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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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

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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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Independent research can sometimes give very interesting results. On one such research, ‘Tommo_UK’, a member of the Mac Obsorver’s Apple Finance Board forum, and ‘howlongtoretire’ from Investor Village’s AAPL Sanity board, collected serial and IMEI numbers from iPhone owners, in an attempt to know how many iPhone devices had been manufactured by Apple.

As the project progressed and more details were collected in the Google Docs spreadsheet, around 170 devices’ details were collected, and by analyzing the IEMI number, they have reached the conclusion that atleast 9.1 Million devices had been produced. Read more »

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Apple sent a statement to all its developers announcing the lifting of the NDA restrictions that forbid developers from talking about software for the iPhone and iPod touch.

Developers will still have to stick to an NDA that covers iPhone hardware and new features, however.

Here is the statement as published on their development site: Read more »

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New Technology Allows Developers to “Write Once, Run Anywhere” Across Mobile, Smartphone and Web 2.0 Landscapes

SAN FRANCISCO - September 9, 2008 - Mytopia Inc., an innovator in cross-platform technology, today announced the official launch of RUGS™ (the Real-time Universal Gaming System), a patent-pending, proprietary framework for rapid rich media creation across the Web, mobile and smartphone landscapes. The revolutionary new technology, which was announced this afternoon in a presentation given at the prominent TechCrunch50 conference in San Francisco, allows developers to code rich, connected applications one time, and simultaneously deploy native versions to every supported platform, including iPhone, Windows Mobile, BlackBerry, Symbian, Android and J2ME devices, as well as popular web platforms like Facebook’s F8 and Google’s Open Social. Content created on RUGS harnesses the unique capabilities of each platform, while running from a singular code base. For more information about Mytopia, please visit www.mytopia.com. Read more »

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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.

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iPhone Dev Team has released their latest PwnageTool update, now supporting the iPhone 2.0.1 OS and including Installer 4 beta.

Apple’s latest iPhone 2.0.1 OS was said to have a new basaband firmware that prevents sim unlock, making the iPhone only usable with the operators signed with apple. Also, the new OS broke the jailbreak process of PwnageTool which made it impossible to run jailbreak apps.
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Apple released the iPhone SDK beta 4 which now includes Xcode IDE, iPhone simulator with Open GL ES support, Interface Builder, Instruments, frameworks and samples, compilers, and Shark analysis
tool.

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