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Zap 'em with the button
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BHUMIKA K. tells you how you can eliminate aliens or win the Wimbledon on your cellphone for a hundred bucks
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Amrita Ghosh: `We're trying to make these games accessible to people.' — Photo: V. Sreenivasa Murthy
GET BEHIND a spaceship and fire away those laser beams, defeat aliens, throw snowballs, bowl ninepins, escape from a prison, jump into a fierce air combat. All this without stepping out of the house, moving nothing more than your fingers. Just gritting teeth and cursing when you miss. And exulting on the highest score.
There's a new temptress around the corner. If you're tired of your distressed-denim clad `Yo!' son zapping away at his cell phone with fierce concentration, you ain't seen nuthin' yet.
Mobile life and style
Mobile Entertainment India, a Bangalore-based "mobile lifestyle" company, is setting up Kick Start Time Pass kiosks from which you can download over 300 "branded" mobile games, many of which are take-offs from Hollywood blockbusters and come with a host of ring tones (even Chinese ones), and wallpapers. All you do is buy a scratch card and download games for around a hundred bucks each.
After stores that dealt out linen, candles, and art as lifestyle products, now we have the mobile life-ishtyle.
So-fa-so-good. But we wonder how many hands would go up if you ask for owners of hi-fi colourful Java-enabled phones with infrared. Because they are the handsets that are willing to download all these J2ME-driven games. And the kiosk will decide which game can run on your specific handset model.
Gadgets and geeks
However, many probably don't know they have infrared on their gadgets. Geeks would have obviously done much more with their gadgets than the kiosk can offer. Lesser mortals have to make do with Space Impact, Pop Ball, Snake and Bricks.
Subtract the Richie Richs from the Java-infrared combo population and we perhaps have movers and shakers, men and women who own these cool phones, but have other games to play in life and at work, thank you!
But ask Amrita Ghosh, Director and CEO of Mobile Entertainment India Pvt. Ltd, who will buy her games, and she tells you that their soft study has found that people are interested in newer kinds of mobile content, especially games. "Global and all-India studies show that most people are not educated on value added services and downloads, international games."
Aha! And we thought kids these days knew it all.
But why will people buy when many are quite game to play with what their cellular network provider already offers? "We're only trying to lighten up your life some more, within 100 bucks," offers Amrita. Let's see — a hundred bucks is a movie ticket at a multiplex or any theatre around MGs, a decent burger, around two litres of gas...
But what the heck, this is entertainment.
So you can have the thrill of playing Venus Williams World Tennis, Football Fever, Mobile Bowling, Sergei Federov Face-Off Hockey, casino and racing games, the award-winning war-based game Call of Duty, Top Gun, True Crime: Streets of LA, Star Trek, The Italian Job, Marbles, and even Truth or Dare. All this with no extra airtime or downloading charge.
Reaching out
"We have realised this has been quite an elitist affair, so we are trying to make it accessible to people," says Amrita, adding, "it's all about selling it rightly to the right people."
The company has signed an exclusive contract with the Mforma Group for the Indian sub-continent. A leading distributor of wireless entertainment content, Mforma has a presence in the U.S., U.K., Europe, South America, Korea, and China.
Their game plan for the future: to tie up with Bollywood production houses for content, sell branded themes such as Popeye for cell phones at the kiosk, and introduce advanced WAP and Java applications into the Indian retail market.
More kiosks
While they have started out with two kiosks at the Global Access stores on St. Mark's Road and in Koramangala, they plan to roll out 100 such kiosks in the coming year. "Bangalore is ideal market-testing ground with a huge population of the MTV crowd and an equally strong IT-savvy population," says Amrita.
For more information, contact 25226303/04.
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