Entertainment
Swara Bhaskar wins best actress title in China
Fuzhou: Indian film talent Swara Bhaskar has won the Best Actress award at a film festival in the capital city of Fujian province for playing a mother to a teenager in Ashwiny Iyer Tiwari’s directorial “Nil Battey Sannata” (The New Classmate).
The “Raanjhanaa” actress won the honour at the second Silk Road International Film Festival, which concluded on Saturday, according to the reports.
“Swara is an amazing actress. She had to put on eight kg for the role. She went to Agra and studied the local culture. She had to take up two months of training. She’s not a mother and she plays one in the film. She had to calm down. She even went for meditation and yoga,” Tiwari had told IANS earlier.
At the fest, Hong Kong superstar Andy Lau was awarded the Best Actor prize for his performance in “Saving Mr. Wu”.
The award of Features Films of 2015 went to three movies, including “Saving Mr Wu”, Russian movie “Puppet Syndrome” and “Yellow Flowers on the Green Grass” from Vietnam.
Jackie Chan, the ambassador of the Silk Road Film festival, said that he hopes the Festival can draw attention worldwide and become the Chinese equivalent to the Oscars.
“I hope the Silk Road International Film Festival will make progress year by year and draw attention from worldwide. And more and more people from other nations would take part in the festival in the future. Oscar is a very important global award. I hope the Silk Road festival would learn from it and become the ‘Chinese Oscar'”.
The Best Animated Film award went to “The Monkey King: Hero is Back” and the Best Documentary Award was bagged by “In the Underground”.
The Silk Road film fest has signed cooperative agreements with Busan International Film Festival, Moscow International Film Festival, Hawaii International Film Festival.
Entertainment
Casino Days Reveal Internal Data on Most Popular Smartphones
International online casino Casino Days has published a report sharing their internal data on what types and brands of devices are used to play on the platform by users from the South Asian region.
Such aggregate data analyses allow the operator to optimise their website for the brands and models of devices people are actually using.
The insights gained through the research also help Casino Days tailor their services based on the better understanding of their clients and their needs.
Desktops and Tablets Lose the Battle vs Mobile
The primary data samples analysed by Casino Days reveal that mobile connections dominate the market in South Asia and are responsible for a whopping 96.6% of gaming sessions, while computers and tablets have negligible shares of 2.9% and 0.5% respectively.
The authors of the study point out that historically, playing online casino was exclusively done on computers, and attribute thе major shift to mobile that has unfolded over time to the wide spread of cheaper smartphones and mobile data plans in South Asia.
“Some of the reasons behind this massive difference in device type are affordability, technical advantages, as well as cheaper and more obtainable internet plans for mobiles than those for computers,” the researchers comment.
Xiaomi and Vivo Outperform Samsung, Apple Way Down in Rankings
Chinese brands Xiaomi and Vivo were used by 21.9% and 20.79% of Casino Days players from South Asia respectively, and together with the positioned in third place with a 18.1% share South Korean brand Samsung dominate the market among real money gamers in the region.
Cupertino, California-based Apple is way down in seventh with a user share of just 2.29%, overshadowed by Chinese brands Realme (11.43%), OPPO (11.23%), and OnePlus (4.07%).
Huawei is at the very bottom of the chart with a tiny share just below the single percent mark, trailing behind mobile devices by Motorola, Google, and Infinix.
The data on actual phone usage provided by Casino Days, even though limited to the gaming parts of the population of South Asia, paints a different picture from global statistics on smartphone shipments by vendors.
Apple and Samsung have been sharing the worldwide lead for over a decade, while current regional leader Xiaomi secured their third position globally just a couple of years ago.
Striking Android Dominance among South Asian Real Money Gaming Communities
The shifted market share patterns of the world’s top smartphone brands in South Asia observed by the Casino Days research paper reveal a striking dominance of Android devices at the expense of iOS-powered phones.
On the global level, Android enjoys a comfortable lead with a sizable 68.79% share which grows to nearly 79% when we look at the whole continent of Asia. The data on South Asian real money gaming communities suggests that Android’s dominance grows even higher and is north of the 90% mark.
Among the major factors behind these figures, the authors of the study point to the relative affordability of and greater availability of Android devices in the region, especially when manufactured locally in countries like India and Vietnam.
“And, with influencers and tech reviews putting emphasis on Android devices, the choice of mobile phone brand and OS becomes easy; Android has a much wider range of products and caters to the Asian online casino market in ways that Apple can’t due to technical limitations,” the researchers add.
The far better integration achieved by Google Pay compared to its counterpart Apple Pay has also played a crucial role in shaping the existing smartphone market trends.
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