BPN 1683: The Finnish Prime Minister is wrong

Finnish Prime Minister Alexander Stubb accused Apple's late founder Steve Jobs of crushing his Nordic country's job market by selling innovations that caught Finland's companies off guard. "We had two pillars we stood on: one was the IT industry, the other one was the paper industry," Stubb told Swedish financial newspaper Dagens Industri.

However, the Finnish Prime Minister is crying over spilled milk. There was nothing wrong with the innovations of the Finnish and in particular Nokia. The company had the brick, the Communicator phone and mobile internet since 1997. And in 2000 Nokia had a prototype of a tablet in its US laboratory (Which company did not have a prototype? HP was working on its PC/hybrid turnstile screen).

Problem with the Nordic countries and particularly Finland was that despite the famous glass and clothes design, the IT companies did not have the design ability, which Apple celebrated as part of its company policy. Nokia was technically well advanced with its Communicator and shelved in 2000 the beta-development of the tablet for another five years due to the economic downturn.

My observation

In 1999 I was in Finland at the first Scholars’ Network Conference in Tampere, hosted by the Hypermedialaboratory of Tampere University in Tampere, the home of my friends Jarmo, Cai and Sohvi. As I had been studying the second wave of electronic books with Rocket Books, I presented an overview to the audience of the history and the near future.

I divided the history in two waves. Sony hijacked the term Electronic Book in 1990 and introduced a adapted discman plus a minidisk. The first device weighted 450 grams, had a black and white screen, but it rendered text, drawings and photographs as well as music. E-Books were produced for it and in fact the American novel Sliver was first published on e-Book and later in print. The device was introduced in The Netherlands in 1993 and a consortium of publishers and producers bundled reference works like a dictionary and hotel guide. The e-book adventure of Sony did not catch on. In my opinion for the singular function of reading books (no games, no diary), only the electronic cover was too expensive.

The second wave came in 1997 when internet was there as a distribution mechanism for e-books to be downloaded on a small tablet. Again, it was experienced as an exciting proposition for distributing and storing a number of book. But in my opinion it failed again by the louzy design, black/white screen and the single functionality. So in 1999 I projected that smart phones and smart tablets would meet e-book functionality. There were not too many smart phones around at that time, while tablets were just around the corner.

Invitation by Nokia

After the presentation a manager of the Nokia Venture Company came up to me and invited me to Helsinki to speak to the people of Nokia Research and Business Development. They wanted to discover the world of e-books, the production and the copyright issues.

By April 2000 we had set a date and I travelled to Helsinki. I was told that I was going to be picked up by cab and that I would travel with a Nokia researcher in the States. So at 8.30h we were ready and waiting for the cab. In the meantime we had gotten into a discussion on e-book, smartphones and tablets. So in the cab he opened his attaché case and took a demonstration tablet out. It was clear to me that this tablet was for games and e-books. Later on it appeared that the tablet should not have been shown to me. But I had had a peep into the future of Nokia; little did I know that the tablet would be on the market some 4 or 5 years later.

It was not innovation, but design

 

Looking at the statement of the Finnish Prime Minister, I conclude that Nokia missed the design ability of Apple and not the innovation capability. If Nokia had been able to apply more design to the Communicator, they would have been a competitor or Apple. Nokia launched some designs of future Communicators, but did not carry out further laboratory work. And Nokia stopped developing the tablet due to the economic downturn. These days we know that during low economic tides innovative development should not get shelved, but should get priority in laboratories.  

I also conclude that the Nordic countries did not take the threat of e-book serious enough and thought that dead trees would be the basic material for newspapers, magazines and books for centuries to come. At a meeting in Stockholm in 2000 on e-books, many directors of the pulp industry were present. My advice to them was to invest in e-readers and e-books like their American colleague pulp company Mead Corp had done in the seventies with Mead Data Central, the originator of the Lexis-Nexis online information service, now a Reed-Elsevier company. The Nordic directors did not. So, the North American companies like Amazon and Kobe are now dominating the e-reader and e-book market.

Despite the misinterpretation of corporate history, the Finnish Prime Minister is looking at the bright side of the Nordic development. The Nordic pulp industry is now at least investing in bio-technology, bringing in its pulp knowledge. And the Finnish IT industry is putting money on the game industry with companies as Rovio with Angry Birds and many app developers.

BPN 1165 Nokia mobiles sing, dance and lead the way

It looks like it might become a classic business case: the changing face of Nokia. The recent figures and the product announcements indicate that Nokia is changing it business model. It used to be a company offering network services and mobile telephones. But now it is changing to music, games and software. Will the company be able to survive the change? Why not: once the company produced wellies, rubber boots, and moved to mobile telephone. The new move is from complex hardware devices to software.

Nokia is already changing its business model for some years. Of course network services and mobile telephones have been sales products for years. But with the saturation of the market for mobiles, other products and sources of income have to be sought. Despite the fact that Nokia bought all the shares in the Symbian consortium o 264 million euro, Symbian will not be a real source of income. In fact Nokia will put it at arm’s length and accommodate it in a foundation, offering other companies like Google the benefits of the development.

As the company is in content related devices it has been looking around for some time into content products and services. In 200 the company looked into the tablets for games and electronic books. Due to an economic depression, this development was shelved. But since two years Nokia is working on content products with a vengeance: games, music and maps.

Gaming has been a difficult area to start up in. The NGage device was not a success. But now the general game software comes on stream.

The music service is interesting. Of course the mobile devices are becoming Christmas trees with many bells such as telephone, SMS, camera game device and now also MP3 player and navigation device. But as Nokia is rather late in the music game it will have to compete with the iPod. In fact the company is applying the iPod syndrome: a device, a library, a fair price for songs. Nokia is producing special mobiles for music. It is building up a library through all large record companies, except for EMI (for the time being) and by buying the music store Comes with Music. And the price is more than fair (for the time being): songs are for free.

The latest content addition is navigation.. Of course, here the mobile functions as navigator. But for the device maps are needed. For this purpose Nokia bought the competitor of Teleatlas/Tom-Tom the US company Navteq. Last month the European Commission gave permission for the acquisition. In the meantime the company had already 406.000 dowloads of maps.

Nokia is changed its face from industrial products to telecom hardware in the nineties. Now it is changing again from hardware to content related products and content services. For the time being the company is still dependant on the sale of mobile devices, but gradually it becomes a download company building on revenues from games, music and maps.

Blog Posting Number: 1165

Tags: mobile, game, music, mapmobile, game, music, map

BPN 1008 The flood of press releases on mobile stops today

Today the boys and girls of the mobile industry pack up and will leave Barcelona. They have a lot to think of. They got quite some messages for the next year to think about. I am not in the mobile business nor am I in Barcelona. I am just a mobile user with an interest in the development of mobile content. So I have been reading the stream of press releases. Most of them could be relegated to the dustbin immediately and were not even worth reading. And as I wrote before about the Readius, the mobile with flexible digital paper, of course the old tricks were played to lure the press; but the press can have a better memory these days due to search engines. (I recently spoke to someone who had seen and felt the Readius and was shocked to find out that you have to open the mobile when called. There is no interface and/or screen on the outside of the mobile to accept the call. This mobile will not win a usability award, was his final judgement).

The flood of press releases shows that the mobile industry will have to deal with saturation. This year there will be more mobiles in China than in the USA. Of course there are still markets which still have to pick up mobile telecom, but they are not the most interesting markets. And the profit margins on devices are under pressure; Nokia has to move its production from Germany to Romania.

After saturation, consolidation sets in. No longer the various models of mobile telephone (or handy as the Germans call the device) are important but the software will influence the acquisition. And the software is based on the operating system. Presently there are some 50 operating systems and new ones still pop up like Google's Android. But the most important ones for now dominate the market: Symbian, Microsoft Mobile, Opera. And the manufacturers are no longer strict in using operating systems. Even Symbian shareholder Sony-Ericsson has now used Microsoft Mobile in one of its new models. And they are desperately looking for infrastructure like search engines. Of course Microsoft hoped to catch two flies in one go with Yahoo. Once the search engine would be part of the conglomerate, it could also function as mobile search engine.

But the main manufacturers and operators are still dancing around the issue of content. The latest item in content is of course television. This will bring in the ship with gold; so they think. I am not a believer of that. Mobile television will fit in the snack culture: short, funny movies. I do not believe that you will watch television series. In my view this will be something for the Ultra Mobile PCs, which will flood the market by mid 2008.

But also in other content areas, manufactures are looking again. Nokia started to distribute content of games, music, navigation information and other information through its Ovi service. Local operators will be glad to pick up the connect minutes, but will not get any extra’s out of it. The operators have also looked for the content revenue extension. But the time of the walled garden services is over. Besides people pick what they want to have and not what the operators think that they should have.

One of the reasons mobile content has not been a success is the tariff of connect time. Just downloading a1Mb from the mobile net cost a fortune. Of course T-Telecom has brought down the price, but if you have to pay yourself, you will not connect to YouTube for the daily selection. And money is not the only handicap, but also the operating systems. The scaling/reformatting of internet screens does not really work, even not on smart phone screens.

There is an old wisdom in the PC world that you have to sell a PC for free and ask money for software. IBM forgot to do this, when it launched the PC in 1981 and Microsoft came in. In 2004 IBM had to sell its PC business to Lenovo. Nokia is trying to hold the fortress by launching the Ovi service. But will this service mature in time to deliver profits, when the profits on device manufacturing will start to tumble and local operators are back to their old game of ticks and bundles.

Blog Posting Number 1008

Tags: mobile, walled garden, smart phone, digital paper

BPN 993 Map manufacturers angry with Dutch government

The manufacturers of digital maps are unhappy with the Dutch government. The state secretary for traffic has announced that the government traffic board will release the national digital road database for commercial use. The digital map manufacturers consider this as unfair competition.

Flakplan Andes, Navteq (to be acquired by telecom manufacturer Nokia) and TeleAtlas (to be acquired by the navigation systems manufacturer TomTom), object to this procedure as they have collected their data for the databases at their own risk, while the government is just to hand out for free. The companies threaten even with legal procedures, as they fear damages and revenue losses. The manufacturers fear that other companies can start more easily, at less cost and in a shorter time.

All roads with a name and a number are stored and maintained in a national road database. This database has been available since 1998 and has so far been working with exclusive contracts. According to an EU directive of 2003 exclusive contracts on governmental content should be forbidden by January 1, 2009. However the whole affair around the map database has been an issue since 2000. Now the question has been posed whether civil servants should keep up a national map database or commercial digital map manufacturers. Offering the same basic information to anyone is an argument to have it maintained by the government. The state secretary has requested the opinion of an expert on governmental content to research the potential damage and costs to the digital map industry.

The Netherlands have a long history of digital maps. Philips automotive was already busy in the late seventies to look at navigation systems seriously. It developed a system by the name of Carin (Car Information and Navigation System), a system which used satellite positioning and stored the maps on optical media. The system was sold to VDO-Siemens before navigation systems took off. TeleAtlas was in fact started in 1986 in the Netherlands. By 1988 there was an experiment in Rotterdam whereby streets were filmed by travelling cars; the movies were digitalised and the maps were embellished with movies; it was a technical experiment using new media like ISDN (new at that time!) and CD-ROMs. The Rotterdam firm AND started to specialise in digital map manufacturing, calculating times for trips and transfers. As the map industry grew global, the companies had trouble to become profitable. In the meantime there is already an Open Street Map project in The Netherlands, in which users can refine the maps. The project uses digital maps, which were a gift by AND.

The issue of digital map information at technical costs for everyone is interesting question in as far as government content is concerned. Should government be a content producer in the first place or have commercial industries do the work by contract. Another question is of course the copyright: who is the copyright owner, when the content has been composed and maintained by government and paid for by tax payers. In the Netherlands we have a famous case of our national law database. Kluwer Legal in the Netherlands had started early in the race to record all the laws systematically, finding mistakes, duplications and omissions. When internet was on the rise in the late nineties, the government wanted to offer the law database to the citizens. But the content was in the database of Kluwer Legal. So a long, extended process of negotiations was started. In the end the Dutch State had to pay to have its own laws back in a database, which is available to citizens now.

Blog Posting Number 993

Tags: content, e-democracy, e-government, e-government

Mindtrek 2007 (5)

The Finnish gaming industry

On Thursday morning there was a session especially for the Dutch delegation (see photograph by Cai Melakoski) on mobile games. The organisers of the trip of the Dutch delegation, Hans Sleurink of Media Update and myself, had requested this special session with the following brief: (a) overview of the state of art of the Finnish gaming industry; (3) a mobile game developer, which turned out to be Nokia; (3) mobile game development for education; the delegation got an encore with a presentation of mobile gaming education.

Mr KooPee Hiltunen started his presentation with a reference to a recent report about the Finnish gaming industry (please register to read the full report). Here is the summary:
From an industry of a few companies in the late 1990s, the industry has, since the mid 2000s, become an integral part of the Finnish content export industry. According to a study published by Neogames in 2006, the growth rate in 2004-2005 measured both by net sales and employment effect was 50%(Publication of the Finnish Gaming Industri, Finnish Game Companies 2006/Neogames). The growth rate for 2006-2007 is, based on this study with a smaller sampling (11 companies), estimated to be approximately 20% in both sectors.
In 2005, the annual net sales of the gaming industry were estimated to be approximately EUR 65 million and involved the employment of approximately 1,000 people. There is no aggregate figure for 2006 but simply in light of this study we have reason to claim that the above mentioned figures grew in 2006 and the growth seems to continue at approximately a 20% rate in 2007.
According to our estimate, the 2006 net sales of the Finnish gaming industry was EUR 70-80 million and involved the employment of 1,200-1,300 people. In a gaming industry culture export report compiled by Neogames for the ministry, the 2012 vision includes the following figures:
- Employment 2,500-3,500 people.
- According to our estimate, this is the structural employment of the gaming industry in Finland. In addition, the Finnish gaming industry is likely to employ approximately 1,000 people in international subcontracting companies. In addition, a considerable number of Finnish gaming industry professionals also work abroad.
- Net sales EUR 500-700 million of which 90% from abroad
- Net value of sales EUR 1.3-1.5 billion. The figure takes into consideration unit sales but not the indirect employment effect of the industry or the skirt industries.
- 50-60 gaming companies. The industry becomes centralised.
- Average company size approximately 50 people (now approximately 10 people).

In an earlier study, the strong development of the Finnish gaming industry was estimated to be based on four factors:
- technological and content know-how of the companies
- excellent price-quality ratio of gaming production
- delivery reliability
- international growth in the mobile entertainment sector.

In light of this study, the above mentioned issues have remained strong competitive factors.

The study also confirmed the finding that the dependency of the Finnish gaming industry on mobile operations is no longer true. For instance Max Payne (Remedy), FlatOut and FlatOut II (Bugbear) and Habbo Hotel (Sulake) prove that the front extends to PC and console games as well. This side also shows signs of new implementations in utilising digital distribution.

Mobile game operators are, however, still strongly represented and in the mobile sector in particular the technological lead gained in the late 1990s seems to be important especially as the number of mobile devices increases and, in order to be successful, a single game must be developed for several hundred different handsets both in the European and US markets.

An interesting growing trend is in handheld devices. Both PSP and to a wider extent DS seem to interest new players. It remains to be seen whether it is possible to build a solid business only on these devices.

So what are the game developers doing, Mr KooPee Hiltunen (see photograph) asked himself. Four years ago 75 percent of the game company employees – many former Nokia employees) - were in mobile games, using Finland with 5,3 million inhabitants as a testing ground stimulated by education and Nokia. But it is no longer mobile anymore. Mobile has become complex due to the fragmentation in handsets. Only big firms can handle the porting to this range of devices. Besides mobile gaming did not get the push from N-Gage as expected. The Nokia effect faded away. Mobile is no longer the entry platform; when needed, companies subcontract porting to big companies as they can build porting production streets for the diversity of mobile phones. Big companies of 160 employees are Digital Chocalate, owned by Trip Hawkins, or Mr Goodliving and Universum. The small companies do the concepting, while subcontracting the technical development.

There are many similarities between Finland and the Netherlands. Both countries have a relative small amount of in inhabitants with Finland 5,3 million people and the Netherlands with 17,2 million inhabitants. Both countries have a minority language. Both countries work cost efficient as the standard costs of living are high. Both markets are small and can be exploited as test markets; so companies have to go global immediately. The Finnish gaming industry is reliable as it is not overpromising or underdelivering.

Blog Posting Number: 886

Tags: games, game industry games, game industry

No love lost on mobile live tv in Holland

No less than 62 pct of the Dutch households are familiar with facility of watching live tv on mobiles. But only 6 pct of the mobile users are willing to use it. That is the result of Ernst & Young Mediabarometer, a quarterly survey about developments of the media- and entertainment market among 2000 respondents.

1 of the 5 respondents which have a mobile phone, has a UMTS/3G device and is able to view live television streams through internet. Of this group, however, almost half of the group (47 pct) does watch video scenes on the mobile occasionally. Especially they download or stream amateur movies, as can be seen on YouTube, and humour movies are popular. On average those people spend 15 minutes per session; non 3G users estimate that they will watch video on their mobile phone for 20 minutes. Of the group of mobile callers who do not have a 3G telephone, half indicate that they will view videos about news and sports on the mobile. However the picture of these wannahaves, does not stroke with the habits of present 3G users, as only 6 pct of the users will view live streams from television.

Of course one should be critical about this survey. The survey claims have 400 respondents with a 3G mobile and using this occasionally for 15 minutes for video. This number of users is very high and one can wonder whether this number is representative for the mobile population. Perhaps the panel existed of early adaptors.

This survey is no good news for broadcast companies, which think that they may have found a new outlet. On the other hand the broadcast companies should not be surprised. Standardisation was still in process. Early user research in 2005 by the Finnish mobile company Elisa, was not very encouraging. During this research the company found that television broadcasts were mainly viewed during the late night. The fact that live television programs have a fixed time programming time might be part of the problem. Of course, the costs might also pose a problem.

In Finland the mobile and broadcast companies still expect a lot of mobile television. There is a Finnish Mobile TV community, founded by Forum Virium Helsinki and some of the key players in the sector. The goal is to promote the creation of innovative and interactive content for mobile TV in cooperation with Finnish and international service developers. The two-year Finnish Mobile TV project was launched in November 2005. It was inspired by an extensive user pilot, launched with the goal of collecting information on the experiences of end users. The findings indicated that the users want more varied content for their mobile TV and are prepared to pay for the services. During 2006 the Finnish Mobile TV project supported service developers by providing DVB-H network capacity, and also started an active developer forum with opportunities to network. During 2007 the project will again focus on the end users of mobile TV, especially regarding consumer feedback on interactive services. Current participants in the project include: Digita, Elisa, City of Helsinki, IBM, MTV3, Nokia, SWelcom, TeliaSonera, Destia, TietoEnator, Veikkaus, VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, WM-Data, YIT and the Finnish Broadcasting Company, YLE. In addition to Forum Virium Helsinki, project funding is provided by the participating companies, while some individual projects also receive funding from public sources. The piloting activities in 2007 are partly funded by Tekes, the Finnish Funding Agency for Technology and Innovation.

Addition: August 27, 2007: I just read the blog Reiter's Mobile TV Report. It had a comment on mobile tv, taken from the British Ofcom Report: The 330–page Office of Communications’ (Ofcom) “Communications Market Report” (available in three sections plus summaries) didn’t devote much space to mobile TV, but the space it did devote indicated mobile TV is way, way down on cellular users’ consciousness and use.
Only ten percent of cellular users surveyed for the report were even aware their phone could play mobile TV. That’s the lowest percentage of awareness for the 13 features in the survey. But that’s a high percentage compared to those who actually watched any mobile TV — two percent.
Just notice that 62 percent of the Dutch people are aware of live tv on a mobile telephone. In the UK only 10 percent are aware of the facility.

Blog Posting Number 849

Tags: mobile television

My museum with content related artefacts (6)

1996: PDAs

I started to experiment with PDAs in 1996. My first one was a Sharp ZR-5800. Later on I bought an HP 320LX. I was rather late in the game. In fact in 1981 I saw a prototype of a handheld computer; the label Personal Digital Assistant did not exist at that time. But I saw a first prototype at the annual conference of International Electronic Publishing Research Centre (IEPRC), which was held on the grounds of the Paper Research Institute in Leatherhead, UK.


Present as a delegate was also Dr David Potter, who was typing on a small machine, which consisted of three parts: a small screen, a keyboard and a battery part. It looked a little bit like a later copy of the Psion series on the photograph. David Potter was one of the smart guys of the UK together with Clive Sinclair, who later on produced the ZX81 and ZX Spectrum home computers. David had established a software house in 1980, which developed games to make money in order to invest in PDA-like machines. The article in the UK Wikipedia on Psion also explains the company name as "Potter Scientific Instruments Or Nothing", a reference to its founder David Potter, CBE.

Later on I met in the Netherlands an entrepreneur who was thinking along the lines of PDAs. But he was too far ahead of the masses. The company was named ENPROS. It wanted to manufacture small machines, which worked with flash memory. The brochure gave a clear idea of the what the machine was intended for (see illustration)

The term Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) did not exist until January 7, 1992 and was coined by the then Apple Computer CEO John Sculley at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Nevada. In the speech where he coined the name he referred to the Apple Newton. Apple developed and marketed this line of PDAs from 1993 to 1998. Suddenly the handhelds of Psion and Palm had a label. And the Newton, an allusion to Isaac Newton's apple, had something more than the others. For its message pad it featured handwriting recognition software. This handwriting recognition software was in its early stages and did not function too well. In fact there have complete take-offs on television like in the series of the Simpsons, ridiculing the handwritten results.

By 1996 I thought that PDAs would be as normal as address and appointment books in the future and that people could also load a book into the memory and read it when they were riding the train or flying. And indeed Peanut Press provided e-Books for the Palm handhelds. But none of the other computer companies stimulated publishers to go into e-Books for their PDAs. I think that it has been a missed chance.

Do I use a PDA at present? No. I will be going for the Nokia Communicator as it will hold my address and calendar books; but I will not load books onto it. I will keep my iLiad for that purpose.

Next - Previous

Blog Posting Number: 818

Tags: digital heritage, PDA

My museum of content related artefacts (3)

Nokia Communicator

In 1999 I bought this Nokia Communicator, a version of the 9000 series. Among gadget lovers it is known as the brick; it is rather large and heavy. I had seen it being used by my Finnish friend Cai and by my Swedish friend Anne. It was fascinating on several aspects.

I loved the usability of the Communicator. It contains a complete key board, which stimulates the production of SMS messages. Besides the screen is also larger and reads like a small notice.

One of the main reasons to buy the communicator was the built-in PDA facility of contacts, notes and calendar. At that time there was hardly a combination of a PDA and mobile. By combining these functions you could save a PDA. In the meantime the number of mobile PDAs has grown.

But the argument to buy the brick was the communication facilities. You could send out and receive faxes. I have never used this facility as I already worked for a long time with e-mail. Fax was already outdated to me. But the unique selling point was the e-mail and internet facility. As soon as I had bought the brick I had it prepared as I was going on a trip and wanted to use my latest toy. But that experience was timely and costly. The speed of the e-mail and internet was horribly slow. I remember that I received a photograph in one of the e-mail sessions and it took more than 7 minutes to load the photograph. Of course also the loading and removing of all the spam messages took up a lot of time. I also noticed that I did not use the communicator in order to look up time tables. I had expected that I would do that, but I found out that I looked up the schedules beforehand on my computer at home or on the railway announcement boards, when I was in a station. And I did not use internet to look up telephone numbers either. All in all I did not use e-mail and internet on the communicator that much. Part of the reason for that were also the costs, especially when I was abroad. I still remember that the first bill for using the communicator totalled 150 euro, while my average was less than 60 euro a month. Despite the lowering of the costs for mobile phoning and especially the costs abroad, the charges for data handling are still costly.

For me the communicator held also an e-Book promise. Given the screen width it would be interesting to download and carry an e-Book. But no book seller picked up the idea. Nokia thought about the distribution of e-books in 2000, but appropriated this to the Nokia tablet. But neither Nokia nor an e-Book seller ever got involved in e-Books seriously. But now newspaper publisher amongst others in Finland have news services for the communicator.

The communicator is still in the Nokia assortment and has been improved on several scores. It has a colour screen; it is faster in connections, which is also partly due to the mobile technology with GPRS and 3G. And it is smaller and more elegant.

The communicator remains in my collection as it is the first combination of mobile phone, PDA address and calendar facilities and e-mail and internet functions. The brick will stay behind the glass doors of the show case.

Next - Previous

Blog Posting Number: 815

Tags: digital heritage, mobile telephone, e-book

Good news for 20+ million European gamers

Game Entertainment Europe (GEE), the first pan-European publisher of Massive Multiplayer Online (MMO) Games, and Spill group, the largest game traffic generator in the world, signed a promotion contract which states that SPILL GROUP promotes the MMO Games published by GEE on all of their European portals and in return Spill group receives a revenue share. The contract is already effective, GEE’s latest MMORP Game Martial Heroes can now be played through Spill group’s European portals such as http://www.agame.com/, http://www.spelletjes.nl/, http://www.jeux.fr/. The first results are excellent, after 4 weeks promotion in The Netherlands GEE’s game Martial Heroes has 35.000 new registrations. Soon other online games will follow.

The MMO Games that GEE publishes are of great graphical quality and deserve a wide audience. The MMO Games are being developed in Korea. Since Spill group’s monthly reach is still growing massively and is up to more than 25 million unique visitors per month globally, both parties are excited about the cooperation.

Game Entertainment Europe offers online community games (MMO Games) to gamers in Europe. To offer the best game experience, the games are localised for the European countries. Game Entertainment Europe organises online billing, game mastering, user and community support as well as in-game events. The company’s head office is based in Amsterdam and recently opened an office in Korea. Game Entertainment is also participating in a chain of European game cafes. More information can be found on http://www.ge-eu.com/.

The Dutch holding company Spill Group was founded in 2001 and has subsidiaries in Europe and Asia. Its aim is to become the number one player in game traffic and online game advertising inventory. Currently, the company develops and runs more than forty gaming portals in European and Asia. Over 25 million unique visitors per month look for gaming entertainment on the Spill Group’s game portals. The current portfolio contains 3.000 online games of all genres – skill games, casual games and fun games. The portals are kept simple and are specifically designed for every country. Those wanting to play a game do not need to register, but can start right away. Look for examples of the game portals on http://www.agame.com/, http://www.gry.pl/, or http://www.jetztspielen.de/.

Over in Finland
It looks like Nokia is going at it again. Having launched the game mobile N-Gage, the mobile has not been the success, the makers dreamt of. Now Nokia is re-defining the mobile gaming experience, still using the N-Gage. Starting in 2007, Nokia will allow consumers to easily find, buy, play and manage great quality mobile games on upcoming Nokia Nseries multimedia computers and other Nokia S60 devices. Consumers will be able to connect to the N-Gage Arena, Nokia's mobile, global gaming community. Nokia is working with the world's leading publishers, including Electronic Arts and Gameloft, to deliver a broad portfolio of games.

Nokia and the Finnish telecom company Elisa have announced that they will carry out a pilot of Nokia's new N-Gage mobile gaming service. The pilot will start in February 2007 and run until mid 2007.

Elisa will combine its existing mobile gaming platform with the Nokia N-Gage gaming platform and carry out intensive testing and evaluation in a live network environment. Nokia and Elisa will work together to bring a superior mobile gaming experience for Elisa customers. Nokia device owners can look forward to improved game quality, outstanding performance and an intuitive way to get games.

With the scheduled launch in mid 2007, Nokia's next generation mobile gaming platform makes it easy for people to find, buy, play and share rich and immersive games on a range of Nokia devices. Elisa intends to support the launch with a full service offering through its own portals in addition to the N-Gage application installed on Nokia devices.

Blog Posting Number: 677

Tags: games, mobile, mobile games