Nokia, mobile phone giant, is finally getting into AppStore business with the launch of Ovi AppStore. The launch was a disaster – they probably had to much press coming out and experience a huge traffic spike. While I write this post the Ovi home page says ‘We’re sorry, Ovi.com is unavailable at the moment’. I’m sure they will figure it out and get it right in a matter of short time and developers should start getting their hands on (use this link to register as a publisher). It took me about 10 minutes to register our legal entity as a publisher. Way faster then with Apple AppStore.

Applications published on Ovi have the potential to reach 50 MLN of devices right now and 300 MLN of devices by 2012 according to Nokia. This is why you might want to become the publisher ASAP. It looks like there is only 536 applications on AppStore and some of the phone models have a few apps only. This might be a gold rush for early publishers.

Nokia believes that Ovi Store is the best opportunity for Flash developers to reach Nokia users globally, targeting 50 million users at launch in May and up to 300 million by 2012.

Revenue split between publisher and Nokia? Home page says 70% of revenue goes to developer but digging further in terms you find out that it’s true as long as user pays by credit card, once it’s operator billing you end up with 50% extracted for tax and operator fees and the resulting amount is multiplied by 0.7 which leaves the publisher with much lower payout.

Credit Card Transactions
Developer will receive 70% of end user price, less applicable taxes, returns, refunds, and bad debt.

Example Calculation
Purchase Price: 5€
Tax Deduction: 5€ – 10% tax = 4,50€
Publisher Revenue: 4,50€ x 70% = 3,15€*

Operating Billing Transactions
Developer will receive 70% of end user price, less applicable taxes, returns, refunds, bad debt, and operator billing charges ranging from 40% – 50%.

Example Calculation
Purchase Price: 5€
Tax Deduction: 5€ – 10% tax = 4,50€
Operator Billing Deduction: 4,50€ – 40% = 2,70€
Publisher Revenue: 2,70€ x 70% = 1,89€*

Technologies/programming languages supported?

Symbian Applications, Java Applications, Web RunTime (WRT) Widgets, Flash Lite Appications

Useful process start-up links:

Ovi Developer Discussion Forums

Documents: Publisher Guide, Billing Matrix, Supported Device List as well as FAQ section

Developer Wiki

Actual Ovi Store where you can browse published apps.

Signing application issue explained

Good luck with development and see your content on Ovi soon!

P.S. We were lucky to register www.ovidevelopment.com and www.oviappreviews.com domain names a while ago, if you have a partnership or purchase offers for those please feel free to email to peter (at) moveyourweb.net

Tags: ovi, ovi appstore, ovi development
Posted in cool links, flash, game development, iphone development | No Comments »

Apalon, our game development and animation arm is definitely having a busy week launching several projects at a time. There were more then 100 online news and review publications about those projects during this week so I’m going to list major news here:

It started on Monday with the release of Drunk Sniper iPhone Application which was released last weekend and immediately started generating buzz online:

http://www.venturebeat.com/2009/05/11/drunk-sniper-an-unofficial-sequel-to-those-iphone-beer-apps/

http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2009/may/13/ifart-iphone-applications-apps-apple

http://www.digg.com/apple/iPhone_App_Turns_iPhone_into_a_Penis

http://www.appleiphoneapps.com/2009/05/drunk-sniper-realistic-beer-relieving-experience-on-your-iphone/

http://www.iphonesavior.com/2009/05/drunk-sniper-the-ultimate-iphone-pissing-game.html

Tuesday – browser based animated MMORPG Disciple released together with Resistor Productions LLC and MMORPG.COM. Disciple had 12.000 preregistered users and during 4 days it raised to 15.000+ :

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/05/12/disciple-is-a-real-time-player-to-player-fantasy-battlefield-for-adults/

http://www.venturebeat.com/2009/05/12/resistor-productions-launches-a-bloody-browser-based-game-for-adults/

http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm/game/405/feature/3030

http://www.digg.com/playable_web_games/New_MMO_lets_gamers_hack_people_s_heads_off

Wednesday – Sparta – iPhone Game developed for Pockey Monkey Games is released and becomes popular the same day. I see it in TOP50 Games USA and TOP100 overall while writing this post.

Looks like half of Apalon folks was working day and night this week – me for sure. Luckily the weekend is here and we can take some rest now.

Tags: apalon, iphone application development, mmorpg development
Posted in cool links, corporate events, flash, game development, internet marketing, iphone development, management | No Comments »

In Belarus we celebrate a holiday which became Men’s Day long ago – it’s 23th of February, Defender of the Fatherland Day.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in cool links, corporate events | No Comments »

It’s a holiday time! We wish you and your family a peaceful, joyous holiday season and stability in 2009. We will happily keep supporting your business in the coming year!

Take a minute and see a greetings card created by our animation folks

You can also watch it in HD quality (youtube finally came up with the way to do it!)

Tags: greetings card, greetings cards, holiday greetings, joyous holiday season
Posted in cool links, corporate events | 2 Comments »

After the recent successful launch of Atomic Checkers Iphone Game we do not reject the leads for Iphone game development any more. Previously Iphone Application Development wasn’t our focus because of the lack of expertise and we stepped into this market finally.

For those of you wishing to learn this science too – here is the nice link to the course prepared by Stanford.

Tags: game development, iphone application development, iphone development
Posted in cool links, game development, iphone development | 1 Comment »

Social bookmarking seems to be the web 2.0 version of what catalogues and directories were originally created for back when the web was born – sites that contain useful links. Or trusted links. Or categorized links. All kinds of links.

But with social bookmarking instead of a few trusted editors for each directory (or topic within the directory as in DMOZ) here comes the power of the crowd that chooses the best sites and pages, instead or limited number of categories – myriads of tags that describe the links as precisely as possible and instead of just one place where the link would be found in a catalog, one wise submission to a social bookmaking site might mean tens or hundreds of links to your site syndicated all over the Internet.

Submitting your link to social bookmarking sites might seem a nice alternative to submitting it to directories. You do not have to wait till the link is approved by the editor (it will appear at the site at once, you can add as many tags describing the links as you need, and much more. If you just want to keep your bookmarks somewhere online instead of just within your browser and share selected links with a few friends and colleagues then any of social bookmarking sites will do for you. You can even go to semi-automatic submission to several sites, with the help of this tool for example.

You can test it on our page if you like: Socialize this page

If you follow this link above, you’ll get a list of services the link will be submitted to. And choosing any service in which you already have an account will bring you directly to the page where you add your link. You will not even have to type the link and page title into each form, the tool will do that for you.

But of course for each good idea there will be people who misuse it. People who will try to spam the social bookmarking sites. And of course these sites will fight such spammers. Some sites would use redirects instead of direct links. Some sites would use nofollow. This means that while any site from the list they use at
this Socializer tool will be fine for just using it to store your link collection not each and every one of them will be fine for SEO. My own top list will include del.icio.us, Yahoo MyWeb and stumbleupon.com and in the following posts I’ll cover each of them more in detail, explain why I chose these 3 sites and give a list of services that seem a complete waste of time for someone who is promoting a site, not just collecting links for fun or future use.

Tags: catalog, cool links, del.icio.us, dmoz, internet marketing, links, SEO, social bookmarking, social bookmarks, stumbleupon, yahoo
Posted in SEO, cool links, internet marketing | 2 Comments »

I recently found easy-to-use software designed for developers using agile methodology. We didn’t try out this tool yet, however the creators of the application have very good valuable posting on their BLOG featuring the Agile development process in details. Worth reading by all our developers.

Posted in cool links | 1 Comment »

I might be late with this link (solid part of experienced internet users already use this tool) however I couldn’t post a notice about it for those of you who still have no idea about it. It’s really hard to find the information that has real value to you, because there are tons of the web sites cached by Search Engine’s clawlers (hey – our guys at SEO dpt promote a lot of web sites resulting at TOP10 positions while they might not be a kind of resources that have value for end customers in the specified period of time).
Fortunately, you don’t have it to do all the searching yourself. Check out del.icio.us, a social bookmarking tool that lets you see the latest Web resources to be “discovered” by other users who are searching for the same topics you are.

I just tried “project management” search and found the open source clon of basecamp I was hunting for couple of weeks. Hopefully we will integrate it into our project management process for some teams that use Agile methodology soon.

Tags: cool links, SEO
Posted in SEO, cool links | No Comments »

SEO PM Mike just forwarded the link to nice tool checking the upload time of any web site in different locations of the world. The results include a timestamp for the check, the location checked from, the result of the check, amount of data received in kilobytes (KBytes), the response time in seconds (Secs), and the transfer rate in kilobits per second (Kbps).

Tags: cool links, response time
Posted in cool links | 1 Comment »

Roman from SEO department passed me another cool link to the wayback internet machine. Here you can browse through 40 billion web pages archived from 1996 to a few months ago. I played with it for a while and found some interesting old looks of today’s e-monsters. Did you know that Froogle existed in 1998?

Tags: cool links, froogle, fun stuff, SEO
Posted in cool links | 1 Comment »