Mobile Advertising

Enpocket
www.enpocket.com
"Enpocket is a global leader in mobile advertising; providing technology and services that allow brands to plan, create, execute, measure and optimize mobile advertising campaigns around the world."



BLYK
about.blyk.com
"co-founded by CEO Pekka Ala-Pietilä, former president of Nokia Corporation, and Antti Öhrling, Chairman and CEO of Contra Group"

AdMob
www.admob.com
"AdMob is the world's largest mobile advertising marketplace"

MOSH Mobile
www.moshmobile.com
MOSH provides free mobile service like unlimited free calls, unlimited text messages, surfing the web and ... free mobile contents like ringtone, wallpaper.

Google AdSense for Mobile

Google

"Google announced today the availability of AdSense™ for Mobile, a program that contextually targets ads to mobile website content."

What is AdSense?
AdSense is a contextual advertising solution to web publishers Delivers text-based Google AdWords ads that are relevant to site content pages. That means you can place the Google ads, which could be text only, on your blog or website to earn revenue.

AdSense for Mobile?
Very straight forward, you can place Google ads on your mobile websites. When mobile users click on the ads, you earn revenue from it.

The service will be available in the following countries soon:
US, England, France, Italy, Germany, Spain, Ireland, Russia, Netherlands, Australia, India, China, and Japan.

[more]

W3C tries to improve the user experience of the mobile web

Mobile Web Market
The number of mobile web users is growing rapidly. From the statistical report of CNNIC in 2007, the number of mobile web users in China is 44.3 millions. The largest mobile market in the world are China, US and Japan.

Mobile Web User
What mobile users really concern in browsing on a mobile website:

• Cost (always the first thing that users concern about)
  
• Easy way to look for the right information (consistent navigation method)
• readability of the website
  
• Time (get what they want in a short time)
• Having the same browsing experience on different mobile phone

Mobile Web Best Practices 1.0
W3C provides some basic guidelines for improving the user experience of the mobile web. Mobile Web Best Practices 1.0 is a mobile web standard that helps us to design and develop a good browsing experience to mobile users. It is like a guideline that telling you "do not do this, and do not do that", and "keeping it simple ... for user".




Read more:
Mobile Web Best Practices 1.0

Tweet Tweet Tweet! Twitter Everywhere!

I believe Twitter will become a big thing in the coming future. Let me just give you a quick update on Twitter.

Twitter

Twitter is a mini-blog web service. It is very simple but addictive. Not like blog, you don’t need to have a topic and write a long paragraph. You can just say a sentence or two words telling people “what are you doing?”. The messages you post are stored in a timeline stream.

There are a lot of cool mashup applications of Twitter out there on the web, such as twittermap, twittervision, Twitticious, Twitter Planet, Twittercal … and more. Twitter now has a huge number of users and there are some competitors coming out like Jaiku, buboo, fanfou …

Jaiku

One of the biggest competitors is Jaiku. Jaiku is similar to Twitter but it has more features. I tried to use Jaiku on my PC and on my mobile phone but I don’t like to use it very much. Jaiku has developed a mobile application (Symbian) for Nokia S60 phones.
http://jaiku.com/
http://jaiku.com/mobile/s60/models

Mobile Apps for Twitter

Abiro Jitter
- very simple Java application for twitter
[More] [Download Page]

JTwitter
“jtwitter is a Java application that you install on your phone. It allows you to enter twitter updates using your phone without having to send SMS´s. It also allows you to view your timeline, friends timelines, public and featured timelines.”
[More] download from mobile: www.jtwitter.com/wap

Twitter widget for Widsets
- If you are Widsets user, you can download the twitter widget for your widset on your mobile phone.
[More] [Download Page]

Twibble
- a GPS enabled twitter client for the Nokia N95
[More]

Twitter Mobile page
http://m.twitter.com

more Twitter mobile apps:
http://twitter.pbwiki.com/Apps

Blogger Goes Mobile

"Snap a photo and write some text … send it to blogger, and we’ll do the rest!” Now, we can blog everywhere.

With Blogger Mobile, we can easily make a post to your blog by just sending the text and/or photos from your mobile phone to go@blogger.com via mms or e-mail. You don’t need any installation and you can just do it right away with your phone now.

You don’t need to have a blogger account in order to use the Blogger Mobile service. By sending e-mail to go@blogger.com from your phone and it will create a new blog for you automatically. It will send you back the address of your blog after that and you can visit it on the web. You may claim the blog later if you want to edit your blog.

The bad thing is that it supports to only some US carriers (Sprint, Verizon, T-Mobile, AT&T/Cingular). It won’t work if you send a mail to go@blogger.com from your webmail gateway, Gmail for example.

If you would like to post to your blog via e-mail, you may use the Mail-to-Blogger feature in the blogger. It will give you an secret email address (NOT go@blogger.com) for you to do the posting. However, you can only post text.

The service is free but there may be a charge for sending MMS or e-mail from your mobile phone, which depends on your service plan that you are using of your phone service provider (operator / carrier).

I didn’t try it out yet, so I can’t give any comments on that. The way that blogger is trying to do is to make the things easier for the mobile users to make a post by just sending an e-mail or mms. That's good because the mobile users do not need to spend a lot of time to learn how to use the service. Comparing to making a mobile app for this service, they may lose some mobile users that refuse to do installation because some mobile users feels installation is a pain for them.

To know more:
Blogger Mobile
Blogger Mobile FAQ

Mobile Based Learning System

What's next? There may be a number of people who wants to learn new stuffs not just in their classroom, office, or on their computer, but also anywhere with their mobile phones. For me ... yes, I really want to learn new stuffs on the street or in a coffee shop when I am waiting for people. Learning some useful things like language ... may be better than spending time on playing games with your mobile phone.

Nokia has a new mobile based learning platform called MobileDu for China people to learn ... English language, health, beauty, car, and etc.

Another one called edioma's edigo™ which is a mobile phone based learning system designed for Spanish/English speaking persons to learn better Spanish or English.

TWUIK - UI technology sex up your J2ME application

An new UI technology TWUIK which is a nice engine for mobile application development provides J2ME developers a very sexy tool to make neat mobile applications.

I've watched some youtube video demos of mobile application built on using TWUIK, and I am very impressed.

You may check out the demo application (a flash demo) on the TWUIK web site. There is also a tutorial that shows your some UI and code sample too. I don't know how much the licenses of TWUIK costs, but I think it must not cheap ... haha.

I just can't believe when I saw the visual album of iPhone on the Sony Ericsson's phone. Of course, this is not real. It is just a J2ME application built using TWUIK, haha but it looks cool anyway.

MTJ - Mobile Tools for the Java Platform of DSDP

Eclipse is working on a very powerful tool of the Eclipse IDE for mobile software development which is Mobile Tools for the Java Platform of DSDP (MTJ).

The MTJ will able to do: Project building, Runtime management, Deployment to devices and emulators, Obfuscation, Signing, 1st generation UI builders (optional), Frameworks (Runtime management, Building, Deployment, and Mobile Visual Editing), Features to device fragmentation, Visual Builders + Screen flow builders, Support for localization, and more ...

Goal
"The goal of the Mobile Tools for Java project is to extend existing Eclipse frameworks to support mobile device Java application development. MTJ will enable developers to develop, debug and deploy mobile Java applications to emulators and real devices."
[http://www.eclipse.org/proposals/mtj/]

The project was proposed in the autumn 2005 by Nokia and it was approved on January 24, 2006. The first public release (0.7) was completed on November 06.
Milestone 1 -- The first milestone build -- 31.01.2007
Milestone 2 -- The second milestone build -- 28.02.2007
Milestone 3 -- The third milestone build -- 30.03.2007
Milestone 4 -- The fourth milestone build -- 27.04.2007
Milestone 5 -- The fifth milestone build -- 31.05.2007
RC 1 -- The first release candidate -- 30.06.2007
RC 2 -- The second release candidate -- 31.07.2007
Final release -- The final release -- 28.09.2007

Structure





Quick Installation
Eclipse build eclipse-SDK-3.2: (download win32 zip)
EMF build 2.2.0(download zip)
Visual Editor 1.2 (VE-runtime-1.2.zip)
The Graphical Editing Framework (GEF) 3.2.2 (GEF-ALL-3.2.2.zip)
Mobile Tools for the Java Platform (MTJ) 0.7 (mtj-runtime-0.7.zip)

Emulator/SDK
You will need to have some mobile device SDKs to start with. You can try one of the Nokia Moblie SDKs : Nokia series 40 Platform 3rd Edition SDK from the download page. If you do not have a login account, you can register one and it is free.

Use
I don’t need to talk much about how to use it here coz Rodrigo Pastrana (IBM) and Kevin Horowitz (IBM) have already given a very good, clear, and short tutorial at EclipseCon 2007. You can download the pdf and power-point file here.

Reference
DSDP: The Eclipse Device Software Development Platform Project http://www.eclipse.org/dsdp/
MTJ: Mobile Tools for the Java Platform of DSDP http://www.eclipse.org/dsdp/mtj/

"Dos Prompt Here"

With this, you can open dos prompt window by right-click a folder or a file.

You can make it on your own:

• Open a empty txt file
• Copy and paste the commands below
• Save it as DosHere.reg
• Run it
• That's it.
• Right click a folder, and you will see "Dos prompt here".

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shell\DosHere]@="Dos &Prompt Here"

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shell\DosHere\Command]@="cmd.exe /k cd %1"

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Drive\shell\DosHere]@="Dos &Prompt Here"

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Drive\shell\DosHere\Command]@="cmd.exe /k cd %1"

Or, you can download it here
http://vin2ktalks.googlepages.com/DosHere.reg

Gmail on Mobile - Nice and easy-to-use J2ME app

I 've tired the google's gmail for mobile recently, and I found that it is very easy to use. Its response time is fast. Sending out an e-mail is just done in few secs. It is a J2ME application.

To download it, go to gmail.com/app on your mobile phone. It will tell you if it can run on your mobile phone, and will ask you to download the app onto your phone.


http://www.google.com/mobile/mail/index.html

[J2ME] Open browser or download a MIDlet from J2ME

platformRequest
MIDP2.0 of J2ME has ability to invoke the browser in the phone. It can tell the browser to open a URL, or download and install a MIDlet. Here is the method:

javax.microedition.midlet.MIDlet.platformRequest()

boolean platformRequest(java.lang.String URL)
Returns true if the MIDlet suite must exit before the external platform service can be invoked. Throws a ConnectionNotFoundException if the platform cannot handle the URL argument. E.g.

platformRequest(http://www.google.com);
platformRequest(http://www.j2medeveloper.com/ota/basicpush.jad);

Test it in your emulator

Before running it on the emulator, you need to do some configurations in the WTK. You need to add the following the the system.config (in the lib folder of the WTK) :

# firefox browser example
com.sun.midp.midlet.platformRequestCommand: "C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe"

Note: Device manufacturers, e.g. Nokia, Sony, Motorola, are free to implement addition platform services.

[J2ME] - Good Articles about J2ME Application Porting

Porting means to convert the original source code which is designed to run on a single platform to run on a different platform. For example, you have designed a game which is original for Sony Ericsson W8ooi, but you want your game run on Nokia 6280 too. You may need to change your source code in order to make it work. We call this porting.

Porting is a headache sometime, so we need some solutions to make the porting easiler and faster. Preprocessing is a way to do it. Here are two articles from www.devx.com which give you some tips to do the preprocessing.

Automate Your J2ME Application Porting with Preprocessing [Bruno Delb]
Use AOP to Help Get Mobile Content to Market Faster [Allen Lau]

Yahoo! Go - Your world on your mobile phone!

Yahoo! Go is an application on mobile phone which brings every yahoo things on your mobile phone, such as Yahoo mail, news, finance, Flickr, entertainment, etc. Take a look of the introduction of Yahoo! Go:

http://mobile.yahoo.com/go/tour [Yahoo! Go]
http://mobile.yahoo.com/ [Yahoo! Mobile]
http://www.flickr.com/ [Yahoo! Flickr]

Channels for distributing your Symbian, Palm, PPC application

If you want to sell your own PDA or Symbian application, you may find some mobile application distributors on the Internet to help you distribute it.

PalmGear.com [Palm]
Pocketgear.com [PPC]
Symbiangear.com [Symbian]
Sony Ericsson Application Shop [Symbian]
handango [Palm, PPC, Symbian, BlackBerry, ...]
handago PSP [PSP]

and more ... (search them on google~)

The 3rd generation of MIDP (JSR 271)

JSR 271: Mobile Information Device Profile 3

This JSR will specify the 3rd generation Mobile Information Device Profile. MIDP 3.0 will enhance the functionality in all areas (such as better UI support, larger displays support, drawing to secondary display, ... ) and improve the security and functionality of RMS.

http://jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=271

China Wireless Technologies signed an order for 180,000 "COOLPAD 288" dual-mode samatphone with China Unicom

China Wireless Technologies (2369.HK) signed an order for 180,000 "COOLPAD 288" dual-mode samatphone with China Unicom recently, and they are going to sell the phones to Europe and other Asia countries.

You are wondering what CoolPAD is. You know Nokia, you know Motorola, but what the hell is CoolPAD? What is CoolPAD? Is it just a normal mobile phone or maybe it is just a PDA phone? No, It isn't just like that.

CoolPAD (Powerful Smartphone + CDMA+GSM and GSM+GSM)

The first phone in the world that works simultaneously in CDMA 800/1900 and GSM 900/1800/1900 networks, two technologically different networks. It has all smartphone features with Windows CE running with dual processor.

http://www.coolpad.cn/product/ [CoolPAD Official site]
http://www.mobile-review.com/articles/2006/cebit-2006-dualmode-en.shtml [CoolPAD review by mobile-review.com]

[J2ME] Mobile Game Development in J2ME

To develop a mobile game in J2ME, there are few things that you always concern about which are:

- Speed (Execution speed of the chipset)
- Memory (Heap size memory)
- Jar size (Jar size of your game)
- RMS (Record Management System, which allows you to save your game data)
- Screen Size (different screen size in different mobile phone)

Although your good friend Progard helps you to shrink, optimize, and obfuscate your code, it can't do everything for you. You still need to have a good program structure for your game, and good programming skill to develop a robust and killer mobile game within this limited enviornment. This is a challenge.

Additional things that you have to know:
- MIDP
- CLDC
- Additional API


Programming Approach in J2ME

- Heavy Object-Oriented Programming approach is NOT good for developing mobile game. One class costs you about few hundreds bytes.
- It doesn’t mean that putting everything into a class is a good design. It makes the code hard-to-read. Also, some phones have a limitation on size of class file.

[J2ME] First step to J2ME

First step to J2ME

What do you need?
You are required to have basic Java programming. And you need some tools. I won't provide too much detail about the tools that you need for developing the Java game on mobile. Instead, I will just list them out, and you may search them in google and find out what they are.

1. Eclipse, Jbuilder, other Java Editor (nice IDEs ... I like Eclipse more and it is free)
2. Sun Java Wireless Toolkit (Compile and build the Jar ... Free)
3. Emulator (find it yourself e.g. forum.nokia.com … developer.motorola.com ...)
4. Progard (an obfuscator, your good friend)
5. J2ME Specification and Documentation

Read
http://developers.sun.com/techtopics/mobility/learning/tutorial/index.html

API
Mobile Information Device Profile MIDP 1.0 (JSR 37)
Mobile Information Device Profile MIDP 2.0(JSR 118)
Connected Limited Device Configuration CLDC 1.0 (JSR 30)
Connected Limited Device Configuration CLDC 1.1 (JSR 139)
Other APIs

I recommand that you read the MIDP 2.0 first if you are new to J2ME coz almost all new Java-enabled phones which are equiped with MIDP2.0.

The J2ME app/game that developed by using midp1.0 API will run on both MIDP1.0 and MIDP 2.0 phone.
The J2ME app/game that developed by using midp2.0 API will run only on MIDP 2.0 phone.


Notation:
MIDP 1.0 phone - Java-enabled phone with MIDP 1.0 support
MIDP 2.0 phone - Java-enabled phone with MIDP 2.0 support


How do I know what APIs that the phone support?
To know more about that, you should check out the spec from Internet. Google can help you~ lol. For example, you can find the spec of Nokia 5300 from here below:
http://forum.nokia.com/devices/5300

Alright~ Have some fun ~ lol

How many people involved in a mobile game development in a large company like Gameloft

How many people involved in a mobile game development in a large company like Gameloft?

Let's see the credit of Gameloft's "KingKong Pinball":

Executive Producer (2)
Producer (5)
Design Director (1)
Game Design (2)
Art Director (1)
Lead Artist (1)
Graphics (4)
Animations (2)
Lead Programmer (1)
Programmer (4)
Lead Sound Designer (1)
Music and sound (1)
QA Project Manager (1)
QA Manager (2)
QA Lead (4)
QA (Many)

... plus some people working on marketing and promotional stuffs ... and maybe more

Market Data (North America)

Market Data (North America)
http://www.telephia.com/html/insights_america.html

Download
http://www.telephia.com/html/insights_050906.html
Subscription
http://www.telephia.com/html/insights_082406.html

Game Title
http://www.telephia.com/html/insights_062606.html


Subscription (53% of downloads)
Web-based (only 8%)
http://www.telephia.com/html/insights_071006.html

Mobile Game Developers and Mobile Game Market

Top Mobile Game Developer 2006
Gameloft
JAMDAT (Electronic Arts) / EA Mobile
Mforma
In-fusio
I-Play
Player X
Superscape
Glu Mobile
THQ Wireless
Kuju Wireless



Target Marget
Casual Gamers and Female Gamers to Drive Mobile Games Revenues Over the $10bn Mark by 2009
http://www.phonecontent.com/bm/news/games/1604.shtml

Pioneer and Innovator Mr.Goodliving Scoops Best Mobile Game Award
http://www.phonecontent.com/bm/news/games/1602.shtml


Licensed game (not good?)
Gameloft's Mission: Impossible III wins What Mobile's "Game of the Year 2006"
http://www.phonecontent.com/bm/news/games/1630.shtml

Interview with Vincent Cotte, Producer of War of the Worlds Mobile by Gameloft
http://www.midlet-review.com/index?content=interviews&id=4


Casual Game is better
"The casual and quick game is doing better than “movie-realted” brands game."The poor performance of movie-related brands and some of the console ports indicates that games companies can no longer afford to rely on brands alone to achieve sustainable sales," said Pamela Clark-Dickson, editor of Mobile Games Analyst." [news.bbc.co.uk]

“Analysts say that mobile games appeal more to the "casual gamer", who is looking to play for short periods of time, than to dedicated gamers.” [news.bbc.co.uk]

“Casual gamers include a large proportion of women, and the games industry is keen to tap into that potential market too.” [news.bbc.co.uk]
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4461239.stm

Mobile Technologies

I will talk about mobile phones, application and game development in mobile devices such as J2ME, Symbian, Brew, PDA, or IPhone. I will also talk about the potential market of mobile game, mobile apps, and everything about mobile devices in my blog.

Let's go mobile~