Smartphone Technologies has signed a licensing deal with online community site Urbaniacs. Urbaniacs allows users to create a hero by combining body parts in a mix-and-match fashion, and then equip them, play games with them, socialize with them and so on. Under the agreement Smartphones will “create, format and distribute worldwide a variety of wallpapers, voice ringtones, ringback tones, animations, video clips and text messaging campaigns for mobile phones based on Urbaniacs popular Internet content”. Personally, I think they’ve missed the boat if this is all they’re going to do. With a site in which users create their own avatar and then spend time playing that character users want things specific to that character—not general content from the site. It’s possible that Smartphone Technologies will be offering the above mobile content based on an individual character but it wasn’t mentioned.
I had a look at the site and a couple of things leapt out at me:
First, there are some simple games you can play to get “urbos” which you then spend to equip your character. These games would be very easy to port to mobile and a system set up so the urbos from the game went to your online character.
Second, there is a section where users can submit art and videos, and again this is the sort of thing that could be made available on a WAP site.
Hopefully Urbaniacs and Smartphone are doing the simple content first and gearing up for the more complicated, interactive stuff.
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