Many iPhone developers are trying their best to estimate of how the rank in the App Store translates in sales. Apparently, a few developers already released some of their data, which is interesting to read.

This article will detail two apps - iFart and Oz Weather - which published real data, and will try to draw a picture of how the App Store rank and sales affect each other.

As an appetizer, seems #1 app is downloaded more than 10K times a day, and if sold for $0.99 makes more than $9,900 a day. Now that we know this, we can estimate the #2 app in the US - EA’s SimCity selling for $9.99 - is making around $100,000 a day ($70,000 after Apple takes it’s commission). Quite a number!
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Jason Rohrer’s excellent game Passage is now also available on the iPhone for the price of 99 cents.

The iPhone version added yesterday is th mobile version of the game that was released last year and generated much attention with game designers. The PC version and source code of the game still remains free on Jason’s game page.

In case you don’t know the game, Passage is an excellent example of an innovative game design packaged in a very little game. It’s actually a game that beautifully allows you to experience how choosing different choices results in different life, and is very interesting to game designers. Read more »

Another doze of charts for you guys. As usual, brands rule the charts and no new players makes it to the top - even the games are ones we have seen before. Glu is hardly present, as well as I-Play. We hope to soon publish new iPhone charts which will probably spice up this monthly report! Stay tuned!

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mGBL (mobile Game-Based Learning) is an academic open source project that offer a system for quickly building decision-based games in j2me. The project site is full with academic information and it’s clear the researchers are taking this project very seriously.

The project homepage describe it in these words:

Within the mobile Game-Based Learning project (mGBL) eleven partner organisations from Austria, Croatia, Great Britain, Italy, and Slovenia have joined forces to work on the development of a platform for the presentation of educational content in a playful and emotional way on mobile devices.

The biggest challenge within this project is to engage a diversity of audiences in the fields of career guidance, e-Health and e-Commerce in to the development of decision-making skills for use in critical situations. Building on the latest innovations in the field of m-learning (mobile learning) and on the latest research results from the field of didactics, new approaches to game-based learning are developed for use on mobile phones.

In addition you could also download progress reports and sample games.

(hat tip: Arjan from MGB)

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 »

Mo’minis, an Israeli start-up we’ve featured before, had announced this evening a game development contest with a total of $4200 + handsets prizes. By registration to the first gamecast you would also be able to download the first release of Mo’Minis Studio, weeks before the official launch.

Mo’Minis is a Israeli start-up that have been developing a ‘game maker’ studio suite that allows people to design and develop 2D / 2.5D mobile games without code, using a drag and drop interface. The studio then produces j2me versions of the game that can run on a range of handsets.

Seems Mo’Minis aims to solve 2 major issues in the mobile game development space - the porting, and game development cycle. By offering a rapid development tool (drag & drop interface), designers can change the behavior of a game very quickly and experiment with different level design and scenarios. Read more »

Well, no one is surprised the economic crisis affects the mobile industry as well, but now we can actually see some numbers from Nokia and Sony Ericsson. The problem with the big companies is that they supply work to many smaller companies in the industry - be it developers, services suppliers, industry journalism and even startups that were hoping for making an exit after selling to one of the big guys. There fore, it’s actually very important to all of us to know where are they now. On to the numbers. Read more »

Another doze of charts, coming from the UK and US

> UK

Jamster - UK Game Download Chart, 15 August - 15 Sept 2008
Data Source: Jamster

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Another doze of charts, coming from the UK and US

UK

Jamster - UK Game Download Chart  - 15 July - 15 August 2008
Data Source: Jamster

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Pasi Manninen keeps testing KunerLite plugins and report to the community. Kuneri have done 11 nice plugins to extend Flash Lite applications and Pasi went out to test some of them. This article he covers the taking, playing and sending video to a remote server. Read more »