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Mobile World Congress 2012

We are excited to be attending the Mobile World Congress 2012 in Barcelona.  As well as soaking in the joys of the beautiful setting, we are looking forward to seeing some great exhibitions and sharing ideas with attendees.

Scribble: are a digital agency based in Brighton.  We enjoy seeking out innovative solutions for our clients and for our own endeavours in the world of apps.   Some of our main interests include creating cross-platform solutions that integrate apps, web and social media, 3D graphics, augmented reality and social media integration.

We love augmented reality and are really excited about what the industry will have to offer in the coming years, so it is nice to see that the conference will be enhanced by a number of augmented reality experiences to show people about the conference and to guide people to different areas.

The conference will host a pretty comprehensive list of players in the mobile world and will include keynotes from Facebook, Google, eBay, GMA, Visa and many many more.  As well as major keynote speakers and exhibitions, the conference has ‘App Planet’ a large section dedicated to mobile apps, where developers, operators, manufacturers and service providers will be exhibiting and sharing knowledge.

This year’s conference will be split up into a number of different ‘zones’, all related to different aspects of the mobile world, here’s what we are most excited about:

Cloud technology has been taking off over the last few years, and with demand for mobile services surging and 4G networks just around the corner, cloud technology is set to become an essential technology in the mobile world, so we will be taking a great interest in the exhibitors on the “Cloud Pavillion”.

We’ll also be checking out m-Commerce developments in the “Mobile Money Pavillion” – the coming years will see many big changes in this area as mobile banking, NFC and the like start to take off.

The “mPowered Brands Zone” will be dedicated to mobile marketing, and we will be interested to see how companies are making use of mobile technology to spread the word about their brands.

We love to share ideas, so please get in touch with us if you’d like to meet up at the conference, we look forward to seeing you there!

If you’d like to meet up at the conference, drop us a line at hello@scribbleuk.com and keep up to date with our tweets @scribbledigital

Check back here soon for our report of the conference!

Here at Scribble, we think games are great.  And of course, one of the things that makes being involved in the smartphone industry fun and exciting is that each of our fancy mobile smartphones is not only internet ready and full of useful tech, but they are also pretty spiffy handheld gaming devices that would give our childhood gaming systems a thrashing!

Smartphones, and in particular the iTunes app store, blew open a whole new market for small-time developers in a gaming industry where most games take millions to develop – harking back to the good old days of bedroom programmers and unique and interesting game concepts.

But games are not just great for fun, they are a great way for brands to promote their products and services.  Games rate highly in terms of engagement for apps: people play games for longer at a time than any other type of app – this is a great opportunity for you to get your message across.

Check out some great stats on mobile gaming put together by Geekaphone.

Today, we would like to focus on a particular category of games: the quick-fire arcade game.  This is our favourite way to play : the kind of simple game you can pick up and play for a minute, or even less.  The key to these kind of games is that they are instantly satisfying, and addictive, enticing you to keep coming back.  But more than just being great fun, there are many reasons that this is a great kind of game to make.

For first time developers, this kind of game makes particular sense.  The classic quick arcade game does not require a large amount of asset generation: rather than spanning multiple ‘levels’ or ‘stages’, quick fire arcade games often take place in one area – perhaps with the possibility of the player getting slightly further each time, or just bettering a high score.  The gameplay is usually simple and repetitive, often involving quick reactions.  This type of game means that the developer does not need to create large amounts of assets, or code governing gameplay.  Instead, they can focus on refining the small number of elements involved in the game.  It also makes it easier for the developer to test and change parts of the game, because there isn’t a huge knock-on effect to other parts of the game that is a risk in larger more complex games.

The key, then, is to make the gameplay simple and repetitive, but still incorporate some way of advancing.  These kind of games often involve trying to beat high scores, getting a little better each time.  A clever mechanic is to incorporate achievements or items which once reached allow the player to get further or get a higher score.  This means that while the game is essentially the same, there is still an incentive for the player to keep coming back.

The ‘feel’ is essential – the playing experience can be very short, but the player must still feel satisfied and want to come back.  This makes the use of sound and graphics very important – but a limited scope means that the developer is more free to refine the little details.

In-app purchases are common in this area – the game will often present you a choice: earn coins to buy items which give you a better chance of beating your highscore… or just buy the items with money and skip the hard work.  If the game has got you hooked in it’s addictive grasp, these little in-app-payments can be very hard to resist sometimes.

The repetitive nature of these kind of games makes them a great opportunity for  getting a brand message across.  If the formula is right, a well designed mini-game can be a perfect way for a brand to get their message out.

We’ve done some painstaking research in this area…. But don’t leave all the hard work up to us, find out for yourself.  Scribble have put together a beautiful list of fiercely fun and addictive arcade games – and the beauty is you only need a few seconds to enjoy these titles, but be warned , you will become hooked!!

There are of course many other games in this area, but we’ve picked out some total classics which are also our favourites.  These are the games that we just keep coming back to no matter how many times we play them!  Click on any of the image banners above to find out more about these fantastically addictive games and  see if you can figure out the perfect ingredients to chucking together the perfect addictive arcade game…  but you’ll have to put the game down at some point if you want to get round to making your own and reaping the rewards!

Being able to pinpoint your location on a smartphone using GPS has become a pivotal feature for mobile apps and services.  In addition to the obvious use for finding your way around using Google Maps or similar, many apps are now available which use information about your location to filter information that is relevant to you.

FourSquare is one of the most successful names in this area, allowing users to find out whether their friends are around, find useful information about their surrounding area, or receive offers from stores that are close by, and Facebook Places helped the technology to gain popularity, but there are many other similar services:   Ask Around is a directory service which allows the user to capitalise on local knowledge when in a new area,  NearbyFeed gives you a feed of news and weather relevant to you local area.  More imaginative location-based services include, StreetSpark, a location based dating service, and a number of interesting games which use local data to populate your game world, such as MyTown, or even turn the map into a playing-field such as in Shadow Cities.

Unsurprisingly, retailers have realised that there is great potential for attracting people to stores.  There are already a number of apps which send users offers and deals relevant to their local area, such as Google Shopping and MyVoucherCodes.  It would be advantageous, though, if shops and retails could detect when customers were actually in the store, not just nearby – retailers could give incentives for customers to visit the stores by rewarding them just for going into the shop…  And this is where the technology has it’s limitations.  GPS is accurate down to about 10 metres in some cases, but phone signal and GPS accuracy is less reliable in built up areas, or indoors.

This represents a new hurdle for location-based services - accurately identifying where the user is, even in built up areas, and whether or not the user is actually inside a specific store or location.  A number of methods have already been used to detect when a user is in the vicinity, such as sending a signal by bluetooth, or designing the smartphone app to recognise which WiFi hotspots it can pick up.

A truly innovative approach to this problem was employed in ShopKick – they use the microphone on the device to detect a sound that is played in the store, but is inaudible to the human ear.  This means that if the user is running the app, they can be ‘checked-in’ as soon as they are close enough to pick up the signal.  The advantage of this system is that the sound signal obeys the physical boundaries of the store – ie, the signal will not go through walls like a WiFi signal, so the app will not get confused if two adjacent stores are using the system.  Of course, this system will only work for locations that have the system installed.

This is a technology which we are very interested in at Scribble, and a particularly interesting one for clients in retail and development.  Google has already started a massive effort to add large indoor public spaces such as airports and shopping centers.  Clearly, some new infrastructure will be required, but the technology is being developed to add a new level of detail to the location services we currently use.