Vallywag reports Google shipped specially branded G1s to their employees as an holiday gift - and instead of the traditional cash bonus. Some employees were disappointed as Google’s bonuses sometimes reach as high as $20K, and some of the workers were actually counting on it.

In a letter sent to all employees it is stated that 85% of all employees will get the G1, except in several countries where legal issues could not have been solved. In those countries employees will get $400 cash bonus, the value of the device.

Here is some of the letter. You can read all of it on this VallyWag post.
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Every week we have more people requesting to join our Linked-In group. Today we have reached 333 members, which must be some kind of a milestone. So hello to all the new members!

Remember, if you haven’t joined yet - it’s just a click away…

Happy XMas / Noel / Hanuka everybody!

LG released a new document on it’s developers site entitled “Flash Lite Developer Guides for LG Phones”:

This Guide is intended to make it easier for developers to create Adobe® Flash® Lite™ applications for LG mobile phones equipped with Flash Lite. The Guide provides Flash Lite 2.0 and 3.0 supported LG phone features, and tips on how to optimize Flash Lite applications.

Following are a few images showing how LG made the LG Prada UI using Flash Lite 2.1:

The only question I have is Why so BLOATED? 17 pages where 3-4 would have been enough. The real text begins at page 10 and even that is just a brief introduction to Flash Lite. Anyway, they published some nicely organized information on Flash Lite supporting devices:
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Hands-On Mobile laid off an undisclosed number of employees. The company claims it has nothing to do with the financial situation but from internal restructuring.

CEO David White said the economy has not affected Hands-On directly yet, and they are seeing strong revenues from smartphones, like the iPhone, he’s cautious given the dire reports from companies, like EA, Vivendi  and Glu Mobile. White: “We are feeling cautiously optimistic about how things are going. We hear competitors, like Glu and EA talk about how dismal things are, and we would be foolish not to pay attention and not to prepare for a coming storm that may or may not happen to us.”

Grab the full post on MocoNews.

A quick audio interview with Riku Salminen from Nokia, by the guys at WOW Tech Minute blog. They had a quick chat with him during Adobe MAX 2008 in Milan.

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.

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.

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.”