"To win the battle for public opinion in America, you have to present yourself as a victim; that is how you win the heart of Americans. He who apologizes for using force loses.."
With supply chains stretching to China, customers as likely in Paris as Peoria, outsourcing operations in India and development in Russia, the reality of today's economy is that we must be global to succeed. But how do we succeed at being global? Here are three areas where most American companies need to get better, if they are going to succeed globally.
"Exploring the New World a thousand years ago, a Viking woman gave birth to what is likely the first European-American baby. The discovery of the house the family built upon their return to Iceland has scholars rethinking the Norse sagas."
The EU struck at the commercial backbone of Microsoft’s global software empire today (12/22/04) – forcing the company for the first time to strip its Windows platform of a popular feature to give competitors a better shot at success.
An EU court ruled Microsoft must immediately divulge some trade secrets to competitors and produce a version of its flagship Windows operating system without the program that plays music and video.
Mobile gaming is big news. In the United States the game download market is predicted to be $260 million in 2004, and the U.K. downloadable games market is exceeding £1 million per month. With Java gaming in the U.K. generating the second-highest non-SMS data ARPU after ring tones, it's becoming increasingly important to the future of the mobile network operator.
And games are the most fun when playing against others. I discovered this working in the City of London in the mid-90s, in the evening we would hijack a departmental server at Citibank and play Doom deathmatch against each other. Did we laugh!
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So, where does the future lie for mobile multiplayer gaming, and what is going to be the most fun and accessible:
—Bluetooth, GPRS, 3G, or Wi-Fi?
—Mobile phones, PDAs, or gaming decks?
—Real-time, phantom racing or turn-based games?
—Sports games, racing, shooters, or location-conscious gaming?
Currently there is a lot of effort going into making games that run over GPRS and 3G networks. Features include uploading and viewing high scores, buying items, leaving messages for other players, and phantom racing—nothing particularly thrilling, in other words.
The Holy Grail of multiplayer, real-time gaming is delivered by companies such as Kayak Interactive and Terraplay, a Swedish company that has just raised €6.5 million to fund expansion. I've seen its Morphun Rally game, and it works pretty well in spite of one-second latency—which is a lot when you are trying to block a basketball shot.
What I really want are high-performance games I can play against friends I am with. Why? Because it's most fun. Just like playing Doom at Citibank: when you toast someone you can laugh at them and then take them out for a pint.
Showing the way are the Nintendo DS (dual screens/developer system) and Sony PSP (PlayStation Portable), introduced at E3. Both offer full multiplayer capability through Wi-Fi, while the NDS has a proprietary local networking capability for up to 16 players. Neither seems keen to integrate a phone—probably wisely, given compatibility issues globally.
It's got to be mobile phones for the mass market. When the standard phone is Bluetooth equipped and running games as well as the Nokia Series 60, it will get very interesting: Bluejacking (scanning for others users nearby and sending them messages, typically to try to pick them up), if you are a bloke, is just as likely to get you a punch on the nose as if you'd tried it on a date on a London Underground carriage. If all the identifier tells you is "T610" (everybody has a Sony Ericsson T610 in London, it seems), what use is that? But if it told you that you could join in a game permeating the whole carriage, how fantastic would that be?
Of course, there is an API issue: Java on a T610 cannot talk to Bluetooth. Even where the API is not the issue, it is still often disabled, for security or DRM purposes. Nokia is to be congratulated that its new Series 60 addresses this. We just need the other manufacturers to follow suit, and agree to standards if we want inter-handset compatibility. We'll have multiplayer mobile nirvana!
A key inhibitor is that Bluetooth gaming is not in the operators' interest. What they want is the data traffic from network-centric games. They make no money on Bluetooth traffic.
This is the opportunity for the savvy handset manufacturers: Enable Bluetooth for games; up the spec on your mass-market handsets; sell millions of units of handsets and games; and watch mobile gaming explode. If the operators won't put the games on their top 10 game decks, sell them through your portals or those of game publishers.
That is a whole lot easier than reengineering the entire existing and planned network infrastructure to provide low pings for networked gaming.
Hi Laserbeam. Sure, I understand. I love the (basic) camera on my 6230, a lot better than what was on my old T610. MMS traffic here in Europe is disappointing, how will your application improve this??
Hi Zenguy. Do you think that the Terraplay and Kayake guys are trying to address this now? If not, yes, please drop me a line and let's take it further!
Paul,
Lots of useful idea's,we have one coming down the pike-our MMS driver application-its got very unusual response from wireless telco's,whom we have beta tested with, we can prove the camera/phone handset can be a really useful device and generate lots of revenue with our application.
The coming MMS boom with these handsets should be underated,last week they released 4m pixel handsets in Tokyo-heading towards 6m pixels with optical zoom lens,this not just the biggest thing happening in the wireless telco sector,its the biggest thing happening in all imaging($200bn+ global business)-soon you will have some 150m-200m annual take-up of these devices-consider it took some 50 yrs for the 35mm camera to reach a market penatration of 1bn camera's-its going to take less than 4yrs in the digital era,to have that imaging capabiltiy-with a device that almost everybody leaves home with in their pocket.
Paul,
You're on to something. There are three aspects to mobile gaming:
1. the user interface(Rendering, shading, painting, textures,....)
2. the gaming engine (collission detection, virtual maps,...)
3. the network stack (transmit moves, receive multi-player status messages, latency recovery, gameroom, join/leave game, ....)
the first two aspects can be solved with a platform-neutral approach (develop for one platform->write a cross-platform toolkit that will generate binaries for each phone platform). The third aspect presents the opportunity. If you came with a network gaming stack (Development Language->Runtime->Protocol->TCP/IP->Radio(GSM/CDMA/CDPD/....)) that could be used by J2ME, BREW, .NET and symbian developers, you could solve a lot of the problems in the mobile gaming industry. Couple that with a server that could support a network gaming protocol, and you have a killer app. that could (potentially) sell like hotcakes to wireless operators. Assuming you work for a VC, if you saw a business plan that executed on this approach, would you fund it?
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Michael Powell Read This: FCC Needs Broadband Trust Fund
Mobile gaming is big news. In the United States the game download market is predicted to be $260 million in 2004, and the U.K. downloadable games market is exceeding £1 million per month. With Java gaming in the U.K. generating the second-highest non-SMS data 
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