Online Gaming Revenues to Hit US$20 Billions - ABI Research

Revenues of web gaming in 2012 are forecast to achieve over US$20 billion, driven by North American, European and Asia Pacific markets, based on market-research firm ABI Research.

The Asia-Pacific region, in particular China, could be the engine behind significantly of this development. However, in China,as a result of commonly lower levels of very own PC ownership, the firm models are enhancing a tiny differently. In accordance with market analyst Michael Inouye, "World of Warcraft, for instance, generates essential earnings for Activision in Europe and North America over a subscription basis. But in China, despite a big `subscriber` base, the revenues are far smaller: it`s a lot more of a pay-as-you-go design (prepaid game cards). This also makes a higher reliance on `cloud` or server-based games."

One more difference in Asia is regulation. "In China, Korea, Vietnam, and elsewhere the rules are much more exacting in what they allow. Some games for instance, have had to adjust their content. utilizing WoW once more as an example, the developers had to get rid of the virtual blood."

The increasingly varied and variety of connected devices would also enable gaming on additional platforms, ABI Research said.

How to Create Mail Merge with Google Mail

Mail Merge can obviously save you plenty of time as you can send personalized email messages to multiple people at once. The feature is neither available in Gmail nor Google Apps but there are workarounds like:

Option #1. You can connect your Gmail account with Outlook and then use the Mail Merge feature of Microsoft Office Word to send bulk email messages through Gmail but from your desktop.

Option #2. You can use web based services like MailChimp, Constant Contact, Campaign Monitor, etc. for sending personalized mass emails but they aren’t free.

If none of the above options work for you, here’s a third and better solution – you can setup Mail Merge in Gmail through your Google Docs account – it’s both free and easy to setup. Let’s get started.

Walt Disney reaches 100 Million Facebook Fans

Walt Disney have got more than 100 million facebook followers, It's a pretty huge and great perhaps the highest number with anyother company. The company has announced the achievement on last Sunday, which coincidentally was Walt Disney's Birthday.

There are around 200 facebook pages ranging from theme parks, movies to characters such as Mickey Mouse and Dory, Where Disneyland's page alone reached 6 million fans.

Walt Disney has launched these pages in August 2009. Now the pages attract about 5 million new fans each week. "One of the reasons why we have been very successful is because we have fresh content all the time," Friedland said.

Other companies appear to fall behind Disney: Facebook itself has 29.6 million fans and Coca Cola boasts 20.3 million fans, according to Techland.com on Time Magazine's website.

Email Marketing

What is it?

Though there are many online marketing methods to generate leads E-mail marketing can be defined as a means of direct marketing in which the email is required being a medium to speak with your targeted audience. 

As the penetration in the Internet is growing, businesses are finding e mail marketing an easy way to focus on their audience and pitch their services or products.

Why Email Marketing?

Email is an ideal solution for brand reinforcement, product testing, promotional offers and customer surveys. It's fast, cheap and easy to send special announcements, newsletters, and promotional offers to their customers via email.

Email marketing is an effective tool to pursue internet business. It can be a concept that invokes immediate response or action from the prospects. 

Email Marketing has many features. I’d like to list out the important features below,

• Inexpensive 
• Drive traffic to your website 
• Increase profits 
• There are various tools like auto responders, bounce messages, read receipts and clicks to trace the email messages. These help out with correlating sales with marketing and measuring the negative or positive responses. 
• Can make sure that the message reaches the targeted audience 
• Cost effective way of reaching a targeted audience to distribute information 
• Encourages customer loyalty, strengthens relationships, and builds trust. 
• Increase brand awareness

Well, the recent survey says that “Consumers want personalized e-mail from marketers” - More than half of US and UK consumers said they would be more receptive to e-mails from marketers if they were personalized and highly-targeted. That is among the key findings of a new report issued from e-mail service provider - e-Dialog, June 07, 2010.

New LG Star Tegra 2 Smartphones in India

The LG Star is an Optimus branded device expected to be the first smartphone to run on a dual-core Tegra 2 Processor. It is anticipated to have a well-sized display measuring 4 inches, large enough for you to view the videos you prepared in HD 1080p. A 1500mAh battery powers the model which will include a microSD slot to expand storage capacity. LG Star Price is yet to declare in India.

Specifications & Features

• 4 inch display (w/ TFT capacitive touchscreen)
• CDMA Network Device (Doesn’t use SIM card)
• 3.5 mm audio jack
• Accelerometer and Proximity sensors for user-interface
• Android OS, v2.2 Froyo
• 1GHz dual core CPU
• 3G, WiFi, Bluetooth
• 8 MP Camera
• Standard battery, Li-Ion 1500 mAh

Facebook's venture into E-Mail Service

Facebook declared plans in this month to offer users a fully functioning e-mail service that will be available sometime in upcoming weeks. Users will be able to get "@facebook.com" e-mail address, which will be able to receive messages from other e-mail service providers too.

The e-mail service is being called a potential "Gmail killer." The move is the latest in an ongoing battle between Facebook and Google, which says it will offer more social networking features in response to Facebook's growing popularity.

The service will be able to pull in text messages and instant chats, according to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, will play a significant role in electronic communication in the future.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt said Facebook's new venture into e-mail will increase healthy competition. Also, he continues that "More competition is always good because competition makes the market larger," told the Washington Post. 

According to a 2009 Pew Internet and American Life Project survey, text messaging has become the primary form of communication for U.S. teens. "We don't think a modern messaging system is going to be e-mail," Zuckerberg said in a press statement.

Well, Most of the people are ready to welcome the new service, while the others say “I hate change”.

Online Marketing is better than Television Marketing - Microsoft

Microsoft India is taking a strange stride to market their latest gaming hardware, the Kinect for the Xbox 360. They feel that usual advertising mediums won’t help them to reach their target audience successfully.

“The people who we are trying to reach, the people who will buy the Kinect from us, are all online, highly connected with the Internet. We are promoting the device through our social networks, and maintain a thriving online community, but unlike the launch of the Xbox in 2005, when we ran a sustained television campaign, today we feel that the community is already aware of the Xbox, is already enthusiastic, and we feel that we can reach them better without advertising” said Jaspreet Bindra, Regional Director for Entertainment and Devices - Microsoft India.

Most of the people are on Facebook and Twitter and on forums which discuss technology, they become familiar with the brand and the device, and then the conversion takes place when they use it themselves.

“On Facebook alone, we have a community of almost 50,000 fans now. These are people that are passionate about the games, identify with our brand and use the page, and our Twitter page and even other paths to connect with us directly” said by Sharan Tulsiani, Community Manager for Xbox 360 India.

Apple is launching iOS 4.2

Apple announced its latest operating system update for iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad users will be available today. The software update would bring a bunch of new features to the iPad that already hit the iPhone and iPod Touch through last summer's iOS 4.0 release. iPad users are now can switch between apps, organize through folders and even can jump from one email inbox to another.

Steve Jobs mentioned in his statement that "iOS 4.2 makes the iPad a completely new product, just in time for the holiday season," "Once again, the iPad with iOS 4.2 will define the target that other tablets will aspire to, but very few, if any, will ever be able to hit."

The new AirPrint feature would print content directly from your mobile device to an AirPrint-enabled printer, a list that presently includes the HP Photosmart, HP LaserJet Pro, and HP Officejet, along with a host of other printers.

Airplay is another feature which would allow you to play music, videos and photos from and iPad, iPhone and iPod to Apple TV. 

iOS 4.2 will be available for the iPhone 3G, 3GS, iPod and iPad. In order to update any of these devices with iOS 4.2 first require iTunes 10.1, which Apple released a week ago.

What comScore says about Search Engines?! - A Quick Review

Google preserved its authority in search last month, capturing 66.3% of explicit core searches and 64.3% of total core searches, which includes Google Instant.

Well, Bing and Yahoo tracked behind, according to the comScore data Bing has got faintly uptime. comScore has continued it’s second month with the impact of Google Instant – which offers suggestions as someone types – when calculating its search engine rankings.

ComScore said last month that when people type something into Google, hit "enter," and then click on a link, it counts that activity in its "explicit core search" results. Results that show up in Google Instant as someone types will be included in "total core search" results if a user pauses on that for at least three seconds, comScore said.

As a result, Google had 66.3% of the open core search market in October 2010, up very slightly from 66.1% a month before. Yahoo came in 2nd with 16.5% of the market, losing 0.2%, followed by Microsoft sites with 11.5%, a 0.3% boost. Overall, more than 16.6 billion open core searches were conducted in October 2010, with Google capturing 11 billion searches, followed by Yahoo with 2.7 billion, and Microsoft with 1.9 billion.

Recently moved Ask.com – had 598 million searches, followed by AOL with 346 million. On the whole Google is only company in the hit list to make any gains month-over-month in a total core search, which includes Google Instant.

Recent article says that “Google had 64.3 percent of the market, up 1.4 percent from the previous month. Yahoo had 18.5 percent, down 0.7 percent, followed by Microsoft at 12.1 percent, down 0.4 percent.”

Nokia Declares N8 Power Problem

The world's leading mobile phone maker Nokia declared on Friday some of its new flagship N8 smartphones, which it hopes will help re-take lost market share, are simply dying. The N8, which is the company's first handset to run the Symbian 3 platform, which was released in October.

Few customers are reporting that their N8 turned off inadvertantly without any way to turn them back on, or refused to power on at all. The company said that complaints of the problems have emerged in the press in recent days, prompting Nokia to release a video interview on Thursday with executive vice president Niklas Savander in which he said he was "concerned" about the flaw.

"We have dressed it down to the way we assemble the engines," Savander said, adding that the company has taken "precautionary measures" across their product line to weed out the problem.