McFilter

There were two speakers at this month's CHASE talk.

Money For Businesses With Green Ideas

First up was a representative from Shell's Springboard competition. They're looking for small businesses with ideas on how to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and up to six of the applicants in each region of the UK (north, central and south) will receive an award of betwen £20,000 and £40,000, plus PR from Shell with announcements about the competition and such.

Applying seems fairly easy, you just need to fill in the online application form, and none of the wordy bits are allowed to be more than ~250 words.

The important thing is that applications need to be in by 10th November 2006.

Is There Money In Mobile Games?

The main event was a presentation from Eben Upton about the world of developing games for mobile phones. Eben has been involved in a number of startups in mobile gaming, most recently PodFun Ltd., who developed mobile games and sold a middleware graphics library to let developers write graphics code which works on all mobile phone platforms.

It's been a few years since I was involved day-to-day in the mobile world, so I was interested to see how the landscape had changed. And was slightly disappointed, although not overly surprised, to hear that it hasn't.

The biggest markets for making money through mobiles are in the ringtone and wallpaper downloads, which seem to still be focused on tricking people into subscribing to some expensive ringtone-per-day service - see the multitude of "Crazy Frog"-style adverts on any music TV channel. This sort of approach is no doubt also harming the rest of the mobile industry - other businesses are priced out of the advertising market, and the public develop the impression that all mobile add-ons are scams.

The downloadable executable market is still small and fragmented. There are a number of different platforms: J2ME, Symbian, Microsoft, BREW... and porting/testing your software on all of them is expensive and time-consuming. The usual approach is to develop two versions of the game - one for high-end phones (the "smartphone" market of Series 60-type devices) and one for low-end phones (the J2ME market typified by Nokia's Series 40 phones).

The operators are still gatekeepers between the developers and customers. In order to get any volume of downloads you need to get onto the operator's downloads page, and preferably on the first page. The main alternative is to use premium SMS to trigger a WAP push message to do the download, but then you're running into the problems of association with the ringtones market.

The Future of Mobile?

Eben recently left the mobile game startup world for a job at Broadcom. I got the impression that he made the switch in order to do hardcore geeky stuff and not because he thinks the mobile game business is something to get out of. In general he seems quietly optimistic about mobile development, although he did half-jokingly predict the "Great Mobile Phone Games Crash of 2007".

In the early 80s the quality of many video games dropped to such a level that people just stopped buying games and the video games market crashed. Eben suggested that maybe the same thing will happen with the mobile market, and although it won't be fun for those in the business, I think it's probably long overdue. Mobile has been the "next big thing" for far too long now without actually materialising, and there are too many people expecting to take a cut of the market.