Friday, May 29, 2009
Palm Pre Demo From D7 Is Better Than Porn
Is CBS Outdoor About To Give Shortcodes Their Day In The Sun?
Thursday, May 28, 2009
Walt & Nokia's "OP" Kallasvuo Chat About Symbian, N97 & US Carrier Relations At D7
- Symbian is a great OS and I hope more hardware manufacturers adopt it for more devices...but it has no hotness factor. Android has the OS hotness factor right now.
- N97 rocks (I want one)...but it will get no market traction in the US if it costs $700.
- There's a lot of blah, blah, blah here about building carrier relations in the US...but, what's actually happening? My feeling is that Nokia needs to re-build the aspirational nature of its brand with US consumers by supplying operators with cool, high-end devices (e.g. N-series, 5800 Xpress Music, E-series). I think many Americans associate Nokia with some of the low-end crap on T-Mo (1680, 2760) and/or their first "Nokia brick" handset.
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
So, Whatever Happened to Jamster 2.0?
The company, which was founded in Berlin in 2000 as Jamba!, was once the revenue darling of the off-deck mobile content space...allegedly generating as much as $600mil in the Crazy Frog heyday of 2005. Fox put a major mobile stake in the ground in late 2006 when it bought a majority (51%) share in the company from VeriSign for ~$190mil, to combine it with its own nascent Mobizzo web-to-mobile brand. They bought the rest of it last October for an additional $200mil, announced a restructure of their mobile groups and teased the aforementioned plan to rebrand...which was originally supposed to happen in Q1 2009. Moconews diligently followed up with Montanaro at CES this January where he admitted that the plan was delayed by the economic meltdown, but that the relaunch was definitely slated for the first half of the year. It's been crickets since then...
I would think in this era of rapidly propagating App Store clones, fighting for mindshare & consumers, that Fox would be anxious to rapidly leverage their substantial investment in Jamster's infrastructure & customer acquisition through a more contemporary offering, if they ever want a shot at reclaiming a leadership position amongst mobile content retailers. I'm keeping my eyes & ears open over the coming weeks for clues that change is afoot.
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
Ovi Is Too Sexy For Its Site
Friday, May 22, 2009
Beware The Inverse Razor Blade In This Apple
Thursday, May 21, 2009
Biggest In Japan...Panasonic P906i
- 2-way shellcase, opens vertically & horizontally
- 3.1" widescreen VGA display (854x480)
- One-Segment Mobile TV Tuner
- 5.1 megapixel camera
- Bluetooth 2.0
- 200 hrs continuous talk
- 58o hrs of standby
- Micro SD/SDHC
- 123 gms
Wednesday, May 20, 2009
Uh...Duh! Data Confirms Everyone IS Buying a Smartphone
Trip Hawkins Claims D'Choc Is #1 Games Company on iPhone
Diamond In The Tweetarrhea...iPhone v3 Leak Courtesy of TelecomNZ
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
2ergo Zips Up Its Wapfly
Monday, May 18, 2009
Are These The Top 20 Mobile Entertainment Companies By Revenue?
Friday, May 15, 2009
Uh Oh!, Verizon's Voyager Successor Has No FLO
Rumor: Nokia & Google in Heated Bidding War Over Mobile Translation Technology
Have a great weekend ;-)
Twistbox To Help Private Reach "New Penetration Levels" in $2.2bil Mobile Adult Content Market
Thursday, May 14, 2009
Artificial Life | The New Hotness In Mobile Games?
DataByte: VC Funding Down 50% | Startup Funding Down 62%
Wednesday, May 13, 2009
Sling Almost Has The Video Genie Out of the Bottle
Here's Another Non-Original Idea: Call The "app store" Vodafone live!
Monday, May 11, 2009
Can Buongiorno Keep It Up?
btw -- here's a look at Buongiorno's revs & consolidated net over the last 2 years in millions of US dollars. Note that I calculated the €/$ rate @ 1.3597 & that the jump in 2008 revs is attributable to their acquisition of iTouch at the very end of 2007.
Wednesday, May 6, 2009
Revenue Last 4 Quarters: EA Mobile, Gameloft & Glu Mobile
Tuesday, May 5, 2009
PopCap Data Feast Puts A Rumbly in My Tumbly
- 57% of survey participants are mobile gamers (have played a mobile game in the last month)
- 78% of mobile gamers have been playing for 1+ years, 55% for 3+ years
- 26% of mobile gamers have paid to download games
- 33% have downloaded free/demo mobile games
- 76% of mobile gamers play pre-loaded free games that come with the handset
- 61% said genre was the #1 factor influencing download of a paid game (followed by price & good free demo)...casual genres such as puzzles & cards dominate
- 86% of mobile gamers play games on other platforms
- 62% of gaming sessions are less than 15mins (it's still about snacking)
- 71% of mobile gamers play on their phones for less than 1hr/week (troubling)
- Paid game downloaders have purchased an average of 7.2 mobile games lifetime
- Mobile gamers with 5+ years experience are downloading fewer games than new gamers
- Mobile gamers most often claim to have played Tetris (20%), Bejeweled (18%) and Solitaire (17%)...after all these years, yikes!
- Men play games more often, women play for longer (no comment)
- 50% of mobile gamers played during work hours
- 32% of mobile gamers said they were “somewhat or very likely” to purchase a mobile game in 2009
It's a veritable data feast, but in the end I feel more queasy than satisfied. If this survey is to be believed (and I'll let someone else weigh in on the statistical viability)...it seems like consumers still have very little passion for mobile games & continue to view them as casual distractions. More depressing is that the same games that were dominating sales 3years ago are still the most popular titles. It would be really interesting to know what % of the survey participants were iPhone owners, and how their results varied from the group at large.
But I needed just one more wafer-thin data point...so I decided to play with some of these numbers to see what I could deduce about AT&T's overall games business. Assuming gamers buy 1 game per quarter @ an avg price of $5.99 then (if my math is correct) AT&T Mobility is making $23mil per month in games revenue (78mil x 57% x 26% x 0.33 x $5.99) or $276mil per year. Actually, that doesn't seem too far-fetched considering that would be 33% of the $845mil US games market as estimated by Gartner. Better?...well considering that means that mobile games revenue per AT&T subscriber is just 30¢ per month (or just 2% of Data ARPU), maybe not. Better bring me a bucket.
RIM Jobs...BlackBerry Throws iPhone A Curve
- RIM BlackBerry Curve
- Apple iPhone 3G
- RIM BlackBerry Storm
- RIM BlackBerry Pearl
- T-Mobile G1
btw -- Palm has totally dropped off the map...that Pre can't come soon enough.
Monday, May 4, 2009
Player X, Why Zed?...$15mil is the Answer
Saturday, May 2, 2009
Gizmondo Gets Ready For Its Closeup
Friday, May 1, 2009
Fireminty Fresh App Store Data
- Firemint estimates 700k downloads since 6 March 2009
- 57% of sales come from the US, followed by UK with 17%...over 80% came from English speaking countries
- Game sold ~35k units WW on best day, ~20k units in US on best day
- Techcrunch estimates Firemint's Rev @ ~$485k (700k x $0.99 x 70%)...but could be a bit higher since $0.99 is promoted as a "sale price"
- Firemint saw sales bumps during Easter and as result of press coverage
- Sales declined pretty steeply at #1 position, going from ~13.k/day to ~9.5k/day in the US in 2 weeks
Overall these are great numbers. The 2 biggest concerns I have are:
- Price erosion on the platform (which I've been harping about for a long time)...it seems very difficult to get into or stay in the Top Paid Apps at over a $1.99 price point
- Short effective shelf life...from this report & other anecdotal evidence, it seems like good titles peak very quickly then drop quite rapidly...eventually to get lost in the increasing clutter of the App Store catalog
This report is a treasure-trove of data and I'm sure it will soon serve as a primer for the entire mobile games developer/publisher community. I hope that Firemint's willingness to share real-world numbers will start a trend in the mobile content space...on this and all other distribution platforms.