After a grilling of our credentials from the Young Producers (the guys steering the game and creating the content) over a Skype call we won the tender and have since been working with them to shape and transform the idea.

It’s extremely exciting to be working with such a talented group of young people and we’re now very close to beginning work on the app (now known as Hunter & Hunted), which will show off Lancaster in a way never before seen. It debuts at the Dukes on the evening of Thursday 26th August.

To find out more about Blaze and to keep up to date with the latest point your internet at http://www.blazeonline.org.uk/

Myself and Rich will be giving a talk at Bathcamp tomorrow (Thursday 8th July) evening on our experiences with the iPhone and how we feel the ecosystem has changed and will change. To attend check out the Ning here. There will be lots of geekery and some beer I’m told.

I’ll also be rocking the big one in Brighton next week: Develop Conference 2010. If you’re about on Tuesday or Wednesday get in contact and we’ll meet up for a chat and a hot and steamy or cold and bubbly beverage. Also check out the GamesAid charity poker event on the Tuesday, where I’ll be rapidly losing stacks of chips for a very good cause.

This morning I received a nice surprise in a brown Please Do Not Bend envelope: a Pocket Gamer Silver Award certificate for B-Boy Beats emblazoned with the quote “the sheer level of polish and an excellent soundtrack ensure that feet and fingers alike will be itching to face off against the next challenge”. Me and Tom were so moved we rushed out and picked up a befitting silver frame, stuck it on the wall and shook hands in a neat photo op (as seen below).

Our thanks go to PG!

We’ve overtaken Tap Tap Revenge 3 to become the number one free music game in most countries now and are currently in the top 50 overall free apps (not just games, all apps) in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Solvenia, Japan, Netherlands, Belgium, Singapore, Finland and Italy! And are rocking top 100 game in almost every country in the world.

Hitting that top spot!

Twitter has been astir with tweets aplenty and we had a huge big-up from the App Era. If you haven’t gone and gotten the game yet, then go and grab it now while it’ll costs you diddly-squat. Let’s see if we can’t rock that number 1 spot by the end of the week!

A big thank you to all the kind words we received and here’s to many more years here in The Oven.

The MWC always promises to serve up exclusive previews of the latest mobile technology, and the big players always aim to be the ones that provide the game-changing story of the week.

Big players means the device manufacturers such as Sony Ericsson, Samsung, Blackberry, Motorola, and HTC, and the others forging their mobile strategy such as Google and Microsoft. Nokia were a notable omission – limiting themselves merely to an off-site invitation only suite – and got people wondering whether they really had nothing to show, were concentrating on their legal battles or were just fishing for Apple-esque enigmatic points (Apple historically never attend external events such as this – apart from their secret agents of course). We can never know the reason, but of those that attended, it was Google, Samsung and Microsoft that probably made the big impressions.

Samsung’s new Bada platform and showcase device the Wave looks to make a splash (Bada is Korean for ocean, we understand). Aside from the usual nonsense technology trademarks (e.g. TouchWiz interface, super AMOLED touch screen), it’s the potential of the integrated application store and developer focus which tickled our interest.

Microsoft announced their new platform Windows Mobile 7.0 and it looked like a decent effort that focused heavily on social network and Xbox Live integration. Users can play mini games on their phone which use their Xbox Live gamertag to earn gamerscore and achievements, which seems pretty cool. When Richard probed on whether this functionality would be open to developers, we were advised to look out for a “rich developer story” that would be announced in the near future. We will, and that may look something like this:

The social side of the latest devices really seems to be taking center stage. We lost count of how many times a phone’s qualities were demonstrated to us by presenting the way in which a user’s combined contact, SMS, email, Twitter and Facebook information is delivered in one almighty integrated UI, and it looks like designers have been working very hard on this aspect. (The bias on this focus can really be seen in the phone TV ads too – which spectacularly took my ‘most annoying ads’ award from cars in 2009.) Notable examples of these socially-obsessed devices are the new Sony Ericsson Xperia X1, and its genuinely snazzy little brothers X10 Mini and X10 Mini Pro. However this Android family of devices told another, bigger story…

Slowly but surely Android has turned in a great year, and now has been adopted by most of the main device manufacturers. Google didn’t exhibit, but the talk by Eric Schmidt in the congress was all over the front pages of the MWC daily newspaper (yes, that really exists!). After the release of the Nexus One this year, he formally announced the shift of the company’s attention from desktop to mobile, and showed off the new Google Goggles app. Big talk.

The battle of the platforms is hotting up nicely, and seeing how it plays out will be intriguing. Also the mobile advertising industry is finally attracting major attention, with ad networks Admob and Quattro Wireless being acquired by Google and Apple respectively, and Orange delivering their brand new ‘Orange Shots’ service.

The MWC is also an opportunity for countries to show off their latest tech companies, with their own ‘pavilions’ – turning the halls into a kind of mini United Nations. One such outfit in the UK space showed off a new mobile typing technology that guessed the words you were going to say before you even started typing them, using machine learning. This could be impressive and/or embarassing! Outside of UK, it was the Swedish Pavilion which was our favourite. Hats off to them, they were they first to be dishing out the free alcohol on Monday. Swedish innovators myFC are looking to solve that ancient mobile power problem with their neat hydrogen powered FuelCellSticker technology. From what I could understand from the demo, you drop a magic pill into a pouch of voodoo-water to get 6hrs of battery time. Sounds great to us! At this point I’d like to add thanks and a shout-out to Caroline Karlsson of Swedish Trade Council for showing us round! Tack så mycket, Caroline!

As documented in my South West Screen MWC blogs from last year, we were a little disappointed with the lack of attention on content and content providers for mobile, but this year we were more optimistic with the presence of App Planet, sponsored by Vodafone. However the 50 exhibitors inside were not much of an attraction and the representation of games was still woefully inadequate. It was a good idea and intention that maybe was poorly executed, we will hold out for next year!

All in all, it was a very interesting few days. It seems like there was a little more buzz about things than last year. Over the course of the congress the general ideas, concerns and hopes everyone has do sink in, and it’s good to take some time to think about the direction of the industry as a whole.

On a final note, away from the conference Richard continued his baffling ongoing international pursuit of saffron.

DUNDEE, UK – 26th NOVEMBER 2009

Scottish iPhone publisher and developer Tag Games is today pleased to announce that its first title in an exciting roadmap of third party games will be the awesome rhythm, action and battle game B-Boy Brawl.

A partnership with Mobile Pie, the hugely talented development studio based in the UK’s hip hop heartland of Bristol, will see this widely anticipated game unleashed on the App Store early in the New Year.

Paul Farley, Managing Director of Tag Games, said, “since we demonstrated how effective our marketing efforts could be with the launch of Car Jack Streets earlier in the year, the telephone hasn’t stopped ringing with iPhone developers interested in Tag publishing their content. Given our understanding and success in delivering games to the App Store it was therefore inevitable that we would eventually take the plunge into publishing external content. ”

He continues “We decided early on that we’d only want to publish games that reflect the style and attitude of our own content and when the team at Mobile Pie approached us with B-Boy Brawl we knew we had a great fit. I’m very excited by the prospect of the Tag and Mobile Pie teams working closely together to bring iPhone gamers a rhythm action game with originality, wit, style and of course some sweet hip hop tracks.”

“We’re extremely excited to be partnering with Tag Games on B-Boy Brawl as they bring so much passion and a wealth of expertise to the party,” said Will Luton, Creative Producer at Mobile Pie. “We’ve put months of love into the game and with the tracks we have lined up it’s destined to shake up the iPhone gaming world!”

Due to be released late January 2010 B-Boy Brawl promises to make a mockery of other weak wristed iPhone music games. Aiming to own the streets (and of course the App Store) the game features a unique control method that allows players to ‘finger break’ for the first time, awesome street style visuals, various crews to ‘battle’ and loads of great hip hop.

ENDS

About Tag Games

Tag Games is an independent game developer and publisher based in Dundee, Scotland, which has quickly established itself as a leader in the creation of games for mobile and digital download platforms. We have earned critical acclaim and commercial success with a number of varied titles including our recent top 10 iPhone hit Car Jack Streets. We have extensive experience of game development for the most important mobile platforms including iPhone, Android, PSP minis, DSi, Blackberry, J2ME and BREW.

Tag’s reputation for flexibility, innovation and delivery is second to none, successfully balancing the creation of original IP alongside development of licensed and commission titles. Tag Games partners include Endemol, Connect2Media, I-play, Big Fish Games, GlobalFun, Tern TV and Sandlot Games.

Media Contact: Paul Farley Tag Games T: +44 (0)1382 220925 E: paul.farley@tag-games.com

About Mobile Pie Mobile Pie is a developer of imaginative entertainment for mobile platforms. Based in the heart of Bristol, the studio has received such notable accolades as Channel 4’s New Mobile Game Developer of the Year and received the Media Innovation Awards’ Trophy 2008.

Mobile Pie has led cutting edge research in games and mobile technologies and have worked with such prestigious clients as Hewlett-Packard and the BBC, putting us ahead of the pack in terms of technology and expertise.

With focus now shifting towards our own original IP Bristol Media identified us as “Ones to Watch” for 2009 whilst Chinwag told the world our “award winning content has mouths watering all over and people coming back for more.”

We are set to continue our growth in to the coming years and beyond with Mobile Pie becoming synonymous in the gaming public’s mind with high quality titles for mobile platforms.

Media Contact: Will Luton, Mobile Pie, T: 44 (0) 1173 155228, E: will@mobilepie.com

Designated trademarks and brands are the property of their respective owners. E&OE.

Matt said:

It’s exciting getting away from academia and working on real world projects, picking new skills and working in a fun environment!

Check out his stats below!

The first speaker was Paul Golding from Wireless Wonders who gave us a great overview of the current state of play with AR, and the first thing that became clear is that AR is quite a broad term which currently encompasses three main approaches.

New services like Wikitude, Insqribe, Layar and Junaio use the user’s location and orientation obtained through GPS and device compass to overlay virtual objects over the camera feed, and are aimed at enabling people to quickly place objects in the virtual space.

Much more impressive though, are applications which react directly to the camera feed to recognise objects in the real world and provide new information or ways of viewing them. Within this approach there are two methods, using predefined markers to aid recognition or using digital fingerprinting to recognise the object directly. Some great examples were shown of Lego boxes, baseball cards and cereal packets. It is expected that markerless AR will gradually become the dominant approach.

Implications of this technology could be new advertising space, new places to send messages to your friends, and also the elasticity of distance. Nowadays we all know that the use of mobile phones means that times can be flexible, people don’t have to meet up at the pub at 8:00 sharp, we can communicate on the move and change plans. Perhaps AR will expand that to the actual meeting location. Let’s meet up in a general area and have a look at virtual layers to decide on where we shall go.

The big problem at the moment is that all the current services are pretty much doing the same thing, and they are walled gardens. We can’t pick up our virtual pet from one virtual world and take it with us to a completely different one. Standards need to be defined to move AR implementations on from a novel feature to a useful product.

Perhaps virtual worlds will be like websites, in that everyone can make their own layer for the same place, and we choose which one we want to view (this is the Layar approach). This brings in the implications of who owns objects in the real world, who can put a message on that cereal box and who can’t?

Other speakers included Andrew from Rummble, a new service which uses the notion of trust to provide users with personalised ratings of places. The idea is that if someone likes something that you like, then their ratings on other places will be of more interest to you than someone who doesn’t. This reminded me a lot of some outcomes of our Happy Packages research, in which (amongst lots of other things!) we explored what people wanted from ratings services (resulting in our innovative Face-the-Place iPhone prototype!)

There was also a good panel discussion about how the current market was viewed from the perspective of developers, and tackled issues such as fragmentation, user privacy and multi-tasking.

In the afternoon we broke out into barcamp sessions to discuss the opportunities from what we had heard and come up with some ideas. All in all it was a fascinating day and thanks to the organisers!

The Mobile Pie laboratory is currently exploring AR technologies of it’s own as we see it as a very significant research area that will have big impacts on the future methods of mobile use (and so in turn, how the web is used) – so look out for some very interesting results in the near future!