WAP and games?

That's right! WAP & games! And it makes perfect sense.

And the leader in WAP development in India continues its innovative approach by extending its portfolio to include WAP games!

What's so great about WAP games?  Here's some key points:
1. No firmware limitations
2. Bye bye - 1.4k deck and 160 character SMS limits
3. So long, long development cycles
4. Welcome - shorter development and release cycles
5. Certifications take on a whole new meaning
6. Costs are more manageable

The down side:
- Limited color options
- Limited color/bit depth
- Lack of an event-driven environment
- Limited programming options
- Unable to support effective "board" style play

How does it work
1. User requests URL; Phone connects to nearest tower
2. Tower passes request to WAP gateway
3. Gateway decodes, passes result to server @ URL (HTTP call)
4. Server processes request - returns data to gateway
5. Gateway may encode, passes data to phone
6. Phone displays

Other than this, have put together some key considerations that one should keep in mind:
- Majority of the action shifts to the server-side, so be careful w.r.t:

• server-side performance


• (server side) resource management


• session management


• keep each user footprint small

- User dynamics

• expect users sessions to be fragmented - each spurt < 5 min


• total game lenght should be < 10 min


• must-have: high persistence - ability to pause/resume frequently


• keep it simple


• variable display sizes from - 100 by 100 pixels, 1-bit graphics and lack of on-board processing


• users despise entering text


• entering URLs is a big pain!


• maximize URL-link menus

- There has to be a clear value proposition: as people are paying by data transfer
- Consider incorporating Location-based features
- Consider re-playability aspect

What types of games as suited for this format?
- turn-based, non-board games

• trivia


• role-playing


• gameshows


• text adventures


• non-board based strategy games

Other ideas include:
- stock trading or financial competitions and fantasy sports contests - something like ESPN Super Selector.

Proximity-playing - the bluetooth angle:
- expect single player, but be ready to offer - "nearby" players to join - proximity-multi-playing.

Using a Content Adaptation server, such as the one provided by MobiPorter, can easily extend the game across a plethora of handsets with minimum maintenance overhead while maintaining quality.

Gotcha's
- avoid select lists
- avoid soft buttons and tables
- Cookies are not always available, so use url encoding
- avoid imagemaps and unnecessary network traffic

Arguably, the main format for games in North America. Accepted in Europe. With the emergence of level4 browsers, expect the space to really start heating up!

Market Data - Japan

Came across some interesting mobile market data.

Am jotting/sharing -

Ref URL:

Excerpts below:

The mobile business in the walled garden of the carriers grew by
23% in 2007 to 10 billion dollars, according to a report
released by the Japanese Ministry of Internal Affairs and
Communications in July. However, the garden is getting very
crowded - there were more than 16 thousand mobile sites listed
on the carrier decks offered by 4,300 companies.

Mobile content sales accounted for about 4 billion dollars of
which 1.5 billion was spent on music. Due to the introduction
of flat data rate plans by the carriers, users do not have to
bother anymore about data usage, causing a shift to
consumption of rich contents. Downloads of full-length songs
reached 1 billion dollars, while the traditional ring tone
business fell 34% to 500 million dollars. Sales on e-books,
the fastest growing content, doubled last year to 200 million.
Popular genres are books about current TV dramas and movies,
mystery, comics, and history.

Mobile commerce is growing faster than the content business –
total revenues were about 6.5 billion dollars in 2007.
M-commerce is divided in three categories: shopping, services,
and transactions. Services - including sales of concert tickets,
hotel and restaurant reservations, airline and train tickets –
grew by 41% to 250 million dollars. The size of the mobile
advertising and promotion market was 550 million dollars in
2007.

Like on the PC, the search on mobile phones is a battle between
Google and Yahoo! Contrary to the PC world, MMD Labs, a market
research firm, found that Google Mobile is number two in the
Japanese market with a share of 52.5%, while 74.9% frequently
uses Yahoo Mobile. Most popular search categories are artists
and comedians, music, and vocabulary. Almost 40% of all
searches are for multiple key words.

A recent user panel survey by Net Asia revealed that
26% is watching mobile TV. It is not clear how the business
model around OneSeg will be defined

Chinese democracy and the Day that never comes

Something completely not-related to Mobiles.

Someone gave me copies of the leaked upcoming GnR album - Chinese Democracy.


Feedback - they are trying hard, trying new stuff, yet trying to stay true. However, they seem to have lost the magic. Average songs, mashed-up rhythms and off-key singing / or at least its not blending into the song (or vice versa).

Overall: For a band that's been trying to release an album for almost a decade and-a-half costing as many millions of dollars - it was disappointing. Nowadays, GnR is shooting blanks. Just, stay away.


Onto - part 2.


The other thing I received was a copy of The Day that Never Comes - off Death Magnetic from the band that doesn't believe in brevity when it come to song titles (almost as bad as Meatloaf)

The video at Leeds, Aug 22:


The song starts off a little strange - but the rhythm and beat stay true and for a long song - its needed - otherwise, one would think its a complete jigsaw of melodies.

There is the occasional interlude that seems out of place, but that's par for the course with these guys.

Solo's are back! Although with this song - it wasn't that great, but not complaining.

The great thing about this band and their music is that you can always feel the energy coming out of the song (provided you listen to this genre). And that is true with this song.

The lyrics are ok.

The song really kicks in from the bridge and really gets going (sounding like the band of old) and ends on a high.

Overall: If this is a precursor to the rest of the album, i'd say, for once, believe the hype!

Other songs off the album include: Cyanide, My Apocalypse, and of course continuing the angst series, The Unforgiven III

New joinee induction

Apparently, we have a new joinee in our company.

Time to indoctrinate (warning - extremely corny and cheesy bit follows):


May you WAP forever,
Be the bane of j2me!
J2me, shall your phone blight!
Let your warcry be heard far and wide - X H T M L - MP!
Graceful shall be your bandwidth consumption
extended your battery life be.


Chorus:
"Joie de vivre ... "

Mobile / VAS data - Part 1

One of the crazy things about India, is how everyone wants to be information hog! Its just amazing how insecure and petty people are with sharing information. Although I am not a proponent of "Information WANTS to be free"; I am a staunch supporter of the I-really-really-really-hate-information-hogs-who-hog-for-no-real-reason.". I am all for confidentiality, etc w.r.t. commercial enterprises, etc. but public and for-public institutions being like that, really gets my goat, so to speak. But that is a topic for another post. Not this one.

In an effort to start collect, collate and consolidate market data, I am going on start making a collection of market data that I am able to slurp, peppered with some of my thoughts.

Starting off:
market research report

which leads to believe:
-- That mobile subscriptions at almost a 19x multiple over all Internet/Broadband subs. 24x if you just compare against Internet.
-- I wonder how close mobile penetration figures tally with those of TV and cable ?
think mobi-TV ! :p
-- WAP is an untapped market! Largely, because of cost, hungry telcos and lack of infra by telecom providers.
Less than in 1 in 12 people use VAS. I would wager that's largely due to the SMS bombing that happens.
-- 6.1m GPRS users. That's like 3% of the overall user base! The optimist in me, screams - Growth opportunity! ;)

Mobile pundit has some interesting facts in its article. Reproducing an excerpt here:

" ...
Indian Idol got more than 55 million votes via SMS between Nov 04 to Mar 05. At Rs 3 per SMS, that is Rs 16.5 crore (Rs 165 million). The telecom companies made Rs 11.5 crore (Rs 115 million), and Sony about Rs 5 crore (Rs 50 million).

Radio Mirchi gets 40,000-45,000 SMSes a day.

Indian music industry got about Rs 140 crore (Rs 1.40 billion) or 20% of its legitimate revenues from mobile music in 2005.

Shridhar Subramaniam, MD, Sony-BMG says a hit film can generate Rs 1-1.2 crore - about 5% of an album’s sale on mobile revenues. Its big mobile hit of the year is Rang De Basanti.

Saregama makes half its money on ringtones through its catalogue. It “sells nothing but ringtones. With new releases, we have the rights to images and wallpapers”, says Sarkar.

The big media firms — Star, Sony and BCCL, among others — have set up entire divisions for mobile entertainment.

Star CEO Peter Mukerjea has maintained that mobile telephony should eventually bring in 30% of the company’s revenues. And Sony will set up its own backend for digital downloads this year. ..."

Two more ... 1 here ...

Currently, the Indian market is split roughly at 60:30:10 between mobile operators, media companies and aggregators. Mobile operators argue that they make the investment and control the consumer, so they should keep a lion’s share of the mobile data pie.

and lastly ...

India has one of the lowest spectrum allocation per GSM operator in the world, about 6 Mhz against, over 25 in the UK or over 20 in China.

Just 15-20% of the phones in India have colour screens and/or cameras.

The revenues from VAS sector in India have been growing at an annual rate of 30 per cent and is likely to grow at a faster pace in the coming few years ...

Another useful data link

Revenue share between telcos & content providers / aggregators is 70:30, substantially more skewed in favor of telco than in other countries - further aggravated by lack of payment mechanisms.

That's enough to chew on for a bit. Will add more later.

A little history and a peek forward

This blog is supposed to focus on my rants/raves/general focus around the mobile/wap world.  Am working at the leading WAP solutions company in India, MobiPorter.  At MobiPorter, we are trying to help organizations who are currently "on-line" in terms of web-based, leverage the enormous potential of the mobile platform.  We are experts at mobify-ing anything and across technologies.  Simply put, we help put the net on the third-screen.

Some of the recent developments in the whole mobile world has started a snowball effect.  Initially, all mobile development used to be done either via C++ or J2ME apps (largely client side with a massive certification and maintenance headache involved.  The other option: was to create applications in WML - the Wireless Markup Language.  This wasn't a feature-rich language, but it did provide a small smattering of "html"-like options and then some.  However, the key thing, here was that WML is not HTML.  And, unfortunately, couldn't be translated into HTML, either (never the twain shall meet-types).  So, the bridge between the two worlds (the online/Web) and the mobile seemed non-existent. No joy!

But don't abandon hope just yet!  Along came a knight.  And that knight was: XHTML-MP! More details can be found in my whitepaper.
 
But, was this really the silver bullet?   In many and important aspects, the answer is a 'Yes'.  However, there were some casualties.  WML veterans would still be griping over them. 
These included the following:

1. XHTML MP does not support decks and cards

2. XHTML MP does not support timers

3. XHTML MP does not support events (bummer!)
   

4. XHTML MP does not support variables (ouch!)
   

5. XHTML MP does not support client-side scripting (ugh!)
   

6. XHTML MP does not support programmable softkeys (pain!)
   

7. XHTML MP does not support the tag

8. XHTML MP does not support the format attribute for input fields

9. XHTML MP does not support posting of data with anchor links

So, while some of the above were "acceptable" losses. Some clearly weren't! It did push the WAP phenom back a bit.

But lo! There is hope at the horizon.

With the advent of Level-4 browsers in most smartphones today (expect them to hit mass-market in the next 12-18 months), most of the above issues are bound to be confined to the annals of history.

So, exactly what is a Level 4 browser? If you haven't heard of that term either, relax, you are not alone.  Its a PIB!  It tries to identify those browsers that are HTML 4 compliant.  Currently, most are either 3.2 or lower (depending on your make, model and firmware).

So, will that solve the woes of the web world? Will this be the silver bullet? Will one finally be able to 'write-one and run-EVERYwhere'? Will everything be just an interface or a translation away?
Is Business Process Management truly possible?

Hardly! (But since when did that stop the "P. T. Barnums of the world" from trying ... ;) )

But it will nevertheless be a huge step towards helping the online world embrace the mobile one. One of the products we are developing at MobiPorter, is a catalyst to help organizations leverage all that is on offer today, and some of what's coming in tomorrow - to allow them to maximize their investments and leverage technology is a truly enabling manner (rather than 're-inventing the wheel').

After all, the future IS mobile! (for now, at least! ;) )

P.S. if you notice carefully, some of the links provided are actually wap-friendly... aren't I clever .... heh heh :p

A brand new day ....

Hi, Am a Thirty-something Software Professional. Based out of Delhi/NCR. This is a personal weblog. The opinions expressed here represent my own and not those of my employer (past or present).

So, blogging is something I am starting off now. Its a new experience. Don't know how much I will like, want to do it, will feel comfortable with it or even if its stuff that I want to jot or remember down the line. But here goes, besides, its better to try and reject, than not try at all (at least with the non-life-threatening or "principle-safe" things).

Could I have started blogging earlier? Yes.
Why didn't I? Partly not really excited/thrilled with the whole blog-idea and secondly, I don't really want to start something I don't want to continue.

So, why now? Well, I have been wanting to pen my thoughts down for a while. Wasn't sure if a blog, especially a public-facing one would have been the best forum for it and also wasn't sure what I wanted to write about regularly. So, what's changed? For one, a few friends and I have launched a company in the mobile & software development space here in India. Secondly, am using this as a forum to share it with all of you. Thirdly, I expect things to start getting a little crazy over the next 12-18 months. So, thought this would an interesting way to doc it out. I do plan to be regular.

Those were the primary reasons. Did have a couple others.

However, as I started thinking and thinking and thunking ... I started bouncing, scraping, bumping, jostling, jumping, grinding, rubbing and tossing against all kinds of ideas. Secondly, I was trying to assimilate lots of information, but not really regurgitating it (to make sure that I really understood it) and lastly, I started developing this weird notion, that I was loosing my touch with prose. The last part's probably already happened. ;)

The last thing is that i would probably look at this as a medium to get away from the JD Salinger'ish type of prose that affects most of the bloggerati today. Funny, irreverent, easy-to-read, and probably far something that most are comfortable with. I have nothing against all these points. However, personally, I would like to try my hand with different styles. For me, that would part of the fun of this whole adventure. Otherwise, it would become too one-dimensional (at least from one perspective). The day is young, so who knows ...

To summarize: go visit MobiPorter, that's my company. We aim to be the leader in WAP and Video Streaming Solutions in India.

Cheers,