While at E3, Albert and I attended the iHollywood Forum for online PC and mobile games.

The Mobile Game Publisher Perspective session brought up an interesting point from the publishers on the panel. That is, developers should not attempt to brand their games before presenting to a publisher.

First, stories were presented about developers who scored a deal with a brand - spent a ton of money to get the rights. But the negotiations for guaranteed revenue and share percentage favored the brand so much, that the publisher could never make a reasonable deal with the developer. The numbers could never work out, and the developer baked themselves into a corner.

A second point was made that many publishers like to be the ones to decide which (if any) brands they deal with or know of would be right for a particular game. They might have deals in place already with brands that they could use, and at the very least, they have better insight into brand matching.

One of the major reasons publishers want this control is market segregation. An anecdote was given where a developer associated a game with Nike. It’s a great deal on the surface, the swoosh logo, the reputation. However, at the same time, it’s a polarizing brand - people are into their shoes. The Reebok and Puma people would steer clear of this game because the brand is against what they like.

So if you need me to spell it out for you, the message was: “Be careful branding. It could hurt as easily as it could help. If you want to deal with a publisher to get your game out, you probably want to avoid it altogether.”

Albert and I got a chance to visit the Superscape booth at E3 where they were showing off some of the games they started publishing.

Interesting fact: did you know Superscape is now publishing and no longer trying to market their 3D pipeline utilities or middleware to others? They just announced it right before E3, and now you can see their home page reflects it.

So before Alby ripped one of the phones off their display holders, we got a chance to play a few games. Honestly, the framerate left something to be desired. I was more impressed by IPlay’s in-house 3D engine - its framerate was much more playable. Now I’m not trying to trash Superscape here. I’m just commenting on what I saw at the booth.

Hi-Corp is still selling their Mascot Capsule engine as a tool. We were unable to demo this however, since the booth that we found using it had their phones behind a glass case.

JSR-184 is certainly coming quick, and the major players are defined. We’ll probably be seeing a lot of Mascot Capsule engines on handsets coming out. Seeing as how they are running nicely on OMAP under Symbian, Nokia’s new phones will probably be using it. By next summer, we should have a bunch of higher-end phones that conform to JSR-184.

Here’s some pics from mobile exhibits at E3:

What a great turnout, and I was impressed by the presentations - especially Tira Wireless’ Jump Transformation engine. I’m surprised commercial-grade porting could be accomplished at the byte-code level. Very nice job.

Here are some pics of May’s Mobile Monday LA. Special Thanks to Marc Brown from Buzznet for use of his awesome loft! Thank you to Rich, Ameet, William and Steve for your presentations and hanging out with us! Thanks as well to everyone who attended! We had another great turn out!

If you’re in Los Angeles on May 16th please come join us at the 2nd Mobile Monday meeting in LA. We’ll be talking about some of the unique trends in gaming in the mobile space: including presentations about social gaming, innovative development platforms, and even some carrier thoughts from Orange!

Location:
Buzznet Inc.
American Cement Building Lofts
2404 Wilshire Blvd. Suite 11B
Los Angeles, CA 90057
map

Here’s the list of speakers:

Ameet Shah
Producer, Tira Wireless
Presenting Tira’s Jump Product Suite.

Steve Glagow
Orange (France Telecom)

William Volk
CEO, Bonus Mobile Entertainment
Discussing their mobile social gaming efforts, specifically The Dozens.

Rich Labarca
Vice President R&D, Tomo Software
Rich will be discussing Tomo’s latest products, Mobile BEAST and SORA, their A.I. based simulation software and game for the mobile platform.

Of course there will be plenty of time to socialize and get refreshed as well! Look forward to seeing you there!

This is an interesting idea from a patent filed by a Japanese group. I can’t seem to find it on USPTO though, don’t know why - maybe my search skillz aren’t 31337 enough. The idea isn’t groundbreaking and is super-easy to implement. Plus, the concept behind it is probably used in almost every LBS game thought up. So what’s left to patent really? The fact that they’re using an icon size to depict distance?

SERVER APPARATUS AND CLIENT APPARATUS IN PRESENCE DISPLAY SYSTEM

INVENTOR- SHIMAMURA, Koichi; SEKIYA, Takenori; NISHIZAWA, Satoshi; SUGA, Hideaki; NAKATSUMA, Jota; KATO, Hisashi; SAITO, Yoshimi

The distance from a buddy as well as the presence thereof is displayed. Mobile; device (11) polls a user data part (26) at predetermined time intervals, transmits; its positional information to a presence server (27), receives both status information; of a buddy and information indicative of closeness to the buddy, and displays; the presence of the buddy by use of an icon having a size corresponding to the closeness; of the buddy. A buddy list server (28) calculates, from the positional information; and requested buddy positional information, the distance from the buddy in response; to the polling of the mobile device (11), compares the distance with a threshold; value established by the user to obtain the closeness, and transmits it to the; mobile device (11).

There’s privacy issues involved here of course, but it would be kind of cool to know if you’re near someone you care about. This would work best in urban areas, and fits especially well into the Japanese keitai lifestyle. If something like this were done over here, it better be stuck into the IMPS standard or we’re just going to have a hodgepodge of random bits of presence information displayed in different ways.

Since Tomo’s developers are somewhat geographically diverse, we all gather at Tomo HQ in Los Angeles every two months for a week-long coding marathon that we call TomoCamp (or Camp Tomo if you don’t want to be cool).

This TomoCamp saw SORA running great, with people starting to explore the new content we’re putting in place for June launch. We also decided to offer a link to MPowerPlayer running the latest SORA build from the website, so people at home can check in on their characters without their phone. That should be coming online soon.

One of the highlights was the time we spent checking out Mobile Complete’s automated phone testing solution. It is an incredible product that lets you place a real phone in a remote testing environment. They actually dissect and wire up a real phone (that you give them) to a custom backplane that lets you completely control the phone from a Java client. You get the real screen output and even audio. Using their Java app, you can create testing workflows - complete with detection of screen changes to help pause your input. It’s quite amazing, and they already have some big names using it.

On a sad note, this was Ted’s last TomoCamp. He’ll always be a friend of ours, and we cannot and will not replace him with a small shell script. I’ll end with a shot of Ted’s last TomoCamp Coke pyramid.

While talking with Anita Wilhelm last week I mentioned the idea that my social network just exists, and that my patterns of behavior describe my network better, and more realistically, than anything I ever could enter manually into a system like Friendster. That’s one of the things that is challenging, and even annoying, about social networking sites, you have to describe real relationships through drop down lists — how exactly does that capture the ever changing reality of human relations? The mobile phone is the perfect device to help me describe my network by living it, and I get excited about the implications of my phone knowing what I know from my life.

I hate to just reference another post, but anyone else who get’s excited about dynamic and living social networks, rather than static descriptions of them should check out David Pescovitz’s Mining Reality, where Nathan Engle from MIT is interviewed.

Here’s the company, Mobule, also related to the research noted above, that will try and commercialize their research. I’m going to check it out!

I was reading this press release:

Colibria Showcasing IMS Integration at Nokia’s Mobile Application Summit
Colibria AS, the leading international developer of mobile instant messaging and presence (IMPS) technology platforms, has been invited by Nokia to showcase its SIP (IMS) and IMPS integration solutions at the Nokia Mobile Application Summit in Hong Kong (Intercontinental Hotel, Kowloon, 25 - 26 May 2005). Within the event’s Application Showcase, Colibria will be demonstrating the capabilities of its carrier-grade Colibria Companion Instant Messaging (IM) and Presence Server, as well as the multimedia Colibria Communities content sharing and communications product.

The demonstrations on show at the summit will include: - Colibria Companion Instant Messaging and Presence functionality will be demonstrated, using a variety of Nokia terminals, and underlining the effectiveness of the OMA-IMPS embedded clients. Facilities include chat-style instant messaging and presence alerts, as well as status logos and text, which greatly enhance a user’s messaging experience and represent an important driver for increasing SMS and voice traffic.

We were looking at IMPS for a while and immediately the questions started coming:

When will carriers start providing IMPS to users?

When they do launch IMPS, will people use the presence aspect of it?
It is not automatic (eg. using LBS or preset times) in any implementation I’ve heard of. So will people actually take the time to set their presence?

Will MIDP apps get access to this information? I don’t know of a JSR that incorporates an API for IMPS yet. Am I wrong?

It is moderately powerful to know if you are actively taking IMs on your phone or on your PC, but AIM has that now if you set it up for mobile use. I haven’t heard of any plans to integrate IMPS into AIM yet. I guess it’s a matter of time and persistent business pressure.

Regardless, I’m curious to see where this leads, and given the right adoption and API, I’d be the first to start using it for interesting applications other than IM. Hey Colibria - if you are looking for interesting end-user apps using IMPS, send me an email and we’ll talk