Viewports all the way down…

Bryan has been experimenting with the new  iBooks Author tool.

This morning, he created a random page. On it he placed an HTML (dashcode) widget (which is basically an embedded area containing HTML). Within that widget, he included a link to the Yiibu site. The whole thing took about 2 minutes.

Here’s what happens when you tap that link.

The Yiibu home page loads within the widget…within the iBooks page. This view is of course chrome-less, but still smart enough to launch (live) URLs and render the resulting content pretty flawlessly. And if that content happens to includes a hyperlink, you can load yet another page into the space occupied by the first. (If not for the lack of chrome and any ability to scroll…it’s basically a small custom browser).

Quick tests reveal a (slightly) different user agent string and dimensions that appear to be an aggregate of the native browser viewport, and that specified by the pixel dimensions of the widget we’ve embedded.

The entire exercise took five minutes. We didn’t need a developer account. Only a Mac, iBooks Author and an iPad.

The past few weeks have seen several conversations around diversity and fragmentation. A fair number of people feel that mobile browser and device fragmentation are “unsustainable” and that when it comes to properties such as screen size, “supporting leading…breakpoints will help accelerate the settling out of the market and its resolution toward a semi-standard set of viewports”. In other words this is all temporary and more importantly, it’s something we can all start to affect through the way we design.

I understand the roots of this sentiment but i’m just not sure it will play out that way. Here’s the deal. Your grandma can now create a viewport. And so can the kid next door. These may not be ‘proper’ browsers, and they may not (yet) be fully interactive, but they can load a pretty sophisticated web page. A year from now, the most popular ‘browser’ may just be be the embedded web view full of ‘related’ links in a Stephen King iBooks bestseller.

Diversity isn’t going away. It’s about to get worse. Ignore it at your peril.

Is Flash Lite Finally Going Mainstream?

We have the Flash Lite player on every handset we own but most players were purchased via the Adobe developer site. Only my E60 had Flash Lite pre-installed at the time of purchase. As a matter of fact, when you look at Adobe’s Supported Devices list, you find that—once Japanese Flash Lite 1.1 handsets are removed from the list—most devices listed support Flash but it’s not pre-installed. And out of the pre-installed list, you find way more high end devices (E series, N series etc.) So what about Flash on lower end, more mainstream devices?

The recent Verizon announcement at the Adobe Max conference was encouraging of course. Flash will come pre-installed on 4 handsets; with more on the way. Some of the handsets don’t seem to be available on the Verizon site yet but judging from the very low, subsidized price tag on existing handsets (Razrs), the new ones that support Flash will maybe range from $50-$150.

Still, let’s do a bit of hypothetical math. Verizon’s has a 25% (2005) market share on a national mobile penetration rate of 194 million [via Netsize.] So that gives us about 50 million Verizon customers. If Flash ends up on maybe 50% of their handsets, you could expect optimistic player penetration of maybe 25 million within 1-2 years (accounting for upgrade cycles etc.) But wait—it seems older handsets of that model (older Razrs for example) could be eligible for the player as well.

You see, Flash Lite is available via over the air download when a game is purchased…

While Flash is often embedded in browsers and media players for PC users, Flash Lite is actually embedded in the individual BREW applications so that users don’t have to download a separate browser or media player onto their phones. [CNET]

…but as we know, many consumers don’t purchase content for their device at all. As a matter of fact, according to M:Metrics (March 2006), Verizon itself only has 27 million data users (50% of its subscriber base.) So with all that taken into account, (people on Verizon, who use data to download content, have the right phone, happen to download a Flash game amongst all the J2ME offerings on the deck etc.) the above figure drops to maybe 10% (10 million?) It’s also unclear from existing press releases and developer information, whether these phones will support any off-deck content that might be transferred by consumers via MMC card.

So the Verizon announcement is all well and good but when will Flash appear on mid-to-lower end, unlocked/un-walled handsets in international distribution?

It may start with the Nokia 5300 XPress Music. We bought one of these yesterday and is it ever a nice little device. It looks fun, the form factor is nice, the music phone aspect is well developed with a good player, great sound, a 256MB card already included, support for over 1500 music files, and nice little headphones. The camera (1.3mpx) and video features are pretty is good and the QVGA (320×240) screen is gorgeous. There’s even ringtone mixing software included and it supports AAC files. The price tag is also reasonable at about $250 which puts it firmly in the middle-class device category here in Thailand and certainly makes it affordable as an (iPod-alternative?) added value gift for kids or teens at Christmas.

And—it includes Flash Lite 2.0 pre installed as a standalone player and for use in wallpapers/screensavers. The lower end model (Nokia 5200) will also include Flash Lite 2.0 and Flash is being promoted on both devices via a link in Nokia’s content discoverer. I don’t know how many of these devices Nokia will actually sell but it’s an approachable enough model that I can see it being very popular. It already seems to be here in Thailand and it’s only been out a few days.

Still it’s hard to say what either of these devices will do for the overall usage of Flash Lite by consumers. This has been an exciting year for Flash and it feels good to see the player finally shipping on a variety of models. I would hope that what next year will bring is an increased openness from operators to experiment with Flash Lite on deck as well as the beginning of strong some mainstream off-deck offerings. The most obvious off-deck category I think is still advertising and subsidized content.

The Flash format is fun, colourful, yet the player robust enough to work with data and launch SMS messages. Some player implementations do vary so features aren’t always 100% portable but it’s still remarkably easy to build once and play a SWF on 10-15 different handset without having to worry about actual porting. The swf files are small and easy to share via email, Bluetooth etc.—so, even if operators and aggregators take a while to catch on, why not use the player and format to its advantage and create free, downloadable, shareable (viral?) content (brochures, adverts, lifestyle content, maps/event annoucements, take-aways, coupons etc.) for brands and services?

If anything, it’ll keep the interactive agencies busy for a while :-)

Twitchr Resurfaces

Funny. I spent a while yesterday hunting around for a good a link to Twitchr—the lovely exploratory mobile game by Future Platforms—for one of my posts. Could only find a few links so I thought the game was defunct; having never gone past the Beta stage.

So I was very pleased to get this news in Future Platform’s newsletter today…

[Twitchr]…explores casual play on mobile, in a format closer to a Tamagotchi toy than a traditional game. It called for highly creative design coupled with strong Java development.

The good news is that we have recently agreed a license with Nokia that will allow us to distribute and further develop this very special mobile experience. FP founder Tom Hume recently presented Twitchr at Playtime, part of the London Games Festival Fringe.

http://www.futureplatforms.com/fp/twitchr.jsp

They say the game is like “Pokemon having a fight with Flickr on your phoneâ„¢” Great news! Looking forward to hearing more in the coming months. (Hey Tom, is that closed beta you mentioned still on? :-)

Mobile Learning and the PSP


Welcome observations from Geoff at CTAD about learning content for the PSP.

I am just back from the handheld learning conference in London, where I showcased our content authoring, and in particular the PSP materials. It seems we have tapped into a latent, and unfulfilled need. We know that there are a lot of PSPs out there. What we didn’t know was that there were so many people interested in using them for learning. Fantastic news!…I have met a couple of people in the UK already looking to use the PSP as a glorified memory stick in education…This is a good idea, but seems like only the beginning. What we need is tools for educators to be able, more simply, to create more relevant, more meaningful content of their own – personalised to their learners. more..

The PSP is a highly underrated device. We discovered its appeal a last year when we made our JPG stacks. It has one of the crispest and clearest displays of any mobile device i’ve ever seen, very useable controls, a great image viewer (for image stacks) and easy content transfer capabilities. There was also something insanely enjoyable about holding it in your hands to browse through content. And back then, there wasn’t even a browser, wi-fi or RSS. The only hitch—as Geoff noted—is the lack of real content creation opportunities (other than video, blogs and images) for mobile devices in general—especially incorporating the type of interactivity that would make the content really useful for learning. [On a related note regarding easy authoring tools for content and widgets, see a recent post by Andrew Woolridge on Open Laszlo and widgets.]

The fish content above is one of our old stacks (still available on Flickr) but head over to Geoff’s site for screenshots of his learning content re-gigged to work on a PSP as well as screenshots of the PDA versions from CTAD’s m-learning site.

Simple. Colourful. Really nice work!

M-Learning with Flash Lite Content Packs from Taiwan

Ok, this is a brilliant idea from Gigabyte out of Taiwan—on two fronts. Firstly, their new g-re line of devices are being marketed as a mobile learning phone.

The g-re is a slider phone with a neat look and rich content. Besides ten novel motion-sensing JAVA games, g-re is equipped with an unprecedented GEPT (General English Proficiency Test) learning tool, providing a complete mobile life of entertainment and learning. g-re supports a series of interactive GEPT learning tools co-developed with National Yunlin University of Science and Technology. Plug in the GEPT memory cards and enjoy a mobile English learning environment from basic to advanced level, and from listening to reading.

The content pack idea is not new but this is a really interesting implementation as it ties specific content with a specific device and specific target group. The phone is fun, colourful and clearly meant for students so the tie-in of ESL practice and learning (a popular subject throughout Asia) with a personal device is a good one. And—assuming developers’ resources (SDK, device profile etc.) are eventually made available to the community and there is no DRM on the cards themselves, it introduces a great secondary market for new m-learning content that would be once again tailored to this group and this device. Plus—due to the flexibility of Flash Lite—with some judicious coding and testing, it’s quite likely that these SWF files would also work on S60 and Sony Ericsson devices—and maybe even the U10—despite the difference in controllers and softkey configurations.

I also really like the way they’ve incorporated the motion sensors into fun yet very useable (sounding) features.

  • Shake and Change wallpapers. I love this idea! Shake the phone, the wallpaper changes. A nice, simple yet non-gratuitous and low-stress use of the motion sensing abilities of the device.
  • Bodyguard. Once again taking advantage of the motion sensors, the phone can be placed on personal property (ex. hang it on a door) and will activate an alarm when disturbed.
  • Smart Alarm. Apparently this built in alarm clock can only be turned off with a ‘sober head.’ Hmm…not sure what that means but opens up some possibilities for early morning skill testing questions or motion sensing calisthenics in lieu of simply pressing the snooze button.
  • Built in Motion Sensing Games: They don’t elaborate on what these might be but judging by some of the awesome games coming out of the region that involve movement already, they could be really fun.

I’m quite the geek but I don’t care much for gratuitous uses of technology. Motion sensing technology prototypes for handsets have often struck me as trying to do too much. Phones spend their days being moved around from hand to pocket to purse to desk to floor (oops!) etc. So the above examples seem perfect to me as they are useful, yet not integral to any of the vital functions of the phone (making a call, sending a text, opening an application, scrolling through a menu etc.)

Plus the features are fun! For all the glitter, handsets are getting a bit boring these days. The Carl Zeiss lenses and all that are wonderful—don’t get me wrong—but when was the last time just using a handset was actually fun, made you giggle, or made you smile right out of the box?

Yiibu Presentation PDF Now Online

If you’re looking for a copy of the Mobile Monday Boston, OZMAD, Boston Adobe Mobile User Group or New Media BC/UBC Magic presentation “Creating ‘Casual’ Games, Content and Applications for the (Mobile) Long Tail”—look no further. We finally have a PDF version available for download (500k)!

Thanks for being patient. We’ve been absolutely swamped lately :-) Thanks as well to Rodger from the Magic Lab and Dale from OZMAD/Moket for the recent opportunity to share our thoughts with their respective groups.

LOL-I am an Infovore, You are an Infovore

I think i’ll have to buy the New Scientist today to read the rest of this article

Why are you reading this article when you could be watching paint dry instead? It’s all because of our innate hunger for information. Humans, it turns out, are infovores…The term was introduced into the scientific lexicon recently by neuroscientists trying to work out why we get a kick out of learning something new – why we have an appetite for knowledge…They claim that the neural pathways through which we learn about the world tap into the same pleasure networks in the brain as are activated by drugs like heroin. They say that, for humans, only the basic urges of hunger, harm avoidance and the need to find a mate can distract us from this info-craving…

This now helps justify the fact that every time we hand someone our Wee Tropical Fish Guide, we end up in a silly conversation about fish. I mean, it’s only fish. How many people can possibly care about fish? Shouldn’t they care about something way more real-time, interactive, data-driven, location-aware and cutting-edge (buzzword…buzzword..:-)

Turns out lots of people do care but everyone has a different reason to care (sushi, diving, memories of travel, aquarium fixation, childhood pet, heron in their backyard koi pond—all real stories BTW.)

Very cool. And totally long tail…

[And yes...data driven and location aware would also be great with a fish guide.]

Universals of (Mobile) Culture

I’ll be the first to admit i’m probably not your typical consumer. I don’t own a home or car, have no kids, watch little mainstream TV, don’t eat fast food, live in a tiny flat with little interest in a larger one, don’t shop much for items to decorate my surroundings, don’t have a large network of friends or family and spend most of by disposable income on books and travel. I also have three nationalities and several adopted countries and cultures which sometimes leaves me with confusion as to where exactly I fit in.

So all this inevitably leads to doubt when designing products or concepts for clients. Do I really get it? Does research alone allow me to put myself in the shoes of consumers who are sometimes not-at-all like me—enough to create something they will enjoy or find useful? Is my cultural ‘confusion’ an advantage or a curse? I’ve had all these doubts when designing mobile products as well.

In a perfect world there’d be a cornucopia of mobile stuff out there for all age groups and interests—just like there is on the web. And I think this needs to happen simply because the mobile is the most ubiquitous device out there. It seems silly that 2.5 billion of us are right now carrying around something that—admittedly is already vital in the way we do business, communicate with friends and family, organize our lives—but so far somewhat lacking in providing us with useful, relevant and enriching knowledge or experiences delivered in the form of content (art, design, music, moving pictures, storytelling, etc.)

But then again. Maybe that’s just me…

Then a few days ago, I ran into a list of ‘universals of culture’ by George P Murdock. Now I hate generalizations but this list looks pretty good. As a matter of fact, I think it’s spot on—and certainly applies to many aspects of games, content, and social applications on mobile.

…age-grading, athletic sports, bodily adornment, calendar, cleanliness training, community organisation, cooking, co-operative labour, cosmology, courtship, dancing, decorative art, divination, division of labour, dream interpretation, education, eschatology, ethics, ethno-botany, etiquette, faith healing, family feasting, fire-making, folklore, food taboos, funeral rites, games, gestures, gift-giving, government, greetings, hair styles, hospitality, housing, hygiene, incest taboos, inheritance rules, joking, kin groups, kinship nomenclature, language, law, luck superstitions, magic, marriage, mealtimes, medicine, obstetrics, penal sanctions, personal names, population policy, postnatal care, pregnancy usages, property rights, propitiation of supernatural beings, puberty customs, religious ritual, residence rules, sexual restrictions, soul concepts, status differentiation, surgery, tool-making, trade, visiting, weather control and weaving.

Some of these (weaving?) may be a tad less relevant today than when Murdoch wrote this in 1945 but I can’t think of a country I’ve ever been to where most of these aren’t true. And with high global migration—this stuff isn’t really defined by country anyhow. Depending on the group it can be regional, local or tribal—but also global—communicated and upheld over distances via devices like the mobile. Sure this global hodgepodge creates a blurring of culture but even MacDonalds realized long ago that serving halo-halo in the Philippines, koulouri in Greece and rice throughout much of Asia was more than just good for business. You can only disrupt culture so much before something has to give.

So—assuming you agree with Murdock’s list—why is the content available for download from our operators pretty much the same from country to country? You do find some variation in the area of ringtones (local music almost always trumps international brands) and wallpapers (esp. in areas of religious or inspirational sayings, depictions of beauty, use of colour etc.) But in games and applications—behold the mono-culture :-)

Admittedly, I am being a tad sensationalist and I did choose games that would prove my point. But the sad fact is, it wasn’t at all hard to find them—even in high growth areas like the BRIC markets where you’d expect volume to drive local content industries. There are lots of American media and pop-culture brands, lots of console (repurposed to mobile) gaming brands, and lots of low-hanging (casual-game) fruit like Sudoku, Mahjong and Tetris. It’s also pretty easy to see that certain regions or countries seem to favour certain types of content—and it’s in these areas that the cultural differences are now showing—even with applications purchased through a global aggregator.

  • Social applications to do with dating, horoscopes and luck seem more popular in certain regions than others.
  • Storytelling via historical or folklore settings seems very popular in South Asia
  • ‘Kawai’ or gaming-branded properties (Sanrio, San-X, Ragnarok, Pukka etc.) are popular throughout Asia.
  • Hong Kong can’t seem to get enough re-purposing of Mahjong,
  • Some local content does creep in, in the form of mass-media or sports brands (ex. Bollywood or cricket)
  • Then there are differences in design, which are pretty easy to spot in content you know is developed locally (visual style, use of colour, representations of male and female interactions or social settings, anthropomorphism of game characters etc.)

So overall, I don’t think we’re doing all that well on Murdoch’s list. Most markets seem to be getting maybe 10-20% locally relevant content, another 10-20% regional or cross-ethnic content (ex. Moroccan operators buying from the French. Thai, Malay, Indonesian and Singapore operators buying from China or India to cater to their multi-ethnic populations)—and the rest is mostly (North American?) big brand entertainment.

If anything, applications currently fare a bit better since they’re sometimes merely containers for interaction in the form of (user-created) voice, text or photography. Which brings me to my original point. Voice and text are vital and there’s certainly lots of room to innovate in that area. But with 2.5 billion of us (and counting,) couldn’t we do so much more if given the opportunity to simply and economically create, distribute, monetize and market content locally?

[Note: I chose not to include Korea and Japan in this discussion. They have quite a bit of local content due to a variety of factors that no-one can seem to agree on but certainly has something to do with high mobile adoption, a content-friendly payment infrastructure, smart operators and more flexible authoring environments. These articles on iMode provide insight into some of this.]

Freedom, Openness and the Evolution of Business (in Response to Charlie…)

.

Charlie had a great post a few days back.

When I review my notes I see that I have been asking myself in so many different contexts, how can we help the operators. How do we give them incentives to open one layer and then move money to another layer? How to we help them loosen control of one layer to enhance the value in other layers? How do we avoid an end-run around immobile operators (pun intended) and bring them in? How do we help them build a rich ecosystem for all to grow?

They are crucial to our success and we to theirs.

My suggestion is that operators spend more time trying to find other layers to get money from (not wring more money out of the same game), and make other layers a lot more free (can you say access?); that they open themselves up a bit in an enlightened way and not be over protectionist (as in locking phones, for one)…that they understand that control restricts and that easier distribution and lower barriers to entry lead to new levels of creativity; that they remove the complexity making it hard for even them to grow, and to keep things simple – in technology, in services, in pricing, in access, in everything.

I don’t have an answer but he’s bang on with his analysis of the problem as well as the reason this is a timely discussion. One upcoming challenge is that the off-deck conversations are heating up—so we may soon see the operators start to panic. To me, this is just proof that there are lots of people (big and small) who want to participate in our currently underdeveloped ecosystem.

If the operators were smart(er)—and I agree Charlie, they already are smart,useful and need to be there —they’d realize that providing access will only encourage participation.

The music business hasn’t exactly collapsed because of mp3 sales. Sure the business changed, and sales may now be occurring in a different way (smaller chunks for example) but then again some of the overhead has gone down (no CD’s to burn, no packaging to print, fewer distribution costs.) And discovery—although still problematic—has increased as well; which has likely provided increased global sales in music that was traditionally very niche or regional. Ironically—we used to have a hard time finding music because discovery was only local (your store, in your town.) Now it’s virtual and global but we have the problem of a bit too much choice—and discovery becomes a challenge once again. We also have to deal with the fact that we may be paying twice for the same music we bought years ago on CD.

So it’s a challenge for us as consumers and a challenge for ‘them’ as providers and promoters. But isn’t that what technology and ‘progress’ is all about? Show me one man-made invention of business, economics, technology or science that didn’t end up with negative un-intended consequences to balance out the positive ones? The idea that you can have your cake and eat it too every single time is unrealistic on both sides of the equation. And when you think of it in historical terms, it’s positively hillarious to keep having these hissy fits of “but it’s always been like this and we don’t want it to change…” about things that often didn’t exist five years ago. :-)

So I see lots of parallels in the mobile industry with what’s happened with music the past few years (and as Cory pointed out—with sheet music years ago.) What will make this all work out in the end is creativity and the ability to re-think our existing models and not be quite so greedy (and content creators, I’m talking to you too:-) Content that’s off-deck doesn’t have to be billed off-deck for example. As a matter of fact, it makes sense to bill it through the operator since the billing relationship already exists and lumping it into a phone bill also makes it easier to impulse buy. Of course the operators can then take a cut.

Then of course there’s data. Whether you scan a QR code, punch in a short code found on a subway poster, download a widget, access an on-device-portal, discover and click through a mobile ad, or use a scratch card to access or discover content—you still incur data charges. There’s tons of studies pointing to the fact that mobile data use is growing but still highly under-utilized by certain segments of the population. I don’t know about you but having an Alexandria’s worth of mobile content to choose from would certainly make me use it more. As would reasonable prices of course.

Diversity in the ecosystem also opens content up to the now well recognized principles of the long-tail. It’s way harder for an operator to interest their 50 million subscribers in 100 random games than for my local yoga studio to interest me in a bunch of yoga-related content that they know may already interest me. Sure the operators could start partnering with thousands of local retailers to sell carefully segmented catalogues of content but that’s just plain inefficient. If anything, let lots of niche aggregators do that (and there’s that access and openness again.) Or offer affiliate services so smaller organizations can hook into the on-deck or aggregate catalogues and promote products direct to their constituents. Then there’s the ability to self-publish (Web 2.0 style) which we’re beginning to see examples of but would also benefit from more access and openness at the operator level.

So maybe (in response to Charlie) the first thing we should do is begin to (regularly and aggressively :-) remind them of the past to better help them envision a future that will be sustainable for all of us.

Casual Mobile Snacks for Everyone

Juniper Research has just released a white paper (PDF) on future trends and market opportunities in mobile gaming.

The casual games sector is going to be the market driver, even though it may not be at the leading edge of mobile games technology. Casual games make most use of the inherent advantages of the mobile platform. People want to fill ‘dead time’ with easy to use, but fun games. This is the same in just about every culture.

This is hardly news. Casual games, content and entertainment are ideal to fill those ‘in-between-moments’ you spend with your devices. Dave Gosen, CEO of I-Play calls it “snacking

“mobile gaming is a snack, console gaming is a 3-course meal. They are a different user experience”.

At Vidfest last week, I overheard Pierre-Paul Trepanier, Director of Marketing for Nintendo Canada explain that with Brain Age, they’re starting to see a shift in game and device buying patterns. While it’s impossible to tell the age group that’s actually purchasing the game (is it gift? personal purchase? etc.) what they have been able to track is the overall contents of purchases.

So far, they’ve found that most people seem to be buying Brain Age along with a Nintendo DS—which would indicate that some of them are maybe not already gamers. Or at the very least, are new to the DS (or possibly—handheld gaming) market.

A Cingular webcast I sat in on yesterday listed the top 5 casual game genres as

  • Arcade/Puzzle (32.1%),
  • Casino (20.7%), Card (19.1%),
  • Retro Arcade (14.2%), and
  • Strategy (12.2%.)

(Top 5 Mobile Game Genres by Country: % of Average Monthly Downloaders, quarter ended Jan 2006, via Cingular “Introduction to Downloadables”)

This is all well and good and certainly would indicate that the casual game market will grow; but I think the term ‘casual game’ may be a bit narrow.

Let’s forget games for a moment and talk about play.

Think back to your typical ‘break-time’ at school, as a child. Twenty kids scattered around the room. Some are alone—reading, building stuff, sorting stuff, examining stuff, breaking stuff, staring out the window, contemplating the pattern in the weave of the carpet. All good stuff.

Others are in small groups—maybe 2-4 kids—doing very much the same thing—just together in some way. Even there, differences emerge. Some participants are passive. Others prefer to lead the interaction or instruct others.

Then you have the kids who roam or browse around the room. Call it low attention span or call it curiosity. (Does it really matter?)

Now look around the office during break time. Are adults really that different? And do our current casual ‘games’ offer something for all these different types of ‘users?’ (nasty impersonal word btw…must stop using it…)

Do current mobile games allow for quiet time, playful time, competitive time, learning time, contemplative time, silly time..?

We have a unique opportunity with mobile devices in that they can be insanely personal and private while being incredibly social and contextual (presence, location etc.) They can offer small moments of quiet play or learning—no peers, no pressure—or small moments of highly networked interaction and competition. Not to mention hybrids of the two.

I think we’re currently just scratching the surface.

Play...?

Photo credits:

‘old pic| traffic’ by miss_pupik on Flickr, licensed Creative Commons Attribution 2.0

‘Karen plays as Luigi’ by drag on Flickr, licensed Creative Commons Attribution 2.0