Paul Coulton's Forum Nokia Blog

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'.

I have just come back from the Nokia Games Summit in Rome as I was asked to demonstrate some of the Mobile Radicals innovations in mobile games (Mirage Space, Mirage Money, Bombus, Boom!, 4 in a row) and it was a memorable experience. Not because it coincided with the worst storms Rome has had for 50 years and the problems this caused the organisation team ( who did a fantastic job of keeping the event running and producing a great experience for us all) but that this year I felt there was a real and demonstrable commitment to encourage innovation in the mobile game Industry. This was not merely the simple expectation it should be all down to the designers but there also needs to be innovation from manufacturers and operators in terms devices and business models to support innovative mobile games which was resonated in the talk from Jaakko Kaidesoja. Whilst there were a number talks I particularly enjoyed ( Roshi Givechi, Scott Foe, and Robert Tercek come immediately to mind) it was the panel on ‘Breaking the Borders in Mobile Gaming’ which most got the old grey matter thinking. The panel was discussing the greater incorporation of Music within games and one member was the musician Dave Stewart who is collaborating on the coming N-Gage title ‘Dance Fabulous’ based around new singer Cindy Gomez and developed by telented team at Digital Legends. It wasn’t the game that I want to talk about (although it does look good and will introduce some novel social activities) but rather in regard to a comment from the panel that mobile games could learn from Music industry which is good at maintaining loyalty of its customers to particular artists. This is interesting because the pc and console gaming industry has been good at maintain customer to particular titles or publishers these practices have never extended to promotion of the actual designers and these practices havent worked in mobile. Whilst you can argue that this wouldn’t work for the large teams on pc and console games there does seem a possibility for mobile games which involve much smaller group. In this way we might create a better perception of the art of the game designer (which currently seems just one step from pornographer) and also benfit the mobile games industry. Just a thought!!!

BTW this is a screen shot of me running mirage money within the heart of the Castel Sant'Angelo. I have no shame

This blog links in with Nathans in relation to the Forum Nokia Developer Day to be held in Budapest in November and relates to my talk which will be on Mobile Users Generated Content (UGC). The emergence of large scale UGC marks a shift among particularly for media organizations from creating on-line content to creating the facilities for non-media professionals (i.e., 'the rest of us') to publish our own content in prominent places. Mobile phones are particularly well suited for this type of media creation as they always carried and are therefore immediately available to the users when required. In my talk I will illustrate through example both the power of user generated content and how it may be harnessed but also the opportunities for utilizing the greater contextual awareness and flexibility the mobile phones offer over current online services. As a taste of what you might expect consider the following figure which relates to the density of user generated geo-located photographs from our LocoMash project for the Roskilde Festival in 2007 (left) and 2008 (right). We can not only see a greater density in 2008 (no doubt partly due to the better weather) but also the relative similarities over the two years indicating the primary areas of interest are consistent for the event which illustrates that UGC through mobile can provide and interesting insight into user behaviour at such events.

As I have been quiet for a while I thought I would present and interesting student project by Russ Gardener based on an idea I had a number of years ago which seemed ripe for resurrection. The concept is very simple in that it’s a mobile application which allows you to create a digital postcard of your own design (seen it before I hear you cry) the difference is that rather than send it electronically directly to the recipient it’s sent to a service which prints it out and posts it to the recipient as an ordinary postcard. This has a number of benefits; it saves the hassle of buying and sending postcards (and the usual result) of getting home before the postcard), it allows you to send cards to anybody not just the technically literate, it’s actually nice to have a physical object (to display in your home) which is probably electronic greetings haven’t really made an impact, if we place a printer service in lots of countries you could save on airmail by printing the card in the country to be delivered (I obviously held back on calling it green ).

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