I’m excited to announce the launch of Windows Live Messenger subscription service to DiGi’s mobile subscribers in Malaysia.

“Windows Live has enabled millions of people to keep connected no matter where they are,” said Chris Chandler, Head of Mobile, Microsoft Online Services Group, Southeast Asia. “For less than the price of a Mee Goreng, Windows Live Messenger on DiGi allows users to stay in touch with friends and family in meetings, on the bus, in the library, or anywhere at all.”

via DiGi – About DiGi – Media Room – Press Releases.

Young Afghans see the world differently from older Afghans because of their use of the Internet and mobile phones, and their participation in sports, said Shukria Barakzai, a female lawmaker and former newspaper editor.

Afghanistan’s youth are not caught up in “the old circle of war,” she said. “They are engaging with the rest of the world. That’s why technology is so important for Afghanistan.”

This article reminds me why I’ve been in this business since 1996. Back in my days at MindSpring, one of the early dial-up Internet providers in the US, I got a real rush from knowing that I was helping people communicate in ways that were never possible before and that my work would in a small way tear down walls and bring people closer together.

While the focus is on the Apple App Store, slides 20 – 28 have great insight on whether or not to offer your app for free as an ad supported product or to charge for it.

The first ever Mobile Monday Singapore Peer Award is coming soon and I’m excited to take part as one of the judges for the event!

If your company is an early stage mobile startup based in Singapore, be sure to get in touch with the organizers with your presentation before 20-March to enter.  Judging will be held on 30-March at the Geek Terminal.

All finalists will be able to showcase their technology at the IDA pavilion at CommunicAsia this coming June which is an excellent opportunity for regional exposure.

For more details on how to enter or to see the presentations, check out the event listing on Facebook.

I had a chance to catch up on the week’s MWC news and look for more info on what BuzzCity has cooking.  In addition to launching a developer program to open up the company’s myGamma mobile social networking service to developers, I was excited to see the company also announced the publication of their latest industry trend report titled  ”Who uses the Mobile Internet? And what do they do?“

The 75 page PDF document compiles the results of surveying BuzzCity Ad Network viewers in fourteen countries including Brunei, Egypt, Indonesia, India, Kenya, Lybia, Nigeria, Philippines, Pakistan, Romania, South Africa, Thailand, Tanzania, and the USA.  I haven’t had a chance to look at the report in-depth yet, but will be taking a close look at the sections relevant to Southeast Asia markets over the next week.

For entrepreneurs looking for new opportunities on mobile, I highly recommend looking over the recommendations on page 71 for several ideas, especially in the areas of m-commerce.

“There are over 1 billion people in emerging markets today who don’t have a bank account but do have a mobile phone,” said Rob Conway, CEO and Member of the Board of the GSMA. “This represents a huge opportunity and mobile operators are perfectly placed to bring mobile financial services to this largely untapped consumer base. Based on the initial findings of research conducted with the microfinance centre CGAP and McKinsey & Company, we believe that mobile money for the unbanked has the potential to become a US$5 billion market opportunity over the next three years.”

via GSMA and Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Partner to Expand Availability of Financial Services through Mobile Phones ~ GSM World.

From my experience, Nokia Series 60 handsets drive a large percentage of consumer data usage in Asia, so the launch of the new app should go a long way to add reach in emerging markets.  I would also recommend that the company check out the opportunity in Indonesia where mobile browsing, social networking and mobile advertising are all shooting through the roof.

Satoshi Tanaka of DeNA, a company that creates content and portal sites for cell phones, explains:

SATOSHI TANAKA VIA INTERPRETER: When you say email to today’s young people, they would never think of emails you do on the computer. To them, cell phone emails are emails. There are even some users who would say, oh, I didn’t know you could do email on a computer, too.

MARK PHILLIPS: This brings up one of the biggest differences between U.S. and Japanese cell phone culture. While most Americans use computers to develop an intimacy with the Internet, the Japanese access the Internet primarily through the cell phone. U.C. Irvine’s Mizuko Ito:

PROFESSOR MIZUKO ITO: Broadband Internet came in relatively late compared to, say, the U.S., and the mobile Internet came in relatively quickly. You saw in the late ’90s that people were really starting to orient towards the mobile phone as their primary portal to the Internet, and this bias still persists today.

MARK PHILLIPS: Many Japanese actually say they prefer the cell phone keypad over the computer keyboard because they can type faster on it. And perhaps, most importantly, they don’t have to share their phones with anyone else. That’s why the pager fad exploded in the ’90s, because it was so personal. DeNA’s Satoshi Tanaka.

[JAPANESE]

SATOSHI TANAKA VIA INTERPRETER: With computers, although there may be one per household, it’s unlikely that it would be your own. With cell phones, on the other hand, it would belong to you exclusively. Thus, you have the freedom to access anything, whenever you want.

MARK PHILLIPS: This has produced two different trajectories for cell phone evolution. In the U.S. we’ve been upgrading our cell phones with the hope of recreating the Internet experience we’ve had for years on the computer. In Japan, since the cell phone has traditionally been the gateway to the Internet, the evolution has instead been in the incremental improvement of the cell phone network and hardware.

But even if our cell phones are on different paths, some of Japan’s hardware features may start popping up in our phones soon.

via On The Media: Transcript of “Moshi Moshi” (January 30, 2009).

Craig, Chris (me) and Tik hamming it up for the camera at the Everything is Now press briefing

At the “Everything is Now” press briefing, I spent a good deal of time speaking with Asina Pornwasin, reporter for The Nation, Thailand’s largest business daily paper.  I was really happy to see this great write-up on the Mobile First “phenomenon” as she describes it:

This large online community has provided significant revenue for Microsoft from online advertising. The jump from the PC environment to mobile phones offers much bigger market opportunities for generating online revenue. Penetration of mobile phones in Thailand is about 86 per cent of the population, with 65 million mobile devices in use around the country.

Microsoft’s strategy is to convert these subscribers to Windows Live and MSN services without the need for a personal computer. It pursues a phenomenon called “mobile first user”, in which people are gaining their first experience of the Internet on mobile phones, rather than personal computers.

The phenomenon will soon be dominant in emerging countries like Thailand, where the mobile penetration rate is higher than that of personal computers, according to the marketing director in Southeast Asia for Microsoft’s Online Services Group, Craig Law-Smith.

The full article can be found online at The Nation website.