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.

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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.”

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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.

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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.

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Lauri Aalto published a post on his blog about converting Redland RDF libraries to Symbian OS, and the issues he had to tackle:

…There’s already a rather well established OOM testing technique on Symbian OS called OOM loop. The basic idea is to inject allocation failures using __UHEAP_SETFAIL() heap failure macro, which in turn uses User::__DbgSetAllocFail(), and then see how the code deals with allocation failures. John Pagonis writes extensively about the OOM loop construct in his Symbian Developer Network technical paper…

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NPD Group ranked Apple’s iPhone 3G as the leading handset purchased by US Adults during Q3 2008, surpassing the Motorola RAZR. RAZR had been ranked by NPD as the top-selling consumer handset for the past 12 quarters.

The top handset models in rank order, based on unit sales in Q3, were as follows:

1. Apple iPhone 3G
2. Motorola RAZR V3 (all models)
3. RIM Blackberry Curve (all models)
4. LG Rumor
5. LG enV2

Read more »

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One day, 2 new mobile browsers versions.

Opera announced it’s Opera Mini 4.2 beta, with new features such as skinning, notes taking system and better performance (added some US servers so not all traffic will be done through their Norway server).One of the noted features of this release is also the support in playing youtube videos. Basically, a support in m.youtube.com.

Microsoft’s Windows Mobile Team announced Internet Explorer Mobile 6 at Tech-ED EMEA and released development tools and emulators.

What was interesting to see is the list of features listed by the Windows Mobile Team. With so many free mobile browsers out there, can you still count text warp - ho, sorry, - “Layout fixes to accommodate a mobile screen” as a feature? Weren’t we passed that?

Another issue if we’re at the subject. Flash support in mobile browsers. So much of the current web is based on flash, no browser should even dare announcing it ‘brings the desktop to the mobile’ without being able to support (at least) Flash 8. And this goes to everyone - Opera, iPhone, Google’s G1 browser, Nokia’s browser… All of them.

The tricks currently used in browsers are not really working. G1 for example: Having a special app pops up every time you encounter a video from youtube might work for a few people, but with so much video content out there (outside of youtube), this is not really the right direction. Not to talk on iPhone and other browsers who seems to close their “eyes” whenever there’s a flash content in a page. At least Google is trying…

All in all, the mobile browsers war is only beginning and it’s going to be even hotter.

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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 »

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Freyja Melhorn just dropped us a word that FISHLABS had launched a Website and PSMS billing system in Russia. They plan to “make greater use of viral distribution for high quality mobile games in Russia”, supported by Iricom (MMSKA).

Michael Schade, Fishlabs’ CEO, was quoted saying: “The launch of our website in Russian was a very important step for FISHLABS. Russia is an unbelievably attractive market for us. Along with the large number of game-capable mobile phones and the favourable connection costs over the mobile network, the Russians’ technical affinity is legendary. It is no wonder that by far the largest share of “virally acquired” mobile gamers come from Russia. Combined with an in-game online connection, we can now generate significant revenues even from pirated copies via the PSMS connection through Iricom.”

I’ll let you read the whole press release next, for the fine details.
Read more »

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Q3 highlights:

• Break even results, excluding restructuring charges, as challenging business conditions continued
• C902 Cyber-shot(TM) camera phone is hit model of the quarter
• First Xperia(TM) branded multimedia phone X1 began shipping
• Expansion of music service offering with announcement of
  PlayNow(TM) plus

The consolidated financial summary for Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications AB (Sony Ericsson) for the third quarter ended September 30, 2008 is as follows: Read more »

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