Proposed GST on computer software opposed …

LAHORE (June 13 2009): The NetSole Technologies Limited Chief Executive Officer and Chairman Salim Ghauri has expressed his concern over the proposed 16 percent general sales tax (GST) on computer software and said it would play havoc with the growth of Information Technology (IT) sector of Pakistan.

Reacting strongly to the government consideration of levying 16 percent general sales tax (GST) on computer software in budget 2009-10, he said any such move would take Pakistan IT industry back to the square one.

The press reports have suggested that the increased usage and sales of certified computer software worth millions of rupees across the country has urged tax authorities to consider the revenue potential of the business. According to him, the dynamic policies of the Pakistan Software Export Board had helped the IT industry to play on front foot in recent past but present recession in the US and other Western countries had put it again on back foot.

Fate of many IT firms is hanging in the balance because of the sudden drop in sales of their software across the globe, he added. He further pointed out that the volume of internally used software was meagre one than the exported one. The snail pace automation of public sector departments in Pakistan was a hurdle in fast growth of IT in Pakistan.

Digital downloads spell end for video game stores?…

Will digital downloads kill the video games store? That’s the multibillion dollar question facing retailers from Wal-Mart Stores Inc and Target Corp to GameStop Corp, as Internet distributors continue to grow. Retailers like Target splashed out on large booths at last week’s E3 Expo in Los Angeles, showcasing games like Activision’s “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.”

But gamers—especially on personal computers—are increasingly turning to alternative methods to play and buy games, such as downloading or “streaming” online games, rather than trekking to a store.

Take industry veteran Dave Perry, whose Gaikai online system lets PC gamers buy and stream games through their Web browsers without needing to download any content.

“Our solution is not to dive into a fight with Sony (Corp), Microsoft (Corp), Nintendo Co Ltd, as it wouldn’t gain any ‘new audience’ for publishers,” Perry said. “Instead, our strategy is 100 percent focused on being an ally to publishers and first-party hardware makers, by delivering them audiences they don’t reach today.”

Digital downloads are still a small, but fast-growing business. According to the NPD group, 17 percent of games sold in 2008 by PC gamers were digitally downloaded. Microsoft and Sony are trying to convert console gamers who have become accustomed to consuming music and movies digitally via services like Netflix and Apple Inc’s iTunes.

Wedbush Morgan Securities analyst Michael Pachter estimates digitally downloaded games will account for roughly 2 percent of industry sales this year, or around $400 million. He expects demand to double annually for a few years, to $800 million in 2010 and $1.6 billion by 2011.

“As broadband penetration increases and the Internet connection migrates to the living room, downloads or cloud computing solutions will become much more viable,” he said.

“Downloads will become 20 percent of the market within five years, and probably peak at around 50 percent of the overall market in 10 years,” said Pachter. This assumes an overall market growth of 5 to 10 percent annually, he added.

INERTIA

With video game sales growth slowing somewhat, publishers and developers are seeking new channels to reach customers.

Yet some retailers resist the format, arguing that going through a third-party online distributor further saps margins for both developers and retail chains. Analysts say the big retail chains like Wal-Mart and Target have also yet to embrace and invest in digital sales.

“Nothing that has been digitally distributed retains the same value as a retail version; it’s always less,” GameStop CEO Dan DeMatteo said in September.

Getting content on demand is no stranger to households accustomed to watching movies over set-top boxes, or teens streaming music over the Internet. But spontaneously ordering a game is stymied somewhat by the limits of the gamers’ personal computer system.

Some fledgling companies try to work around that.

Over the past seven years, entrepreneur Steve Perlman has been developing a digital distribution box called OnLive. He hopes to offer high-definition PC games on low-end hardware.

OnLive has struck deals with Electronic Arts Inc, Ubisoft, Take Two Interactive, Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment, THQ, Epic Games, Eidos, Atari and Codemasters. While the company had 16 games on display in March at the Game Developers Conference, it had no presence on the E3 show floor.

OnLive this fall is slated to launch a subscription service similar to Microsoft’s Xbox Live.

NPD estimates 18 percent of Xbox 360 users who have a “Gold” membership to Microsoft’s Xbox Live service regularly download from Xbox Live Arcade, and 10 percent of PlayStation 3 users regularly buy digitally from Sony’s PlayStation Network.

The largest independent games distribution network is Valve Software’s Steam, which has 21 million users and 700 games.

Doug Lombardi, vice president of marketing at Valve Software—known as the groundbreaking backers of the “Half-Life” shooter series—said digital distribution has already been largely embraced by the industry.

But the real forte of digital distribution may be the ability to provide automatic updates and extras, keeping things new as with the Team Fortress multiplayer-shooter series.

“Now that games can be connected to their audience, they will last and grow well beyond their traditional 6-month to 1-year sales cycle,” Lombardi said

Yahoo! launches research centre in Beijing

BEIJING (June 11 2009): US Internet giant Yahoo! has opened a global research and development centre in Beijing to tap into China's pool of intellectual talent as it seeks to reduce costs, state media said Wednesday. The centre, the third for Yahoo! with the two others located at its US headquarters and in India, will focus on search, advertising and other personal Internet tools and technologies, the China Daily reported.

It will also work on developing the company's core platform globally, the report said, citing Jeff Kinder, senior vice president of Yahoo! Media Products and Solutions. "The primary reason (for us to set up the centre here) is the deep pool of engineers and scientists the country has. We will also optimise our cost structure," said Kinder, according to the report.

The company did not disclose the value of the investment or the number of staff the centre planned to employ, the paper said. The facility will be operated independently from the Alibaba Group, China's biggest e-commerce portal that controls Yahoo!'s operations in the country, it added.

Yahoo! owns 39 percent of Alibaba, which also runs China's top online auction site Taobao.com and business-to-business e-commerce platform Alibaba.com, the report said. The launch of the Beijing centre came after Yahoo! reported a

nearly 80 percent slump in its net profit in the first three months of the year due to the economic downturn and said it would trim its workforce by five percent. However Yahoo! Chief Executive Officer Carol Bartz has said the company planned to bolster its ranks of engineers while shaving away unneeded layers of management.

PTA directs ISPs to check grey traffic…

KARACHI: Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) has directed all Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to ensure that their networks are not used for illegal call/voice termination and such cases of grey telephony are brought into the notice of PTA immediately.

These directions were issued in a meeting on the issue of Grey Traffic held at PTA Headquarters. Chairman PTA, Dr.Mohammed Yaseen, chaired the meeting. Members and senior officers of the authority were also present in the meeting. It was observed that ISP bandwidth and Internet Protocol (IP) addresses are being used for the termination of illegal voice. staff report

PTA issues WLL Licences for AJ&K, NAs…

Islamabad—Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) has awarded Wireless Local Loop (WLL) licenses to M/s PTCL and M/s Wateen for three regions of Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJ & K) and Northern Areas (NAs) during a license signing ceremony held at PTA Headquarters today.

The ceremony was presided over by Chairman PTA, Dr. Mohammed Yaseen while Member (Finance), Syed Nasrul Karim Ghaznavi, Member (Technical) Dr. Khawar Siddique Khokhar, senior officers of the Authority and representatives of PTCL and Wateen were also present on this occasion.

The issuance of WLL licenses would augment the efforts of government to provide enhanced and affordable telecom services to the people of the AJ & K and NAs. This step is likely to capture huge investment in 3 Telecom Regions (TR) including Mirpur, Muzaffarabad and Northern Areas.

While speaking on this occasion, Chairman PTA said that earlier there was only one telecom operator in AJ&K and NAs but when competition was introduced and new operators started their services, all segments of the sector witnessed rapid growth. With a teledensity figure of 3.59% in the Year 2005-06, the region was lagging far behind from the rest of the country in terms of telecommunication services. Two years after the deregulation in the area, the teledensity of AJ&K and NAs today stands at 37.46%. Mobile subscribers figure of 0.167 Million of 2005-06 has now jumped to 1.84 Million subscribers.

The Chairman said that WLL is a wireless technology, which best suits to the environments in AJ&K and NAs as the service had proved very useful in other far-flung areas of the country. He said that the people of low income groups in rural areas would greatly benefit from this service. He said PTA would extend full cooperation to the telecom operators in the successful operation of their business.

These licenses were awarded on the basis of a bidding conducted by PTA in November last year. In the bidding of spectrum in 3.5 GHz for Mirpur (TR-1) one block was taken by PTCL at the highest bid of Rs.10 million while other was withdrawn because there was no second bidder for the TR-1. For Muzaffarabad (TR-2) PTCL gave the highest bid of Rs. 4 million followed by Wateen which matched the price. For Northern Areas (TR-3) Wateen offered highest bid of Rs. 4 million and second block went to PTCL for the same price. In total 26 million rupees were collected against the auction price of 5 WLL licenses in 3 regions.

Mobilink signs MoU with ERU …

KARACHI: Mobilink signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the Emergency Response Unit (ERU) to establish Mobilink Camp in Kund, which will support 1,000 families of IDPs for a period of 3 months.

Director Public Relations and Corporate Social Responsibility Mobilink, Omar Manzur said, “Estimated at about Rs 80 million or $1 million, the project has been made possible by Orascom’s continued support for this noble cause.” He said our teams would remain personally involved in various areas of camp management, procurement of items and other requirements. staff report

Microsoft, Sony take aim at Nintendo Wii at E3 (AP)…

LOS ANGELES – This year’s Electronic Entertainment Expo has been quite the moving experience. During presentations at the video game industry trade show, both Microsoft and Sony debuted prototype motion-control devices for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 that could rival Nintendo’s popular Wii, the first console to employ a motion-detecting controller when it debuted in 2006.

Nintendo said Wednesday they are flattered by the imitations.

“It’s certainly nice for us to see other companies adopting the philosophy that Nintendo communicated back a few years ago,” said Cammie Dunaway, executive vice president of sales and marketing at Nintendo of America. “For us, we’re really pleased and excited to bring consumers the next advancement now with Wii MotionPlus.”

Nintendo mostly used the show as an opportunity to showcase Wii MotionPlus, an attachment announced at last year’s E3 that uses sensors to more precisely mimic gamers’ hand movements on screen. The only new apparatus Nintendo debuted this year was the Wii Vitality Sensor, which can check a player’s pulse. The doodad prompted some to wonder if Nintendo had run out of ideas.

“That sensor was slightly bizarre,” said Paul Jackson, an analyst at Forrester. “But it plays into the success that Nintendo has had with ‘Wii Fit’ on the health and lifestyle front. I imagine that one does get a bit weary of new things that you can plug into your Wii. I just can’t see the Wii Vitality Sensor having more than two or three applications.”

Meanwhile, Microsoft unveiled a motion control device, codenamed “Project Natal,” that combines a camera, depth sensor, microphone and processor to eliminate the need for any button-mashing input device. Microsoft said the gadget can track a players’ full body movement, recognize their face and voice and respond to their physical and vocal commands.

The Xbox maker demonstrated “Project Natal” with three prototype programs: “Ricochet,” a soccerlike game that requires players to use their entire bodies to bounce balls at targets; “Paint Party,” an art-making program that uses a players’ hands and arms as the brush; and “Milo,” essentially a virtual boy who can communicate and interact with the player.

“The first two games Microsoft previewed were very polished, but ‘Milo’ showed where this stuff can go above and beyond in gaming,” said Jackson. “I don’t think people have seen anything like that outside of artificial intelligence labs in universities. It showed ‘Natal’ wasn’t just about flaying around or responding to commands on a screen.”

Sony’s motion-control gizmo was decidedly less astonishing. The unnamed wand-shaped apparatus has a light-emitting sphere on the end that can be “seen” by a PlayStation Eye camera. It was demonstrated with software that transformed it on-screen into objects such as a sword, flashlight and gun with one-to-one motion control — much like Wii MotionPlus.

“If you look at the consumer that is playing ‘God of War III’ or playing ‘Killzone 2,’ they’re not typically somebody who may be the biggest Wii consumer,” said Jack Tretton, president at Sony Computer Entertainment America. “I think we have the opportunity to improve the experience for the casual gamer, but also address the hardcore gamer with the motion controller.”

Sony promised it would conjure up the wand-shaped controller by next spring while Microsoft was mum on when “Natal” was due on store shelves. Neither company showcased any actual games for their flashy new devices, leaving many questions about the motion control technologies unanswered. Perhaps the most important one of all: Will they live up to the hype?