no interest in "gambling.eu." Could it be that gambling operators do not have a good feeling about the European Union?
Plen-T-Mobile
T-Mobile International recently announced that its total subscriber base has increased by 11.6 percent year on year to stand at 86.6 million as of end 2005. T-Mobile USA added 4.4 million subscribers, with 1.4 million net additions in the fourth quarter alone, to take its total subscriber base to 21.7 million as of the end of December. T-Mobile UK added 845,000 subscribers in the fourth quarter, and its subscriber base increased 9.1 percent year on year to 17.2 million. T-Mobile is directly and indirectly involved in mobile gambling operations in the United Kingdom (Bet2Go, in cooperation with bluesq.com, Ladbrokes, Paddy Power, SportingOdds and totalbet.com), in Hungary (together with Hungarian gambling company Szerencsejáték Rt) and Austria with tipp3 betting, via WAP mobile or PDA. "Following on from the first mobile phone Lotto slip we have been providing our with customers for almost three years, tipp3 betting is yet another highlight in the area of mobile entertainment," says Dr. Georg Pölzl, CEO of
T-Mobile Austria. "Almost 1.3 million Lotto bets have been replaced by mobile phone since the application started at the beginning of 2001."
Interoperability
Open Terra, a leader in enterprise mobility enabling technology, and Intellisync, the leader in platform-independent wireless messaging and mobile software, are partnering to offer advanced synchronization technology utilizing Open Terra's mSolve Enterprise Mobility Suite to customers pursuing mobile business initiatives in connected and extended disconnected environments. Business users and consumers will increasingly demand interoperability between their different mobile devices. Open Terra's mSolve technology will, therefore, provide customers, partners and distributors a powerful mechanism for rapidly and seamlessly integrating mobile applications into backend enterprise systems, including Web services, databases and message queuing technologies, among others.
Mobile Village
According to a Portio Research study titled "Global Wireless Market
Data: Worldwide Mobile Market Forecasts 2006-2011" (January 2006), aggressive mobile market growth will continue over the next five years, as the worldwide total number of mobile subscribers climbs from 2 billion to almost 4 billion. Last year was another year of healthy growth for the mobile industry, and the global rise of this popular technology continued unabated. The total number of mobile subscribers worldwide at the end of 2005 grew to 2.129 billion, an increase of 384 million subscribers from the start of the year. This figure is expected to increase to approximately 3.964 billion by the end of 2011. In the same timeframe, the population of the world is likely to increase from approximately 6.5 billion to approximately 7 billion, meaning that worldwide mobile phone penetration should pass the 50 percent mark sometime around the end of 2009.