Free mobile game

The is a major coup for Greystripe because Mocondi’s on-deck partners include Vodafone and 3 Italy, thus providing a potential outlet of 45 million consumers.

Until the Greystripe deal, the Me You site offered mostly paid-for content such as downloadable video, games, and music. This is the network’s first move into ad-supported mobile content.

Although Greystripe has its own games, over 85 per cent of its total downloads come from 40 partners, not just its own Gamejump portal. The mobile URL for Gamejump is http://gjmp.tw

Top tier publishers using Greystripe’s Adwrap technology include Vivendi Games Mobile, Hands-On Mobile, Skyzone, Punch Entertainment, and Digital Chocolate.

Both companies feel this is a win-win deal. Alvaro Bravo, a veepee with Greystripe, commented, “Mobile social networks are an ideal place for users to discover and share ad-supported mobile games.” He’s probably right.

Games can be shared web-to-mobile or mobile-to-mobile with one click for free on Me You. Subscribers’ friends receive mobile message recommendations that contain a message from users, a download link for the content and a link to install the Me You application.

The company says people are five times more likely to click through these ads than traditional WAP adverts. The ads last for four seconds, and are shown while the game loads, and at the end of the game.When your 24 hours of freeplay are up, you can buy that game, or download a new game for another 24 hours.

In Scandinavia, two million people had downloaded the Didmo application by January, generating an average of 220,000 game downloads a month. Advertisers there include 7-Eleven, Activision and Unilever.The company says it’s aiming to get 3.5 million regular users by August this year by expanding abroad. Didmo also claims to support 99 per cent of all Java-enabled phones on the market today.

Our Nokia N81 8GB obviously fell into the other 1 per cent, as when we signed up via WAP push we were told no games were available for that handset. However, it worked for our W880i.Once we’d downloaded the Didmo application, we were invited to play the game of the day – Splash Bomb – from Slovakian developer Inlogic. It’s an addictive little puzzler that we certainly didn’t mind trying out.

We’ve rooted around Didmo’s website, and can’t find a list of the publishers that it’s signed up. But the technology is certainly intriguing, and the 24-hour limit is a different approach to its ad-funded rivals. We’ll follow their progress with interest.

“This is one kind of publicity. We are also making arrangements to facilitate the download of ring tones, caller tunes and wallpapers free of cost. For this purpose we have imported some special blue tooth devices, which would be kept in commercial complexes in various cities. Those who are interested can download them with the help of blue tooth,” he added.

Trivikram is the director of the film.

At present two games are shown by free broadcaster ITV on a Tuesday, with Sky showing the rest of the games that evening as well as all of Wednesday’s offerings.

The new deal means that, during the group stages, 15 of the 16 games on each matchday will only be available to UK viewers who pay the subscription fee.  A terrestrial broadcaster, thought to be either ITV or the BBC, will have the rights to one Wednesday game of their choice in each round.  The final will be shown on both free and pay TV.

Fishlabs is the first vendor worldwide to offer hassle and cost free delivery of mobile games to its customers.Before, depending on the type of mobile data-plan, charges for downloading a mobile game via mobile network can exceed the price of the game itself.

In the opinion of experts at this year’s Games Developer Conference Mobile in San Francisco, these high and hidden data transfer charges are one of the main reasons for the slow growth of the mobile gaming market in 2007.Data traffic costs are often particularly high for prepaid card users, to which the predominantly young mobile gaming target group belongs.

Fishlabs CEO and co-founder Michael Schade said, “Because our high quality 3D Java games have sophisticated graphics and offer several hours of gameplay, they can be up to a megabyte in size, which is relatively large. So as of now we are offering hassle and cost free delivery of our mobile games as e-mail attachments. The mobile game can then be transferred quite simply from the PC to the mobile phone via data cable or Bluetooth connection. This means that our customers not only save on data transfer costs, they also have a backup copy if the game is accidentally deleted or the mobile phone software is updated.”

The good news for game companies: U.S. cellphone users do like the idea of playing games on their handsets — 22.3% did so in a month last quarter, up 6% y/y. But they’re generally playing free games that come pre-loaded on their machines.

What could boost game download growth? Smartphones, like RIM’s BlackBerry, Nokia’s N-Series phones, and Apple’s iPhone, which are making up a growing percentage of the overall mobile market. M:Metrics says 17% of U.K. smartphone owners played downloaded games in a month during Q4, versus 10% of ‘dumb-phone’ owners.

That’s good news for game companies (and perhaps advertisers who will foot the bill for the games) but mixed news for carriers: Smartphone users aren’t locked into mobile operators’ start pages, or “decks,” where carriers have revenue-sharing deals with preferred game companies.

When smartphone users find “off-deck” games on their own, carriers are less likely to get any revenue kick-backs from game sales or in-game ads. But for now, they should be happy to sacrifice that (miniscule) lost revenue stream for the $15-$40 per month that smartphone owners pay for access to the mobile Web.

Yamake is a game of its own but centers around creating mini-games using the player’s own content: audio, photos, and videos captured or stored on the phone can be used to build puzzles. The resulting creations can be shared through the N-Gage Arena and are linked to a comment system that lets fellow Yamake players review the games as well as offer suggestions to creators.

The cellphone designer has not said when the game will be available but is currently running N-Gage in a testing stage through its First Access program, which is currently accessible through a handful of Nokia smartphones such as the N81. Devices such as the N96 will also support N-Gage when they launch later this year.

Users can find content like ringtones, video and now games from publishers like Digital Chocolate and Vivendi Games Mobile on Deerfield Beach, Fla.-based Myxer’s proprietary ad-supported platform. This marks the first time mobile games have been available from Myxer.

San Fransisco-based Greystripe’s AdWRAP Catalog Platform allows mobile portals and social networks to easily distribute its catalog of more than 800 mobile games–and completely customize it for the look and feel of their site.

According to Myk Willis, founder and CEO of Myxer, adding games to Myxer’s catalog of free mobile media was a natural progression, and Greystripe’s AdWRAP network allowed them to do it cost effectively without sacrificing game quality.

The Skiller app comes with the tagline “The world’s playground”, and according to the firm’s website is “an innovative playground of skill games for adults and teens which is accessible from web and mobile.”Skiller reckons it’ll blend multiplayer casual games with social networking elements like profiles, friends, chat and tournaments.

You can sign up for the Alpha client here, which sends an SMS link to your phone that in turn takes you to a WAP site to download the Skiller application. Our N81 8GB wasn’t supported, but we took a chance on the N76 version, and it seems to be working.You sign in by choosing a username and password, and are then presented with a list of available games, including 4 in a Row, Reversi, Checkers, Sketris and Popcorn (the latter two are versions of Tetris and Breakout, respectively).

Some of the games, like Reversi and Checkers, appear to be multiplayer, so you can set up a game and wait for someone to join, or go to the Skiller lobby to see who’s already waiting.Meanwhile, there are tournaments for the single-player games, which cost you points to enter, and offer prizes of points. And it seems that points may equal real money or prizes when the application launches for real, judging by the Help section on the website.

For now, you get 1,000 points just for registering, allowing you to explore the app and its various games.The community aspects seem interesting, as you can sign up friends as your buddies and then message them from within the application to play a multiplayer game.

It all looks very slick, with a nice menu carousel running along the bottom of the screen. The games are basic, to say the least, but are colourful and fun for a quick bash – with the competitive aspects being presumably what’ll keep you playing.

It’s clearly early days, but after playing with the Alpha app, we’re definitely going to keep tabs on Skiller to see how it develops – particularly the web elements (we wonder if it could be a Facebook application, for example).

Have a look, and see what you think. Currently, the Alpha works on these handsets:

Sony Ericsson: W910, W850i, W660i, T650i, K880i, K850i, K810i, K800i, K610i, K530i

Nokia: E65, N73, N76, N95, 5700, 6120, 6131, 6233, 6280, 6288, 6500, 6680

Motorola: K3, V3, V3x, V3xx, V6, Z3

Simply sign up with your mobile number and a few details about your phone on DD’s site and it’ll send you a text containing an installation link. Then, whenever you want to kill a bit of time, you just fire up the Java app and download that day’s bundle of new content.

Stuff like Sudoku, horoscopes, original word and number quizzes and daily trivia will then all funnel themselves onto your phone every day, providing what DD describes as “snackable original content” for whenever and wherever you may find yourself bored.

Daily Downtime supports a wide range of mobiles - the web site will tell you the likelihood of it working on yours.