Rocking & Rolling at Mobile Monday
Thrilled to join with nice folks at HP Bazaar to co-host a rocking good MoMo Tokyo debut event on 13 September and it seemed as though most of the unwired digerati within commuting distance of the Pink Cow, in ubertrendy Shibuya, were there. In today’s Portable Reportable, Chief Editor Daniel Scuka quizzes WWJ’s Lawrence Cosh-Ishii on what he saw and heard at the Mobile Monday launch in Tokyo.
The evening focused on multiplayer games (“From Niche to Mass Market”), and Jeroen Elfferich, from Ex Machina, spoke on gaming, differences between 2.5G & 3G networks, developing gaming platforms for event, subscription, and wager-based billing, and game culture differences between Japan and Europe.
Mobile gaming is a pretty hot topic in Tokyo, judging from the turn out, and has proven to be one of the earliest content exports out of Japan and into Europe and Asia (read: China). Companies like Bandai, Taito, Namco, G-Mode and others are all actively fulfilling mobile game content orders having delivery addresses other than Japan.
Further, WWJ covered Newt Games in July; their massively multiplayer game Mogi can (so far) only be played in Japan and Korea (it needs CDMA GPS technology), and Tokyo players have been featured in Wired and The Feature, but (we think) we’re the only site that has covered Mogi in streaming video.
Attendees at the Pink Cow included representatives at all levels from well-known mobile brands such as HP Japan, Nokia, Disney, Vodafone, Namco, MTV, NTT DoCoMo, Sony Ericsson, Index, and many others. In a mail message sent yesterday, Nina Nordlund, market development specialist for mobile e-services at HP Bazaar, said: “MoMo was a big success; we got a lot of participants and candidates for MoMo Tokyo board members. We will try to make this a tradition.” The crowd was also represented equally well by both Japanese and foreign attendees — a pleasant break from the usual networking event which tends to be heavily represented by one or the other, but rarely both in equal measure.