Posts Tagged ‘Mobile Monday Berlin’

Thomas Nindl of Wireless technologies provider Qualcomm leaves open the question if LBS has the potential to become a killer application. Still, watching his talk from Mobile Monday Berlin is worthwhile. The Director Business Development Qualcomm Europe foresees a huge market potential for social networking, indoor navigation as well as Augmented Reality. In his view, today’s location based services like AT&T’s Family Locator Service are only the tip of the iceberg... Stay tuned for more presentations from Mobile Monday Berlin!

Last week’s Mobile Monday Berlin was all about Location Based Services: How will location drive mobile revenue? The mere existence of maps and location-finding alone won't bring in the money. In her talk, Kate Imbach - director of marketing at event sponsor Skyhook Wireless – explained how location can create new avenues for mobile revenue. In Kate’s view, traditional advertising on mobile is currently just an extension of web advertising and there’s more we can do: „When you take location and use it the same way you do on the web and add it into mobile campaigns you get some cool results. The future of location based ads is a lot of stuff that we haven’t even seen yet. Tying together all kind of information totally changes at how we look at advertising on the mobile. I think it’s still really early but the more location gets tied into it the cooler it gets“. Skyhook's technology uses signals from WiFi hot spots to triangulate and find a person's location. The Boston-based company has pioneered the development of the first hybrid positioning system to fully leverage WiFi, GPS and cell towers. For more information on how developers can make money of apps check out Skyhook’s Developer’s Guide to in-App Advertising.

There’s a lot of movement in the mobile entertainment market - the most popular gaming titles are now available in special versions for smartphones and other mobile devices to provide gaming fun anytime, anywhere. Tiburon-TV today introduces five promising players in the mobile gaming market: Zed, exozet games, sMeet, gimigames and urban team with FastFoot-Challenge.

Zed is the world’s Number One in mobile entertainment in terms of revenue and geographical presence. The company holds a portfolio of more than 200 games compatible with the majority of handsets on the market. At the end of the year Zed will start its own movie called „Planet 51”

Ever wanted to play your favorite adventure game or boardgame in a mobile version? Berlin-based exozet games develops and produces mobile versions of popular gaming titles - boardgame adaptations like Ingenious and Settlers of Catan as well as PC and console games. Click here for a exozet presentation from Mobile Monday Berlin.

Online gaming platform gimigames has just been launched about one month ago: To start with, the Berlin-based company offers three brain jogging games – “Super Sudoku”,  “Moneymemo” and “Captain Math”. For every new player gimigames offers one Euro as a starter gift…

sMeet is a social virtual world like Second Life and Habbo Hotel. It allows you to create your own 3D look, furnish your own rooms, entertain yourself and show off your singing talents on the sMeet screens. You can meet with your friends as well as with new people and even get virtually married in sMeet! German startup urban team has won the "Best Real World Game" Award 2009 with its pilot project FastFoot-Challenge. The various players of the GPS Multiplayer Action Game have 25 minutes to catch the Protagonist – each of them equipped with a GPS enabled mobile phone. Click here to watch the FastFoot-Challenge trailer.

Next Monday: "The Five Most Promising Educational Startups"

Click here to watch earlier "Top 5" posts...

Zed is the Number One in digital entertainment without platform boundaries and is clearly focussing on the mass market. The company offers mobile entertainment content, console and PC games as well as interactive TV shows. At the end of the year they will start their own movie called „Planet 51“. Marcel Pirlich, Zed’s Country Manager Germany, has a quite critical view of mobile entertainment: „Developers create very nice, technical solutions that require a pretty fat mobile package at the consumer side which most people don’t have. As soon as the iPhone goes mass market, we will all be happy“ says Marcel. „In the innovation life cycle, the iPhone is at the famous chasm and will soon be crossing it into the mass market.“ „At the moment, network operators have the main stake in revenue streams whereas application providers only have a little bit of it“ Marcel explains. „Revenue streams will change and the whole cake will grow a lot which is a good thing for the operators.“ Marcel’s message is to create the internet of things where you have to charge pennies instead of euros for everything. As of tomorrow, we will be posting interviews and presentations from Lift conference Marseille. Click here for all videos from Mobile Monday Berlin.

One of the „older“ companies in the mobile games market is exozet games. The Berlin-based game developers started in 2004 with mobile java games for a handful of handsets. Nowadays, exozet is developing on quite a wide array of platforms and offers mobile, PC and console based games internationally for hundreds of devices. The games company’s specialties are adventure games and boardgame adaptations like Ingenious or Settlers of Catan from Klaus Teuber. In his interview with Viktoria, exozet’s head of mobile development Matthias Hellmund talks about the hot trends in mobile gaming: „Platform-wise every developer has been jumping on the iPhone wagon already. The iPhone is a very appealing platform but our core platform is still java. Content-wise you probably will see more games in the casual area but also in the high-end, high definition area where games are connected with console titles because that’s also where the game sales are. That might change again with upcoming markets like India and China where there are more entry phones.“ Because of its background and experience, exozet helps other developers to bring their titles to the hundreds of distribution channels there are for the java world. With the ability to target so many handsets, exozet also does hire projects like advertisement games which are almost business applications... Click here to learn more about exozet’s mobile gaming expertise by watching Matthias' presentation. An overview of all videos from Mobile Monday Berlin can be found here.

Games, games, games: In his presentation from Mobile Monday Berlin, Matthias Hellmund introduces exozet games. The Berlin-based unit of exozet group not only develops games for mobile devices but also for platforms like PC and consoles. IT developer and Head of Mobile Matthias explains: „Exozet started in 2004 in the mobile java world with basic games on handsets. We’re now developing on a variety of java flavors covering BlackBerry, iPhone, Nintendo DSi and the upcoming Google android platform. Since Bluetooth is included, lots of games work with multiplayer mode across Nokia, Motorola and SonyEricsson handsets.“

For exozet games, internationalization is a huge topic and quite important for its distribution partners: Titles and in-game text as well as the game visuals are adapted to the corresponding markets. For the tricky Japanese market characters were changed to a more manga-style version. But one of the trickiest part for developers is to adapt games to the more than 600 handsets supported by exozet games. Therefore, the game development company developed a specific in-house tool which enables them to profile and test game-specific features on new handsets. Aside from premium commercial games, exozet also develops marketing games and applications for well-known top brands which include Bluetooth multiplayer and delivery as well online features.

For screenshots, video and more info on exozet's mobile version of the legendary board game Catan click here.

Come back tomorrow: We’ll be posting Viktoria’s interview with Matthias! To check out all videos from Mobile Monday Berlin click here.

Mobile gaming is THE new trend sport according to Tom Nicolai, co-founder of Bremen-based urban team. The company’s pilot project FastFoot-Challenge is certainly not a couch potato sport: The Protagonist of the GPS Multiplayer Action Game is chased by four other players equipped with a GPS enabled mobile phone. While the FastFoot-Challenge players have 25 minutes to catch the Protagonist, their friends can watch them running around on Google Earth.

Annika Brinkmann from absichtbar adapted FastFoot-Challenge for the mobile web. She enabled the user to make everything around the game directly on his mobile phone: „Besides watching life games on Google Earth, the user doesn’t need to switch on his PC. New users can download and purchase the game and register mobile. As soon as they have their log-in, they access the start page with Quick Links to community features so they can tell their friends about the game and start playing with each other. The mobile community is running in the browser of the user’s phone“ explains Annika.

To get an idea of how fast and exciting FastFoot-Challenge can really be, click here for a mobile GPS game trailer or just watch the trailer in the presentation...

There’s more to come from Mobile Monday Berlin – so stay tuned! Click here to watch earlier posts.

Tiburon-TV’s coverage of the highlights of Mobile Monday Berlin includes the following presentation by Yukoono’s Director Sales Thomsen Ghebresellassie. Berlin-based Yukoono Mobile Business Portal GmbH just launched their service at fairly low price. Yukoono brings on Air, offline and online content to all cross-media platforms. Like a mall with lots of stores, Yukoono offers a lot of functionalities. Thomsen explains: „We invite our partners to get a channel on the forum and present us content which we then implement - i.e. Hertha BSC with HerthaTV, Hertha Profile, tickets etc.“ How is Yukoono’s Portal financialized? „We advertise on our portal“ says Thomsen „and use a revenue-share model when partners sell their content premiumly. The user can Pay Per View. We also offer a postpaid card with a prepaid functionality. It only costs five cent per minute in each partner portal. The user puts in the SIM Card into the mobile, goes on the portal, browses for free and chooses a channel – movies, TV, weather news, sports channel, whatever he wants...“ There’s more to come from Mobile Monday! Please click here to find all videos from the event.

Gescheitert ist Facebook mit seiner Plagiatsklage gegen StudiVZ: Laut einer Entscheidung des Kölner Landgerichts hat das kalifornische Online-Netzwerk keinen Anspruch auf eine Umgestaltung der StudiVZ-Seiten. Nach der gestern veröffentlichten Präsentation von Markus Berger-de León bietet Tiburon-TV mit Viktoria's Interview einen noch umfassenderen Einblick in die ehrgeizigen Pläne von StudiVZ. Gerade im Bereich des Mobile Entertainment will StudiVZ hoch hinaus: Die eine Million Mobilnutzer sollen mit spezifischen Lösungen für den deutschsprachigen Raum sehr bald auf bis zu fünf Millionen erweitert werden. Einziges Hindernis ist hierbei, dass die mobile Internetnutzung in Deutschland immer noch etwas zurückhängt. Günstige Datentarife fehlen, so dass die Menschen davor zurückschrecken, Dienste mobil abzurufen. Klassisch wird das Handy in Deutschland immer noch ausschliesslich zum Telefonieren gebraucht: „Das sind die Leute, denen wir beibringen müssen, dass die mobile Internetnutzung sehr sehr gut und einfach funktioniert. Davon erhoffen wir uns eine noch stärkere Nutzung unserer Portale, denn wir leben von Interaktivität“ betont Markus. Offen zeigt sich StudiVZ gegenüber interessanten Ideen und qualitativ hochwertigen Applikationen: „Wir sind uns darüber im Klaren, dass wir längst nicht alles selber entwickeln können, schauen uns jedoch sehr genau an, wo wir dem Nutzer welche User-Experience bereitstellen. Wir wollen die Menschen nicht überfrachten mit herunterladbaren Applikationen. Wie im Internet findet am Ende doch alles im Browser statt. Letzlich ist es eine Frage, an welche Entwicklung wir glauben.“ Als Trend sieht der StudiVZ-Geschäftsführer eine immer stärker werdende Verschmelzung mit dem, was wir heute auf dem PC sehen und dem, was wir auf dem Handy sehen werden – angereichert mit handyspezifischen Funktionalitäten: „Der Vorteil vom Handy ist, dass es als persönliches Gerät und Heiligtum angesehen wird. Gerade in Richtung Kommunikation wird sicherlich weiterhin extrem viel Neues geschaffen werden - Kommunikation ist das allesübergreifende Thema, das wir heute den Nutzern bereitstellen.“ Mit Hilfe eines MeinVZ-Profils könnt Ihr Markus ürigens mit weiteren Fragen direkt anschreiben! Aktuelle Videos vom Mobile Monday Berlin findet Ihr hier.

Did you know that StudiVZ is by far the largest website in Germany – even bigger than any German TV channel, with far more messages per day per minute than something like Twitter has on a worldwide basis? While Facebook has 60% of activity in any given month with users spending an average of 10 minutes on the site, StudiVZ’s stats show 80% of activity with users staying about 30 minutes on their site. And what are the plans of the VZ-Networks (StudiVZ, SchuelerVZ, meinVZ) in the area of mobile entertainment?

According to CEO and tech/mobile maniac Markus Berger-de León they plan to provide cool services to their 14 million users: „Everybody talks about apps and browsing, but social networking is the big growth rate, mobile of course. It’s all happening in the UK and many other European countries, whereas it’s not happening yet in Germany.“ So far, StudiVZ launched a mobile portal as well as an iPhone and Android app. Markus says: „It’s all at a very very early stage. We’re developing far more and will be adding a lot of functionality and applications – music, video, games, location based services and events. All of this is done based on open standards, we’re gonna go straight to OpenID and OpenSocial. But just like everybody else we do need good data traffic rates. That’s the only thing that is holding up the market in Germany.“

Tomorrow we will be posting Viktoria’s interview with Markus on our blog. For more videos from Mobile Monday Berlin, please click here.