South Korea is pushing forward with a plan to completely digitize its classrooms by 2015.

Video via Reuters

Villagers who travel from villages and farming areas into the big cities to work are increasingly using mobile money services to send cash back home, said Husain.

“Asia is absolutely leading the way,” Husain noted, adding that regions like North America and Europe may not see such an urgent need for the services owing to a highly banked and credit card laden society. This gives developing countries the chance to “leapfrog” developed markets when it comes to mobile money technologies and practices.

That doesn’t mean developed countries don’t have any use for mobile payments, it’s just a different business model, and one of convenience rather than basic necessity; paying for one’s parking space via mobile instead of finding a meter for instance.

“There is a lot of money in mobile commerce,” Husain told RCR adding that firms in the space had “barely scratched the surface.”

Transaction fees would now be the major challenge for mobile credit companies to face, said Husain, with people unwilling to pay 20 cent fees on small amounts of money amounting to just a few dollars at a time, but the process still offered financial institutions to make money from anybody, even the unbanked.

The sad fact is, said Husain, that in today’s world, it’s the unbanked who end up paying the highest percentage of transaction fees anyway, at the hands of services which charge exorbitant rates to transfer low income salaries home to their families.

The upcoming battle in mobile payments, however, would be between mobile operators and banks, claimed Husain, with carriers having taken an early role in the game and financial institutions only just starting to wake up and pay attention.

“Certainly at this stage we’re seeing everyone get into it, from the smallest players to the biggest players, everyone’s having a go, seeing how much land they can grab, this is what the gold rush looks like right now,” he said.

“Video is the new voice,” said Kearns speaking to RCR Wireless News in Singapore recently.

The deployment of 3G on a global scale is what is really giving video a boost, as carriers feed consumers what they want at speeds they can finally enjoy.

“Entertainment is what it’s all about and for very many people in Asia, their very first exposure to the Internet is going to be on their mobile device,” he said.

Analysts are predicting up to 50 times growth in network data traffic, said Kearns, but the problem is that operators are only seeing that translate into a 15% increase in revenue. Thus, the capital expenditure needed to deliver quality video services remains high.

Dialogic believes it can do much to help solve this problem, firstly by optimizing videos for mobile consumption and secondly optimizing the backhaul in the network to make it more cost effective to distribute video.

“The biggest thing about VAS is the content,” concluded Kearns, noting that if content was compelling enough, it would sell.

The BBC’s Cindy Sui visits one very successful Taiwanese firm – HTC – and examines the challenges facing other Asian technology companies.

For more information visit BBC News here

“At AT&T we’re looking for new devices to add to our network each and every day,” Michael Stice VP of the carrier’s business development for emerging devices told RCR.

“We’re looking to take our customers beyond smartphones and handsets,” he said noting that the operator was looking into any types of devices it could attach to its network. “Computing devices seems like a reasonable place to start.”

Stice said AT&T sent teams to Taiwan at least a couple of times a year to visit the OEMs and ODMs in the country.

“A lot of the technology and the interest in the space really starts from here,” he explained adding “we come to learn about what the trends are, about what the devices are going to look like, a year from now, six months from now, we try to bring that into our portfolio, and really bring the best of technology back to our customers in the United States.”

Convergence between the mobile and computing space has become a strong theme in the industry and Stice said AT&T was keenly interested in looking at how some of the Windows on ARM products would develop. “We’re very excited about trying to understand what the ecosystem’s going to do to develop products in that space,” he told us.

The industry, said Stice, needed to carry on delivering innovation and differentiation to handset buyers, asserting that AT&T was committed to figuring out “the best of those choices that we can get into the hands of our customers.”

RCR also learned that AT&T is keeping its eye on Intel’s prospects in the industry too.

“There’s a lot of smart folks at Intel trying to figure out how to break into the mobile space and make it big and sell their next several million chipsets, I think eventually they’ll do it,” said Stice, noting that while the firm had “not quite cracked the code” just yet, had “no doubt” it would get there eventually.”

“We need them to be there,” he added, “they’re a very strong ecosystem partner as well.”

Asustek’s tablet/phone combo – which allows consumers to use one SIM for two devices by allowing the smartphone to dock at the back of an Android tablet – should emerge by the end of this year, a company spokesman told us.

Google has apparently been working closely with the Taiwanese firm to get the software optimized for the still unknown hardware. Early prototypes of the device(s) were on display at the Computex show in Nangang, Taipei, but were thought to be too unstable for hands on demos just yet.

However, RCR managed to track down a company rep to talk us through the platform on the following video:

With almost 700 million users, Facebook would have the world’s third largest population if it was a country. Now the social networking site is heading south to find even more “friends”. This week on ‘Tech 24’, hosts Rebecca Bowring and Eric Olander report on the site’s growing popularity in Africa and Asia.

Video here via The Australian