iPhone Hype: Big Business in Mobile Content
July 3rd, 2007 by Nilanjana Bhowmik
The iPhone – even with the reports of minor glitches and troubles with purchasing the phone on its debut weekend – has already been an enormous success for Apple. Since the Company announced the iPhone in January, Apple’s shares have increased by more than 40 percent. Clearly, investors are interested in investing in mobile technology.
The hype around the iPhone has brought even more attention to mobile phone use in the United States. As mobile technology continues to improve, users will demand more content for their cell phones. The iPhone has been so popular because it offers more mobile content capabilities than ever before — users can store photos, listen to music and play video content (like TV shows and movies). And, believe it or not, you can even make phone calls on it.
But as the hype around the iPhone begins to wane, we expect to see more articles like this one at the Informationweek blog “Over the Air.” Reporter Elena Malykhina recently mused about her adventures buying an iPhone and poses an interesting question in her headline: “I bought an iPhone… now what?”
We have one answer: Play games.
That’s one reason why Longworth recently invested in Cellufun, an ad-sponsored mobile gaming company that provides free games and content for web-enabled mobile phones. As more users buy iPhones and other next-generation mobile devices, our research indicates a surge in demand for mobile content – especially games designed specifically for the mobile format.
Cellufun is an attractive investment for several reasons:
- The games and content are free – sponsored by the growing market for mobile advertising. Free is an enormous attraction to young people, the largest users of mobile devices and the demographic most desired by advertisers.
- Cellufun offers multiplayer games so that friends can play games like “Battle for Orion’s Belt” and “Video Poker” together – as long as they are connected to the mobile network. So a college student in San Francisco can play “Saturday Night Bowling” with a friend in Boston.
- Cellufun’s platform – Smooth Move™ — enables a true arcade style experience for users no matter the carrier.
- Cellufun not only provides cutting-edge mobile games, but the community experience so that users can interact with one another to share hints and high scores and to meet other gamers.
The rapidly increasing interest in mobile games is one reason why Cellufun had more than 3 million unique visitors and more than 22 million page views last month alone.
As mobile phones get more sophisticated so will the content and services used on them. That’s why the hype around the iPhone is real. The mobile revolution that has already happened in Japan and Europe is about to become very real in the United States.
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