Nice buzz application for Street Fighter’s IV launch, takes a pic of you through the webcam and maps it on one if the player while rendering a combat sequence – nice stuff!

I’ve been nosing a bit in the mobile world again lately, and especially in the use of (mobile) games for brands, and working with a few communication agencies over that topic (gotta earn real money with stuff I know those days).
Mobile is a great opportunity for brands, and by targeting specific platforms such as the iPhone you can, if you are smart enough, create a real intimate binding with a community of users around your brand image. Yet, it’s important to understand the behaviors related to mobile apps usage, and as such the following slides (especially from slide 12 and above) are really insightful:

iPhone AppStore Secrets – Pinch Media

View more presentations from pinchmedia. (tags: pinch smartphone)

I think games can go far beyond a simple buzz phenomenon and really create a community of users around your brand if you know how to go beyond just delivering an app and start animating your community through events around the application itself. Enabling easy things such as high-scores comparison, time-limited worldwide challenges can bring high virality and create a strong user base – while keeping in mind that the life-span of the app will be about 3 months and that in 6 month the marketing impact will start vanishing.

It’s all over the blogs, Microsoft might be looking to buy 3DV Systems for $35 million, the producer of a 3D webcam device that would be able to get plugged into the xbox 360 to compete with Sony’s EyeToy and bring casual games to the xbox 360 platform.
While I think this is a smart move for Microsoft as they definitely need to catch up in the casual games market which means enabling fun without the hassle of learning to master the so complicated controller they have, I must confess I’m not such a big fan of that kind of technology.
What mainly bothers me with that system, is that you have to remain in plain sight of the camera to be able to play, and in my personal case I’m never twice on the same spot. Also casual game means also multi-player games, i.e. 4 players at the same time on the same platform. The raving rabbits are just so much fun when everyone plays together and the portions where you lay alone on the Wii Fit kinda suck – and that’s the kind of experience that a dedicated camera can only provide.

Yet while I’m not such a big fan of the use case I’m really happy to see that Microsoft is feeling the power of accessories to deliver engaging gaming experience, which is also the main objective of VR-WEAR : mix immersive and interactive technologies to create a strong engagement in the game !
Microsoft, if you read me, I’m ready to sell for just a bit less than 35MUSD !

Finally managed to have latitude work on my Android phone this costed me a firmware update and a complete factory reset but now it’s working! Basically it’s built right into google maps 3.0 and it’s fairly easy to use : just add friends from your address book and latitude will share with them your position. When on your PC a widget lets you see where they are.
Nothing really groundbreaking here – Mobiluck has been doing the same for years now but still it’s nicely implemented and maybe it will be easier for Google to reach critical mass which is key for that kind of service in order to be fun and useful !

When I co-founded Kamayo in 2005 (which was acquired by Streamezzo), we did most of our mobile services based on the Streamezzo technology which was and still is the only one able to provide a full framework enabling mobile developers to create applications that work on *a lot* of mobile devices and even low-ends…
The technology has matured a lot over the years and now it obviously can be brought to the “masses” of developers. To do that and to animate this community of experts Streamezzo just announced today at Mobile World Congress the launch of their developer program at http://developer.streamezzo.com where you can get the SDK and learn your way through the Streamezzo tools and language.

Freely downloadable, the Streamezzo SDK includes; Streamezzo Workbench (authoring tool based on the Eclipse IDE), Streamezzo Rich Media Server Developer Edition (J2EE compliant mobile application server), Streamezzo Components Library (Music and Video Players, RSS Reader, Picture Slide Show…), Streamezzo GUI Toolkit (Carousels, progress bars, animations…).

I haven’t been talking about Flash Lite for quite some time for a very simple reason, imho the subject is boring. Let me explain :

• Flash Lite covers only a very little amount of terminals mostly Windows Mobile 5&6 or Symbian series 60
• Flash Lite only worked as a solid use case in Japan on the Symbian platform to feature idle screen animations and tiny games
• The player is poorly integrated to the mobile phone platform and thus gives very little interactivity to available components such as dialing, text messaging and thus limiting a lot any business logics you would like to get inside your Flash application

Adobe made a big announce on their “Open Screen Project” in December where they announced they would remove any licensing fee on their player and push it inside their partner ecosystem on any MID (Mobile Internet Device – this is this year’s Mobile World Congress’s buzzword) and just released an Adobe Mobile Packager:

The Adobe Mobile Packager is a desktop tool to wrap a SWF application with a player version checker, an icon, and metadata into an installable file for user-friendly discovery on S60 and Windows Mobile devices. The resulting output file is recognizable by S60 (.SIS) and Windows Mobile (.CAB) operating systems, acting essentially like .ZIP or .AIR files

All in all it really doesn’t get me exited, technically this is no big deal, they could have done that for years and it’s just yet another announce trying to convince us that Flash is coming to the mobile like they have been doing for years (at least since 2004 which makes it 5 years) and yet none of the high end devices in my pockets are Flash compliant. And I still wonder how they’re going to manage the complexity of the ecosystem they’re building, this is going to be harder than handling 3 existing platforms (sorry, the Palm Pre doesn’t count until it’s released) which is what they are doing right now…
Adobe, stop talking big about strategy and start getting things done !

I’ve switched since CES to my new Android ADP1 phone (developer’s version of T-Mobile’s G1). Overall I’m really happy with the functionalities built-in, it’s all about productivity and I’ve never been so well connected. The keyboard is a dream and lets you type long emails easily and the notifications and background applications are updating you on a regular basis on your digital updates letting you keep in touch just as conveniently as if you were behind your notebook.
Yet the phone has a lot of defects,
first of all the UI is really crap – once you have tasted at the iPhone splendid and homogeneous UI, you can’t really enjoy Android’s which is totally heterogeneous, with both input mechanisms and look’n'feel varying from one menu to another… not mentioning that application developers are really doing it their own way with no real guidelines to follow…
Seconds come the battery life which is a real issue here, when I turn off all notification and network access, that I give a call or two (below 20 mins), I get far less then 24hrs uptime. And when I fire up notifications and network access I just get a couple of hours of uptime, this is TRAGIC!

Don’t know if it’s the software itself that is so young or the fact that I have a developer phone, but this is really a pain, hopefully I’ve got a 1m-long USB cable but that’s not gonna last.
Last but not least : when I install an app it goes in the main phone memory – unfortunately there is little place left there (opposed to the sd-card which has about 1Go of free memory)… still haven’t found a way to move applications to that memory and get rid of the “low memory” notification…. Actually I found a hack explaining how to reformat and hack the OS to have this done, why should I have to bother doing that ?
Update : After updating to firmware 1.1 battery lifespan seems back to something normal for a smartphone (It lasts throughout the full day) – YAY!

I’m a big fan of connected devices (and I should – my companies built a couple of those) so seeing MIT’s David Merril’s toys at this year’s TED was pretty exciting. I’m especially interested in the use cases they came up with and I could totally imagine having my little boy having fun learning about figures and spelling words with those little interactive devices, just the way I had fun with TI’s Speak and Spell in the 80s.
As you may have figured out there’s a lot of tech in there, I guess there must be about 23USD of parts within each “Siftable” which would put a retail price for a 10-pieces pack + the PC dongle at about 500USD… I guess we’ll have to wait a bit to see such things at Toys’r'us but this is exciting !

Damn that’s the killer app… the JoyDick !

We tried to get to Versailles today – and sudden snow just got things harder then expected. Two hours earlier this place, in the wood between Versailles and Ville d’Avray was totally dry ! And the BMW which is rear wheel propulsion really was a mess in that environment. At the end of the day we managed to u-turn and get down the hill and back home !