ME's Top 10 Mobile Entertainment Misconceptions

This post from Wednesday by Stuart Dredge over at Mobile Entertainment is awesomeness... not sure how I missed it until now. Check it out if you haven't already. To whet your appetites here's Stu's list of popular misconceptions, but believe me, the real entertainment value of the piece comes from reading the witty and concise set of words he uses to dispatch each item in this collection of old saws and new myths.

1. "We're going to be big in China / India..."
2. "People are more willing to pay on mobile..."
3. "iPhone is the promised land..."
4. "The problem with 99-cent iPhone apps..."
5. "A mobile phone is such a personal device, it's perfect for targeted marketing..."
6. "Build an app store, and they will come..."
7. "Fragmentation will cease to be an issue in time..."
8. "It's big in Japan..."
9. "Location-based technology is intrinsically exciting for consumers..."
10. "The operators are toast..."

Mobile Game Mavericks On The Move

Three veteran luminaries of the mobile games business, and three people that make this a great space to work in, have made professional moves in the last couple of weeks...

1) On August 3rd industry journalist and thought leader Stuart Dredge left popular games news source PocketGamer.biz in order to contribute his freelance talent to UK mag/website Mobile Entertainment. Previously he was at Informa, where he was lead reporter for the analytical newsletter Mobile Games Analyst. Stuart is, without doubt, the most highly regarded journalist in the mobile games business.




2) On August 7th Qualcomm's gaming BREWmeister and ubiquitous industry panelist Mike Yuen left the company after an 8 year career to join Zeebo (a company Qualcomm funded with Brazil's Tectoy) to become its SVP of worldwide content & services. Zeebo has developed a low priced console for the developing world that uses OTA distribution and leverages Qualcomm's BREW technology and protocols. Mike is a clear thinker, great guy, games enthusiast and, perhaps most importantly, super-helpful at navigating companies through the often labyrinthine world of Qualcomm.


3) Today it was announced that Jason Ford, who was at Namco for the last 3 years, has joined re-emergent Kansas City based developer/publisher Handmark as its VP of Games. Ford is probably best known in the industry for his 5 year tenure at Sprint, where he was an almost legendary, obsessively quality focused, not-that-shy about sharing an opinion, general manager of that operator's game deck when it was a dataARPU superstar. When the book is written about the development of mobile entertainment there will be a chapter about Jason Ford.