[via Bill Bishop] Forbes writes: "Shanda Interactive rules China's online game business. Now Chen Tianqiao wants it to be the nation's online media supermarket."

Chen Tianqiao wants more. In the past few months he has put into motion a plan to parlay his gaming network's success into China's first all-in-one online media supermarket. In February Chen bought 19.5% of Sina, China's online news leader and biggest Internet portal, for $230 million in cash. In April Shanda announced a partnership with Universal Music Group, the world's largest music company, that will allow Shanda users to stream tunes to their PCs. It is Universal's first online sales foray into China and Chen's first foray into music. The service begins in June. "We want to be something like an interactive Disney or an interactive Viacom," Chen says.

But to do so he needs mass distribution into the Chinese home--and there the PC is a poor pipeline. Only 94 million of China's 1.3 billion people were Internet users at the end of last year, but 330 million have TV sets. A huge chunk of Shanda users are nomads, logging in from Internet cafes.

Later this year Chen will unveil a new interactive entertainment box, dubbed the Shanda Station, that will allow TV viewers to go online, play Shanda's games and buy music and, eventually, films. Developed in part with Intel, the product uses Microsoft software and connects to the Internet over high-speed DSLphone lines. Shanda is considering putting voice and video calling features inside the Shanda Station, which will be sold through electronics chain stores, plus Shanda's own sales channels. The manufacturing will be outsourced. "The most important thing for us right now is the expansion from the PC to the TV," Chen says. "We sell fun games, but this is a serious business."

A home audience will also give Shanda a better claim on China's torrid advertising market...Says Safa Rashtchy, senior research analyst at Piper Jaffray in Menlo Park, Calif.: "Shanda has the potential to be one of three or four really big media companies in China."

The Economist writes that the battle has just begun.

Suddenly, it seems, everyone is realising that the next big thing in telecoms and technology could be mobile e-mail. On May 10th, Microsoft, the world's largest software firm, unveiled a new version of its Windows operating system designed for mobile phones. This will be able to run programs from independent software firms, such as Silicon Valley's Visto, Good Technology, SEVEN and Intellisync, that will let mobile-phone users send and receive e-mail on their handsets. This follows a very busy April, when SEVEN bought Smartner, a Finnish rival, and Visto reached deals with the largest mobile operator in the world, Vodafone, and, in Canada, with Rogers Wireless, to start rolling out mobile e-mail services.

“It is still early, early, early in this—dare we say nascent?—trend,” says Pip Coburn, an analyst at UBS. He expects mobile e-mail to be a “killer application” because it taps into people's strongest psycho-emotional needs—the urge to connect with others (and simultaneous fear of social isolation if they cannot), as well as the desire to be mobile—while asking relatively little of them by way of new learning, as they already know how to send e-mail via their PCs. Indeed, e-mail is likely to blow away a lot of the other fancy services that mobile operators are hoping to push over their third-generation wireless networks. Andrew Odlyzko, a telecoms guru, once did a survey in which he asked people to choose, hypothetically, between having either e-mail or the entire content of the world wide web: 95% chose e-mail.

Roger McNamee writes:

A few major themes that entrepreneurs can leverage:

Time: No one has enough of time. Saving it and making the most of it are key drivers of consumer purchases today. Google and Blackberry save time. Portable music, DVD, and game players enable higher quality activities in limited time.

Full Duplex Automation: Most services on the web are automated on the provider side, but require lots of effort by the end user. What I want is services that are automated at BOTH ends: full duplex automation. My two favorite examples are MyYahoo and TiVO. You program them once and they work for you forever.

Universal authoring: It’s astonishing how many devices exist today that enable consumers to create content. The tools for managing that content are still pretty lame.

Here are a few of the innovations that I want to see . . .

Digital safekeeping: Now that family photos, music, and video are digital, protecting them is a real priority. What is the right model for personal back up and how do your make it automatic?

Full Duplex Search: Imagine a search engine that could watch the web for you. It could keep its eyes peeled for bargains, for specific news triggers, or whatever you want . . . and then send you an email—or execute a transaction—when it found what you want.

BitTorrent client for the rest of us: Video on the internet is way too hard to use. What I want is a product that provides TiVO-plus functionality for digital downloads over the internet . . . full duplex automation that doesn’t require a computer science degree. Done right, the client could find, download (and even pay for) digital files of any type.

Ability to buy anything on eBay with a credit card: This isn’t a start-up opportunity, but it’s something eBay should be doing.