Ericsson's Telecom Report on online / mobile games

From Ericsson's Telecom Report:

But a significant trend is happening: Online games for free. How does a business model work when the user pays nothing?
...
"The trends in our industry are multiple, there are games that are going to be free to play, so to say, you can download them for free, play them. we have a couple of those already up and running. and then we are looking to get a smaller part of the player base to start paying for bits and pieces of extra content basically in that game."
...
But free games on social media sites are proving to be a hit.

"If you're looking at it from a gamer perspective, social media, is I think goint to turn into one of the main distribution channel. so you will see a lot of the gams including some of the ones that we have launched recently have links into some of the sites like Facebook"
...
Selling 5 million games on a console, like Xbox or Sony Playstation is considered to be a great success. But it compares nothing to companies like Zynga who have free games on social media sites like Facebook and attract over 100 million users every month. Games such a Farmville, Yoville, Petville and many more are free to use, but encourage the gamers to buy, swap, send gifts and attend different activities thourhgou the course of their experience. experiences that can be played on both the fixed computer and mobile devices.

"In say five years time it could be a market where there are five hundred million smartphones being sold per annum with an install base of maybe one to one and a half billion smartphones."

"I mean that is the largest addressable market for hardware worldwide. Mobile games, worldwide about 5.5 billion dollars at the moment. forecasted to doubel over the next three or four years, so a ten billion dollar mark. a lot of that growth is coming from the smartphones."

 

Global mobile data traffic surpassed voice during December of 2009

From telecoms.com:

Global mobile data traffic surpassed voice during December of 2009, after growing 280 per cent during each of the last two years. According to Swedish vendor Ericsson, which published the figures, global mobile data traffic is forecast to double annually over the next five years.

Ericsson said that the crossover occurred at approximately 140,000 Terabytes per month in both voice and data traffic, while traffic on 3G networks also surpassed that of 2G networks.

playing more with maps

Below is another google maps app using the latest Turkish earthquakes from Kandilli.


And here is a bigger version.



Update
Just read some about Google Maplets for such needs with a similar and sure better example.

Update, Jul '11
Just noticed that there is a website doing almost the same