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My principal interest in mobile applications is to push the boundaries of innovation to create uniquely mobile experiences. I hope my blogs excite and challenge developers to think 'outside the box'.

N-Gage and Mobile GDC

coultonp | 22 February, 2008 12:59

This week I have been at my favourite event of the year the Game Developers Conference and I must say after a fairly subdued event in the previous year for mobile games this year has been much more up beat. Whilst I felt a lot of people were indicating a need for change last year, this year people have really bought into the idea and I think to their credit Nokia have embraced this most of all. There was a great keynote from Anssi Vanjoki encouraging the greater use of context and the demo of new N-Gage platform at the Expo. For me what is particularly exciting about the new N-Gage platform was not the games they had to show (although i think Yamake is a cool idea) but inclusion of all the social and presence features which will allow us to create uniquely mobile games experiences which I have long be advocating and will help us create a games industry for mobile the exists out from the shadow of the consoles. I feel this could be a good great year for mobile games and I for one am very excited by the prospect.

In terms of other happenings the new Wii fit is great and there was a cool demo of creating your own game assets by drawing on paper by Sony. Oh yes and our Widget talk seemed to go down very well despite having the graveyard shift slot.

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Black Swans and Silly Glasses

coultonp | 14 February, 2008 11:59

For the last few years I have been recommending Nassim Nicholas Taleb's book Black Swans to my students. A Black Swan is an unpredictable event that carries massive impact which after it has happened we generally try to explain it away with some explanation that makes it appear less random, and more predictable, than it was. The reason I recommend to students, besides being an interesting read, is brings home to us the fact that we generally know a lot less about the world than we may think we do and not to be afraid of trying an idea that defies conventional wisdom. I believe that rich diversity affordable in all types of mobile development is particularly well placed to see the emergence of Black Swans as many of the ideas of the long tail or niche markets in mobile web 2.0 are advocating that we can have unconventional ideas but for large groups of people.

And why Silly Glasses? Last June Will and I created m3dcam to look at emergence in the  long tail mobile applications  by allowing people to create 3-D anaglyph photographs using their mobile phones. The only publicity we gave it was a blog here and MOSH with the result is that yesterday we passed the 4000 photographs up-loaded mark! Whilst this may not seem significant to some you have to appreciate to use the application users need a pair of need 3D and the users bares the cost of the up-load which is two pictures (therefore actually 8000 up-loads).

Whilst I wouldn’t claim it completely satisfies the criteria of Black Swan as we haven’t really made high impact it is very interesting given that the recent emergence of all these social mining tools shows that many consider value in creating a community and its always worth considering a daft idea.

On a final note and in honour of my many Finish friends here is a 3D picture I took with my shiny new N95 8G of a reindeer at the airport baggage claim in Kuusamo, Finland a couple of week ago!

 

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