Sony Ericsson’s developers site published a new article entitled New Project Capuchin tutorial with RSS feeds, Motion Sensor API (JSR 256) and Flash Lite UI :

An example of using Sony Ericsson’s Project Capuchin API, this new tutorial illustrates how to create an application where RSS feeds are retrieved by a Java ME application and presented on the phone screen over a Flash Lite UI. Adding an extra dimension, this tutorial and accompanying code takes you through the steps of using the Motion Sensor API (JSR 256) to retrieve accelerometer data to control the motion of a Flash UI.

Sun Santa Clara Campus Auditorium, California, USA
January 21-22, 2009, Event Website

This conference is devoted solely to the technologies of mobile, media, and embedded Java platforms and is a unique opportunity for content developers of intermediate and advanced skill levels, platform developers, and technical experts at product companies, device manufacturers, and service providers to get introduced to open source Java ME, the community, and to join in and collaborate. Attendees will enjoy a broad range of technical sessions, lightning talks, poster sessions, panels, hands-on labs, and participatory sessions. There will be plenty of opportunities to meet your peers and the experts from Sun and the industry, to network, and to discover how to apply these technologies to your own projects. Read more »

The demand for RIM’s BlackBerry Bold was so high that Verizon Wireless’ online ordering portal crushed on Friday. BlackBerryCool and QuicklyBored hold an interesting updates flow on the launch of the new device, check it out.

London, November 25, 2008 - Sony Ericsson has just launched the latest panels for its multimedia convergence phone, the Xperia(TM) X1, teaming up with the popular social networking site Facebook and Microsoft Windows Live. These web-centric panels come in addition to the existing connectivity panel from Dashwire, a site which allows you to sync your phone content to the web and share it to a range of popular social networking sites.

The new Facebook application built for Sony Ericsson uses the unique interface of the Xperia(TM) X1 to deliver an intuitive version of the site, putting images of your friends onto your phone’s desktop (standby screen) and showing their latest status updates as you touch their images. Touch through to access more Facebook features. Read more »

Juniper Research published a new report claiming that operators (MNOs) will need to change how they work with mobile content if they want to avoid being dump pipes in the future (quotes from their press release):

A new study from Juniper Research has found that Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) will need to fundamentally change their mobile content business models by emphasizing ‘shared value creation’ in order to avoid becoming ‘dumb pipes’ in the future. Only if they can transform their businesses into ‘smart pipe’ service providers, can they significantly increase their income from mobile content – estimated at $23bn in 2008, rising to $52bn by 2013 according to Juniper.

The global mobile content market will be worth $167bn by 2013, shared among players such as MNOs, Content Providers and third parties such as content aggregators and billing companies.

Currently MNOs take a significant percentage of the revenues generated by Content Providers when they use their networks. This has resulted in high prices for end-users and consumers being deterred from accessing mobile content on a wider scale. This unattractive situation has become a disincentive for MNOs and Content Providers alike, with some Content Providers attempting to bypass the MNOs or exit the sector altogether. Clearly, the situation needs to change. But it will be down to the MNOs to make the first moves, says the report.

The report examined 3 main scenarios that can effect operators and the whole industry - the Dumb Pipe, the Smart Pipe and On-Portal. the report author, Andrew Kitson, was quoted saying:

“One single scenario will not win out since different business and revenue models have to co-exist in the mobile content market. Players will adopt multiple approaches that best fit their markets. Crucially, if MNOs are to benefit financially, they need to move away from their Dumb Pipe roots to the Smart Pipe model, though they will clash with the content providers which already dominate the Smart Pipe. A compromise needs to be found.”

Kitson also found these:

• Under the Smart Pipe model, MNOs will not see their share of the overall mobile content market rise appreciably, but revenue will rise in value by 125% over the 2008-2013 period.
• Under the On-Portal scenario, content providers will see their share of the market rise from 54% in 2008 to 68% by 2013, providing they can secure more attractive terms from MNOs.
• Third parties – especially aggregators and billing service providers – will come under pressure from larger players (such as MNOs) seeking to achieve horizontal integration and economies of scale.

New members joined our Linked-In group, making us stand on 272 members.

If you’re on Linked-In and haven’t joined yet - you can do it here. You can also join our Mobile Game Developers group on Facebook.

Anyway, warm welcome our members: Vinay, Wojciech, Václav, Jonathan, Cem, Adrian, Adam, Mikolaj, Tom, Isaac, Christie, Tomas, Chris, Marius, Liesl, Carlos, Sinju, Bill, Mark, Michael, Alvin, Alexandru-Bogdan, Henrik, Chintan, Quoc, Jordi, Christian, Chintan, Emma, Alexey, Claude Patrick, Noyan, Maks and Tim.

Two really nice interviews with seniors in the Mobile Games industry:

Smartphone.biz-news published an interview with Xavier Carrillo, CEO and founder of Digital Legends Entertaiment (DLE). Xavier talked with David Montgomery about how the iPhone changed the mobile games space, and about their game Kroll.

Interestingly, smartphones have become such attractive platforms for gaming almost as a by-product of the drive to create multi-media handsets.

The demand for more megapixels on cameras led to more RAM, the popularity of mobiles as music players required more storage capacity and the addition of TV functionality led to improved hardware accelerators.

For gamers, Carrillo said it means someone playing a game on a smartphone on the train to work can now expect a quality similar to that on their PS3 at home.

Another interesting interview is the one MocoNews’ Tricia Duryee held with Gonzague de Vallois, Gameloft’s SVP of Worldwide Publishing.

During Glu’s Q3 conference call, the company mentioned that the adoption of smartphones is actually negatively impacting mobile game sales because they aren’t typically tied to a carrier’s deck, where games are sold. Are you seeing that, too?: “Yes, it depends on the carriers. With both AT&T (NYSE: T) and T-Mobile, you can download Blackberry games, but they [the carriers] were taken by surprise by the strong take-off of the smartphone content business—first the smartphone sales and then the content business. They are all taking care of that now, and will all be live by the end of the year. There are lost opportunities now, but all of this will be taken care of by the end of the year.”

Another exposure of the nasty business practices running around the mobile industry. Arjan from MobileGamesBlog published an email from an executive in Glu to one of the game reviewers on an undisclosed site. In the email, the Glu representative demands to see the reviews before they go online and clearly state they will not allow reviews with ranks lower than 8/10 to be posted: Read more »

David Wood, Executive Vice President and Co Founder of Symbian, gave the opening keynote at the Mobile 2.0 event in San Francisco and made some notes about it on his blog. He talks about how will smartphones be in 2013, why does he think OS is so important, how to tackle different problems we have in the industry and the role of open source.

Of course, being such a high figure in Symbian, he also gives his perspective on where the company should go in these areas.

It’s a bit long, but it’s quite interesting. Check it out.

After Arjan broke the news on Vivendi Mobile closing it’s US operations, comes the European office shut down. According to sources, the team already been informed and will be disbanded.

This was expected since Activision aquired Vivendi to form a gaming giant Activion-Blizzard. The official statment released at the buy-out announced Activion “…also is evaluating options regarding two non-strategic business units Vivendi Games Mobile and Sierra Online, which provides casual games for the PC and Xbox Live Marketplace, including the possibility of divesting these business units.”

Activision practical philosophy so far was to build successful PC/Console franchise and then licensing the IP to 3rd parties (such as Glu) to do the mobile games.