Gameloft’s strategy has been twofold:

• Buying licensing rights (like Avatar, UNO, Shrek, SplinterCell)
• Most interestingly, deliberately copying established games. This segment generate 58 % of Gameloft’s revenues, and features games like Gangstar (copy of Grand Theft Auto), Eternal Legacy (Final Fantasy), Modern Warfare (Call of Duty), The Settlers (Civilization).

It has proven very successful:

• Gameloft announced €141 m (about $200 m) in revenues, while Rovio (makers of AngryBirds) is rumored to make $50-70 m. EA’s mobile business generated about the same: $212 m — yet EA is a 6.5 bn company…
• The Ubisoft spin-off had 150 m downloads in 2010, about 400k per day.
• The firm has 4,800 employees.

Since major console developers were unprepared for the iPhone, Gameloft very quickly filled the void. As CFO Alexandre de Rochefort explains, “why should videogames be any different than novels, where most authors agree a handful of basic plots serve as the foundation of endless variations?”

The Gameloft example demonstrates how first-mover advantage can apply to mobile application platforms.

Sources:

• Fortune, Games you can Xerox

An expert in HTML, CSS, JavaScript but you don’t want to learn Objective-C?

Perfect! PhoneGap is your new best friend.

At this meetup we’ll get you started.

The requirement for this Meetup will be to bring a Mac laptop. You don’t need an iPad/iPhone because you can use the simulator, but if you’ve got one, bring it and you can launch your apps on your device.

Space is limited. Learn more and RSVP at our meetup page

The SF AppPitch will be at 6:30pm on June 10th at the pariSoma Innovation Loft. We will have 10 developers presenting and demoing their apps.

Developers will get 5 mins to show off their app to the crowd and the group of judges. Judges will include a VC, a successful developer, a mobile ad network representative, and a top representative from the mobile division of a large technology corporation. They will provide feedback to developers and select the top apps.

Current judges:

Tony Mak, O’Reilly Alpha Tech Ventures

Eddie Marks, Inedible Software

Anthony Ha, Assitant Editor, VentureBeat

Ashwani Kumar, inMobi

We have thousands of dollars in prizes for the top apps, as named by the judges, and some great schwag to give out to attendees. Prizes include mobile ad network credit, targeted survey taking, and more.

Drinks (beer and pariSoma’s famous sangria), snacks, and networking will happen between 6:30 and 7:30. At 7:30, we’ll have developers present, judges judge, and prizes given. Following the formal event we’ll have more drinks, snacks, and great networking.

Currently, we are looking for developers who want to pitch their app! Fill out the form here to be considered.

For the full list of apps, hit “more”!

Apps being demoed include:

Double Dutch – A best in class set of features combining cutting-edge social and location-based functionality.
DoubleDutch helps people stay connected with their friends while they discover new places.

Key features include: keeping track of places visited, connecting and competing with friends, reading and writing reviews of all the hottest spots around the corner and around the world, and more!






Econtact Pro – Econtact Pro is the best way to organize your business cards. It is the only app that uses manual trancription to input the data from all your business cards. Everyone has tried OCR business card readers and the response is always the same: it only does about 80% of the job. Econtact Pro is designed to do 100% of the job.

You snap, we transcribe, and it’s stored. With our manual transcription service, your contacts automatically sync to your native iPhone contacts and sortable by name, company, or date. We also provide .csv forms and backups of your contacts to input into your CRM or hold for your personal records. Based in France, Econtact Pro complies with the strictest privacy laws in the world as set forth by the European Union and France.

Ubercab - For almost a century the process to request a car service has been extremely similar to what it is today, terrible. Your options are to place a request by telephone for a car arriving the next day or you could walk to the street and hope that an available taxi would happen to pass by at the same time. There was no efficiency or dependability
to the process, and there still isn’t today. In early 2009 we set out to advance this industry and bring innovative solutions to this problem.

Today the UberCab team is working to provide high-quality, on-demand car service booked easily through your iPhone or SMS. Our location based dispatch platform provides elite, efficient, and simple car service using high-end sedans with reputable drivers rather than traditional taxi cabs. We’re starting in limited beta in San Francisco and rolling out to other cities in mid 2010.

Plus 3 Network’s iPhone App tracks your exercise via GPS and wirelessly syncs your activities back to the Plus 3 Website where you can take advantage of all the community enhancing options provided. Plus 3’s Web + Mobile platform motivates and rewards individuals for leading active lifestyles thanks to corporate sponsors who share a vision of healthy living and philanthropic giving. Plus 3’s playground includes a list of 45+ activities that individuals can log for charity as well as compete in challenges to create anywhere/anytime fitness fundraising events powered by donations from a corporate sponsor. Plus 3’s customizable, social network provides individuals with the opportunity to surround themselves with who and what matters to them. People become healthy heroes as they convert their daily efforts into a measurable difference in the community.

Visit www.plus3network.com to learn how you can make it count.

Skobbler is 3D turn-by-turn for the everyman… and by everyman we mean those of you that are broke! With the help of the open sourced mapping system “OpenStreetMap”, Skobbler has found a way to make what was typically the most expensive app on someones phone, their turn-by-turn directions app, and made it free!

Not only is it free, but because OpenStreetMap can be edited by its users, it is an ever evolving mapping system that over time will become the most accurate mapping system on the planet, beyond those offered by the GPS giants.

PhoneTell is a free application for Android smartphones that helps you manage inbound calls, and allows you to search/discover any number you want, instantly.

With PhoneTell, you can screen inbound calls and accept, decline or respond with one click. You can see who’s calling, even when the person or business is not in your address book. You can respond from a menu of pre-set or user-customized text messages that let your caller know you got their call with one click. PhoneTell even schedules a call back reminder so you never forget to call someone back.

PhoneTell takes your search for phone numbers beyond your mobile phone address book to your “personal cloud” of contacts and the universe of public/private phone number information. PhoneTell scours these data sources and with its patent-pending algorithms, searches, verifies, de-dupes and delivers ranked search matches instantly to your smartphone. Any number you would ever want to call – instantly accessible in your dialer.

iGift4u is the easiest way for you to share any content on social networks. iGift4u is a unique mashup of multiple web services (YouTube, Bing, Google Maps, iTunes) and embedded content (quotes, jokes, virtual gifts), sharable on Facebook, Twitter, SMS, MMS and e-mail.

Finally, you can search, preview and share videos from YouTube or web images, links and recent news from Bing; or send the Google map of your current location (also via SMS!) While listening to your music, you can read the lyrics, watch the music video from YouTube, check the Top 50 charts from iTunes, and obviously share your current song. After checking the available Facebook birthday calendar, you can send a beautiful virtual gift or use any of the images in the Collection to make your post and MMS more attractive and eye-catching. If you just want to update your status on both Facebook and Twitter, you can easily do with a single tap; and if you run out of words, over 25,000 quotes and 6,000 jokes are there to inspire you. iGift4u, making the iPhone social.

appbackr is the first wholesale digital marketplace for iphone and ipad applications where developers can sell wholesale copies of their apps to get immediate financing for development. The challenge facing many iPhone app developers is that it can take $5,000 to $10,000 to bring a new mobile app to market. Currently, they don’t get paid until the app sells in the iTunes marketplace. appbackr gives developers immediate funding by letting wholesale buyers acquire copies of apps, either in conceptual or finished form. The result is a win/win for developers, who get immediate funds for new applications without surrendering their intellectual property, and for buyers who can realize up to 53 percent profit on the apps sold through iTunes. The buyers also play a key role in aiding in distribution. Since each wholesale buyer has a vested interest in the success of your application, finding buyers who can help drive sales fills out the wholesale model and provides a scalable benefit to the developer.

Our Sponsors:

InMobi is the world’s largest independent global mobile advertising network.

InMobi provides advertisers, developers, and publishers with a uniquely global mobile advertising solution. InMobi, who doubled its network size quarter-over-quarter, delivers the unprecedented ability to reach 179 million consumers in over 100 countries through over 14 billion mobile ad impressions monthly.

InMobi is a venture-backed with marquee investors including: Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers and Sherpalo Ventures. The company has offices in London, San Francisco, Bangalore, Tokyo, Mumbai and Singapore. To learn more, please visit: www.inmobi.com

faberNovel is dedicated to innovation and its implementation. Our clients decide to call on us to handle any aspect of an innovation-linked project. We link together concepts, talents, technologies and the appropriate market to allow our clients, start-ups and industrial groups alike, to create prototypes or enable innovative
companies to define and lead for successful strategies focused on innovation and development. From idea to concept, to prototype, and to actual implementation, faberNovel applies its professional expertise, its specific innovation know how all the way to the launching of new products and services.

Mobclix (www.mobclix.com) is the industry’s largest mobile ad exchange network via its sophisticated open marketplace platform and comprehensive account management solution for iPhone application developers, advertisers, ad networks, and agencies. The Mobclix ad exchange provides complete transparency and visibility for developers to maximize revenues and advertisers to increase performance.

Media Sponsors:

The meeting will be chaired by iPhone Boot Camp trainers Eddie Marks and James Anthony, co-founders of Inedible Software – Inedible Software has produced some of the most popular apps in the app store, including Air Guitar, Shotgun Free, Shotgun Pro, POW and Song Sift. Shotgun Free was the #2 free app for over two weeks and has been on the Top 100 free list for over 6 of the last 9 months. They have also create a number of apps on contract, including an app to promote the Magnolia Pictures’s movie Mutant Chronicles and an app for the indoor mapping company Micello.

Developers and the hosts will also be discussing what we hope to be some very exciting Apple announcement on the 27th: the iTablet and the new SDK 4.0.

RSVP here.

Meetup Abstract:

In iPhone OS 3.0, in-app purchases will allow developers to offer subscription content and provide the ability to sell new content and features in a simple and secure process from directly within their apps. Meanwhile, game developers can leverage the new peer-to-peer connections support to more easily create peer-to-peer network games for iPhone and iPod touch by using Bluetooth.

The updated iPhone Software Development Kit (SDK) has over 1,000 new Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) which will facilitate new capabilities such as in-app content purchases; peer-to-peer connections over Bonjour; an app interface for hardware accessories; access to the iPod music library; a new Maps API and the long-awaited push notification support.

Discussion Leaders:

Eddie Marks and James Anthony, co-founders of Inedible Software.

Their company Inedible Software as produced some of the most popular apps in the app store, including Air Guitar including Shotgun Free, Shotgun Pro, and POW. Shotgun Free was the #2 free app for over two weeks and remained on the Top 100 free list for over 4 months, obtaining some 3.6 million downloads to date. They have also create a number of apps on contract, most notably an app to promote the Magnolia Pictures’s movie Mutant Chronicles, starring Ron Perlman, Devon Aoki and John Malcovich.

Learn more and RSVP here.