“Mobage Town offers free online games, ranging from full-scale, real-time, match-up games to simple mini-games, with high quality equal to official game sites. The site is distinctive for its wide variety of community functions through which users can enjoy, at no charge, content similar to that offered in social networking sites, such as blogs, e-mail, chat, diaries, message boards, and shared interest communities”.

The service effectively delivers two killer applications in the Japanese market - gaming and communication. As has often been the case for Western mobile developers trying to understand and learn from the success of Japanese i-mode services, there is little English information available about the service. However, the usage figures speak for themselves. After launching in February 2006, 100,000 users subscribed to the service in the first 26 days and a over 3,000 new users have registered per day since then to reach the current user base of over 2m users. Differing to the European mobile market, i-mode users are more familiar with mobile advertising being used to keep subscription costs down, and as Terries Take notices, DeNA appears to be on to a good earner with Mobage…

“Almost unbelievably, Mobage gets 3,300,000,000 page views a month, or about 100m a day, and using a “mini-mail” service, the users send each other about 2.5m anonymous emails a day. That’s a lot of content for Dena to place user-specific ads on.”

Read Terrie’s Take on japaninc.com
Mobage Town site [in Japanese]
DeNA Co. Ltd Mobile services

Juniper also identified user experience as the key if sports “infotainment” is to be successful on mobile.

“There is a great opportunity for content owners, application service providers and operators to exploit sport content over the mobile channel in innovative ways, now that the technology barriers are diminishing… However, this will only happen if everyone in the value chain pays attention to detail. End user experience in some markets of mobile sports content services built around the 2006 FIFA World Cup, has not been consistently good. Many new users of sports services have been disappointed with the quality of the deliverable and may never buy again.

Full article at www.juniperresearch.com
2006-11 report overview at www.juniperresearch.com
2004-09 report at www.juniperresearch.com

• The most basic modifier is to use double quotes to link terms together. For instance, searching for “mobile phone” will return pages with that specific phrase, not just all pages using the terms “mobile” or “phone”.
• Preceding a search phrase with allintitle: will limit the results to pages which contain the search terms in the page title e.g. allintitle:mobile phone
• Similarly, and particularly useful where a site’s own search function is ineffective, preceding a search phrase with site: will limit the results to pages from a the given site e.g. site:www.commonagency.com “mobile phone”.
• The link: modifier on Google works the other way round - returning all the sites that link TO the given site e.g. link:www.commonagency.com

An understanding of such modifiers begins to give an insight into the complexity but continued importance of good SEO on your site.

Email us at info@commonagency.com to find out more

We bring together the best minds in the Flash design and development community, with an optional intensive workshop day, a three-day conference, and the largest International Flash-related film festival on the planet. With the focus on Flash as a platform, Flashforward offers diverse knowledge and inspiration for everyone in the Flash community, whatever role Flash plays in their life and work. Flashforward is dedicated to providing education, inspiration, information, and community resources via our conference, website, blog, and podcasts.

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Nokia and Flickr have joined forces to enable your Nseries device to work seamlessly with your Flickr account - no downloads, nothing to install. We want to make it as easy as we can for you to feed your Flickr addiction.

Find out more at http://www.flickr.com/nokia/

Yet if previous versions of Internet Explorer offered less features than competitor browser’s, why should IE7’s arrival be “long awaited”? From a design and development perspective, IE7 finally brings the market leading browser up to scratch with CSS. CSS allows for greater creativity, accessibility and flexibility in the way web pages are created, and Internet Explorer’s previously limited implementation of CSS required significant extra effort to ensure sites performed as effectively in IE as they did in ’standards compliant’ browsers. From a client’s perspective this should allow sites to be designed and developed more quickly and with greater and easier code re-use and updating in the future.

Wired are also predicting that American mobile users are beginning to “want more from their phones“. For example, 6% of American users currently use music on their phone but 19% see this as a feature they want. Though this represents a growing uptake of multimedia services in the US, it still lags significantly behind Europe, with 3G Newsroom reporting last year that “European mobile consumers are four times more likely to use their music-capable wireless phone (e.g., phone with MP3 player) than their American counterparts.”

Fundamentally though it is clear that portable music players - mobile phones, mp3 players, mini-disc players, etc - are in for some exciting development and convergence over the next 12 months. Critical to this have been the music labels beginning to shift towards more suitable pricing and licensing for the ’snacking’ behaviour that is often required for online purchasing of low-cost items, along with technical advances in the networks, device design, etc. The final piece to this puzzle will be to bring the platforms back together so that users may maintain one ‘digital music profile’ whilst using and purchasing their music via any digital platform they choose.

Also, if you’re even vaguely interested in mobile then check out the growing MoMo community around the world… there’s bound to be one near you and it’s highly worthwhile being involved in the group and ideally attending the events. The Finnish group has a very active site including links to some of the other groups around the globe…
http://www.mobilemonday.net/mm/