In case you haven’t figured out the question from Friday, I put a post up over at Techdirt that should give you a clue.

Happy Halloween. To make sure your phone doesn’t feel left out on this spookiest of all days, now you can get it its own costume (reg req’d, BugMeNot), part of a growing trend of dressing everyday objects in seasonal decorations. Available from sites like Fun Friends and AnniesCostumes.com, most of them are plush stuffed animals of various species, nothing too scary (or exciting).

So, if you go whole-hog into the whole Halloween deal, don’t let your phone or iPod feel left out. Assuming, of course, you don’t already have one of the KDDI phones dressed to look like a lump of cheese.

MocoNews points to an article sayingSprint’s full-track download service will launch Monday. There’s two important points, really:

- Dual delivery to both mobile phone and PC

- $2.50 per track.

One of those will be a bigger determinant of its success (or failure) than the other. Any guesses as to which one?

Rudy de Waele is hosting this week’s carnival over at m-trends.org. Plenty of great stuff this week, so check it out.

The British music industry says music phones pose a huge threat to them because they’ll let kids share music without their computers. It’s another silly argument — people that pirate music will do it over whatever medium’s available. If one of their friends can’t send a song to their phone over Bluetooth, they’ll get it from a P2P network, or just find another friend that has it. The response will likely be a push to get Bluetooth crippled, or have police do spot checks at school entrances, or something else. But any of these are just band-aids. Piracy won’t stop until the record labels figure out a way to de-incentivize it and give people an incentive to make legitimate purchases, or change their business models so they’re not completely dependent on recorded music sales.

Mobile game guru Greg Costikyan, formerly with Nokia Research but now head of Manifesto Games, highlighted a number of problems facing the mobile games industry, and developers in particular.

- The mobile gaming business model impedes innovation, because consumers buy games based on one line of text, and therefore are drawn to recognized brands (Tetris, licensed games, console titles, etc).

- Games are content, media are containers. There’s lots of game media, and this medium is mobile. So does the mobile game have to be a subset of “the video game”? Probably not.

- Different game styles are suited for different media. Mobile device will always be an inferior video game platform because of the small screen and controls that are designed for telephony, not gaming.

- So how do we bring about the mobile game? It’s not a technological problem — what games are suited to the device?

- A true mobile game style would provide a collection of game mechanics that together produce pleasing player experiences. Some would depend on the unique characteristics of the mobile devices, some exist in a current medium.

- What makes mobile different as a medium? It’s voice-centric, highly personal, it contains a slew of the user’s own information, it’s networked, it’s ubiquitous (both always on and always with the user), it’s usable anywhere and it almost always now has a camera.

- But, almost none of the above characteristics can be used by mobile games. No simultaneous voice and data connections, and J2ME (for good reason) can’t access phone and date book information.

- The phone is networked, but it’s hard to use because of high latency, the JAR model makes it hard to add new levels and content to a game on the fly, and it’s also hard to connect services without a server.

- Location-based services still really don’t work well. Cell-based locating is too inaccurate, and GPS is too slow and doesn’t work in dense urban areas.

- APIs for cameras that are useful to games developers are few and far between.

- To enable mobile true mobile games, technology providers must figure out how to let developers use the features already available on devices, how to use them better and to make sure they’re as widely developed — and as standardized across manufacturers — as possible.

- Voice is the biggest example. Player communication is vital to every multiplayer game, from cards to MMOGs. Online services in the 80s noticed that just adding text chat to classic board games spurred usage.

- “Single-player games are a wast of devices built for human communication.” (A quote from my former colleague Justin Hall on TheFeature)

- How to make voice a reality? Ensure deployment of OMA PoC as soon as possible, and further examine VoIP in the context of gaming.

- People should be able to use their phone books, which is their “buddy list”. Shouldn’t have to create a new list for gaming. Create ways to for people to play their friends (ie sending an SMS if they’re not online), and to make people they’ve met online “friends” out of game.

- It’s in everybody’s interest to make superdistribution a reality. If someone wants to send a game to their friend, and their friend wants to buy it, it should happen — regardless of if they’re on different carriers or using devices from different vendors.

- Networking has to improve, and much of that is dependent on operators’ configurations — reducing latency isn’t a high priority because gaming is one of the only applications that needs it.

- Developers should have easy ways to both add new content to games (new levels etc) and pull content from a user’s phone (say they have a personal avatar).

- The success of mobile games has been based on cross-vendor, cross-operator solutions, like J2ME. But technology doesn’t yet let developers take advantage of the things about mobile devices that make them different from any other platform.

- Presumably, the ideal mobile game will be one that won’t translate well to other platforms.

A commenter on Russell’s earlier post about Gizmondo execs and their interesting management payment plans turned us on to a little further scandal earlier in the week regarding some previous extracurricular activities of some of their executive team — apparently some of them had done some time in Sweden for fraud and organized crime.

In an SEC document that came out this week (but was dated October 20), the two that went to jail resigned along with Gizmondo Europe’s MD, who had earlier reimbursed the company for some of the expenses paid to him, his wife and companies to which he was connected that Russell pointed out in his first post.

It’s an interesting soap opera. Just a shame it’s more interesting than any of the company’s actual business.

Jason Ford, the general manager of games and entertainment for Sprint Nextel gave the mobile keynote this morning at the Austin Game Conference. Here are some notes from his presentation:

- All this talk about the “third screen” — the mobile phone is more like the 4th or 5th screen for gamers.

- Who is the gaming customer? 51% male, average age of 30 (compared to 44 for general wireless subscribers), ethnic minorities “over-index” for mobile game purchasing. But the next wave of mobile gamers is more mainstream: the average age of people intending to buy games in the next year is 35.

- New gaming demographics, such as the “hard-off” player: hardcore mobile gamers off their normal platform, and are more than twice as likely as average consumer to buy a mobile game.

- Casual games are the most popular for mobile, leading to the “cardcore” player: hardcore casual games players. Sprint’s top Bejeweled player has logged 44,171 games in 2,025 hours, and the average of top 100 players is 750 hours. For the World Poker Tour game Sprint offers, players start with $2000. 17 people already have over $10 billion, 61 have over $1 billion, and 675 have over $1 million.

- The market is immature, so it’s important to exceed customer expectations with great games and a complete experience so they’ll both play again and tell their friends.

- 8 pillars of mobile gaming business: quality, partners, , attract, pricing, carrier, but the three most important are exceed (exceeding customer’s expectations), megarg (acronym for make every gamer a repeat gamer), buzz (what happens when you succeed on exceed and megarg)..

- Exceed: games must exceed customers’ expectations, which are the bar by which they judge everything. For example, Sprint offers two very similar tennis games. One is branded with a famous player’s name, and the second is not. The unbranded game ranks 88 places higher in user ratings, and the branded version is next to last.

- In-fusio’s VP of game design says “the definition of a fun game is the one that is able to tap into the emotion of the player so that he/she is compelled to automatically press ’start’ again. There is some new hook (and it can be simple) that keeps me coming back. The two biggest reasons people stop playing mobile games is lack of interest and poor overall quality of game play.

- Megarg: Make Every Gamer A Repeat Gamer. New customers are great, but let’s keep the ones we have. Look to the customer for feedback and direction. For one game, Sprint’s ratings partner had rated a game 8.6, whereas the average customer feedback from 400 votes was 6.1. Evaluate games from the player point of view, not just employees, people in the office, and professional reviewers. To that end, Sprint has a review board of 10-15 customers to look at games. The focus needs to be on what customers feel about a game. Do they feel cool? wowed? happiness? warmth?

- Buzz: Consumers will spread the word about good games if we give them the opportunity. People don’t buy games because of brands or technology — they buy them because they’re fun. Customers become “mini-evangelists” if the focus is on great games. 21% of mobile game customers heard about a game from a friend (74% heard about it from a carrier). The highest rated games in Sprint’s game lobby have the lowest churn.

- Sprint did a study by geographic area of games downloads, and it could see tiny pockets with high download rates, a phenomenon they put down to people spreading games among their friends.

- Carriers don’t always understand what has to happen in developers’ business for them to be successful. Conversely, developers don’t always understand carriers’ business — these misunderstandings cause much of the conflict between the two. For instance, games are just one thing carriers market to customers, not the only thing.

From the Q&A:

- Multiplayer is being used increasingly as an aspect of mobile games, rather than their top characteristic.

- The “predominant” force behind deck placement decisions for Sprint is customer feedback.

- Sprint wants to see the industry grow through alternate distribution channels (premium SMS, etc), but wants to make sure they’re done in the right manner and don’t alienate customers through things like unclear subscription plans.

- Sprint’s policy is that for a game to be billed on a subscription basis, it has to have a service element — no monthly payments simply to keep the ability to play a game.

- The phone’s biggest advantage over portable devices like the PSP and DS are that people have their phone with them all the time.

One of the MVNOs I met with at CTIA, SK-Earthlink, has rebranded, and is now going by “Helio”. It’s still planning to launch in the spring here in the US, and hasn’t given many details on its content or pricing strategy yet, apart from saying it will target 18- to 30-year-olds with high-end devices and advanced services.

It’s early, but the company is still saying all the right things. I missed the news a few weeks ago (PDF) that they hired away the director of design from Danger — that’s a good move as well. The Hiptop isn’t without its faults, but its UI and industrial design certainly isn’t one of them.

I saw this on Digg earlier: Can You Spot The Hidden Cell Towers?

Nothing new or earth-shattering, but some relatively amusing pictures of base stations and antennas hidden in palm trees, cacti, or, my personal favorite, big plastic rocks.