It seems that the Finnish gaming monopoly, RAY, is the latest in the game of playing the big bad wolf who doesn’t want to play nice. Finnish Helsingin Sanomat reports that they are ready to sue an iPhone app maker Elias Pietilä, for creating a game of the similar concept from one of the oldest coin games in Finland, Pajatso. Elias Pietilä calles his version of the game Pajatzo.
RAY (or the Finnish Slotmachine Association) has referred to the trademark law, law regarding good business practices (laxly translated) as well as the ever-so-famous copyright law. The first odd issue that puts the whole case into perspective is that RAY does not own the trademark to Pajatso, the original game concept.
Continue reading »
I talked very briefly to Kimmo Sainio of Cellictica, a Finland based mobile applications company focusing into translation services in Slush. Their service Trippo is available in the Nokia download catalogue in about 10 different countries, which has proven a good partnership for Cellictica. Trippo is a Java language based server-client application that can be used to translate a number of phrases. It currently supports translations from/to English-French, English-Italian and English-Spanish.
The cool thing about Trippo is that even if you’re shy – you can use it, the service itself can dictate the translation and thus help you out in an awkward situation abroad. The only question that comes to my mind is about the required internet connection to the server. John Biggs of CrunchGear once again reminded people travelling abroad to avoid data roaming – it still costs a fortune. This is a huge show stopper for many mobile consumer applications. Once we sort that out, a ton of applications will become a lot more useful.
MyWidz is a Swedish startup aiming to create a mobile widget community and taking user generated content to the mobile phone. The service is currently in early Beta.
The company plans to tab into the mobile marketing market that they estimate to grow into a 19 billion USD market by 2012. I am not quite as optimistic about the mobile marketing as such, but if done right via an innovative community approach it might yield better results than what have been more traditional approaches, namely blind spamming.
MyWidz is a community service that takes user generated content to the mobile phone by aiming to make development, sharing and collection of widgets easy. WyWidz widgets can be developed by anyone with simple step-by-step widget wizard and then get them send to one’s mobile phone. More advanced users can use MyWidz unique script language to write their widgets from scratch, or use other users widgets as templates.
Before one can start using the service she needs to install a Java client to her phone. For me the client did not work that well as I only got an error message after a several tries. I will keep fiddling with the client on my Nokia N95 and hopefully get to work on my first widget soon, but so far I’ve not seen beyond the MyWidz home page.
That said I did see lots of potentially useful widgets on that home page including a CNN News widget, an Aljazeera News widget, a Weather-Stockholm widget, a UK traffic information widget, and even a Find McDonald’s widget. When the MyWidz guys can push the service beyond the early Beta they are facing tough competition from the likes of Nokia Widsets and Plusmo.
As a market the mobile widget area is as hot as it can get even during economic times like these. Just look at the Apple App Store growth figures. The question is how you can beat Apple in their own game call it a widget or an app, and whether the app market will develop into a centralized or decentralized one over time.
Biovakka Suomi Oy 
Bitbar
