Betavine and GPL software

Vodafone’s Betavine has launched a serie of updates, including a section for the development of open-source, much like SourceForge.
To kick-start the site they have included some libraries that Vodafone is releasing as open-source. I am especially happy about the GPL release of the drivers for the Mobile Connect Card. It’s for linux at this time, but one of the big issue for non-Windows users and getting on internet while on the move has certainly been the lack of drivers for proprietary PCMCIA cards. I think that the raise of the USB modems for mobile networks is a sign that more and more customers wanted non-Windows support, now that the drivers for a PCMCIA card are available I expect developers to take it and extend it.

Good move, Vodafone.

J2ME Guide – Part 1

Massimo Carli recently published a book about J2ME. The book is in Italian, but the good news is that it’s also available online for free. I had also put a link here on the right column, but I’ll take this chance to link it again, here.

Massimo has done another step further and published the first part in English on a friendly site. If you are considering to approach J2ME development and you’re a J2SE developer this is a very good starting point.

J2ME Guide – Part 1

Vodafone UK: welcome flat fee data, good bye IM and P2P

Vodafone is introducing a new data plan which is very near to a flat fee if not even better. Customers will pay a flat 1 pound per day to browse anywhere including the portal AND any site on the web.

Unfortunately this does not include VoIP and specifically Skype (which I can understand it not only uses a lot of bandwidth, but would also take away money from Vodafone), but it also does not include any kind of IM.
When using these services customers will be charged the standard fee per MB. Are they scared of losing money on SMS? Too much traffic due to the presence (clients regularly connecting the servers to ping)? How long will it take for users to install a Jabber server on a personal server (so none of the well known ICQ, GTalk, MSN servers) and using a non-standard port? Back to blacklists?

Read the Overview and the cost details.

Zooppa

Clicking here and there on a few blogs I ended up on Zooppa. It’s yet another social network with a slightly different aim from many others, they suggest a brand and a task and all members are invited to create some video content (a-la TV commercial) and to vote others’ creations. The top voted videos win a prize.

It seems like a really cheap way to get some ideas for commercials. I wonder how much this is really worth as it is not clear to me how much work is done to make sure the videos transmit the correct message to the end user. The communite votes the one they like best, not the one that really transmits the message in the best way which is an important value added that marketing and communication companies should add!

Anyway I’m posting this message for 3 reasons:
1) You HAVE to watch the videos that explain the contests. The guys speaking are certainly Italians and their accent is clear, at least for me! 😀
2) You might actually like it and I’d like to hear comments
3) They declare to be the first Italo-American startup. Actually the oldest I can think of is Funambol that’s been around for WAY longer and I don’t even think that they have been the first one. Maybe Funambol was the first to be a Silicon Valley-based company, so computers and new techology. Zooppa is certainly not the first.

PS: Zuppa (pronounced in Italian just like Zooppa) means soup.

Ideas for open-source and Software as a Service

Via Fabrizio Capobianco: “Rufo [Guerreschi] wrote a post on his blog about a model for the democratic control of telematic services. In a nutshell, he is trying to close the ASP loophole of GPL (v2 and v3…) with something quite more elaborate than a simple license.”

Here the full post from Fabrizio, Free Telematics and a enforcing open source SaaS, there’s also a link to Rufo’s blog and original posts.

Swedish Beers, round 2

Last Wed (Apr, 11) I joined the networking event in London. It was the second time I joined a Swedish Beers evening, but it was the first time I did in London. Last time was in Barcelona, during the 3GSM (Parties at 3GSM).

It is amazing to see how many people, only from the mobile-space-business, joins these events. It is sad to say this, but in Italy we are VERY far from this level of activity in the mobile space. We do have some big companies such as DADA, Buongiorno! and Zero9 that are actually rocking worldwide, but when you talk about innovation, getting in touch, doing networking, then we’re far behind. We do have MoMo Italy, but it’s very different from MoMo London. If you don’t know it, when registrations open, in London, you must be quick to register, within 4-6 hours all the 150-200 seats are taken; in Milan, once I saw 40-50 people at the evening, the other times I joined about 10-15 people joined the meeting.

So, even if I’m not a networking-professional, I think the evening was a success, I made 3 new connections and got to see other people I already knew (which is already a step ahead since about 2 years ago I did not know anyone of these guys!).

Congratulations to Helen, of course.

20+ years and still on top of game sales

I am talking about Tetris, of course! Created around 1984-1985 has been a best seller for more than 20 years.

Every time a new console comes out one of the first games to be released is Tetris (plus some variants) and what is amazing is that it just keeps selling!

In the mobile space it’s not different. If you check out the monthly chart published by ELSPA, for example, you will see that the February 2007 UK mobile chart lists Tetris in third position and was second last month.

How is this possible? Well, I think that Tetris shows how all the most important rules of Casual Games should be applied and demonstrates that if they are well balanced will generate an endless interest from gamers in all times.
Here’s a blog post by Tom Hume written after “Casualty Europe” 2006, it’s from a presentation by Jason Kapalka of PopCap called “10 ways to make a bad casual game“. I remembered Tom’s post, but while searching on the web I also found another post from a Microsoft person, Kim Pallister, Casuality Session: Designing casual games.

My favorite rules (deduced from the worst mistakes according to Jason) are number 1, 8 and 9. I really think that the winning combination of a casual game is to make it easy to pick up (so no need to read or really just 1 minute to know the basic rules) and hard to master. Easy to pick up means that users will start playing quickly and see how the game works and get sucked into the game world, hard to master will make sure that users don’t get bored too quickly. Hard to master does not mean it is complicated, but that with many little things you can achieve a higher level, more points, better rewards.
Games like racing or war with too many power-ups, for example, are fun for a few hours or days, but then become boring. It must be something that you get little by little.

I think that Tetris matches the most important rules, SUPER easy to pick up, years to master. Simple graphics, you don’t need a modern computer with 4 processors to run it (it was designed in the Eighties!).

If you checked out the ELSPA chart you will have seen Puzzle Bubble in that list. The game is younger (1994), but same rules apply. Needless to say these are among my favorite games (and also the only ones I still play).

It comes as no surprise that in the mobile space these are the games that still sell the most, even if sometimes the phone keypad is not the best joystick even for these games (think of when it starts running fast!).