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MobileMonday Global Summit

Tonight is the Mobile Monday Global Summit 2006 in Helsinki, Finland. The summit includes a peer awards ceremony featuring mobile software nominated by other Mobile Monday cities. Mobile Monday Austin has nominated Bones in Motion to the B2C (Business-to-Consumer) Category and Opera Software to the B2B (Business-to-Business) Category.

Conveniently enough, I happen to be in Helsinki today, so I’ll be attending the ceremony and crossing my fingers for Mobile Monday Austin nominees!

Austin Python Meetup

I went to my first Austin Python Meetup last night! It was great to meet some local Python enthusiasts, and the presentation on Chaco, a Python plotting toolkit, was very educational.

The meetup was at Enthought’s downtown office — a great central location with a fantastic view of the city.

There was quite of bit of interest in Python for S60, so I might be doing a presentation on at the next event. If you happen to be in town I hope you’ll drop by!

SXSWi — quick post

Instead of blogging throughout SXSW Interactive (there were plenty of bloggers there), I decided to wait until after the conference and pull together a few highlights from my notes. I’m still working on that, but until then I have a few quick comments about the conference.

First of all, it was fantastic. It really was one of the better conferences I’ve been to in a long time (and I’m glad that was the case, since this was the first tech conference I’ve paid for completely out of my own pocket — I even had to take vacation time to attend!) The last SXSWi I attended was during the down-fall of the dot-com economy, so the conference wasn’t exactly ripe with enthusiasm; However, the recent spike in entrepreneurialism and innovation happening on the web was certainly fueling the excitement this year. The conference was practically over-booked with friendly people.

My second comment is more of a general conference-going tip: For whatever reason, presentations and panels rarely end up being about the topic listed in the schedules. Because of this, you want to pick sessions based on: (1) Whether you have an opportunity to learn something new (ie., it’s a topic that’s at least somewhat new to you); and (2) The actual people presenting, rather then the topic. For example, even if you weren’t interested in Darknets, “The Future of Darknets” panel included Ian Clarke (of the Freenet Project) and Kori Bernards (VP Corp Comm for the MPAA)! You knew that was going to be a heated discussion. And the “Interview with Henry Rollins” — no way was I going to miss that!

In the end, I think part of what made the conference so enjoyable was the opportunity to go to panels and sessions that weren’t just mobile-specific. If my attendance had been company-paid, I would have been in all (instead of some) of the mobile panels, and I’d be spending my evenings writing up trip reports instead of out having drinks with other conference goers. Call it a mixed-blessing… but I’m looking forward to next years’ conference already!

BarCampAustin

I swung by BarCampAustin Saturday morning before the SXSW Interactive keynote. I’m a fan of the self-organizing, everyone-is-a-contributor conferences, so I was excited that BarCamp was coming to town. (And that another is in-the-works for later this year!)

The conference (technically) started at 9am; However, it took a few hours for enough people to stumble in for sessions to start organizing. That was unfortunate because I had to bail after lunch to hit the SXSW Keynote. Still, I met some interesting people and I look forward to having another local BarCamp (that isn’t scheduled on the first day of the largest Film/Interactive/Music conference in town.)

Even though BarCampAustin started late, it was actually a well planned event. The facility was nice, there was food and coffee (not for free, but it was a free conference so I’m fine with that), there was free parking, free wi-fi, plenty of seats, plenty of space, good location (center of town), and good people. If I had any complaint it’s that I think the activities could have started sooner if a formal introduction had been planned. (For example, we could have pulled everyone into a room at 10am and each given a 10-30 second intro. This kind of introduction greatly speeds connections with the people you want to meet.)

I look forward to the next BarCampAustin and hope to see you there!

“Agile Software Development Techniques and its Impact on Product Management”

Just in case you’re thinking of going, I’ll be at the Austin Technology Council session tomorrow (Jan. 12, 2006) on Agile Software Development Techniques and its Impact on Product Management. Unfortunately, the talk isn’t free, but they do have three speakers lined up and it’s a topic I’m particularly interested in.

IMO, traditional Product Management processes are still lean toward the waterfall-era of process design, even though Agile processes fit the goals of Product Management better (given the focus on understanding the problem space and evolving the product based on experience with it.) However, applying Agile development to large, corporate software projects can be a challenge at the managerial level. The problem is explained very well in this wikipedia quote:

“Agile processes seem to be more efficient than older methodologies, using less programmer time to produce more functional, higher quality software, but have the drawback from a business perspective that they do not provide long-term planning capability. In essence, they say that they will provide the most bang for the buck, but won’t say exactly what the bang will be.”

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_development_process January 11, 2006)

In a smaller company, the focus might be just on making rent — and when that’s the case, delivering a “bang” is all you need (and in many cases, it’s irrelevant whether the bang turns out being what you thought you’d be doing.) If the product makes money, you go with it. But when you have an identified customer with an identified problem that needs to be solved within an identified set of constraints, the folks with the checkbooks tend to want reassurance that you’ll be building the exact solution they need. It’s when constraints like these exist that formal Product Management is more often utilized, so I’m looking forward to seeing whether the presenters are able to address this issue.

Go Horns! (You knew another post was coming…)

“Tower lights mark victory at Rose Bowl“:

“The Tower at The University of Texas at Austin will be lighted entirely orange with the #1 displayed tonight (Thursday, Jan. 5) to celebrate the Texas Longhorns’ national championship victory at the 92nd Rose Bowl game in Pasadena, Calif.”

“The Tower will remain lighted orange with the #1 displayed throughout the weekend.”

Of course, even though the #1 didn’t go up after the game, that didn’t stop thousands of people (including me) from going to campus to celebrate. The tower was lit orange (as seen below), but the lighting of the #1 won’t happen until the team returns to Austin today.

1am at the UT campus: (taken with a 7610)

Fans filled the square, the commons, and the drag (which was closed to foot-traffic.)

Flickr has a number of pictures already.

Go Horns!

I’m not really a big football fan, but when your alma-matter is playing for the national championship, you make a few exceptions. Since moving back to Austin last year, I’ve found myself watching the UT games again. With a whole town behind them, it’s pretty easy to get pulled into the excitement (and I live close enough to the University to hear the echoes of the stadium announcer and the cheers from parties in the neighborhood.)

So here’s crossing my fingers that we get to see the legendary #1 on the UT Tower tonight!

Austin Game Conference summary

As indicated in my last post, I attended the Austin Game Conference last week, mostly following the mobile track. Overall, I’d say the mobile track is not as mature as some of the others, and the content seemed more fitting to people new to the mobile market rather then people currently working in the field. Still, it’s always nice to pop out of the rabbit hole from time to time to hear what other industry people are talking about, and there were plenty of opportunities to have casual conversations with people from operators and development shops about the projects they’re working on and the challenges they’re facing.

For my conference summary, I’ll start with some overall themes, then move to highlights from a few individual sessions.

Major themes

[1] Mobile 3D:

There was a lot a talk about 3D graphics, and just as many mixed opinions. However, there seemed to be some confusion on why mobile 3D is such a hot topic for developers. While there were a few people who pitched this as 3D games (ala first-person shooters and N-Gage titles), and just as many people who proclaimed that mobile devices would never have the processing power or form factor for this, the real drive for mobile 3D engines is to reduce the development costs of games by moving away from bitmapped sprites that must be customized for every screen size. 3D engines (and even SVG or Flash, for that matter), should be able to scale the game canvas and objects to match the hardware, even for games that don’t appear to be 3D. For example, imagine a mobile Checkers game… Using bitmap sprites, you would have to hand-draw every possible chip and board piece for all the mobile phone screen sizes you are supporting. But with a scalable engine, you simple tell the code how many rows and columns should be in the grid, and that you need red and black circles to fit the grid’s cell size. With the scalable engine, your post-production porting costs should go way down (which means margin’s go up.)

[2] Supporting hundreds of mobile devices:

The number of devices developers have to support is getting to be a problem logistically, not just technically. For major game titles, developers claim to be supporting 300 to 500 devices globally. Multiply that by 10 language localizations, and you now have 3000 to 5000 unique builds (SKU’s) of your game! That’s one heck of a build process, and you still have to tackle device, language, and network specific bug tracking, and possibly tweak the game play on some phone models if they can’t handle the animations or other aspects of the game.

Before you can start testing though, you need actual phones… and they’re not free. Nor is it free to activate phones (on all the networks you’re supporting) so you can test game installation and multiplayer features. To test real-world performance, you might also need a physical man-on-the-ground in other countries to test on live networks.

[3] Mobile games market is becoming harder to enter.

The mobile game market is starting to close a bit. There used to be open opportunities for small development shops to get their titles “on-deck” (meaning, shipping pre-installed, or at least available via an operator’s portal), but the operators are starting to raise quality requirements and reject mediocre games. This trend on it’s own isn’t necessarily bad since it implies that only quality games will make it to customer devices; However, increasing operator standards isn’t the only issue. With the increasing number of devices to support combined with the need to produce quality, innovative titles, the cost to produce mobile games is increasing. We’re not at the several-year production cycles that the consoles see, but top quality mobile games are now three to four month projects for a small team rather then the one man-month cycles we were seeing a couple years ago.

Wide-audience game distribution is also tied almost exclusively to operator partnerships (direct to consumer distributions models haven’t been as fruitful), meaning that small shops also need business connections in addition to top-notch technical chops.

[4] Mobile multiplayer networking is seen as too complex and unreliable.

Mobile data networks got a lot of flak from developers, with complaints about variable latency, roaming costs, spotty coverage, operator-specific networking API’s, and the testing costs involved. Curiously (and sadly) enough, I didn’t see many of the complainers at Markus Huttunen’s presentation on “Reaching the Mass Market with Connected Mobile Games.”

Session highlights

From Jason Ford’s (GM Games and Entertainment, Sprint/Nextel) keynote:

• Sprint Nextel has 43 million customers and the the highest customer ARPU in the States.
• 51% male customers.
• Average age of 30 (which is younger then average wireless subscriber, 44.)
• The average age of people who claim they will buy a mobile game next year is 35.
• Casual game titles are the most successful.
• Customer feedback (on the Sprint portal) is more important (for revenue) then professional game reviews.
• The top three players of Bejeweled Multiplayer have each played the game over 40,000 times, logging around 2,000 hours of game play per person.

From the Post Production panel:

• Data suggests an 18-24 month replacement cycle for mobile phones.
• Companies launching global game titles can expect to support at least 300 different phone models.
• Some developers are seeing a 100%+ increase in the number of SKU’s per game. (A unique SKU is created for each build and localization.) The highest number heard for a global title is 5000 SKU’s. Managing these variants is becoming a challenge for small development shops.
• It’s fairly common practice to do game development targeting four devices (a high-end/low-end Java device, and a high-end/low-end BREW device.) Supporting (or porting) to other platforms generally happens after the game is working correctly on these key devices.
• For small shops, outsourcing your porting work may make sense, but larger shops would rather keep the competency in-house instead of teaching other companies how to be competitive.
• Some, but not all, shops are looking to middleware to solve the porting issue.
• Expect to change some aspects of the game when porting to other devices (ex., devices vary greatly in their ability to handle complex animations and sound.)
• Mobile multiplayer (over the network) greatly increases development and testing costs, and should be limited to simple things like posting high scores and chat messages. One developer mentioned writing a custom Win32 client to test the networking back-end services.
• It’s more difficult to do distribution of native games then J2ME or BREW.

Carrier Panel:

• The cost to produce a mobile game is rising. It used to be $25-30k. Now the average cost is around $100k for a top title.
• Operators are starting to reject games, and are in general being more selective on offering games to their customers.
• Publishers are becoming responsible for game marketing, rather then the operators.
• Amp’d mobile is targeting a younger crowd, and plans to offer “adult” content and games.

From the “Starting, Building, or just not shutting down your mobile dev business” panel:

• Expect a 3 - 4 month development cycle, even when reusing a game engine.
• Overall market is shifting from being open, to being one where relationships with operators are key for wide distribution.
• As operator quality expectations go up, amateur developers will be replaced be pro’s.
• Off-deck distribution (direct to customer) is not expected to take off anytime soon given the costs to acquire customers.
• To save development costs, try to get a publisher to purchase your test phones for you, and rotate active accounts between phones as needed instead of activating them all. (Even doing this, one developer claimed a $30k/month cost to keep test phones active.)

From the Casual Games panel:

• A good publisher can often run the porting effort for a developer (ie., they typically have connections with porting houses already.)
• The hype around mobile 3D is not to get 3D graphics per say, but to develop scalable game engines instead of producing custom bitmap sprites for every screen resolution possible.

From the J2ME vs. BREW panel:

• Using a device abstraction layer is recommended to avoid porting headaches.
• Good build tools should enable targeting multiple platforms with a single build.
• EclipseME is a nice choice for general J2ME development.
• The cost of supporting lots of devices is very related to different hardware capabilities like screen sizes and the memory available, not just API differences.

For more on the conference, Carlo Longino and Paul Whitaker attended many of the mobile sessions as well, and have both posted about it:

• @Austin Game Conference - Mobile Keynote (via MobHappy)
• @Austin Games Conference - Towards The True Mobile Game (via MobHappy)
• Go to the Austin Games Conference next year (via MyPhoneRocks)

You can also find a number of additional bloggers talking about the conference via Technorati’s search results.