iPhone Games

PopCap Games, the multi-platform casual game company best known for its popular titles such as Bejeweled and Chuzzle has announced a free web version of Bejeweled for Apple's iPhone that's now available via the Safari browser through http://www.popcap.com/.

"We're excited to be providing the most popular puzzle game of the 21st century to users of the most advanced mobile device yet created," Andrew Stein, director of mobile platforms at PopCap, said in a statement. "We wanted to give the hundreds of thousands of iPhone users a fun, fast gaming fix -- and at no cost, no less."

Jupiter Research analyst Michael Gartenberg called the introduction of the PopCap classic on the iPhone a significant milestone. "We've seen a couple of different homegrown games that people have developed for the iPhone," he explained, "but now we are seeing a very powerful implementation of Bejeweled made available for free."

Scientific American Magazine Launches Mobile Site

For those of you looking for something other than ringtones or mobile games on your phone, you should check out Scientific American's new mobile site.

Scientific American is one of the world's most enduring and revered science and technology magazines, and now anyone with a web-enabled mobile device can access Scientific American Mobile by visiting http://wap.sciam.com/ for free news and additional interactive features customized to their specific device.

Among other things, Scientific American Mobile features include:
• Daily news in science, technology, space, health, mind, nature, biology and more
• Daily trivia questions for added interactivity
• A listing of the current newsstand issue

“The launch of our mobile service is part of a broader brand strategy by our publication to offer new technology offerings to our loyal readership,” said Mina Lux, Managing Director/VP of Online, Scientific American. “Our new mobile service will allow our readers to easily access our content and the latest breaking science news on-the-go, giving science fans more options to access information from Scientific American, which already include the Web site, blogs, podcasts, RSS feeds and the print edition.”

I am not an active reader of Scientific American, but it's great to see publications like this enter the mobile medium. The mobile site is well laid out and easy to navigate. In Today's Trivia, I learned that there are 438 operating nuclear power plants worldwide with 104 in the US.

Now it's up to them to start driving traffic to the site and according to the release, they will promote the site through paid search, podcast and RSS ads, subscriber emails, online ads and print ads in the publication.

Check it out and let us know what you think.

Deal or No Deal Mobile Hits One Million Downloads

The mobile game version of hit TV show Deal or No Deal has been downloaded more than one million times according to mobile game publisher Mobliss.

"At Mobliss, we have been committed to building our mobile games business and the success of Deal or No Deal really validates our decision to continue to work with top brands to create casual gaming experiences that consumers want on their mobile phones," said John Loschky, VP of Program Management at Mobliss.

Deal or No Deal is the mobile game that mirrors the top-rated television game show in the country. Gamers are asked to choose a briefcase that contains a random monetary amount between $.01 and $1 million. As each round in the game progresses, players must make the choice of "Deal or No Deal", where they will either accept the banker's offer or test their luck with the hope that their original case holds the $1 million. The game ends when a player accepts the banker's offer or decides to open the original briefcase selected.

"With the continued success of its TV counterpart, we anticipate that subscriptions and downloads of the Deal or No Deal mobile game will only increase over time in not only the US, but also International markets because of the new Spanish version," Loschky added.

15 years later

On December 3, 1992, an engineer named Neil Papworth sent the very first SMS with "MERRY CHRISTMAS" on it, to his colleagues at Vodafone in Great Britain.

The technology was actually created by an Anglo-Dutch information technology firm called CMG, as reported in The Guardian.

According to Cor Stutterheim from CMG, "It started as a message service, allowing operators to inform all their own customers about things such as problems with the network. When we created SMS (Short Messaging Service) it was not really meant to communicate from consumer to consumer and certainly not meant to become the main channel which the younger generation would use to communicate with each other," added Stutterheim.

Fast forward to yesterday when Verizon Wireless said its customers sent and received more than 10 billion text messages last month, the highest monthly figure the company has yet posted.

Pretty incredible.

Release us from the carrier prison (NY Times article review)

The New York Times had a story today (When Mobile Phones Aren't Truly Mobile) on the state of carrier control in the US. The point of the story is to make clear that the current carriers, all of them offshoots of the old Ma Bell, are working in the same anti-competitive fashion that the old Ma Bell did when it was forced to split up. And the key is the artificial panic that the carriers try to spread when it comes to the subject of letting others 'use' their networks for any reason (like all of our clients trying to make a buck or two selling mobile games off-deck).

This subject is awfully close to our hearts at Movaya, as working with the carriers is the biggest pain in our collective asses. Like most people, I do not want Google to rule the world, but I am all for them throwing their hats into the wireless ring and trying to open up all the 'walled gardens'. It will benefit everyone, just as the article states happened with landline networks when the Feds forced them (Ma Bell) open to 3rd party innovators who produced such things as answering machines and the fax machine. Imagine, there was a time when Ma Bell tried to artificially induce panic in everyone by crying that answering machines would threaten the the integrity of their network...I would guess they simply hadn't thought to invent it yet.

It appears that there are a few fronts attacking the walls of the carriers, and they will break down eventually. We have MVNOs springing up left and right, large retailers desiring to sell mobile content, Visa, AMEX, Mastercard, Paypal and Google looking to use their payment processors on the handhelds, Microsoft and Apple building mobile OSes, and huge media companies looking to advertise like mad and showcase their goods on the little screen...yes there are big forces out there cracking the walls so us little people can sneak in and make a living. It just needs to happen a little faster.

Samsung passing Motorola?

According to a report issued today from FierceWireless, Samsung is now the number two handset maker by units shipped with 37.4 million shipped in the most recent quarter.

Something seems amiss, however, as the latest IDC report shows Motorola still having a nearly 10M unit lead over Samsung. I've sent a note to Fierce to get some clarification but if any of you have inforamtion, please let us know.

Google tests AdSense for mobile

According to FierceWireless, Google is currently sending out invitation emails to some publishers for an AdSense for Mobile beta test.

Google's invitation reads:
"As part of our efforts to develop new and improved AdSense products for our partners, we will begin a limited beta test for AdSense for mobile. AdSense for mobile allows publishers to monetize their mobile websites through the placement of targeted text ads."

Google already has an extensive FAQ page for publishers looking to create mobile ads for AdSense.

For those of you not familiar with Adsense, just look on the right hand side of our homepage and below Advertisements it says Ads by Google. Google AdSense matches ads to your site's content, and you earn money whenever your visitors click on them. On our site, it looks like right now there are a bunch of ringtone ads. Google Adsense makes it very easy for any website to generate advertising revenue and Adsense for mobile will do the same for your mobile site.

This is certainly worth keeping an eye on, because there has been a lot of noise in this space from mobile-pureplay ad networks. The biggest one of those, Admob, claims over 4Billion mobile ads served on their network.

The fact that Google is getting into the game means that the mobile web may actually be taking off. There have been some recent reports about mobile web usage and truthfully, I'm always a little suspicious of the growth estimates. It's definitely coming though, and having Google push this will only help adoption.

Sugar Mama Update

About a year ago, Virgin Mobile USA announced plans for a program called Sugar Mama that lets customers talk for free, as long as they agree to watch commercials and answer questions about what they've seen.

Well, today Virgin issued a release on how the service has performed. About 1,000 subscribers have signed up for the program each day since it launched about a year ago. That makes for roughly 330,000 of its 4.8 million subscribers, who are willing to exchange 45 seconds of advertising on their handset or on their PCs for an extra minute of talk time. Virgin has doled out 9 million minutes of mobile talk time since Sugar Mama launched.

Most importantly, the Sugar Mama users aren't ignoring the advertising either: they clicked on offers in the ads they viewed more than 5%of the time, which is 5 times higher than the average online click rate.

Advertisers in the service include Pepsi, Xbox, Jive Records, Levi Strauss, New Balance, Nintendo, Showtime Networks, Sony Pictures, Subway and the U.S. Navy.

"When we launched Sugar Mama, we knew we were adding something pretty unique to the way companies use mobile advertising to interact with consumers," said Howard Handler, chief marketing officer, Virgin Mobile USA. " With an average click-through rate of 5.5%, Sugar Mama offers our partners a way to directly engage our customer base. Certain outstanding Sugar Mama campaigns have achieved click-through rates which are significantly higher than our average. The most successful campaigns managed click-through rates of up to 21.1%. And our customers continue to tell us how much they appreciate the opportunity to see cool new ads and earn minutes."

"SUBWAY restaurants are all about freshness, and that includes the way we look at marketing to our customers," said Tony Pace, chief marketing officer of the Subway Franchisee Advertising Fund Trust. "We like the innovation behind Sugar Mama and it is a natural for reaching the digitally savvy consumer."

It sounds to me like the Sugar Mama program is a win-win for everybody. I'm surprised none of the other carriers in the US have rolled out similar programs.

"It's not a matter of if" mobile banking will take off...

Thanks to reader Kman790 for sending us the link to this recent article about mobile banking. I'm pretty sure we've never written about mobile banking and this article does a good job providing an overview.

Essentially, banks are looking to extend their online banking service to mobile devices so their customers can do all of their online banking tasks from their computer and their mobile device. I haven't researched options yet, but according to the article, mobile banking basically works two ways--either through the Web browser on your phone or special software that you download.

Market research firm, Celent, predicts that by the end of 2010, 35% of all online banking households will be using mobile banking.

I can certainly see a lot of value in mobile banking but although the article says Bank of America customers can now access their accounts from their cell phones or PDAs, I don't think they have marketed the service to me yet - I will check it out and let you know what I discover.

In the meantime, what do you think? Are you likely to do some banking from your cellphone?

EA 2007 Annual Report

As a shareholder of Electronic Arts (Nasdaq: ERTS), I just received the 2007 Proxy Statement and Annual Report. Revenue growth and their stock price has been pretty flat over the last year or so but considering this is the Mobile Phone Blog, figured it would be interesting to see what EA has to say about Mobile Gaming.

For those of you not familair with EA, they are the world's leading independent developer and publisher of interactive entertainment software for advanced console systems as well as PC, casual web-based games and games for mobile phone devices. EA entered the Mobile Gaming space through a $680M purchase of Jamdat in December, 2005.

If you read through their report, mobile gaming shows up in a number of places, with a couple of highlights worth noting:

-Under "Our Priorities", the third item is:

Mobile - Games played on mobile phones are now a fundamental part of our business. Today, we are the world leader in mobile gaming with annual revenue of $140 million.

- In the revenue detail, mobile gaming represented about 6% of their total revenue last year and they indicate:

"We expect sales of games for cellular handsets to continue to be an increasingly important part of our business worldwide."

Those of us in the mobile gaming space know that it can be a tough and complex business but if huge companies like EA (over $3 billion in sales last year) are making big bets in this space, you've got to be encouraged about the future potential of mobile gaming.

MobilePhoneBlog featured in BusinessWeek

BusinessWeek, the number one business weekly, has a featured our blog in its 'BlogSpotting' area in this weeks UpFront section of the magazine. MobilePhoneBlog.org was created as an effort to keep readers informed about the mobile content and cell phone industries. It has built a sizable following (Thank you readers!!) and clearly getting showcased by BusinessWeek is a great bit of recognition.

The article showcases the features of the MobilePhoneBlog.org. Check it out sometime.

Cool New Product - Reactee

The MPB has just learned about a cool new product - Reactee - the idea is that you order a personalized message printed on a T-Shirt. People then text your keyword to 41411 and get back your pre-programmed message.

Reactee is a project of TextMarks Inc. - a leading provider of text messaging services for consumers, corporations and non-profits.

The shirts are meant for individuals as well as organizations. Individuals can make shirts with their own unique keyword and response - which they can update as frequently as they want. Organizations can make many shirts with the same keyword and use them to promote their causes.

If you go to the Reactee gallery, you can try it out for yourself. Here are a few examples that I tried out this morning:

- "Hung Like A Democrat" - text GODEMS to 41411 and you get a message back that says: " America needs a Democrat as president to put our country back on the right track. Support the Democrats in 2008!"

- "Help Get Me An iPhone" - text SHENANIGANS to 41411 and you get a message back that says "Donate a buck or two to kurt@kurtcruse.com on paypal. Leave your number and I'll call you when I get it to say thanks."

I think this is a very innovative concept for charities, and brands that are looking for a inexpensive and slick way to get their message out and connect with consumers in the US. We are working on a WAP version of the MPG and as soon as it is ready for prime time, we'll create some tee shirts and get the street team to start wearing them around town to drive traffic. You should go create one now too!

More Carrier Consolidation

AT&T has bought regional US telco Dobson for $2.8 billion in cash and the assumption of $2.3 billion in debt, bringing the total price to $5.1 billion. Oklahoma City-based Dobson markets wireless services under the Cellular One brand and has provided roaming service to AT&T and predecessor companies since 1990. Dobson has 1.7 million subscribers across 17 states.

AT&T Mobility President and CEO Stan Sigman says this acquisition will be an excellent fit for AT&T as the transaction will enhance the company's wireless network coverage in the United States by combining the two companies' networks.

In addition, by becoming part of AT&T's network, Dobson's customers will be able to order the Apple iPhone (recently reviewed by the MPB) and take advantage of the computer company's music subscription service. AT&T is the exclusive wireless carrier for Apple.

AT&T is already the largest wireless carrier in the US, servicing over 62 million subscribers as of the end of March but they are in a tight race with Verizon (+/- 60 million) over subscriber additions. AT&T will surely get a boost from the iPhone release, but getting almost 2 million paying subscribers from this acquisition will give them some breathing room in their battle.

Mobile Phone Blog iPhone Review - Revolutionary

I begin the review with this: The iPhone is the hands-down, bonified, 100% legit, coolest gadget ever. I had high expectations for the device, and they were exceeded. Apple has done it again, and all the mac addicts out there will be happy with this first addition. And let me stress this: this is the first edition.* The iPhone lacks numerous features that many people are already complaining about as 'show stoppers'. Get over it, the software will improve, the hardware will improve, and it will evolve into the greatest hand held platform this world has ever seen. Come on, OSX in our pockets people.

*Does anyone remember the first iPod!!! it was a brick, black and white text, and the click wheel was loud and lousy. Now, iPods are slick machines that everyone loves, but it took 5 generations and 7 years to get there. It feels like everyone forgot this...

My PROS

• Start with the 'LOCK' feature to get a feel of the touchscreen, it is wicked awesome. It is used in all the applications, in different ways. My favorite so far is the photo gallery, where you can slide your finger over an image to move back and forth between images.
• Using the touchscreen to navigate: brilliant, just brilliant. In a single moment, Apple has erased the pain of using tiny little buttons to navigate a hand held device, which is definitely one of the main drawbacks of using a hand held device as a primary means of typing instrument. This is a significant point.
  
• The iPod functionality: WOW. WOW. WOW.
  
• Movies and TV shows, in landscape, are like HD quality.
• when you turn the phone 90 degrees, it turns into landscape in many applications like iPod, photo gallery and Safari, giving the user a large surface to enjoy
  
• Syncing could not be easier...it really could not. If you are any type of iTunes and iPod user, its a snap. If you have never used either, its still a snap.
• EMAIL application works very well, as does SAFARI.
• Built in speakers are a nice touch. Obviously for speakerphone they are needed, but they work well with iTunes
• Weather, clock, timer, alarm, maps and stock prices at your fingertips, very handy, and very well presented
  
• The overall interface detail is so smooth, its like butter
• Vibrant LCD, sweet looking icons
  
• Text is made crystal clear in emails and web browsing
  
• Visual voicemail is unique and very interesting, allowing you to see a list of who left messages and more. This is actually a really nice feature, and very one of a kind
  
• The phone uses the same connection type as the ipods...I was worried they would give us a new type of connection. but, not so. all the extra usb cables I have will work just fine. This also means the phone will plug into your car audio system like an iPod.

The list of things I like is long, and I highly recommend getting your hands on an iPhone to truly understand what a breakthrough device it is. Or read any of the hundreds of blog entries on the subject. The entry at Cult of Mac is good, or head over to Technorati for more.

Though far from perfect, the iPhone is exponentially better than any other device I have handled.

I do want to show my list of cons, and these are limited to the features that the phone should have:

1. No A2DP - meaning, no streaming bluetooth audio, no hooking up a sweet set of cans that you can use for tunes and phone calls (without a dongle handing from your hip). This is the one item I am most disappointed about. I cannot hook up a bluetooth stereo headset to enjoy the tunes and take calls...I do not know enough about the tech to know if a software upgrade will fix this, but that would be nice.
2. No JAVA or FLASH - means, no gaming!!! no flash madness!!!
3. Though I find NO official info on this, it appears that you cannot use your own music as ringtones. As far as I can tell, the only thing you can do is PURCHASE ringtones from the iTunes store, after you have purchased a song. So, you pay for a song, then pay again for the same song to be a ringtone. I cannot find any official info on making an iTune song a ringtone. Odd.
   
4. No high speed 3G network...now, I knew this all along. But you use the device on a WiFi network, and its sweet. On EDGE, its a little worse than OK, now that we are all broadband junkies.
5. No flash for the camera
   

Bottom line: go get an iPhone, or least head down to an Apple store or ATT store and play around with it, take it through its paces. You will quickly discover its genius. And you will be buying each generation of the iPhone, get your bank accounts ready.