This year's Developer Days event in Taiwan on November 30 put mobile multimedia and marketing in the spotlight. James Sha, head of Ericsson Mobility World Taiwan, says there is great interest in this area from all parties: operators, content providers and application developers.

Ericsson has placed its MMS MM7 VASP software development kit (SDK) in general release. This SDK, previously only available to owners of Ericsson's Multimedia Messaging Center (MMC), is now available at Ericsson Mobility World, free of charge to Value-Added Service Providers (VASPs).

The breadth of mobile applications may not be as great in Malaysia as in other Asian countries, but there is solid base and encouraging statistics for potential success. Operators are increasing their mobile data capacity, SMS is giving way to MMS and telecom statistics all point upwards.