He touched on Nielsen’s law - the Moore’s law of Bandwidth - which ” holds that bandwidth available to the high end customer increases by 50 per cent compound each year, and that the mass market will lag two to three years behind it.”

He also talked about the market and consumer’s willingness to pay for the access as a major driver for the take up of higher speeds. Picking up on your fears that we may go back to a “dark age” of having to actually post stuff (how on earth would Royal Mail cope?), Richards clearly recognises the importance of good broadband access, commenting: “These networks form part of the critical infrastructure of the country’s economy and will be central to the way we live our lives in the future.”

He then went on to talk about the drivers of change and the technology aspects - all in all it seems like it was an interesting speech. If you want to take a look at the full copy, it’s here: http://www.ofcom.org.uk/media/speeches/2008/04/ietspeech

enjoy!

Perhaps I should have realised that the planning was not all that it should have been when I was unable to get the volunteers’ lunch of a sandwich, packet of crisps and bottle of water (or packet of Ribena) at 12.30 pm because they had already run out!

It was an interesting day and one I will dine out on for some time to come.

I vaguely remember something like this feedback vest has come out before too. See:
http://www.pocket-lint.co.uk/news/news.phtml/12159/13183/gamers-get-force-feedback-vest.phtml

Might it be worth managing Heather Mills McCartney though? Yes you’d end up with egg on your face… But didn’t she owe her lawyers £2 million even though she dumped them within a month or so? That’s pretty good going.

Alex

I think I’d have to stay well clear of the “tainted” celebrity resurrection campaigns, like Michael Jackson, Heather Mills, Britney Spears, ANY political figure and other examples of people being their own undoing. I’m sure there is money to be made in working with them but I am a simple creature who prefers a quiet life to what I would assume would be the non-stop craziness of celeb management.

Jo

That said, I also think that the second Sony or Nintendo et al get behind a mobile company, the mobile gaming experience will really take off in a big way, with proper adverts and everything…

You’re right though. Whilst the best mobile phones can offer me is ’snakes’ and naff puzzles, I’m not going to spend my hard earned EML wages on downloads of games that will hold my attention for 5 minutes at a time at most!

If I were more of a geek and had more time, I’d explore who was behind Warcraft and SecondLife as I would think those both have a lot of potential on the right mobile platform. But I’m not a geek (honest) and I need to go and earn those wages so that I can not spend them on mobile gaming.

I also agree with your assessment that it’s got to be a console (with an additional phone) rather than a phone with gaming. I also think that the one thing the N-Gage got mostly-right was designing the look-and-feel of the handset with gaming in mind, not phone functionality. Ultimately if someone is going to buy one of these devices they’re probably thinking about games at least as much as the phone.

Bottom-line, if it looks like a phone, it probably won’t sell to mobile gamers. That said, the N-Gage’s side-on phone functionality was a bit silly. All I’m saying is make it *look* like a games console (rather than have two huge buttons on the front for ‘dial’ and ‘hang up’.

The biggest problem companies such as Apple, Nokia, et al are going to face when creating a viable games platform is size. The PSP is more or less the ideal size for a gaming platform in terms of being able to twiddle the various controllers with both hands at once, while still being able to see the screen. But for a phone it’s way too big.

For this reason I honestly think a large conducting (not pressure-based) touchscreen such as Apple’s is going to be the future for these kind of games platforms. Capacitance screens would let OEMs provide a reasonably-sized screen and two-hand control, without having to provide a device the size of the PSP.

However whether or not this will translate to Apple becoming the top of the mobile gaming pile or not is uncertain. Apple does not have an amazing history of game-porting. Are their games going to be Java-based (which would be unfortunate in terms of performance), or written in a native code?

I think Sony or Nintendo both have the opportunity to squash the iPhone, but only if they hop on the capacitance sceen bandwagon very soon. Otherwise Apple will gain enough momentum to own this market.

Alex Perryman