News In Brief: GSMA, Conexus, Google, Twitter, Sky Italia

The GSMA has awarded six new grants of up to $1 million each from its Mobile Money for the Unbanked Fund (MMU) administered by the GSMA Foundation. New recipients include AKTEL in Bangladesh, Dialog Telekom in Sri Lanka, Grameenphone in Bangladesh, MTN Cameroon, MTN Uganda and Vodacom Tanzania.

 

Vietnamese operator VinaPhone has joined the Conexus Mobile Alliance, expanding the coalition's reach to over 240 million mobile subscribers. The Alliance now has 11 member operators. Conexus said its members will soon launch a unified roaming rate of $0.20 per SMS.

Global IT spending is on pace to decline by a record 5.2% in 2009, but will return to 3.3% growth in 2010 to reach a total of $3.3 trillion, Gartner said.

 

Google is believed to be planning to launch a beta version of its new Google Chrome OS on Thursday, during which time it will reveal its launch plans for 2010.

 

PR agency Waggener Edstrom has launched a Twitter analytics service that measures sentiment and brand impact on the micro-blogging site, called. The WE twendz pro service gathers tweets, assigns influence ratings and calculates metrics to show how a brand is being discussed within Twitter conversations.

 

Italian broadcaster Mediaset, which is controlled by Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, has reported Rupert Murdoch's Sky Italia to the antitrust authority for introducing a "digital key" that allows Sky subscribers to access its rivals' free-to-air digital terrestrial content. Mediaset