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!
Read more »

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.
Read more »

Symbian published a 4rd installment of it’s Multi-Language Programming series. Notice Part 3 was written by no other than Filipe Andrade. (:

Multi-Language Programming - Part 4

This is the fourth and final paper in a series examining the possibilities of building Symbian OS applications by mixing multiple languages and runtime environments. In this paper we focus on Widgets, applications that use the Web Runtime (WRT). The Web Runtime is new to mobile but provides an environment similar to that of Apple OS X Dashboard Widgets or Windows Vista Gadgets. Widgets essentially use the web technologies of XHTML, CSS and JavaScript to provide a familiar environment for web designers and programmers. Widgets can be used to their full potential as thin clients for Web Services on the Internet. Download PDF

Previous articles in the series are:
Read more »

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)

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:
Read more »

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.

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.”

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.