Moshi Monsters wins on Nintendo DS

Moshi Monsters the children's on-line game created by Mindy Candy has now taken over the video games market as their Nintendo DS game Moshling Zoo has taken over the No 1 spot, beating the previous holder Dr. Kawashima's Brain Training. Moshling Zoo has been No 1 for a record braking 15 consecutive weeks. This matches their music prowess as Moshi Monsters: Music Rox! reached number one in the download charts ahead of artists such as Madonna. The on-line game also has 60m users from around the world and in the UK around 1 in 3 children has a Moshi Monster. Michael Acton-Smith the CEO of Mind Candy is rising from strength to strength and everyone's waiting to know what's coming out next from the Mind Candy stable, rumours are that it's another on-line game, but aimed at all the family.

Adobe CS6 for hire

Adobe is allowing users of it's Creative Suite v6 (CS6) to 'rent' the software for $49 per month instead of purchasing it outright. A user can download a single copy for both Mac and Windows (currently this generally requires 2 licenses) and both are included in the rental price. If the user is upgrading from an earlier version (from v3 to v5.5) then the rental price is only $29.99 per month. Of course it's still possible to purchase the full suite for $2,600 which is around 5 years rental (by which time there's bound to be an upgrade). This also links into Adobe's Creative Cloud which offers tools like Photoshop Touch (the on-line version of Photoshop) and allows sharing of content.

Vodafone offers £1.04bn CW

Vodafone has made an offer of £1.04bn ($1.7bn) in cash for C&W (Cable and Wireless Worldwide). This works out at 38p per share which is considerably higher than the original expected offer of £700m. Vodafone is seeing vastly increased mobile data traffic and this may be a defensive move to lessen it's reliance on BT who provide most of their backhaul. Vodafone also wholesales several BT business services, which they'll now be able to offer in-house. C&W also run a broadband LLU service for other providers and again this could be directly used to sell broadband to Vodafone's consumer base. Vodafone replaced all their DSL connections at cell sites with fibre from BT, these can also all be taken in-house using the significant assets of C&W's fiber network that covers much of the UK and in places like Scotland they have better coverage than BT (due to the historical acquisition of THUS Plc which was originally Scottish Telecom prior to the acquisition of Demon Internet). There's sure to be many problems integrating the two companies, though in the long term they gain access to a enterprise and consumer solutions and should deliver long term costs savings