In a regular series, Mobile World Live‘s Asia Editor Joseph Waring provides a regional roundup of news snippets:

SoftBank makes offer for DreamWorks
SoftBank reportedly has made an offer to acquire DreamWorks Animation for $3.4 billion.

The Japanese company is flush with cash after booking a $4.6 billion gain from Alibaba’s IPO last week. It has a 32 per cent stake in the Chinese e-commerce company.

Masayoshi Son, the company’s founder and CEO, has made a number of bold acquisitions over the years, most recently buying Sprint in the US last year.

Macau to issue triple-play guidelines in 2015
Macau’s telecoms regulator will draft guidelines next year on introducing triple-play services, with commercial services expected to be launched in three years. The draft will stipulate the number of players the market can sustain.

The pay-TV market in the territory was just liberalised in April, allowing direct competition with Macau Cable TV. Newcomer MTel, which received its fixed-line licence a year ago, is required to cover 30 per cent of households by December.

Machine translation venture
NTT Docomo, Systran International and FueTrek have set up a joint venture today to develop and market machine translation technology.

The venture, called Mirai Translate, will initially develop technologies to translate between Japanese and three other languages — English, Chinese and Korean — with future plans to translate between Japanese and other widely used Asian languages such as Vietnamese and Indonesian.

Systran is a leading translation software developer while FueTrek is a developer of speech recognition and translation systems. Docomo will have a 51 per cent stake, Systran 30 per cent and FueTrek 19 per cent.

Huawei to invest $4B in broadband R&D
Huawei Technologies plans to invest more than $4 billion in fixed broadband technology R&D over the next three years. The Shenzhen-based company’s effort would focus on photonics as well as software-defined networking.

Meanwhile, the company and China Mobile recently tested what they claim is China’s first 400G optical transport network, based on PDM-16QAM and PDM-QPSK coding schemes.