Opinions on LTE

The Opinions in Mobile project asked this week about our thoughts on LTE. Having recently had the pleasure of speaking at Alcatel-Lucent's 4G Symposium at CTIA, being members at their ngConnect programme and with general curiosity (and excitement), this is something I find quite interesting. Head over to read what some of the industry leaders are saying It's here.

Image credit: http://www.watblog.com

Mobile Games on Twitter

Birds (sic!) do it, bees do it, even educated fleas do it, and now even Oprah (have you been there before her? Check here)... so: what about mobile games companies tweeting? Now, there's many of them already out there (see list below) but how much sense does it make (that it makes sense for your business I demonstrated recently)?

Looking at a few of them, you'll find anything from very 20th-century in-your-face selling (probably not so efficient) to enlisting (or trying to) followers to help in everything from game design, logo colours to community components that should go into the next iteration of the website. And it is in the crowdsourcing where I see a bit of potential: most mobile games companies are fairly small, and money to spend on sophisticated research, focus groups and what not is scarce or AWOL. If one can draw on the opinions and insights of friendly followers to learn about their (the consumers') preferences, this is surely all good. Since Oprah is on there now, too, there is even a chance that your followers will not only be fellow industry professionals...

Although, even to the industry, Twitter is as powerful a tool to the mobile games people as to anything else (maybe with the exception of the global car-wash industry - everyone who's been to CTIA Wireless will understand the reference): it is a great channel to get the message out to people who matter to you (and who actually show that they care by following you), which puts trade marketing (even if not in the strict sense of the word) onto the list on why you should do it.

So here's a (surely incomplete - please excuse and feel free to add!) list of mobile games companies who tweet:

EA: @eamobile

Gameloft: @gameloft

Connect 2 Media (yes, that's us): @connect2media

Glu: @glumobile

Oasys Mobile: @oasysmobile

Hands-On Mobile: @handsonmobile

Digital Chocolate: @dchocgames

I-Play: @iplaymobile

Namco: @namconetworks

Tag Games: @taggames

Fishlabs: @fishlabs

Gamevil: @gamevil

Distinctive Developments: @distinctivegame

Lemonquest: @lemonquest

Kiloo: @jacob_kiloo

Oh, and I'm out there as @vhirsch...

123 Play at Metro

123 Metro could be the name of the latest Major League Soccer franchise but it signifies a neat deal that 123Play, a service that wraps mobile games with ads free to end users, has just struck with the newspaper mavericks from Metro (they're the guys with the free newspapers; see here for UK and here for the [seeming] inventors of the concept).

I like this deal a lot as it is so natural: Metro is a very successful advertising-driven medium and it ties in extremely well with 123Play's model. Seamless, simple, very neat: anecdotally, a lot of people play games on their mobile when they have time to kill. Likewise, a lot of people read Metro when they have time to kill, namely when they commute on public transport. One challenge will of course be that there is no mobile reception in the London tube (or most other undergrounds for that matter) but the overall concept should work.

Disclosure: my company works with 123play.com (although I don't think this post will bring me front-page coverage on Metro...).

22/23 April: European Media Conference, Prague

I have mentioned this earlier: Next week, I will be headed to beautiful Prague in order to attend and contribute to the European Mobile Media Conference. If you can, make sure to head over (there is even some last-minute discount).

I will be speaking about the phenomenon that is "social games" (are there really that many non-social games?) and I am fairly excited to be able to meet and learn from a couple of rather remarkable people that promise to bring fresh views to the mobile entertainment table. Speakers include carriers (Telefonica/O2, Vodafone, T-Mobile will all be there) and distributors (the CEO of Aspiro, Gunnar Selleg, will be amongst the speakers), OEM and technology platform providers (Nokia, Nokia-Siemens, Ericsson) but also - and maybe most remarkably - a few luminaries from the classic agency world, namely Mark C Linder (WPP) and Jonathan MacDonald (Ogilvy) whose views will surely be tested by the godfather of mobile advertising, Russell Buckley.

Have a look at the full programme and ping me if you are coming!

Top 10 Mobile Phones - March 2009

The monthly numbers on best-selling phones from our accessory-maker friends over at Krusell are out. In March, it looked like this:

1. (1) Samsung SGH-i900/i910 Omnia

2. (7) Nokia 3109

3. (3) Nokia 6300

4. (2) HTC Touch HD

5. (8) Nokia E71

6. (4) Nokia E51

7. (10) Nokia 3120

8. (8) Nokia 5800

9. (5) Blackberry Storm

10. (-) Samsung M8800

() = Last month’s position.

Not too many changes as compared to last month. The trend to higher-end phones is maintained (or is it that owners of shiny touch-screen phones tend to spend a little more on that stylish holster?).

Be it as it may be (and my earlier comments on the holster-phone correlation probably stand true to an extent), the numbers are roughly in line with the previously noted growth of the smartphone sector, which continues to outperform the rest of the handset market.

Photo credit: http://www.crunchgear.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/cellphone-holster01.jpg

Thumbplay raises more Cash

US D2C giants Thumbplay were called by one competitor the "kings of the web" (referring to their prowess to customer acquisition enlisting web-based search). And now - recession or not - their founder and CEO, industry pioneer Are Traasdahl and his team apparently raised another $6m in funding. Thumbplay's model seems to be slick enough (pay-per-click web search ads rather than fairly unpredictable TV spots) and they have a capable team in place.

If their business is as great as they wanted people to believe, they would not need this for operations, so is this money for acquisitions? And if so, where? Thumbplay so far stuck to the US market where they made some great moves (partnering with everyone from MSN through AOL to Comcast) but have been silent elsewhere. Some of their rivals did dare making the move to Europe (though not followed through with the noise perhaps to be expected), so will use the cash to take on the likes of Fox Mobile (f/k/a Jamba), Buongiorno, recently acquired Arvato Mobile (D2C brand: tj.net) and Zed over here? Ah, the excitement... ;-)

iPhone all-time top 20 apps, countdown to 1bn downloads

I've been raving about it many a time and I still won't stop but then: Apple does neither. When, waaaay back in January, I looked last, the App Store had raced through 500 million downloads and I calculated this to equate 4,000 per minute. Well, that's history: We're now through a 948 million total (count taken on 13 April, 11.23pm UK time from Apple's site [check the little clock]) and look at 6,000 downloads per minute (or 100 every second of every minute of every hour of every day!) or so some learned friends have summed it up to.

Apple also revealed a list of the top 20 all-time top downloads, both paid and free, which (courtesy of MoCoNews) is this:

So here's the good stuff for my gaming friends: 14 out of the top 20 paid apps are games! Yes, baby! 6 out of the top 20 free ones are, too. Way to go! I haven't looked at the pricing for the above paid apps but MoCoNews did: ¢99 is the prevailing price-point at the moment but $4.99 seems to be the price point of choice for "premium" games.

Carnival of the Mobilists #169

The latest Carnival of the Mobilists is on now at Chetan Sharma's Always On Real-Time Access blog. You can check it out here. Besides gratefully including my last post on 4G mobile gaming, he lined up some of the heavyweights and their contributions, including Tomi Ahonen on how to monetize mobile social networking (or not), Ajit Joakar on 4G and telcos, Russ Buckley's musings over 1984 and more.

4G, LTE & Games: Casual On Speed!

Next to app stores (or markets or marketplaces or app worlds or, well, Ovi), the dominating theme of CTIA Wireless was 4G/LTE. Now, as sexy and de jour as app stores might be, the latter has a hugely larger commercial impact (the Verizon Wireless contract for their LTE network will be a multi-billion deal alone!). But what is a network without applications?

So it was just as well that, one day before CTIA Wireless, I had the great pleasure of contributing to the "Connecting the Consumer" panel at Alcatel-Lucent's 4G Symposium (with Disney, Samsung, Buzznet and Atlantic Records all contributing, providing for the various facets of content [games, video/film, music, web]). The ground had been laid by the keynote of the formidable Mitch Singer, Sony Pictures CTO and a long-standing thought-leader in changing sectors (he's one of the people who brought the original Napster down and - in his own words - "look was the music industry has become"). Mitch had reminded us of "The Innovator's Dilemma" (Read it! It's worth it!), which deals with how businesses should tackle change...

And this brings me to the nucleus of this post, which is how the content industry will (should?) approach the next big thing that is LTE.

By way of background: LTE (Long-Term Evolution; don't ask why but this is apparently what it stands for) is largely seen as the successor to current third-generation (3G) networks (UMTS, WCDMA, HSDPA, HSUPA, CDMA2000, EVDO, call me if you want more acronyms...). LTE appears to have won the "fight" against Wi-Max (as some early commentators predicted) with carriers (Verizon Wireless, Vodafone and China Mobile amongst them) and vendors (Alcatel-Lucent, Ericsson, etc) strongly supporting it. The standard is capable of delivering speeds well in excess of 10MB/s over wireless networks. So, world, be prepared!

One of the obvious beneficiaries should be the games sector home of the tech-savvy early adopters: ultra-high broadband, super-speeds, fantastic opportunities. Or so they say...

The games market can probably - to this extent at least - be simplistically divided into a) hard-core and b) casual games. The former would comprise massively multi-player online games (MMO) as well as fast-paced, high-end racing and action games. The latter is, well, everything from Solitaire to Scrabble and Tetris. And, yes, the latter is the one genre played by far more people, including the online gaming industry's "golden customer", the proverbial 42-year-old housewife from Ohio (absolutely no offense meant, implied or indeed merited!). Whilst it is easy to see how a high-end action game would benefit from high bandwidth, the case may be slightly less obvious for the casual games space (on PCs alone, this is a $2.5bn+ market already today!).

Given the casual games' higher adoption across a much broader demographic, it is however conceivable that carriers (the ultimate gate keepers for mobile content at least in the world as we currently know it) would want to reach that broader demographic: higher spending power than geeky kids, faithful, not necessarily wanting to change things every 5 minutes, predictable spending habits - this is a much safer and more promising target demographic than my 13-year-old son who will happily switch allegiance to a provider the moment another one has something cooler, cheaper, slightly funkier, whatever, ... to offer.

So what can 4G do for the (mobile) casual games space? It brings, quite simply, wireless (or wire-free; remember that sweet tagline from Orange days long gone?) digital media to par with the wireline one (and will, in very large parts of the world, effectively be digital media (or do you think Brazil, China et al will dig up their vast countries to lay down copper or fibre cables to connect their non-urban consumers?).

So what, you say? Well, this allows consumers to actually play as they did before the arrival of the first crude iterations of the Internet, and that is socially: what was a game before computers and gaming consoles took over? An intrinsically social activity (cards, board games, petanque, golf, you name it). We have seen a huge uptake of social games on the Internet with tens of millions of consumers enjoying fairly simple games on Facebook and other platforms. And the next generation wireless will enable that again wherever you are (see here for a presentation I recently gave at Casual Connect in Hamburg on the topic).

So, high connectedness it is then! Games that will allow to interact with peers, friends, total strangers that happen to have the same passion for the same type of game around the world. Games become a social activity again. It is a less fancy, less futuristic vision than all-immersive high-end niche products such as World of Warcraft (which will also see its fair share of fame once the wireless networks can support it) but it is one that will finally make any wireless device as ubiquitous as many in the industrialized world (East or West) have learned wireline connected devices to be. And it actually takes some of the sting out of concerns that (digital) games will make video zombies out of our children.

This development (with LTE as the backbone) opens a market to be counted in billions rather than millions, and most of them will be wireless (the number of mobile phones outnumbers the number of Internet-connected PCs by a ratio of 2.5:1 already today!). And this is where the true market opportunity lies!

Carnival of the Mobilists #168

Due to the Nevada frenzy also known as CTIA Wireless there wasn't much from me last week but, thank goodness, there were others, and so I suggest to browse to this week's Carnival of the Mobilists, hosted this time by James Cooper on his mjelly mobile 2.0 blog over here. Lots to read there: why games are to blame for the iPhone's incapability to multi-task, what operators need to do to innovate (hint: listen to your customer...), mobile advertising, and, and, and... Go and enjoy!

And, yes, the image shows the reception area (!) of the Bellagio... Oh dear...

Conference: European Mobile Media

On 22/23 April, the glorious city of Prague will play host to the European Mobile Media conference. The event will cover the entire spread of the mobile media sector from content (games, music, TV) through to advertising and marketing with a focus on - what a surprise - monetization. There's a great line-up of speakers, including mobile advertising guru Russell Buckley from Admob, agency heavyweights Jonathan MacDonald (Ogilvy) and Mark C Linder (WPP) as well as one of the industry's brightest analysts, Peggy Anne Salz (mSearchGroove) and, last but not least, yours truly.

The spice will hopefully added by the combination of executives from the production, publishing and distribution side with their counterparts from network operators with a large number already confirmed to attend.

Come along! Prague in spring is wonderful on its own. And a good conference won't spoil it.

Off to Vegas: CTIA Wireless 2009

On Monday, I shall be boarding a plane to visit Las Vegas for the All-American wireless love fest that is CTIA Wireless.

I will have the great pleasure of discussing the next generation of mobile entertainment services under a 4G LTE environment with executives from Samsung, Walt Disney, Atlantic Records, Buzznet and others. Alcatel-Lucent, who recently won a tender providing the infrastructure to Verizon Wireless for roll-out in early 2010, are hosting the respective 4G Symposium.

And otherwise? These are exciting times across a wide range of industry segments: network infrastructure and ultra-high bandwidth, the coming of age of smartphones and their widespread take-up as well as the respective changes for the content industries which can now offer services people could only be dreaming of a few years ago. Stay tuned!

Get in touch if you want to meet up during the show. Best to drop me an e-mail at volker (dot) hirsch (at) gmail (dot) com.

Carnival of the Mobilists #166

This week's Carnival of the Mobilists is hosted by the formidable Caroline Lewko at WIP Jam. I am very happy to note that my latest post on Apple's growing relevance as a gaming platform is included in last week's line-up. For the remainder, there's stuff on LiMo (for some background on where they came from see here) and some very worthwhile piece on mobile marketing amongst much more. And now go to read it here!

Apple's Gaming Platform

I wrote about this topic a couple of times already (here and here) but here's an interesting update/summary. The gist of the argument remains, only the numbers got better: Microsoft's XBox has sold 29 million units, and that is fairly respectable (in particular when you consider that people regularly fork out $30 and more per game). Apple however (Mr Gates, I hate to say it) outsold its dear competitor by selling more than 30 million iPhones (and, well, iPod Touch).

The hardware install base is fairly similar then. There are two differentiators (besides the price point as per above and the fact that an XBox is not so portable nor meant to be): 1) Apple took a lot less time to get there, and 2) there are more than 25,000 applications for the iPhone, of which about 1/4 are games. That's a lot!

And with its fairly awe-inspiring iPhone 3.0 update (more here or watch the entire keynote), one can now also add in-game micro-payments to the mix, which enhances the flexibility of billing models beyond anything its console or handheld rivals have on offer. Add to this the points raised in my earlier posts and the neat additions to the new iPhone SDK (use music stored on the device in the game, in-game voice chat, push notification waking up an app, stereo Bluetooth, etc, etc) and we are hopefully to see yet another wave of innovative, intelligent implementations of this. It is pretty cool indeed!

Twitter Can Save Your Business or How Virgin Media uses Modern Customer Service Tools (off-topic)

This is not strictly within the realms of topics I normally cover in this blog but it certainly deserves wider notice.

We run a game development, publishing and distribution business and, just before Christmas, moved offices. Our ISP is Virgin Media, part of the Branson empire that bought erstwhile ISP NTL a while ago. Virgin was quite forthcoming to accommodate our move and were, I'd say, happy that we would stay with them. They needed - or so they said - 6 weeks to make the full switch but told us to accommodate us with a DSL line in the interim. Whilst this is stretching for the HQ of a digital company, it was only for a short time so, hey, roll with the punches...

Then we were told that all would actually take "a little" longer. A little became end of May 2009; this would have been nearly 6 months from our office move. Impossible! Software engineers, deployment teams, sales force, marketing, project management all over a DSL line? Our worst nightmare!

That Friday night, after I had heard this - fairly solemnly delivered - verdict of the Virgin customer service, I vented my frustration on Twitter, namely by addressing a tweet to Sir Richard Branson, entrepreneur extraordinaire, customer service evangelist and face of Virgin. Sir Richard was at the time, I believe, on an around-the-world trip with his various Virgin airlines...

Then the power of Twitter, ordinarily available only to the digital and real-life celebrities with North of 25,000 followers, also showed its might to me: inside 12 hours, I had direct messages via Twitter from the MD of Virgin Media and their Sales Director for the business division of which Manchester is part. By Sunday I had their mobile numbers and arranged for a call with the MD on Monday morning. By Tuesday, we had a tentative date (20 March), which was then bettered to 17 March. And as of 1pm of that day, our business was, well, back in business (the engineer delivering the router et al was actually a full half hour early). Within 15 minutes our IT manager, sys admin and my good self were peppered with careful inquiries from various sources within Virgin asking if all was in order. Wow!

Besides this being a nice war story, it does show what Twitter can be used for: Virgin Media will have identified a need to address the - anecdotally very poor - customer service levels of the NTL business they acquired. Now, one could of course (and rightfully) claim that I should not have needed to go to one of Britain's most successful entrepreneurs to get a response from somewhere in the bowels of this organization. On the other hand did they manage to demonstrate in exemplary fashion the passion and dedication they have: I mean, an MD of a large ISP twittering you on a weekend? Impressive.

Whilst this does not solve the root of any general customer service issues Virgin Media may (or may not) have, it does allow their management to manage change from the top, and it does - whilst not replicable (at least not through MD treatment) - allow them to accelerate sensitivity and awareness for such issues within the organization whilst displaying (and in a convincing fashion) their will to improve (and don't we all happily fall for a show of good will and effort!).

The only question that remains is whether Sir Richard has a Twitter Manager or if he actually forwarded my tweet to his lieutenants himself... I do thoroughly thank everyone involved there; a great example of how it can work, a great showcase on what Twitter can do to help your business, faith restored!