ArcticStartup » java

The Game Industry In Flux

Miikka Kukkosuo — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 06:00:22 +0000

Those following the mobile gaming industry paid notice that the Finnish gaming studio Universomo was shut down (in Finnish) by its owner THQ Wireless, which acquired the Finnish firm back in 2007. Rumors started to spread on Tuesday this week and pretty soon THQ confirmed the liquidation of the studio. This is part of a bigger shift in the game industry.

The piece on Universomo is a continuation of bad news for the Finnish game industry, which has suffered from a drop in sales similar to the rest of the globe. The hard time THQ is having is of course related to the traditional Java J2ME mobile gaming market having bad times as well. The high porting costs due to the fragmentation of the Java handset market and inflexible operator-run marketplaces have made it quite impossible to maintain a profitable business for more than a handful of the biggest mobile publishers.

Heard through the grapevine, it seems, however, that the now-ex-Universomo employees are not paralyzed by the outcome, and we might see multiple gaming startups being born, which is definitely a good thing for the industry. Another positive Finnish news are of course Redlynx’s reported success, and that the preorder figures of Remedy’s much expected new Alan Wake are rumored to be rather good.

Nevertheless, the gaming business is changing fast with climbing digital distribution, and browser based web and Facebook games increasing their share of the consumption. Also the much-praised iPhone market has quickly become very much hit-driven, so saturated with new releases that without effective cross-promotion from existing installed base, known brands, or Apple featuring it is hard for developers to make any meaningful revenues.

Another big change is the rise of the Games as Service model, most elegantly demonstrated currently in the social games on Facebook and Myspace. The development is very much according to the rules of agile software and web service development – launch early, launch fast, and iterate the acquisition, retention, and monetization rates based on real user data. Furthermore, as with software business in general, the service business is very, very different to product business.

I am actually somewhat surprised, and worried, that I have not heard about that many Finnish firms developing Facebook games (and likewise for the rest of the Nordic and Baltic countries – if you are a Facebook game developer in any of the countries in the region, let me know!). I hope the lure of the “cool” consoles and devices will not take all the focus. As many game developers are enthusiastic “gamers” themselves, understandably the next generation devices and more “hardcore” games often interest the most. Sometimes the product development decisions are rather emotional and based on intuition as opposed to marketing and business driven, as elaborated in the study done by Pyry Lehdonvirta.

Of course the traditional console game market won’t cease to exist, one can still do business there as well. But the digital games market will explode, and it will not happen on consoles. Facebook is without question the biggest market opportunity available to new game developers at the moment.

More and more people will start playing games online when it’s made dead simple to discover games and start playing them (i.e. “installing” and the actual gameplay). Then, pretty much everybody plays, like the stories about grandmas playing Mafia Wars on Facebook demonstrate.

Also, the monetization will likely follow the growth path. Already the Facebook social gaming market estimated to be several hundreds of millions of dollars in size. And looking at the examples of iTunes (music and games), and for example Spotify, people are willing to also pay for content they value when it is made extremely easy for them to do so.

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TimeGT Is All About Getting Things Done

Antti Vilpponen — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 06:00:02 +0000

TimeGT is an Estonian project that is most likely going to spinoff from a software company Codehoop. The project’s aim itself is to create and capitalise on the personal task management market. I’ve been looking for a product like this for quite some so I know the general ups and downs of the tools out there. While the product is still in its early infancy it has a lot of promise in becoming a widespread tool.

Currently I’m using Things, which is perhaps the most known personal task management tool out there. Even in Things there are a ton of unharnessed possibilities and it seems that the development has completely stopped after they made a commercial version of their product. This is something that TimeGT has taken into account in their service nicely. Currently, there are two versions of TimeGT available, a free and a premium one (4,95€ a month). In the premium one you get to vote on new features that ought to be developed.

Another note worthy issues is that the team has enabled commercialisation very early one, something I personally like to see. Although there isn’t quite that much value just yet, I could see myself paying the monthly subscription if they are able to finetune the value-prop for individuals like me.

So what is TimeGT all about then? I’ve come to realise that one of the corner stones of creating a personal task management application is that it needs to run on your computer locally. Why? When you need to jot something down, it takes too much time to flick to the browser tab and wait for the service interactions online. There is a clear advantage in doing things locally.

After installing the application, which by the way works for all platforms (although I’m not sure many non tech-savy people are able to run the right Java file from all the folders in the package – a lot of room for improvement here), I created an account on their website and was ready to start posting todo-items. While there is no clear advantage for the user in creating the online account with TimeGT, I can see the marketing value in being able to follow the user activities. Below’s the application UI when you sign on (with one todo-item from myself).

There are a few very clear improvements over the other personal task management software. One which I personally like to see is the amount of time I’m putting into certain tasks. This can be adjusted by the duration options in the middle. Secondly, there are very nice additions to David Allen’s Getting Things Done techniques. While many applications use the date specific ways to prioritize todo-items, TimeGT has taken this further. You are able to mark items in three different ways: “in progress”, “important” and “urgent”. Also the user is able to use a slider to show todo-items from a certain period of time from today, next three days and so on.

I have to say, TimeGT has a lot of potential. It is already far in its development and progress, but there are a few killer features that could make it the best GTD app out there. One of the most asked items has been the possibility to share todo-items between team members. If TimeGT is able to implement social features into their service, it will be miles ahead of its competition.

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Mobile Nordic Is Now Numo Solutions, Accelerates Internationalization

Miikka Kukkosuo — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 06:00:25 +0000

Norwegian mobile caller ID search startup Mobile Nordic has changed its name to Numo Solutions. Accordingly, the firm’s mobile phone number and SMS search products, previously with country-specific localized names, will be branded as Numo Finder and Numo SMS Preview, respectively. The changes preempt new operator deals and handset manufacturer deals in Europe, Asia, and Latin America, said to be announced within a few months. The firm will also open new offices and affiliates in Beijing, Frankfurt, London, Madrid, and Taipei.

Numo’s main product Numo Finder provides an automatic network phonebook directory caller ID search, showing the caller’s name and address in real time on the screen. The unique selling point is thus being able to decide for oneself before answering calls, and prioritizing important calls while neglecting telemarketers etc.

The application also includes other features like call log search and unlimited manual search for names, businesses, and addresses. Numo Finder is currently available in Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, and Germany, and also fetches caller information from the UK phone number directory (though Brits seem to be much more reluctant to have their number listed in public directories).

SMS Preview on the other hand shows a preview of the incoming text message on the screen automatically after receiving it. It may not be that valuable a feature alone, but notably the application pop up space can also fit in mobile marketing ads in addition to the SMS text. Therefore some operators have shown great interest in the product as a way to deliver mobile marketing, as a Numo representative commented to me directly.

The short video below (still with the old branding) shows how the caller ID search works in practice:

118 Mobile – See who is calling? from Mobile Nordic on Vimeo.

The service is clearly beneficial to all stakeholders – operators get a new billable service, and handset manufacturers, striving to offer the best user experience, could integrate the unknown number search in their new “social phonebook 2.0’s” (à la Android Motorola Droid and Sony Ericsson X10), giving users the ability to see detailed information of the person calling (or a missed call), be it a friend or a stranger.

Numo currently supports Symbian S60, Java J2ME, Windows Mobile, and Android platforms. Blackberry and iPhone support is said to be on the way. However, especially with Java and iPhone handsets the functionality is likely to be somewhat limited, as iPhone does not allow background apps and only Sony Ericsson widely supports background Java applications in their handsets. In order to provide a seamless automatic caller ID experience the Numo app would have to run in the background, intercepting and identifying each arriving call. Nevertheless, the easy manual search can still surely be a service which adds good value.

This year, the firm has won a GSMA Mobile Award for Most Innovative Consumer Application or Service, and also been a Red Herring Europe 100 finalist. Numo will face increasingly fierce competition, however, as the technology is not unique and there are other similar solutions. But at least for now the firm has been able to successfully expand quickly across Scandinavia with good quality and a flat rate monthly fee pricing as opposed to previously typical per search charges.

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Easier Mobile Development with Mobile Sorcery’s MoSync

Miikka Kukkosuo — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 08:12:42 +0000

Mobile Sorcery, a Swedish startup founded in 2004, provides cross-platform mobile development tools. The company’s product is called MoSync, which allows developers to write single source code and then launch their applications on a wide range of mobile devices with different platforms, like Symbian, J2ME and Windows Mobile. Mobile Sorcery has gotten SEK 1.5M (around EUR 150k or USD 211k) funding from Swedish early stage VC STING Capital last year.

The key business benefits of MoSynch are reducing porting costs and time to market. For developers MoSync offers access to many existing C/C++ libraries even when targeting J2ME and other platforms and existing device profiles of hundreds of handsets. There are some clear feature weaknesses at the moment, though, which seem to be on the list for MoSync’s next release: touchscreen support and SMS sending support.

It’s a tough market out there. The existing players in the mobile industry have already porting frameworks and tools in use, and there are quite a many similar competitors as well. Less established companies or those entering the market currently might find Mobile Sorcery’s offering quite interesting, though, as it can enable you to focus on building the actual product or service instead of worrying about the device fragmentation. MoSynch is available at no cost for non-commercial use, commercial users will have to contact the company for getting a license.

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ZeroTurnaround JavaRebel to Improve Development Productivity

Miikka Kukkosuo — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 09:00:57 +0000

ZeroTurnaround JavaRebel is a product by Webmedia Ltd, an Estonian firm, which has been the fastest growing software development company in the Baltics.

ZeroTurnaround JavaRebel improves developer productivity by reducing the “turnaround” time it takes for the programmers to see the changes made to the code in action. Turnaround time refers to the time it takes to build, deploy, and initialize changes in web development to see the actual result in running application. With web development it might take several minutes, or more, for the programmers to see the changes made to the service. Big software development teams having many deployments per hour are wasting a lot of time and money with developers waiting for the deployment process to finish. The people may have hard time concentrating, and the overall productivity may be low. With JavaRebel the deployment process is claimed to take maximum 1-2 seconds. The company also offers JSP Weaver product, which interprets the JSP files used in web site development on-the-fly and thus reduces the time taken to reload a JSP up to 50 times down to milliseconds.

Webmedia recently announced that LinkedIn Corp. has licensed JavaRebel for all its Java engineers. According to Ivo Mägi, Chief Development Officer of Webmedia, JavaRebel has currently more than 10 000 users worldwide, and it is the first step in conquering enterprise Java development market.

The company offers JavaRebel as open source for “qualified Open Source projects” and with commercial licenses.

[Via Toivo Tänavsuu's TigerPrises.com]

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