Motricity News: Lay Offs, Moving to WA, Renewed Focus

Motricity, a heavily funded mobile content infrastructure company announced today that they are restructuring its business, laying off 250 people and moving its headquarters from Durham, N.C. to Seattle.

There have been lots of rumors about this news and the company made it official today.

The elimination of nearly half of its workforce will occur over the next nine months, with all affected workers getting an unspecified severance.

For those of you not familiar with Motricity, they provide the core technology platform that enables wireless carriers (AT&T, T-Mobile) to sell and distribute content from the device. If you've ever downloaded a ringtone or game from your phones store, it's likely that Motricity (or one of their few competitors) powered some or all of that transaction.

The Movaya team pays close attention to what Motricity does because we provide a similar set of technology to our customers who want to sell and distribute digital content for mobile devices. The difference is that Motricity's customers are wireless carriers and Movaya's customers are anyone with a website.

One of the announcements in the release that caught our eye, was that Motricity plans to retract from their non-carrier (or direct-to-consumer) business to focus on their carrier customers.

Now, one might hear that news and assume that if Motricity is getting out of the direct-to-consumer business that it must be a bad business to be in. Certainly the off-deck business is not growing as fast as some in the market had anticipated, but I think the real issue here is that Motricity needs to FOCUS on what they do well and what is paying the bills for them.

Talk to anyone in the mobile content space and you will quickly learn that the Motricity platform is far from perfect and they need to get their current house in order before they can extend their reach to new markets. Just as Movaya has chosen to focus on providing best of breed technology for off-deck mobile content sales, Motricity is best served focusing on their core business, which is providing best of breed services to wireless operators. You simply cannot be all things to all people.

But, if you are a portal or content provider that used to work with Motricity for off-deck purposes, the Movaya team would love to talk to you about how we can help. Give us a call, or drop us a line.

Mobile Gaming Moving Beyond the Deck

Good news for folks in the mobile game industry. According to a new report from Parks Associates titled "The New Frontier: Portable and Mobile Gaming", off-deck sales of mobile games will grow from less than 10% in 2007 to nearly 30% in 2012.



This move to off-deck will enable the mobile game market in the US to grow from $700M in 2007 sales to $1.7B in 2011.



“Off-deck marketing and distribution, combined with new business models such as mobile game advertising, episodic content delivery, and micro-payments, will rekindle industry growth," said Yuanzhe (Michael) Cai, director of broadband and gaming at Parks Associates.

The article from eMarketer highlights how off-deck sales help the mobile gaming market grow in a few ways:

- Independent developers and publishers who don't have to have their games approved by carriers can potentially offer a wider range of game types, bringing in more gamers.

- Off-deck transactions could also mean more money to game publishers by reducing the carriers' cut. Similarly, such transactions could lower prices for consumers, prompting more sales.

This is music to Movaya's ears as we plan to help power a significant percentage of that $600M in off-deck game sales in the US in 2012.

Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?

Capcom Interactive has launched Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader? mobile game.

Based on the hit show, Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader? brings all the charm, humor and deceptively difficult questions to the mobile platform.

Players are asked a series of up to 11 questions ranging from subjects like U.S. history, math or social studies. Perform well and you can work you way to the $1 million question. Choke and be forced to utter the unenviable phrase “I’m not smarter than a 5th grader.”

The game features more than 800 questions covering 12 different subjects. Simulated students provide “peek,” “copy” and “save” assistance just like in the TV show. And sound effects from the TV show complete the experience.

This game is selling very well on the carrier decks and it is a fun game for consumers of all ages. And just to eliminate any perceived subjectivity, you can read IGN's review here.

And the best part, is that if you want to buy the game, you don't have to dig through the store on your phone to find it. Simply click here and use Capcom's slick phone downloader tool to buy it. (Note: Verizon users are not supported yet, but rumor has it that this will change soon.)

Gameloft - Making $$ in Mobile Gaming

One month after announcing they had sold over 100 million mobile games worldwide, Gameloft has announced record sales of 24.4 million euro for the third quarter.

During the first nine months of 2007, the company had sales of 70.2 million euro, up 51% from the same period last year. In addition, Gameloft has reiterated its annual sales target of 95 to 100 million euro.

Europe accounted for 44% of sales during the first nine months of 2007, North America 35% and the rest of the world 21%. Over this period, the strongest growth took place in the rest of the world, up 82%.

Gameloft said that it intends to release approximately 25 titles between the end of September and December 2007, including Heroes, CSI: Miami (pictured), Assassin's Creed, Prince of Persia Classics and Beowulf.

This is great news because there has been a lot of talk about limited growth in mobile gaming over the last year. Perhaps it's possible that Gameloft is simply taking market share from other mobile game publishers but I highly doubt this accounts for all of the 51% growth in the period.

Glu, another big mobile game publisher, is scheduled to announce their most recent quarter results on Thursday, so we'll report on that later this week.

Bango releases new products; Movaya listens and learns

Some of the scariest moments you have as a startup founder is watching (via internet press releases / news updates) companies in your sector announce new products that *might* duplicate what your products/services do. Fortunately, you can almost always breathe a sigh of relief after digesting the content of the release or news, for it's rare when that other company actually has a product &/or service that competes with you.

The problem is that I ingest so much info, it's rare that I read something slowly, from start to finish, and more likely, I skim something that catches my eye, like the below snippet from email sent by a PR firm.

From Bango Corporate:
Bango launched Bango Boosted today, an API that is geared to help the mass market take full advantage of a low cost, mobile web presence. Bango Boosted is a web services API meant to enable mobile site builders to deliver Bango features to their customers' sites. mobiSiteGalore from Akmin Technologies is a site building tool designed to integrate with the Bango Boosted APIs and add Bango functionality to its core product. The services will also be available to users of site.mobi, the dotMobi site-building tool powered by mobiSiteGalore. Bango Boosted automatically activates entry level Bango functionality for any mobile website. Bango is looking for other site builder tools to use the API.

Skimming this, I get 'API; enable mobile site; site building tool'. I got a bit jumpy, then I read the entire piece and realized this service compliments us far more than competes with us. In fact, we met Bango at CTIA and might work with them.

Rocketshotz Update

We first reported on Rocketshotz last month and we just got an update from the team on some new features:

New Mobile Sites - They added over 50 new mobile sites including Maxim Magazine, Sports Illustrated and Burger King.

New Larger Link Capacity - each category can accomodate up to 50 sites as opposed to the 25 that was the previous cap.

OperaMini Style Support - they have added a new set of styles to accomodate OperaMini users.

SMS RocketShotz Share - this feature allows you to send them a quick link to the RocketShotz Mobile site directly to their phone via SMS.

It's great to see that these guys are taking feedback from their users and making upgrades to their system. We really like their product and think our readers should check it out.

Off-Deck mobile game sales: where are they?

As reported by mocoNews, this report from Telephia itemizes the average price paid for mobile applications and the number of consumers who downloaded them during the Q2 period of 2007. moco notes that games are not mentioned.

Interesting report, but after reading it I think moco could have done a better job with its analysis. This report appears to be centered on applications not including games; basically they are ignoring games.

We (Movaya) are simply waiting for a report JUST on games, especially concerning off-deck sales. The mobile gaming industry is at a crossroads right now, with carrier sales running flat, and off-deck sales stuck in the early adopters rut. In the near future, however, off-deck game sales will explode, and this will be due to large online retailers selling games, which produces wide consumer adoption rates. That will be a nice day!