Mobile URLs in Japan

I have read article about mobile URLs and how they use them in Japan. I recommend you to read it.

It looks like, that in Japan, they solved problem which every mobile startup is solving and that is what kind of url they should use for their project.

For Cotopia, we choose to use www.cotopia.com for web version and cotopia.mobi for mobile version of the site.

There is no problem with our web url, but we had a lot of arguing about our mobile URL.

Other possibilities were using old wap.cotopia.com, which we used from 2003 to 2007 or new schema, which is starting to be adopted by big USA internet sites like Facebook or Google, which is m.domain.com, in our case it would be m.cotopia.com.

We decided, that wap domain is not good anymore. People generally don't like wap and there is not "cool" effect in wap anymore.

So our "fight" was whether to use m.cotopia.com or cotopia.mobi.

.mobi was just starting and I was thinking that it makes total sense to use it. It looked like, that .mobi initiative will try to help all .mobi startups and they will push it hard. For some reasons, this process is much slower than I was thinking it would be. Today, still nobody knows, what .mobi domain is. If I tell somebody to go to cotopia.mobi , they usually ask me if they should write www in front of it.

From this perspective, I think .mobi domain is good for projects, which have no .com domain.
If your website have www.domain.com, put your mobile version to m.domain.com. It's cheaper and easier to explain.

Or you may try the Japanese approach from the article and let me know how it goes.

Cotopia open sources Project Darkstar client API for JavaME

I've done it again :) After some time of development I've decided to open source another of my brilliant endeavors:

Project Darkstar client API for JavaME together with a Darkstar management console (as a NetBeans plugin)

The project contains everything you need to take advantage of Project Darkstar in your MIDlets:

1. Web project template which serves as an HTTP proxy for a Project Darkstar client application

2. Mobile project template with all code required to connect to the Web proxy implements the Java ME HTTP based Project Darkstar API

3. A NetBeans based Project Darkstar server instance management console (under Tools-> Darkstar server menu) that enables user to start and stop server application instances without any need to mess around with command line

4. (Planned/not yet there) Java ME socket based Project Darkstar API will be available soon

All of this good stuff is packaged for NetBeans 6+ only. If you don't have NetBeans installed then stop being a loser and go get it. You have no business doing Java ME development without it anyway! :)

To give it a try download the sources from:
https://darkstarmobile.dev.java.net/

I'll answer questions via email, tutorial is comming soon.

Our google ratings - pretty good I'd say :)

Check this out - Cotopia is on the first page if you Google for:

multiplayer mobile games

and it's on the second page if you search for:

mobile multiplayer games

given our marketing budget of $50 a year I'd say that Tomas is doing pretty good job promoting us. Now only if we could make it to number #1 for both search terms, we may have to double our budget :)

Adding Go to our portfolio is something we will do pretty soon to achieve this goal. Our little poll (on the right side of this page) indicates that Go is the next thing players want and as always (well... nearly always) what players want players get.

Multilingual mobile game project

After I have mobilized our blog using Wirenode RSS to mobile solution. We are getting some comments from cotopia.wirenode.mobi mobile page using text area for getting messages.
Point is, that as we are international project, just recently I have got this comment to my email.

I have no idea, what is in this message. If anyone can translate it, it would be great. I hope its not anything offensive :-), it should be in Arabic language.

In our in game forums, we are getting some international posts too. There are not many of them right now, so its ok, but we will have to do something with it in the future. Possibly sooner than English will be the only one world language on this planet.

Project DarkStar: light at the end of the tunnel?

Ever since I finished the Game Builder plug-in for NetBeans Mobility I've been looking for ways to further improve NetBeans and make it fit with Cotopia's goal of dominating the world (as far as mobile multi-player games go anyway). Then I read an article on java.sun.com about Project DarkStar - an open-source multi-player game server. Now there is something that we could use. Our current server implementation is based on EJB3 spec and GlassFish and works like a charm (currently we're handling nearly 2000 games a day) so no problems there. However, I am an explorer, rather than a "if it ain't broken don't fix it" kind of guy, and this DarkStar thing really strikes me as something worth exploring. So I continued in my new tradition:

If it's cool - write a NetBeans plugin for it.

I've exchanged a few emails with Jeff Kesselman (DarkStar lead) and I am happy to say that I am nearly finished with the plug-in which features:

• Server management
  
• Application management
  
• .. and some code templates to make DarkStar work with mobile phones over HTTP

The whole thing will be presented at Java Mobile & Embedded Developer Days in SF in a few days by a friend of mine from Sun (NetBeans Mobility engineer) Karol Harezlak.

How does this fit together with Cotopia? Well, Project DarkStar is capable of handling the back end for Massively Muiltiplayer games, and who said that Cotopia was going to always be about 1 on 1 play? While we have more 2 player games in development (BallShot, Poker, Go, Checkers ..) we're looking into the future and see masses of players all interacting together in a new kind of game :)

Admob geo stats

Admob have released geographical statistics (Geo Stats) as a new feature. I have been waiting for that for a long time (see my Google mobile analytics post).

This is how it looks like for cotopia.mobi site.

I hope they will add phone types and operators in each country to the statistics soon.

Celebrating 100000 games played

Thanks all of you for supporting us. We hope that soon we will have this number in active players too.
Please take a poll in the right menu and vote which game we should release next.

Connected mobile games

I have spoken with several people about mobile games with multiplayer capabilities and I was surprised that those games are also called connected games.

I am now not sure, what is more used, should we call our games connected games or multiplayer games? I am writing this post to see, how many people will come to it from Google search, based on search term "connected games" (connected gaming), that's why the title is a little bit strange.

We keep calling our platform multiplayer for now.

If anybody knows the difference, please let me know.

UPDATE 1:
for term "connected games" , we are number 9 on Google
for term "connected mobile games", we are number 5 on Google

I will post data from Google Analytics on how many people use this term soon

UPDATE 2:
I have observer the Google stats and only three people came to the blog using connected mobile games term. What does it mean? I think that it means that nobody is using this term.

Lets go back to free mobile multi player games term.

I am doing some other observations regarding mobile SEO, I hope I will write a post about the results.

It's getting bigger

Here's another great piece of news:

We're past the "20000 registered users" mark.

I think that's excellent because it shows that even with a minimal (virtually zero) marketing budget a project can attract people by providing a good entertaining experience.
Our games are - and always will be - free. We believe that users should not be FORCED to pay for good entertainment, they should WANT to pay to keep it going (in other words use the donation button). This is similar to what I've recently seen happening with free podcast books. Make it free and they will come (more than once if your content's good enough). And don't forget - there are always adds to help along the way :)

Serving more than 1000 games a day

I think this is pretty awesome - just yesterday we've hit more than 1000 games served in a day for the second time (that's actual games played after both opponents confirm) here is a small table:

Date / Games

2007-11-08: 1013

2007-11-09: 818

2007-11-10: 713

2007-11-11: 1126


I think this is really great and I hope that the numbers keep going up. Right after we re-launched in July we were getting between 10 and 140 games per day so it's good to see that the community is growing and having fun!