This seems like a ridiculous statement from the CTO of a company that has
trademarked “The Mobile Entertainment Company”. The facts are, what we have
discovered since incorporating in February of 2000 is that wireless
entertainment is a cool idea, but true “games” are still a ways away. CDMA
and TDMA networks provide such unreliable and limited bandwidth that true
gamers don’t recognize cellular phones as a reasonable platform to play
games on.
Furthermore, a phone is not a great game platform. The keys are clumsy and
the pad is designed for dialing not rapid response. So with all this
negativism, why bother with mobile entertainment? Simple. Content always
prevails. Our firm, Falcon’s Wing Wireless depends more on the quality of
reasonable textual based content that is well branded and compelling. We
focus on delivering pragmatic wireless web experiences that augment and
extend the wired web… not try and replace it.
So much advertising blows by us these days about the wonderful and fanciful
features of having a “portable” Internet device. Inevitably, what happens
is that the consumer purchases a WAP enabled phone, and suffers from
“anticipointment”. That is their anticipation is met with disappointment.
While cellular carriers rush to improve the basic delivery infrastructure,
we believe in managing the expectations of our customers. We give content
“bites” that are tasty, relevant, timely, and even location based. These
are things that a WAP enabled phone can do well today. Clearly less is
more.
One more thing we do, is stay platform and network and device independent.
Our experience indicates that a WAP game that might look OK on a version 3.1
phone.com browser looks awful on a 3.0 browser. Since there are so many
different phones and wireless devices (i.e. Palm VII) we structure our code
to write it once (in XML) and scale it on the fly to the specific device
that dialed into our network. This insures the maximum experience for the
end user.
These are exciting days for wireless developers, but most of my hard core
programmer friends look at WAP games as reminiscent of their days in
Computer Science 101. Look, it’s not about the trickery of the game, it’s
all about the stickiness of the content. Therefore, the development of the
“game” becomes the game. The skill of the developer is to make a compelling
experience out of text-based information and at best, one-bit graphics.
Ken Mages
CTO
Falcon's Wing Wireless
26 Broadway
Suite 400
New York, NY 10004
24 Hour Pager 888.763.5842
Efax 603.388.8050
Telephone 212.504.2910
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Received on Tue Nov 14 23:23:20 2000