Another Day in the Antz Farm

Nielsen Entertainmen Study (2006) found that among the roughly 117 million active gamers in the U.S. in 2006, more than half (56%) play games online, and that 64% of all online gamers are women.

Obviously, these guys have done their own local market segmentation homework and research, before launching the Hello Kitty Sport Series games to China mobile phone users to tap into this lucrative market. I wonder what is their business model?

Last month, when I was in Hong Kong MTR, I noticed lots of young females were seriously engaged in a portable gaming device which looks like (but wasn’t) a Nintendo DS with a stylus. They were playing casual, mentally stimulating puzzles like games. Maybe this sports games series is similar but on a mobile phone.

27/6: Looked like the device was really Nintendo DS  and there is a game called Brain Age to give one’s brain a workout.

NetikaTech has created an impressive Windows Form designer and an extensive catalog of Silverlight powered- Windows Forms controls within a browser with the Silverlight 1.1 Alpha SDK. It looks almost identical to the Visual Studio environment. What if we can one day develop and compile our code within a browser, we can truly work anywhere* (with an internet connection). I don’t see how such experience is too far-fetch from our current OWA email experience

Original Source: Silverlight as WinForms Designer

Related link:
Microsoft Silverlight 1.1 Alpha Developer Reference Poster

As part of the medical services improvement for the 2008 Olympics, Beijing will adopt a mobile phone positioning system that can give the exact location of people calling about a medical emergency. The positioning system can tell the location of emergency callers within a radius of a few dozen meters, according to the Vice-Chairman of the Beijing Municipal Red Cross Society.

Source: Beijing to use mobile phone positioning in medical emergencies for Olympics(People’s Daily Online)

Berno: You might find more mobile apps related articles gradually appearing on my blog. Increasingly, I find myself drawn towards to innovative use of mobile technology in big countries like Australia and China which have lots of opportunities to more services via mobile technology to disperse communities.

The suspense is killing me! I saw a few Imagine Cup pictures on Nick’s and Michael’s Flickr streams but there is still no official word on this year’s Australia Imagine Cup winning team! No update on the Aus IC blog or Aus Academic blog neither.

Last time I heard from the source, there were going to be some pretty heavy weights judges onboard including Victorian government official and MVP on the panel. How did the event go? When will we ever know?