Casual Gaming

Casual games are a much better match with mobile phones: typefied by long but shallow learning curves ("a minute to learn, a lifetime to master"), they use easily understood or familiar concepts, and can fit around the lives of their players rather than imposing on them. They're popular precisely because they're the opposite of "immersive" -- their familiarity and non-threatening nature provides an opportunity for games companies to extend their audience out beyond the traditional gamer demographic, and encourage those furthest from the profile of "early adopter" to do more with their mobile.

You'll already be familiar with some forms of casual games: crosswords and puzzles. These are of educational value (for instance, crosswords build on universal language skills, developing vocabulary and spelling), generate revenues through repeated play and appeal to a broad cross-section of society.

Via Mobilegirl

See also:
Soracity
Customize your character and build a community! In SORA you can meet new friends, invite them to virtual group activities, post blogs, message each other, keep up with what your Soran's been doing... and more!

Today M. and I were eating out and during our conversation (and having both newer types of camera phones: Samsung and Sharp) we both used the mobile version of our weblogs to illustrate a purpose. Naturally some people in the restaurant looked at us quite strangely, but I believe this will become quite common in a few months;).

After some experience with my mobile weblog, the scenarios in which I use my mobile weblog most often are:
a) showing a picture or a quoting a post in a face-to-face discussion
b) reading one of my posts published via internet in detail and more thoroughfully (that's why I quote so extensively) later when on a tram or bus ride.
c) checking the latest posts in the mobile KAYWA universe.

So when I found Howard Rheingold's article Cameraphones as Personal Storytelling Media, I was quite amazed to see that Daisuke Okabe has come to similar conclusions in his paper (PDF) (L.C.).

And although camera phones transmit images through the Internet, they are also turning out, rather unexpectedly, to be face-to-face media. It looks like this newly ubiquitous device could be more about flows of moments than stocks of images, more about sharing presence than transporting messages, and ultimately, more about personal narrative than factual communication.

[...] The cameraphone study extends this framework by revealing how people's choices of images to share enables intimate social networks to share ambient information; but, "on the other hand, we are finding that users tend not to e-mail messages to one another, and prefer to share images by showing pictures on a handset screen." Hence, the communication device that used to transmit messages across distances is now also used to capture a flow of experience in order to add a visual element to face-to-face storytelling. (Hmmm... What do McLuhan's "Laws of Media" tell us here?)

[...] Okabe noted a number of different uses included "personal archiving" (saving images for one's own use, as a memory of a day or special moment, a "self-authoring practice"), "intimate sharing" (showing a mini-slideshow of one's day or one's hour in person to a friend), peer-to-peer news and online picture sharing.

[...] Okabe also noticed an additional use to the capture of mundane images: material for conversation. In Japanese, the material people collect to share conversationally with friends is called "neta": "a new store seen on the way to work; a cousin who just dropped out of high school...an odd statue sited in town." Cameraphones "provide a new tool for making these everyday neta not just verbally but also visually shareable."

See also:
Breaking Out of Default Thinking

"Another strong and under-appreciated aspect of mobile phone use is the personalization people do to their phones. This is usually in the form of snap on covers, ring-tones or wallpaper. [...] People are turning their phones into a stand-in for themselves. Some provocative ideas come from examining this need and 'Web-izing' it, expanding it into cyberspace.

'Mobile generation' going back to the tube

Mark Selby, vice president of Nokia's multimedia unit, says, media companies don't need to create new content [...]. Surveys and early mobile TV trials have found that consumers want to see on their mobile devices the same stuff they see on the home TV — reality shows, soap operas, sitcoms, news and sports.

"The model that we anticipate is going to work best," said Selby, "is straight broadcast television." The group he called the "mobile generation" is going back to the "tube."

This view differs quite strongly with that of Andreas Göldi, who tried it out. So will broadcast TV on the mobile really work?

It is understandable that people would want the same as they already know from broadcast TV (why bother again with checking out new content), but would they really use it for more than 5, 10 minutes? As Mark Selby himself says, nobody would want to watch a 2 hour movie on a mobile phone.

So I guess it's something you would do from time to time during your idle time e.g. before you hit home, kind of "hey it's after ten, I already start watching Nip/Tuck during my tram ride".

More info from Nokia:
Bringing TV into Mobile Phone
An overview, business opportunities and on-going trials today
Forum Nokia's Mobile Application Summit
Singapore, 18 June, 2004
Riku Karlsson, NVO

Via Tom Hume