In the furthest reaches of India’s rural heartland, the cellphone is bringing something that television, radio and even newspapers couldn’t deliver: Instant access to music, information, entertainment, news and even worship.

Despite its rapid modernization, many of India’s 750,000 villages remain isolated except for the cellphone reception that now blankets almost the entire country after a decade of rapid expansion by operators. So in villages that don’t receive any FM radio stations, people have begun calling a number that has a recording of Bollywood tunes and listening to it on their headsets.

This primitive cellular “radio” service was used by close to 20 million Indians last year, phone company executives estimate.

“I call it the poor man’s iTunes,” says Mahesh Prasad, president of Reliance Communications Ltd., one of India’s largest cellular companies. “A villager waiting for a bus has nothing to do. When he wants to kill some time, this is the only entertainment media available.”

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Videogames are serious business in China. The country’s online game market will reach 41 billion yuan ($6 billion) by 2010, accounting for half the global market, according to newly released data from Cnzz.com, a Beijing-based data analysis firm.

The Cnzz.com report says that almost two-thirds of China’s 338 million Web users are now online gamers. The online-game industry, which currently accounts for more than half of the total Internet economy, will see strong annual growth at a rate of 20 percent in future years, the report says.

The mainstream remains the awkwardly named sector of Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs). In October, six out of the 10 most popular online games in China are MMORPG games, according to the report. World of Warcraft by Activision Blizzard (ATVI) still tops the list with the most registered players and peak simultaneous online users. But the current government regulatory fighting over its Chinese license, held by Netease, may yet have a negative impact on the game, according to the report.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Once upon a time Second Life had a Twitter level of hype. Even those without a cartoon version of themselves couldn’t plead ignorance due to blanket coverage in newspapers and magazines.

Second Life is a virtual world started by the US firm Linden Lab in 2003, in which users design an avatar to live their “second life” online.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

The term “3-D” has been largely synonymous with Hollywood blockbusters, buttered popcorn and ill-fitting cardboard glasses since the 1950s, when three-dimensionality was introduced to draw TV owners into theaters.

Over the past 20 years, 3-D-capable devices like set-top boxes as well as 3-D programming have become available at home. A lack of standard broadcasting formats, relatively little content and the need for 3-D glasses, however, have kept it from a broad audience.

Tech companies are betting that will all change, and when it does, you’ll be able to lose the glasses.

According to new data from Thomson Reuters, 3-D-related patents have risen sharply in recent years, led by companies such as Samsung, Panasonic and Toshiba. “It will only be a matter of time before 3-D televisions start showing up in the home,” the report says.

Patent activity in the 3-D television space grew 69 percent over a five-year period, with more than 1,000 unique invention patents filed last year alone. This year is on par, with 486 filed in the first half of 2009.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

As Sony Corp. (SNE) scrambles to reassert its technological relevance, Chief Executive Howard Stringer is betting on a strategy for the electronics giant that focuses on adding online content to more of its gadgets.

Speaking at the first joint public appearance by Sony’s new management team since a shake-up in February, Mr. Stringer said the Japanese giant is “moving faster than we’ve ever moved” to meet parallel challenges.

Sony is racing to close the gap with technology companies like Apple Inc. (AAPL) and Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN) that have used Internet services to enhance standalone electronics like digital-music players and electronic-book readers. Sony was a pioneer in both only to see it early advantage evaporate without a strong online component.

At the same time, Sony is trying to overhaul its core electronics division, a business encumbered by heavy overhead costs and an inefficient supply chain. This has put the company at a disadvantage to both conglomerates like Samsung Electronics Co. and upstarts like discount TV maker Vizio Inc.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

These days, videogame platform makers often boast that they are also entertainment hubs.

Microsoft (MSFT) can now add some credibility to that claim. On Thursday, the company announced a partnership with Nielsen that brings TV ratings to Xbox Live’s “1 vs. 100″ online trivia game show.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Fans of “Twilight” and “New Moon” already have plenty to be scared about–vampires, werewolves, a swirling debate over the feminist values of Stephenie Meyer’s hit series.

But what about malware? According to reports from the around the Internet this morning, the Twihard set was recently targeted by a group of online scammers, who sought to profit off the “New Moon” hype.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

California created the nation’s first energy-efficiency standard for television sets, arguing that it needed to act because federal energy officials have been slow to confront the issue.

Under the standard adopted Wednesday by the California Energy Commission, no TV with a screen size less than 58 inches may be sold in the state after 2011 unless it meets limits on energy consumption. The standard tightens further in 2013. (Larger screens were left for future examination.)

Sets sold in California under the standard would consume 33 percent less electricity in 2011 and 49 percent less in 2013 than the average set sold today, according to the commission. The standard replaces a rule that only considered energy use when sets were in standby mode.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

In a case that would have been impossible even five years ago, bad-girl rocker Courtney Love is being sued for libel by a fashion designer for allegedly slamming the woman on Twitter.

The suit claims that after a disagreement over what Love should pay Dawn Simorangkir for the clothes she designed, Love posted allegedly derogatory and false comments about the designer–among them that she had a “history of dealing cocaine”–on her now-discontinued Twitter feed.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

I remember my brother showing off a new device in the late 1990s that let him navigate the Internet on the television. Back then, there were no dogs riding skateboards on YouTube or NBC dramas on Hulu, but the technology from WebTV appeared to be a breakthrough in the convergence of the two mediums.

The frustrating thing about WebTV was that the dialup connection was so slow–at times crippling–that you often sat on the couch waiting minutes for a page to load. Plus, the resolution on TVs then was far from hi-res, and the lack of multimedia on the Web made the task rather boring.

Fast forward more than a decade: While you can now search the Web at lightning speed on the tube, watch television shows online at will and view Internet videos with clarity on any screen, companies are still struggling to come up with a business model for the Internet-connected television market.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

While Tony Hawk has been a skateboarding legend since the 1980s, today there is a generation of kids who know him for his eponymous videogames.

Starting with Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater in 1999, the Tony Hawk series has spawned more than 10 titles–among the more successful gaming franchises, and popular among skateboarders who play videogames as well as gamers who have never stepped on a board.

Mr. Hawk came to the Journal’s office Tuesday to show off his new game, Tony Hawk: Ride. Players control a virtual skater through a motion-sensing board instead of a joystick, following a growing number of interactive, stand-up games such as Guitar Hero and nearly everything on the Wii.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Current TV began with a promise to be the great democratizer of media. Some four years into the experiment, it has a new chief executive who is shifting it away from short videos to more traditional cable programming.

In that transition, Current has cut shows and staff, with the most recent layoffs happening last week. The announcement has prompted questions about citizen journalism’s future, though Mark Rosenthal, Current’s CEO and a former president and operating chief at MTV Networks, said that it isn’t in doubt.

“Current’s mission has not changed one iota,” he said in an interview. “Citizen journalism is far from dead.”

The moves are among Current’s first big changes from Mr. Rosenthal, who helped take MTV from videos to reality and entertainment programming in the ’90s. And while he said the network is still committed to viewer-created content, the format still faces plenty of skepticism as a business model.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

When web video juggernaut Dr. Horrible’s Sing-A-Long Blog debuted last year, it inspired fan-made contributions to the world of the series almost immediately–something the Whedon family encouraged by soliciting supervillain applications to be included on the official DVD. But more than a year later, a group of Houston-based fans has taken things to a whole new level.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Probably the funniest bit of commercial ingenuity I’ve seen these past few months is the growth of corpse-spam in World of Warcraft. You see, it’s quite hard, in-game, to spam people with commercial messages. If you send messages to people you get blocked and reported and your account shut down.

Read the rest of this post on the original site