Vor dem Spiel, ist nach dem Spiel, ist vor den Spielen

REDRUM... REDRUM... actually my Cologne experience was far from 'The Shining' (movie). EU-project INCCOM (actually charming Deutche Welle guys) arranged a congress on 24th August at Rheinpalais. We talked about mobile television, football, FIFA06, cross media and the future of games and television.

We had an excellent line of speakers from telcos and broacasting companies to SMEs and underground channels. RTL, Vodafone, Yahoo! and Deutche Telecom talked about lessons to be learned from FIFA06. All of those companies had activities during the FIFA06 -- the others had broadcasting or online licences, the others didn't -- but all of them had rather promising news to share with us related to the user figures, online shopping and watching mobile television transmissions. The percentages were still rather low but actually better I had expected.

We also had a session focusing on mobile/digital (virtual) games and gambling. Unfortunately Fraunhofer (Iperg-project), BWin, Gameloft, Plan B and UFA didn't share that many new ideas. Actually the only positive exception was Michael Rueger from UFA. He talked about Master of Maya mobile MMOG trading card game -- hmm... Even though I believe in mobile minigames, I think this Maya-thing could have possibilities in the mobile world. Michael also brough up some of his favourites such as augmented reality stuff done by Adrian Cheok et al at the Singapore University (actually we do pretty same (and as impressive) stuff at the VTT). Also SMS to smoke, Mattel's Miau and SMS HugMe are -- if not blockbusters -- at least funny experiments.


I also learned that Katrin Bauerfreind from ehrensenf.de (iTV channel) had attained rather impressing audience. That was also one answer to the debate about the future of television. Cross media and internet publishing are must as well as segmenting news and reaching new user groups such as youth.
That's about it in brief. Oh, I forgot to mention the discussion whether mobile television standard is doing to be DMB, DVB-H or DxB... but I quess we'll figure it our sooner or later.