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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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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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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iFund is an investment fund created by KPCB (Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers) to invest in iPhone oriented start-ups. It has a US$100 Million pool and has already invested in 5 companies: Whrrl (whose parent company is Pelago), iControl, Gogii, Ngmoco and another unnamed (yet) company.

While Whrrl is a location-based service and iControl is a remote-monitoring one, Gogii and Ngmoco are gaming companies about to launch this fall.

Gogii Games was started by George Donovan, after selling his previous company  Infiknowledge Inc. to Traffix Inc. Gogii received $5 Million from KPCB and is concentrating on casual games that will be both online and based on social networks, targeting the iPhone primarily.

Ngmoco is a company created by KPCB by bringing a few former EA seniors together. Bing Gordon, formerly chief creative officer of EA, is on the board and Neil Young (no, not THAT one…) is the CEO. Neil was on the team of games such as Sims 2 and the up-coming Spore. Also, Bing Gordon is on the board of Zynga as well, a company KPCB also invested in and which concentrated on making a games network which is cross-social-networks. Thus, it is likely the new compnay is going to play a role in facebook/myspace/etc, as well as on the iPhone.

According to the NYT, iFund investments range from $100K to $15 million, and KPCB already invested between $5M to $8M in these companies.

It would be interesting to see how things will go for these companies and how different will they be.

Surprised to see a different MobileGD site?

MobileGD has been running since 2004 as a resource for developers of games and other mobile applications. Contrary to many early sites in the industry, we were always a little more into the technical issues than the general business stuff. However, the past year we have realized that over the years we added more and more services which caused us to lose focus.

This new system is us refocusing on what’s important. MobileGD now concentrating on doing what we know best - be a developers site. In addition to the main news and tutorials site, we are now offering you guys to contribute and discuss technical issues yourselves. Every member can now open a new blog, or join a blog and run it with others. As part of that blog we also offer you diskspace where you can host your projects.

Interesting posts or projects you’ll write about will be forwarded to the main site so we would become a better development community, where everyone can be heard.

I will still make adjustments and updates to the new system as we go along, so feel free to leave comments here or contact me if you find anything you think should be fixed, or if you don’t find something where it should be. Hopefully, within a week all little issues will be ironed out.

I hope you’ll enjoy the new change and make it for the better.
Go ahead, Login and start your own Dev-Blog!

Ohad Barzilay (Civax), MGD Editor.

There has been quite a fuss the past few days on Nokia disallowing to transfer NGAGE games to a new phone. Good news - Nokia reconsidered and will allow transfer.

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Michael Schade of Fishlabs shares his notes from a Quo Vadis 2008 session on a subject to do with all of us. It would be interesting to hear your opinions - post your comments!

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