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Game Monetisation Europe

Will you be in London next week? If so, make sure to head over to Tower Hill to join me and tons others for the Game Monetisation Europe conference. I will be participating in a panel on how to approach multiple platforms. There are a lot of very worthwhile speakers for you to listen to (in case you’re bored by my rants, that is… ;-). Here’s a few of them:

  • Ian Livingstone (Eidos/Square Enix, Games Workshop, etc).
  • Teemo Huuthanen (Rovio)
  • Tommy Palm (King)
  • Ed Rumley (Chillingo/EA)
  • Peter Edward (PlayStation)
  • Alex Bubb (Nokia)
  • Oscar Clark
  • Patrick O’Luanaigh (nDreams)
  • David Engelberg (Halfbrick)
  • and lots more…

It should be interesting and fun and, besides, London in spring is rather cool anyway! 🙂

 

BlackBerry 10 Rises / Slides

Last week, it was Casual Connect Europe time again. And as is good tradition, here are my slides:


Game Horizon 2012 / Slides

This week, I had the privilege to attend and speak at the truly fabulous Game Horizon conference in Newcastle (which is rather pretty as you will see in the picture). There was a plethora of inspiring and insightful talent that taught me a lot, including Torsten Reil (CEO, Natural Motion), Ian Livingstone (Life President Eidos and Founder of Games Workshop), David Helgason (CEO Unity), Mark Rein (Co-Founder Epic Games), Oscar Clark (Evangelist Papaya Mobile), Michael Pachter (Analyst Wedbush), Gareth Edmonson (CEO Thumbstar) and too many more to mention, all chaired by the formidable Charles Cecil (he of Broken Sword fame).

I gave a talk looking out on what we are trying to achieve for BlackBerry 10 on the gaming front, and here are the slides to it (some of which may only make sense if you actually attended…).

 

The (Big) Business of Mobile Games [Infographic]

 

OK, this suffering a little from the usual simplification inherent to this seemingly favourite pastime of many, namely of creating infographics, but I thought there were a few interesting bits in there nonetheless, so enjoy… 🙂

little-games-big-business

True Interconnectedness. What gives?

I did a little talk reminiscing on what was hot at this year’s Mobile World Congress, the mobile extravaganza in Barcelona. One of the show’s highlights was BlackBerry’s hyper-connected Porsche (See here for disclaimers) of which you’ll find a video here. Now, that car makes the most of the combination of powerful mobile-connected devices, protocols like NFC or Near-Field Communication and next-generation mobile networks (such as LTE), which deliver data bandwidth by far surpassing our relatively shoddy 3G data through-puts of today.

I also had a meeting with the good folks from Adidas who used their miCoach in-shoe chip to do some nifty stuff with the data so produced (video here). Adidas takes this one step further in that the performance of your chosen player in an accompanying mobile game. For the time being, this has to make do with a clunky accessory to your otherwise oh so smart phone. But, alas, these days are numbered thanks to the next generation of connectivity coming up right now. Apple’s latest (both phone and tablet) support the next Bluetooth standard, which would be version 4.0 (as opposed to “new”), and that is actually a huge step forward (considering how ickle it all is) and has understandably got its fair share of press recently. Here’s why:

Bluetooth 4.0 (full specs here), which comes as a “system in a package” has no noticeable impact on battery life of peripherals, which means you could effectively run your external keyboard or, perhaps more importantly to some, heart-rate monitor, on the same battery charge for the lifetime of the device. Oh, and it always handles NFC on top. The new standard handles up to 26 Mbps data throughput (compared to 2 Mbps for the older standards) although this is lower in the above-hailed low-energy mode.

All this put together creates potential for solutions that may not make for head-turning cool gadgets at tech conferences but they are things my mom might use: Just pair your phone with WiFi by touching in using an NFC chip (she could not find the settings for this if her life depended on it), use it for any type of fitness-related stuff, hook up any type of wireless device with the settings of, say, your car (probably with seamless handover of content, preferences, playlists, etc, too). Last but not least, the full range of healthcare all of sudden becomes a whole lot less geeky and a whole lot more accessible to normal people (which often was the problem with “modern” stuff: they worked well if you had an engineering degree or an unhealthy appetite for anything that smelled remotely geeky but was utterly unusable for anyone else). And for the geeks of you, there will always be the under-counter coffee-making faucet that you could then arguably also power using the hyper-connectedness of the brave new world.

So, interconnectedness is just about to enter the mainstream and that, dear friends, was the news of the week for me in Barcelona.

Carnival of the Mobilists # 260

As per usual, another week, another carnival (if things were only like this in real life, too…). This week’s edition of the Carnival of the Mobilists is being hosted by the formidable Antoine RJ Wright, and it is full of goodies. He is featuring:

  • Not one but two posts on BlackBerry (and I have no involvement in either; cf. my About Me page for disclaimers), one looking at its (apparently) impending death and offering advice on how to fix it and one looking at its (apparently) robust health despite recent dips.
  • A very interesting post on how handset UX affects testing.
  • A book review on HTML5 and the mobile web.
  • A report on mobile in the MENA (Middle-East and North Africa) region.
  • My own little piece on the mobile component of Facebook’s IPO (hint: there is none).
  • An interview with one of GigaOm’s mavens.
  • Plus about 10 or so more incredibly worthwhile reads including by singularity rockstar Ray Kurzweil, mobile influencer #1 Tomi Ahonen (not my but Forbes’ words) and, and, and…

Go, get a coffee (or green tea, or whatever you feel inclined towards) and allow yourself half an hour of good reading on all things mobile over here. And, if you would like to participate in the carnival yourself, you can: to submit a post, just e-mail mobilists@gmail.com. If you want to host, check out the Mobilists website for processes etc.

Conference season: Where I will be…

Yes, conference season is firmly upon us and, before I descend into the mayhem that tends to come with it, let me tell you where you can find me over the next couple of weeks.

This week sees London at the centre of a lot of things gaming: the Mobile Games Forum opens its doors on Wednesday in the Hilton Tower Bridge in SW1, which combines with the Social Games Forum. I will be speaking on a panel on “How to engage cross-promotion for social game discovery”.

There is also ICE in town but not the freezing variety but the big gaming (as in proper gaming for money and such) expo over at Earl’s Court, which rolls a variety of gaming-related tracks into this. I will be speaking on a panel on their mobile gaming track with the concise title “Incorporate Social and Mobile to create the Ultimate Modern Gaming Experience”.

Only a little later, on 7/8 February, we will be in Amsterdam for BlackBerry DevCon Europe. It is well worth coming to this to get a glimpse of the “new” BlackBerry and our plans there [disclosure: I work for BlackBerry]. Sign up here and hit me if you are a developer; I have a few discount codes left. I will lead a breakout session on Social Gaming with Scoreloop there.

Onwards to my old stomping grounds in Hamburg from there for the annual European edition of Casual Connect where I will deliver a talk on how BlackBerry will deliver on gaming (yes, you read that right!).

After that, there is a two week (conference) break before heading to Barcelona for the monster that is Mobile World Congress. I’ll be there all week!

Barely a weekend’s rest and the Game Developers Conference (or GDC) opens its doors at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. Again, it’ll be a full week for me there.

I hope I will meet you at one of those. Sorry that Asia isn’t featuring in this tour de force this time but, hey, it’s still early in the year, huh? 😉

Image credit: http://gapingvoid.com

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