4. A Closer Look at Android

With Apple’s iPhone SDK announcement just around the corner, iPhone hacker Nate True’s session might have seemed a little redundant, but that wasn’t the case. Fears that Apple would use the iTunes Store to control distribution (and installation) of applications have turned out to be correct – so developers and users who want to build and use more iPhone applications than Apple will allow will have to continue to use open source development tools and “jail broken” phones. Most applications will be compatible with those written using Apple’s SDK – and now that iPhone APIs have been revealed, open SDK developers will be able to use them to improve the applications built with their tools.

Google’s Android is a much more open alternative compared to the iPhone. Still in early beta, the Android developer tools have been available for several months (while phones are unlikely to ship before the end of 2008). Google Product Manager Dan Morrill compared today’s mobile platforms to a gold rush that requires miners to register before they can pan for gold and where they can only buy tools from approved channels. Android claims to change that, offering an open platform that can be used by the entire industry. Developers also get deep access to the underlying platform (if not the hardware). As Morrill pointed out, this isn’t intended to be AJAX on a phone – and developers will be able to use all their favorite tools and tricks, without having to certify applications before they’re deployed. Google expects a wide mix of applications, and demonstrated a wine explorer application that linked to a spreadsheet to help choose the appropriate bottle.

Asia is far ahead of the West in using mobile phones. Mike Walsh, managing director of Hong Kong-based think tank Tomorrow, coined the term Futuretainment for the growing Asian mobile mediasphere. Unlike our business and commerce-driven networks, China’s Internet is focused on entertainment.

Mobility has become a lifestyle, not just a device, and there are more people accessing the Internet through mobiles than through PCs in Asia. Half the top-selling fiction in Japan in 2007 was published for mobile devices and some of it was written on phones. While mobile TV hasn’t been a success in the rest of the world, it’s popular in Korea and Japan.

One key to understanding the success of mobile entertainment in Asia is its formal social structure. In the West everyone can see your Facebook profile – but in Asia where you fit into the social hierarchy determines how much access you have into someone’s life. This also means social networking tools are very powerful, and can result in activities like group buying where hundreds of people arrive at a store and demand discounts for a particular item. Online status is very important. The most popular Korean search engine, Naver, has a huge database of answers because users gain status by providing information. Put it together and the future of entertainment, at least in Asia, is connected audiences, not broadcast TV networks.

Sun’s Darkstar Project

The keynotes each morning started with mobile phone games: not the solitaire or Tetris clones most people play on their phones, but interactive games that use the phone as a way to get people running around the room barking like a dog, quacking like a duck or mooing like a cat.

These simple games were run by Megaphone. Anyone who wanted to play called a number, while 20 players were chosen randomly. Instructions sent by text message had them trying to find the player who’d been sent the same animal faster than anyone else.

For more serious gamers, Sun unveiled Project Darkstar, a project intended to help small gaming companies build massive multiplayer online games. Today MMOGs take significant amounts of investment – often in the tens (and even hundreds) of millions of dollars – and need significant amounts of hardware. There’s also a high chance of failure. Sun’s Chief Gaming Officer Chris Melissinos talked about the rise of “Generation Pong” that has grown up with the grammar of video games (which he describes as a 40-year-old new market). Gamers are raising gamers, and casual multiplayer online games are a growing market share (with women over 35 the largest single group of online players). Game servers are complex, and each and every one is handcrafted for the games they host. They’re built for performance, not for scale.

Game development quickly becomes a network problem but game developers don’t want to be network engineers. Project Darkstar is based on open source Java code and supports multiple client devices and languages. A Darkstar game thus can pit players on a phone against players in a browser or a set top box, or even a fully fledged console. It’s cheaper, so small companies can start their own games. And Melissinos says it’s designed for massive scale, for persistence and for transaction integrity because it builds on work Sun has done for the largest MMOG in the world: Wall Street.