Mario Tapia

Aggregation of the aggregators has started.

Jamdat today announced it has been acquired by Electronic Arts, itself a player in the mobile space, but one that never seemed to get a mobile business model in high gear. After today, not only is EA in high gear, but it owns most of the significant turf it was unable to exploit on its own.

The merger agreement calls for EA to pay $27 cash per share and also assume outstanding stock options for a total of about $680 million, according to EA.

Now what consolidation lays ahead for the rest of the gaming Mafia, Mforma, In-Fusio, and Digital Bridges?

…and so it goes

Finally an art category using a mobile medium! I’ve wanted to organize a mobile arts event in Seattle for some time now. An event using device cameras is what I would like to plan, but here mobile video is the category. Check out the SFFS link SF Film Society Wireless Category.

Here’s the details:

Wireless Media
This is an invitation to submit work to the San Francisco Film Society for consideration to be included in the 49th San Francisco International Film Festival taking place April 20–May 4, 2006. In specific, this call is for a program that will focus on a series of visual works made by or for wireless media devices. Roughly this breaks down into three categories:

-Works made by mobile devices
-Works made to be specifically viewed on mobile devices
-Works that use wireless signals as a new aesthetic medium

Monday’s Seattle Mobile was a success. We had ~70 attendees from all of the mobile industry value chain, Operators, Content Providers, Device OEMs and Infrastructure. Thanks to Brendan and Kosar for their time and excellent presentations and also a big thanks for those who attended.

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My old company Dwango (soon to rebrand as Dijji) has finally succeeded in launching Playboy Mobile in the US. Cingular is currently the only US operator, but Rogers in Canada has been providing the content for a couple months now. The question now is what kind of backlash our puritanistic country will cause. Playboy has been doing a good job in licensing its brand globally. There are some 20+ mobile licenses around the globe and its been making an impact on PBs stock as well. CNN PB Article

Although adult content has been available for mobiles since the early days, 1999, most US operators have been reluctant to place it in the mainstream portal or even off portal via 3rd party aggregators. This is a big move on behalf of the operators, especially when there are no Parental Controls to limit access to this content, I am concerned especially for the minors that are the growing demographic for mobiles in the US.

Although CTIA is working on standardizing Parental Controls I don’t think we will see anything published from the working group any time soon. So parents beware and you adult males… enjoy?

–and so it goes