So far, Zong’s payments have been used primarily for paying for virtual goods or items within games on Facebook and Android phones.

Today, the Menlo Park, CA, company says it is extending carrier billing to other environments, such as Adobe’s Flash, Interactive TV, gaming consoles, the mobile web, and Unity, a gaming development tool that works across various platforms. It will also be supporting Android’s new operating system for tablets, called Honeycomb.

Zong said to collect payments, it will ask the user for his or her mobile phone number. Zong will then verify the number with a text message that is sent to the handset, which will complete the transaction. The charge will appear on the consumer’s mobile phone bill or prepaid mobile account.

Collecting payments is frequently a challenge, no matter what the platform. Often, children or young adults don’t have access to credit cards. Users across the age spectrum might prefer the convenience of charging small transactions to their carrier bills rather than having to input a credit card number.

Mobile phone billing has been around for years, but has been used primarily for buying ringtones and other mobile content. It’s only been in the past few months that it has become viable for other expenses, as carriers have lowered the rates they charge.

Zong, along with other startups in the space, like Boku and BilltoMobile, have been negotiating with carriers to lower those rates to make it more feasible to use the carrier bill as a viable payment method.

Zong’s CEO David Marcus told us recently that a lot of progress has been made in recent months with carriers dramatically lowering rates, so they are more in line with credit cards (although still more expensive).

In the not so distant future, he believes carriers will lower the rates enough to enable charging for even some lower margin physical goods. Potentially, it won’t be low enough for everyday items such as groceries or gas.

But next up is for things such as vouchers from Groupon and LivingSocial.

On April 2, the free online game will be unveiled, marking the culmination of two and a half years of development. It represents a significant undertaking for the network.

Kyra Reppen, SVP and general manager of Nickelodeon’s Virtual Worlds Group, who was showing off the game at GDC last week, declined to quantify the investment, but said it will be heavily promoted, much like a new TV show.

Monkey Quest is comparable to other so-called massively multiplayer games, such as the insanely popular World of Warcraft, which has roughly 12 million subscribers.

Except for that it is cute and cuddly, and something even parents can approve of.

“What we did was take the big adult games and adapt them for kids, which is something you don’t see very often,” Reppen said.

That doesn’t mean they cut any corners.

While it runs in a PC’s browser, it has the quality look and feel of a console game, thanks to a development platform company called Unity, which has been the basis for a lot of other high-quality games.

Monkey Quest takes place in the World of Ook. It spans a vast territory that encompasses five different tribes, which are connected by a network of highways. Initially, there will be 50 levels for players to achieve, but new content will be added daily.

Even after the game launches, the Nickelodeon team will be busy adding missions, characters and other tribes–indefinitely.

In the game, each player creates an avatar monkey that can be customized. Even without a lot of work, the monkeys are very animated and have kid-friendly attributes, like the ability to burp, or take a nap if they aren’t being very active.

Challenges include fighting monsters, or venturing into volcanoes, where they may meet Maurice the Gorilla, a friendly giant that enjoys roasting marshmallows. Players never fight one another, and even when shooting monsters, they use silly guns like the Kernal Blaster, which is an ear of corn. The monkeys are also rewarded with bananas for completing tasks.

The game is targeting 8 to 12 year olds, and keeps things safe by limiting what can be said. Players are never allowed to know each other’s real names, and some phrases are filtered out of text-based conversations automatically. Nickelodeon monitors conversations around the clock, and parents can even choose to limit chats to a handful of canned phrases, like “do you want to trade x for y.”

Still, they find that doesn’t keep kids from interacting with one another.

While the game is in beta, they are noticing that a lot of the players are learning how to interact with one another through gestures. For instance if a monkey squats down and puts his hands above his heads, it implies that it is offering to give another monkey a boost up to a higher ledge. If you give someone a boost, it’s only proper etiquette to reciprocate.

Like many social games today, the game is free, and users never have to pay if they don’t want to.

But there’s two premium offers to entice kids. Subscriptions will cost $9.95 a month, or users can choose to pay as they go, by buying Nick Cash. Parents can enter their credit card online, or they can buy game cards in 40,000 retail locations through a partnership with InComm. Players who pay have access to additional content, including premium missions and items for your avatar.

The idea for Monkey Quest is an evolution from Nickelodeon’s roots in the gaming space, starting with Neopets, which Viacom purchased almost six years ago.

Neopets, which launched 11 years ago, allowed kids to take care of virtual pets, by buying them food, toys and clothes. Similarly, users had to purchase virtual currency to play.

As part of its efforts, the handset-maker announced partnerships with Unity and Havok, two companies that offer tools to help developers build games for various platforms, including consoles, PCs and mobile.

The event represented the Xperia Play’s U.S. debut after it was officially unveiled last month at Mobile World Congress.

While the new tools will make it easier to move over an existing game to the device, what’s missing is a plan to leverage the thousands of games already built for the PlayStation Portable.

In theory, PSP games could easily be adapted for the Experia Play because of the commonalities of the two devices, ranging from the screen size to the similar set of controls.

When asked why there wasn’t a simple way to port the games, Peter Farmer, Sony Ericsson’s head of marketing in North America, told us: “That’s Sony’s business.”

Too true. While Sony Ericsson is a joint venture between Sony and Ericsson, the PSP  is owned exclusively by Sony.

He added that since the device is running on Google’s Android, the spirit is to be open to the whole developer community, including those that are already participating in the Android Market. Because of that, he sees more casual games coming to the platform than you typically see on the PSP, which focuses more traditional console gaming experiences.

That’s not to say that a PlayStation Portable game won’t be separately built for the Xperia Play.

At launch, Sony Ericsson expects to have 50 titles available, and says a few games will be pre-installed games, including Bruce Lee Dragon Warrior by Digital Legends, Asphalt 6 by Gameloft, Star Battalion by Gameloft and The Sims 3 by Electronic Arts. Farmer said games will cost about $5 to $10 apiece, which is average for the mobile industry.

In addition, to help with the phone’s marketing efforts ahead of the spring launch on Verizon Wireless, it also announced a year-long sponsorship to become the official mobile handset of the Major League Gaming, a professional video game league.

The MLG has a dedicated gaming audience of 8 million people, who participate in online competitions, as well as six tournaments around the country, where players will get hands-on experience with the devices. In addition, Sony Ericsson will also sponsor a new video segment on MLG.tv highlighting popular apps and games.

Yesterday Apple released some proposed changes to their SDK license restricting the technologies that developers can use, including Adobe software and others such as Unity and Titanium.

First of all, the ability to package an application for the iPhone or iPad is one feature in one product in Creative Suite. CS5 consists of 15 industry-leading applications, which contain hundreds of new capabilities and a ton of innovation. We intend to still deliver this capability in CS5 and it is up to Apple whether they choose to allow or disallow applications as their rules shift over time.

Secondly, multiscreen is growing beyond Apple’s devices. This year we will see a wide range of excellent smartphones, tablets, smartbooks, televisions and more coming to market and we are continuing to work with partners across this whole range to enable your content and applications to be viewed, interacted with and purchased.

Translation: If Apple won’t work with us, what can we do?

There’s not a lot more Adobe can say at this point, really. The interesting part will come next, when developers start making choices about whether they want to work with Apple (AAPL) or with platforms that support Adobe (ADBE)–or build apps for both ecosystems.

The first approach uses a feature called Boot Camp that comes free on every new Mac. Using Boot Camp, the entire Mac is turned into a Windows PC, with the full capabilities and speed of a standard Windows machine. No trace of the Mac operating system is left running. The downside is that you can’t run Windows and Mac programs side by side.

The second approach uses one of two third-party programs to create a virtual Windows PC inside your Mac. This faux Windows machine runs at normal speeds and can operate simultaneously with the Mac’s own operating system. Programs native to each operating system can run side by side. The downside is that, because Windows doesn’t get complete control of the computer’s hardware, it isn’t quite as fast as in Boot Camp, and a few of its functions, like 3D graphics, don’t work as well.

This latter method is enabled by two excellent, closely matched $80 programs: Parallels, from a Swiss-based company of the same name, and Fusion, from VMWare, a U.S. company. It is Fusion that just got better, because VMWare just issued version 2.0 of the product with lots of new features, some of which let it catch up to the older Parallels and some of which push it ahead.

I’ve been testing Fusion 2.0 for a couple of weeks on two different Macs, and using it to run both Windows XP and Windows Vista. My verdict is that while you won’t go wrong with Parallels, Fusion edges it out as the better product.

The new Fusion 2.0 is a free upgrade for owners of version 1.0. It can be obtained at vmware.com/mac and at various retailers.

Like Boot Camp and Parallels, Fusion requires you to obtain and install a fresh, boxed, full version of Windows on your Mac. But once you’ve done that, your Mac becomes two computers in one. If you need to run programs that are available only on Windows, you can do so with ease.

For instance, as I write this column on a MacBook pro laptop, using a Macintosh word processor, I am using Fusion 2.0 to simultaneously run Google’s new Chrome browser, which is so far available for Windows only. I can switch between the two with a couple of keystrokes and copy text from one to the other.

Like Parallels, Fusion allows you to run Windows programs in one of three ways. You can see the entire Windows desktop, with Windows programs running within it, inside its own window on your Mac. Or, using a feature called “Unity,” each Windows program can float free, as if it were just another Mac program, with the Windows desktop invisible. If you minimize a Windows program, it disappears into an icon in the Mac’s Dock, just as Mac programs do.

Finally, you can devote the entire screen to the Windows desktop and hide the Mac operating system entirely.

Parallels can also do these things. Both programs can now also “mirror” your most common Windows and Mac file folders so that, for instance, all of the files in your Mac’s Pictures folder also appear in the My Pictures folder in Windows XP. This is a new addition to Fusion, as is the ability to take multiple “snapshots” of your Windows virtual machine, so if something goes wrong, you can roll back to a previous state when things were stable.

But Fusion has some other features Parallels lacks. For example, it allows you to automatically take those protective snapshots at timed intervals. It also permits you to completely customize keyboard commands so that the same common key combinations work in both Windows and Mac programs. It allows the faux Windows machine to take full advantage of multiple monitors, if you have them.

Fusion also uses a more modern and capable version of the proprietary 3-D graphics system in Windows, called DirectX. That means some Windows-only games and other programs that won’t work in Parallels will work in Fusion. I successfully tested two such programs, both from Microsoft: Worldwide Telescope and Photosynth.

And, in my experience, Fusion is a bit faster than Parallels. Both programs put a strain on your Mac when performing major tasks, like starting up or shutting down Windows. But Fusion seems to affect the Mac less. And, unlike Parallels, it can make Windows quicker by optionally assigning it control of the multiple “cores” in most modern processor chips.

Fusion also offers a one-year free subscription to Windows security software, while Parallels offers only a six-month subscription.

However, Fusion has its limits. Like Parallels, it cannot run the 3-D visual effects in Windows Vista. And, in my tests, it wouldn’t allow Windows running on one of my Macs to use the printer that was configured on the Mac, although that feature did work on my other test Mac.

In my view, Fusion is now the better choice for running Windows on a Mac virtually.

Find all of Walt Mossberg’s columns and videos online, free, at the All Things Digital Web site, walt.allthingsd.com.

Write to Walt Mossberg at mossberg@wsj.com

They are basically bandwidth hogs.”

–Alan Mauldin, research director with Washington-based research firm TeleGeography, comments on Google’s capacity requirements.

If your corporate mission is to organize the world’s ever-increasing mass of digital information and make it universally accessible and useful, sooner or later the telecom costs and peering fees associated with the transmission of that information are going to get, you know, quite large. So large, in fact, that it may make sense to build out your own network.

Which is why for the past few years, we’ve been hearing rumblings about Google (GOOG) leasing hundreds of thousands of square feet of carrier hotel space, buying up dark fiber and mulling the purchase of hundreds of millions of dollars in DWDM and Ethernet-based telecom equipment.

It’s clear that Google has a big appetite for network capacity, but apparently it’s quite a bit larger than previously thought–undersea-cable large. This morning Google revealed that it had joined a six-company consortium to build out a trans-Pacific multi-terabit undersea cable. The project is called Unity and is scheduled for service launch in 2010.

“As more and more people conduct online searches and interact with applications like Gmail, Google Earth and YouTube, we’ve had to think outside the box to create a more scalable, affordable and easy-to-manage network that meets our users’ needs worldwide,” Google’s Manager of Network Acquisitions Francois Sterin wrote in a post to the company blog. “One of the biggest challenges we face is staying ahead of our broadband capacity needs, especially across Asia. One of the ways we are addressing this is by working with five other international companies to create a consortium. Collectively we just signed an agreement to build a new high-bandwidth subsea cable system linking the U.S. and Japan (more detail in the press release). This cable system, named Unity, will address increasing broadband demand by providing more capacity to sustain the unprecedented growth in data and Internet traffic between Asia and the U.S. Our participation in building Unity ultimately helps provide our users with faster and more reliable connectivity.”

And Google itself with an easy means of becoming a full-fledged network operator, if it so chooses, right? Sterin says no. “If you’re wondering whether we’re going into the undersea cable business, the answer is no,” he wrote. “We’re not competing with telecom providers, but the volume of data we need to move around the world has grown to the point where in some cases we’ve exceeded the ability traditional players can offer.”

Google declined to comment on the plan and did not confirm that it has hired the sort of submarine cable specialists that might work on it. “It should come as no surprise that Google is looking for qualified people to help secure additional network capacity,” said spokesman Barry Schnitt. “In some parts of the world, these people will work with submarine cables because there is a lot of ocean out there. … Additional infrastructure for the Internet is good for users, and there are a number of proposals to add a Pacific submarine cable. We’re not commenting on any of these plans.”

They are basically bandwidth hogs.”

–Alan Mauldin, research director with Washington-based research firm TeleGeography, comments on Google’s capacity requirements.

If your corporate mission is to organize the world’s ever-increasing mass of digital information and make it universally accessible and useful, sooner or later the telecom costs and peering fees associated with the transmission of that information are going to get, you know, quite large. So large, in fact, that it may make sense to build out your own network.

Which is why for the past few years, we’ve been hearing rumblings about Google (GOOG) leasing hundreds of thousands of square feet of carrier hotel space, buying up dark fiber and mulling the purchase of hundreds of millions of dollars in DWDM and Ethernet-based telecom equipment.

It’s clear that Google has a big appetite for network capacity, but apparently it’s quite a bit larger than previously thought–undersea-cable large. This morning Google revealed that it had joined a six-company consortium to build out a trans-Pacific multi-terabit undersea cable. The project is called Unity and is scheduled for service launch in 2010.

“As more and more people conduct online searches and interact with applications like Gmail, Google Earth and YouTube, we’ve had to think outside the box to create a more scalable, affordable and easy-to-manage network that meets our users’ needs worldwide,” Google’s Manager of Network Acquisitions Francois Sterin wrote in a post to the company blog. “One of the biggest challenges we face is staying ahead of our broadband capacity needs, especially across Asia. One of the ways we are addressing this is by working with five other international companies to create a consortium. Collectively we just signed an agreement to build a new high-bandwidth subsea cable system linking the U.S. and Japan (more detail in the press release). This cable system, named Unity, will address increasing broadband demand by providing more capacity to sustain the unprecedented growth in data and Internet traffic between Asia and the U.S. Our participation in building Unity ultimately helps provide our users with faster and more reliable connectivity.”

And Google itself with an easy means of becoming a full-fledged network operator, if it so chooses, right? Sterin says no. “If you’re wondering whether we’re going into the undersea cable business, the answer is no,” he wrote. “We’re not competing with telecom providers, but the volume of data we need to move around the world has grown to the point where in some cases we’ve exceeded the ability traditional players can offer.”

Google declined to comment on the plan and did not confirm that it has hired the sort of submarine cable specialists that might work on it. “It should come as no surprise that Google is looking for qualified people to help secure additional network capacity,” said spokesman Barry Schnitt. “In some parts of the world, these people will work with submarine cables because there is a lot of ocean out there. … Additional infrastructure for the Internet is good for users, and there are a number of proposals to add a Pacific submarine cable. We’re not commenting on any of these plans.”