In the wee hours before the Macanese dawn Tuesday, I'm caffeinating myself ahead of what will surely be a fun and busy day at the Asian i-Gaming Congress & Expo. Today's agenda: mobile gambling, one of the industry's most perennially intriguing sectors.

Kicking things off will be Matti Zinder, the chief executive of Spin 3, a mobile gambling operator and developer with ties to Microgaming Software Systems Ltd. After ending its brief partnership with PacificNet Inc. in June 2008, I'll be interested to hear whether the company has found a new Asia-facing partner. Conventional wisdom around the sector has that agreements with local partners are key to negotiating successfully the complex economic and regulatory landscape here.

Mr. Zinder and Spin3, meanwhile, have been among the early bulls on gambling applications for smartphones like the iPhone and BlackBerry. The company's newest game, Royal Derby, was just released last week and follows other titles like roulette, blackjack and a "Tomb Raider" slot.

I know very little about smartphone penetration in Asia's markets, but with Spin3's appetite for pushing smartphone gambling technology, my money's on them finding some way to circumvent the Random Number Generator Trust Issue.

But will we see a live-dealer application for next-generation handsets anytime soon? Marcel Puyk, the chief executive of Cellectivity and a speaker this week, told us No, recently.

"The fact that there are so many handsets out there -- many more models than Europe, not all of which are 'official' -- means that porting to that will be a big headache," he said. (For those like me who are learning their way around the mobile gambling lexicon, "porting" means transferring software from one device to another.)

Random: A deal that had promise here, I thought, was one inked in October 2008 between the now defunct mobile developer Phantom Fiber Corporation and Mahjong Time, a minority-owned subsidiary of CryptoLogic Ltd. William Sutjiadi, the chief executive of Mahjong Time, will be on hand, so it will be interesting to see whether his company still has designs on executing a mobile strategy.

Regulation, I'm sure, will continue to be one of the sector's highest hurdles, and I expect a lively debate on that very topic will ensue here.

Charles P. Cohen, the chief executive of Probability, told us recently that mobile gambling will have a more difficult time than its distant relation, online gambling, overcoming regulatory cruxes in Asia.

"Mobile gambling cannot skirt around the legal issues with the same apparent ease as online, mainly because you need the cooperation of network partners to make sure your service succeeds," he said. "They cannot play fast and loose with regulation without risking their entire business. So I think that we will have to wait for a more favorable regulatory environment before mobile gambling takes off in Asia."

While the sector consensus seems to be that the appetite for gambling more than exists among Asia's mobile users, which jurisdiction here will be the first to regulate the activity? Which sector -- betting, lotteries or casino games -- will become the most popular? Will smartphones have any role to play? When, if ever, can we expect a live-dealer application, and how are trust issues regarding Random Number Generators to be overcome? Where is the technological infrastructure best developed to support a mobile offering in Asia?

I look forward to some answers today.