Smartphone Mobilizes Urbaniacs

UrbaniacSmartphone 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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