World Telemedia Day 2: High Resolution 3D and the future of mobile content, Phil Atkin, nVidia

"A short history of NVIDIA... through real-time hair"

A history of PC games. Turning point was GLQuake with rendered lighting behaviours.

So what happened? Low-cost 3D accelerators. OpenGL, the first cross-platform standard. High-performance CPUs became available.

Games need: powerful CPUs. Standardised 3D APIs. Affordable 3D acceleration. I'd disagree with all these for mobile.

Java is not the best solution for gaming; it's interpreted, unresponsive, etc. JSRs help out here (JSR-184). BREW is good. Still no GLQuake yet.

Demo of Quake on a handset.

3D titles scale better to different resolutions so are more portable (sounds tenuous to me but hey I'm not a game developer).

"Phones are more like arcade machines than consoles": short play sessions.

Why 3D necessarily - just cos that's what console games did?

World Telemedia Day 2: Making it work across devices, Hila Dahan of Adamind

P2P and A2P multimedia services are growing. (What's A2P?)

Many devices. Many content types. Many data formats.

Transcoding as an alternative to manually versioning.

Converged services will be realised through transcoding. This all sounds quite naive to me, but oh look, Adamind are a transcoding company! They're building their own database of device attributes, optimisation rules, etc.

World Telemedia Day 2: Enda Carey, iFone

Based in UK, 5 years old. In 50 countries, on 80 operators. License from Atari, Sony, SEGA: Monopoly, Sonic, etc.

Too many handset variants. Slow ROI for publishers. High dev costs. Lack of "real" data from carriers to prioritise. Slow churn. Smaller territories have lots of legacy handsets. Voda introduce a new one every week, old ones aren't getting retired!

Future trends: more personalisation, new business/payment models: subs, rental, one-offs. More game enabled handsets (of course), better game design. Games specific to mobile will come; they have to, to avoid mobile being seen as the poor cousin of the PC. Lots of operators are pushing community management back to publishers... e.g. Vodafone want to own their community of gamers, but have no interest in running the Monopoly community.

Connected features: chat, hi score, leagues/ladders, tournaments, prize giving, adding value to overall experience.

Upcoming features: 3D, LBS, tilt, vibration, better sound and memory. 3D can triple the cost and time-to-market for a publisher; Enda seems sceptical about the use of 3D on limited devices - all sounds very sensible. Standardised interfaces, logins, demos, timeouts, etc.

New peripherals: analogue joysticks for phones, screen magnifiers, touch sensitive screens, TV outs.

How can developers help: establish standards, innovate, understand publishers.

They've never gotten a title launched with more than 30 of the 50 MNOs they work with.

How can handset manufacturers help? Standardise the platform, be more flexible on biz models. Want more sharing of information about the market in distributors: from handset vendors, publishers, etc. There's too many predictions and not enough stats.

So overall message: it's difficult now. It's going to be great.

World Telemedia Day 2: Devices, Mike Grenville

Nokia pulled out of show.

What are phones actually used for? As watch replacement, address book, alarm clock, diary, torch (!), photo album, status symbol. Buying content isn't one of these things.

When T-Mobile launched MMS, they told handset manufacturers that if they put a cable in the phone box, the handset wouldn't sell - to drive OTA traffic.

Handset configuration is a problem; imagine if every time you bought a new network card, you had to phone up your ISP and get it configured!

World Telemedia Day 2: Nick Davis, Mobestar

Technology company from Guildford, presenting a case study on Manumission content.

Launching a mobile dating application.

Manumission gets 10,000 people on a Monday night in the summer. 50% UK, 20% Italian, 17% Spanish, 8% German.

Objectives: take the brand and assets (film footage, etc.), make it exciting and exclusive. Make money from a quite broad demographic.

Phase 1: awareness campaign; mobile site with background about the show. Ringtones, clips, etc.

In future: dating services, photo sharing.