Nokia Games Summit 2007: SNAP Mobile, Markus Huttunen
October 09, 2007 | CommentsNokia Games Summit 2007: SNAP Mobile, Markus Huttunen "Nothing new here - I'm going to press F5 on what's going on in the mobile gaming space" What's the promise of connectivity in mobile gaming? People love connectivity in play across all sorts of electronic and real-world gaming. XBox Live is now the key differentiator between XBox and Wii/Playstation, but it took them 4/5 years to get there. Casual gaming: Pogo has 170k players online at once, at night. It gets more eyeball-hours (the new currency of attention) than Desperate Housewives, etc. Connected games get better shelf space, they're bought more, get played longer, and are differentiated from the mass of games out there. Operators get more data revenues from data customers, upsell data to voice customers, showcases fancy data networks, and doesn't hurt to add to the overall offering to customers. Given the move to flat-rate and a lack of supporting data for the last 3 I'm not sure how great this sell is...? ROI for this is unbalanced: technical fragmentation, high testing costs, immature technology vs limited distribution, difficult to deploy globally (nod to operator gateway problems) and no premium for connectivity. Halo got 1m players online in one day. If Nokia ship 1m connected phones/day and they have a connected snake (say) game onto it... how will that scale? Getting this working with such huge numbers is a challenge. The dominant distribution channels in mobile games (operators) aren't taking risk and giving premium placement to connected games. Nokia have purchased and put in place a global infrastructure for serving this stuff.
Nokia Games Summit 2007: N-Gage: Evolving Mobile Games, Gregg Sauter
October 09, 2007 | CommentsNokia Games Summit 2007: N-Gage: Evolving Mobile Games, Gregg Sauter He's the Director of 3rd Party Publishing. N-Gage is about experience: discover, try, purchase, play, share. "What if the community decides what's at the top of the deck?" "No-one spends 6-700 euros on a device to make phone calls". Nokia aren't comfortable ceding control of the gaming user experience worldwide to EA, Yahoo, etc. They looked at music, but it's an industry in big transition: everyone loves it but it's a brutal business and the commercial side of it is threatened. TV, film, and video will be important; but games are more interesting: it's a huge business (look at market cap of Nintendo/EA). They span every demographic segment. Gaming is massively untapped: 5% of mobile subscribers play games, less than 2.5% make a repeat purchase. Sony legitimised console gaming, taking a kids toy and turning it into an adult experience; Nokia want to do the same for mobile gaming. Apple did the same for music with iPod; before then there were multiple devices from multiple manufacturers, different sources for music, different DRM, etc. To legitimise mobile gaming we need to do for gaming what Apple did for music: build a single brand and experience. Even before doing much in gaming, in research Nokia scored very well in brand awareness for mobile gaming. "N-Gage will be a brand developers can leverage in the same way EA leveraged PlayStation"
Lurching from one medium to the next
October 09, 2007 | CommentsOn the train to London yesterday, I noticed myself doing one of those clinging-to-old media things. I have a signature on my email - yer standard contact details, email, mobile number, etc. This I add automatically to all emails I send. But I type my name at the foot of emails. Why? Because it feels like I'm signing the email that way, though obviously it'd be way more efficient to have this automatically added... but I don't do this because it'd feel "fake". I'm such a fool I like signing my emails with QWERTY because I instinctively and irrationally think it gives them a personal touch...
links for 2007-10-09
October 09, 2007 | Comments-
Specific examples of transcoding done by Novarra
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Good to see S3 getting an SLA, but 25% back if they don't meet it doesn't seem to give a customer much purchase... still, it'll tick a box for some so it's a good thing :)
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See also: Eastbournecisco! http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/10/08/sms_txt_solar_parking_meter/
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Oh christ, now they can claim it's legal and therefore OK...
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"if you've fixed all the known bugs, and all that's left is new code, then your schedule will be stunningly more accurate."
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I'm curious about this... and deeply impressed if everyone is measuring the same thing
links for 2007-10-07
October 07, 2007 | Comments-
"it's strange that so many people seem to suggest that the lack of uptake in mobile apps is tied to some inexplicable and fundamental property of mobile. That's an awfully complicated non-answer."
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"More than half of mobile execs do not use the mobile content that they are marketing"
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Wow. We may not be all the way there yet, but thank goodness we've managed to come this far...
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"The device is not an innovation platform... We should focus on the faster tools of Java and Web services to explore what works and what doesn't."
+1, a thousand times +1
Access to handset APIs through JavaScript would be nice (on iPhone and elsewhere). But didn't jobs emphasise iPhones's use of OS X at launch? It's not like he ever revealed the OS inside the iPod, why mention it if it didn't have some future relevance?
"So if all Mobile Advertising switched straight into operators tomorrow, it only increases the market by 0.25% - not exactly something to get the City slavering." It's the same problem with most mobile data services: they're all a teensy %age of revenue
OTT home automation, cat flaps and vision software.
"Instead of directly designing an information space, you’re better off designing the rules that underly the generative construction of such spaces."
This is a feature I love on the iPhone: nowadays I tend to navigate to the last conversation I had with someone, then tack on a new message rather than finding them first. Conversations, not contacts, are the route to new messages.