In the new tradition of moblogging, here’s a few snaps I took with my camera phone whilst in Helsinki.

A statue

A fountain near the harbour

A liner

The Cathedral

I’ve been invited to appear as a guest - in a pre-recorded interview - on Harddisken, a radio show on Danish Radio. The interview will primarily be about mobile online games, very similar to the concepts I covered in my Helsinki talk.

I’ll try and get an audio copy of the interview once it’s been broadcast, and post it.

Using Existing Markets to Create New Ones

Introduction
Whilst mobile gaming has become incredibly popular around the world, the popularity of mobile multiplayer or online gaming has yet to take off, especially in places like Europe and the US. Typically the cost of remaining connected to the mobile network has been a big drawback to online gaming, as has the quality of connection. With most online games requiring at least a modicum of recurrent data to be passed between players, it can rapidly become very expensive to participate in an online game on a mobile.

When compared to more familiar types of online play, such as PC-based or console based, where high bandwidth is taken for granted – and in this instance, even modem speeds of up to 56k are considered fast when compared to the typical mobile connection speed of 9600bps – and the difficulty inherent in finding people to play against, mobile online gaming has a long way to go.

A report by Safety, Awareness, Facts and Tools (SAFT) claims that 9 out of 10 children play online games, and when you combine with reports that claim that extremely high proportions of European teenagers own a mobile phone (one report even claims that 100% of Norwegian teenagers owns one ), it seems obvious that – at least at this early stage in the development on online mobile games – an easy route to promoting acceptance of online mobile gaming will be not through the models already in use (such as Bluetooth multiplayer or turn-based online multiplayer), but by placing the mobile device first as a device that gives additional access to games that people are already paying to play.

This serves a number of purposes, not least of which is to get the online game playing consumers used to using the mobile handset as an interaction device. It also allows for simple implementation of the easiest method of encouraging online game playing: the speed of pick-up-and-play services as opposed to the more time consuming match arrangement needed in most peer to peer games. And once you have created a core community of people who do play online on their mobile, expanding this market to other games, and to mobile-only online games is a relatively easy task.

(more…)

I’m giving a speech in Helsinki next week as part of a trade mission organised by the DTI. You can find information about the seminar itself here. I’ll post the text of the speech when I return.