Earlier on this week, UK mobile game and middleware company Ideaworks3D announced that dominant mobile chip design outfit ARM had made an strategic investment in it.

The amount was undisclosed but a sensible reading of the situation would suggest at least couple of million for a minority stake (although, interestingly ARM didn't issue a press release about the deal so it probably wasn't stacks of cash).

Such speculation aside, however, we fired some questions over to Ideaworks3D's CEO Alex Caccia (pictured) to find out some more about how the deal would impact the company's future, especially with respect to its Airplay game development technology.

Pocket Gamer: Obviously this is an important deal for Ideaworks3D but is the financial investment or medium term access to ARM's sales and marketing efforts etc more important?

Alex Caccia: The heart of the deal is a shared mutual interest and vision in providing the market with a real solution to fragmentation across ARM-based devices for application development, including games.

There has already been extensive co-operation between our companies in building Airplay in the first place, and we have integrated ARM-based tools into the Airplay development to improve the quality of the SDK.

We will share marketing efforts where we can, and will share perspectives on the market, but of course we sell to very different parts of the value chain.

Can you be a bit more specific in terms of what you will use the money for?

The plan is to use the funding to support our go-to market plan, which extends to offering services to content and applications companies that want to deploy efficiently across multiple platforms and operating systems, to OEMs and potentially operators looking for a cross-platform architecture for distribution.

We launched Airplay as a commercial product mid-way through last year, after three years of development, and have approached the market gradually, focusing on a few key customers, including EA.

We now plan to widen the customer base, and include application developers outside the gaming space, as our API set supports a wide range of functionality.

Will you increase your support for specific ARM hardware; notably its MALI 3D chip designs?

The dominant theme is cross-platform, so we will support all relevant hardware architectures, including MALI, but not to the exclusion of other GPU solutions. We need to maintain a neutral position in order to provide real value to our customers.

Not all game companies associated with ARM have gone on to prosper - Superscape for example - so are you worried that the attitude of potential customers may change?

There has been an overwhelmingly positive reaction to this investment from our customers - and this is because everyone in this industry involved in building content businesses is plagued by dealing with fragmentation, and are looking for assurance about the available solutions.

As you would expect, ARM's investment followed extensive technical due diligence, and this in itself will help build confidence in Airplay in the market as a whole.

Will ARM's involvement change Ideaworks3D's focus in terms of the split between your game development work and your game middleware work?

These two activities have co-existed in our business for a number of years, and we plan to continue running the business in this way. ARM's investment provides real credibility to our strategy around Airplay and our middleware solution, as well as strategic guidance around building a developer community.

As software developers, we all know that games push any platform to the limit, and we have benefited from this tension in building Airplay - and from the fact that we were delivering high-quality commercial games right the way through the development process.

Finally, why do you think this is a good deal for ARM?

ARM's business is built around selling licenses for ARM-based processors. A healthy ecosystem for content will drive the uptake of more powerful mobile devices which need powerful processors, and often more of them. This will ultimately benefit ARM.

As already outlined, at the moment content development is hampered by fragmentation, and so our shared belief is that the success of Airplay will ultimately benefit ARM's core business.

Thanks to Alex for his time, and we'll expect more news about the company's push with respect to Airplay before too long.