This is a great video from Dan Rodriguez an artist based out of Minneapolis. This video was directed by Erica Mayer who shared it on Twitter. I think the song is great, the colours are wonderful and the picture quality is just awesome.

Gameloft, the french mobile game maker of such hits as Assassin’s Creed, and The Settlers have announced that they ‘and other software developers were reining in their Android development budgets because the app store was not as nice as iTunes (very true) and they weren’t making as much revnue as iTunes (expected.)

The article doesn’t mention which other developers are cutting back, but quotes Gameloft finance director Alexandre de Rochefort,

We have significantly cut our investment in Android platform, just like … many others,

This announcement that they have cut their investment is interesting but not really a surprise if they are measuring the investment with direct sales, given they have a duty to their shareholders. However, I don’t believe this news is a ‘death knell’ for Android but merley the decision of a public company to scale back investment in an unproven market.

The news that they are selling 400 times more games on iphone [than Android] and that iphone apps are 13% of its profits is a sign of a successful and mature [in relative terms] market. What this report does not tell us is how much they had invested in Android Apps, nor how much they have scaled back.

Given that Android has the potential [at least according to Gartner] to leapfrog the iPhone by 2012, one would hope that Gameloft continue to invest in Android development, even if it is billed as ‘research and development’ rather than immediate income generation.

I h ave heard a lot about Biffy Clyro but never heard their music. In fact, I still haven’t. I was intrigued, however to see the cover of their latest album.

Which looked a lot like Storm Thorgerson‘s work for Pink Floyd, the Division Bell. In particular this one particular image bears a striking resemblance to the shots for High Hopes. (You can see more of this imagery in the video at the end of the post.)

A quick bit of digging shows indeed Storm is working with Buffy and this additional image shows they are going for a very Pink Floyd (or is Storm?) style, this one reminisicent of Wish You Were Here.

Buffy

Wish You Were Here

Brilliant! I love Storm’s work, my walls are covered in Pink Floyd prints and I find his work very inspring.

As he is working with Biffy I will now go and listen

Mobile Apps are set to become even bigger business in 2010. With Apple already generating a reported $200m in app revenue (that’s only 30% of the pie) Google’s Market and Nokia’s Ovi Store have both opened this year to tap into this booming market. Whilst some way behind in scale, I believe these app stores represent a signifcant shift in mobile consumption and in turn the actual business model for mobile companies. No longer will mobile ‘phone promotions be purely about what the ‘phone can do but what you can do ‘on the ‘phone.’

The latest promotions from Apple and from Nokia both concentrate on the apps, rather than the handsets.

Joining the bandwagon today is Samsung, which will open an App Store for independent apps next year. To quote the FT,

Samsung’s first smartphones using its bada platform will be released in the first half of next year, together with an “app store” that is meant to include at least 1,000 applications.

The latest research from emarketer also points to next year and beyond as ‘big’ for app revenue. I quote,

Mobile applications are a major channel for content delivery to mobile devices. In September 2009, the Yankee Group estimated that US paid smartphone application revenues would reach $4.2 billion in 2013—an order of magnitude above the 2009 estimate of $343 million.

In time it will be the mobile ‘phone companies without mobile app capability [and associated stores] that will be the laggards.

Today, the one piece of news that has circulated ad infinitum is the story that Ruper Murdoch will block Google from visiting his sites. I will write a longer post tomorrow but,

What the fuck are you doing?

I have yet to see any article actually question this wisdom owing to the fact that he is one of the world’s most successful publishers. He can still get it wrong. Until he shows us how his subscription model will work we will have to assume it is a pile of crap (I am happy to be corrected in time.) His deal with Google for Adwords on Myspace is $100m adrift of the deal target (that’s one hundred million dollars adrift) and the offices for his Myspace digital vision remain empty at the cost of $1m per month.

So, that says to me, he needs Google. He needs Google for traffic, he needs Google for revenue. As some have argued this is probably a [very public] negotiation stance for future haggling but he really needs to be careful. He may have revolutionised the TV industry with SKY but that was when the channels and choices were closed. The Internet is the utter contrast to this.

I will post more tomorrow, but read this article from e-consultancy and this article from Andrew Girdwood, both of which I have commented on.

With today’s announcement that Apple has achieved over 100,000 apps in their app store we look at how apps need to work with social communities to enable their full growth and return potential.