When Appy Entertainment announced its launch earlier this year, it created more excitement than the average iPhone developer due to the history of its founders, who'd worked on console games including Ready 2 Rumble, the Oddworld series, Darkwatch and The Bourne Conspiracy.

However, the company's first app isn't a pure game - it's a fun personalisation application called Appy Newz. However, as co-founder and brand director Paul O'Connor tells us, it's just the start of the company's plans.

See below for his thoughts on Appy Newz, the iPhone 3.0 software, and his prediction for Apple's future plans to get even more gamey.

What's the thinking behind Appy Newz as your first app?

It actually grew from a more ambitious product idea that we elected to shelve after Alpha. That other product wasn't going to hit the quality bar that we've set internally. So here we were, several weeks into our first project, no closer to shipping, and our money burning (we're a self-funded startup).

One aspect of that project generated posters similar to the news covers of Appy Newz. We carved off that chunk of the technology and wrapped it around the concept of building spoof news covers featuring family and friends.

This still required several weeks' work and an entirely new interface, but at least some of our core tech made the transition.

The Appy Newz concept proved to be dead-center for our product philosophy of Apps that promote sharing, customisation, and laughter, so even though we took the long route to get here, Appy Newz ended up being the right product for our brand.

Plus, we're using the personalization and face technology at the heart of our next App.

Was it important that you came out with an entertainment app rather than a game?

The game space is super competitive but I would have preferred to debut there if we could justify it - the next several Apps in the Appy pipeline are all games, and we'd like to develop some recognition in that category.

But Appy Newz isn't a game - with Shake It To Make It, there's a random quality that is definitely entertaining, but it doesn't have any of the goal or reward structures of a game. So we came out in the Entertainment category, and we're trying out the Photography category, too.

What's your view of iPhone so far, from working on that and other projects - are you enjoying the platform, and why?

I'm enjoying the platform because of the reduced barriers to making new stuff and the fast development times ... we're coming to this out of the console industry, where we'd work on something for years and spend tens of millions of dollars before bringing a game to market. Three-month development cycles are refreshing.

On the downside, the market is unorganised, visibility it is difficult to guarantee in the App Store, and Apple is pretty clearly overwhelmed with the success of this market, leading to longish lead times for product approvals and sometimes-random rejections.

You accept these growing pains as a young company in an emerging market, but it can be frustrating.

What's exciting you going forward? Is there stuff in iPhone 3.0 you're itching to crack on with?

Just getting into the market and finding out which of our Apps is going to catch fire. Everything we're doing right now shares our common core brand values of sharing, friendship, and customisation, but each uses that recipe in different ways.

We're positioned to rapidly follow-up on the success of any single App, but right now our job is to put a lot of bread on the water and see what the market does.

From a 10,000 foot view I can tell you exactly what Appy will look like a year from today, but from up close, just looking at the Apps themselves, things could go a lot of different directions and that's exciting.

What's your view of iPhone gaming in general, and its potential for Appy?

Pretty clearly this market is wide-open, rich with possibilities. Large publishers and outside money is starting to take notice.

The user base is growing like crazy and I believe Apple has some game-changing surprises in store - for example, I fully expect them to make a flank march on the living room with game content via a repositioned Apple TV sometime in the next year or two.

Our job at Appy is to build an entertainment brand in this exploding market that fans come to recognize as a symbol of quality and fun.

We have a long-range product vision but it has to be subordinate to where the market goes and what the market tells us in terms of reception of our games.

At the same time, we have to keep an eye on the long term prospects for Appy. It's tempting to chase trends but to paraphrase Wayne Gretzky, we're trying to skate to where we think the puck is going to be, rather than to where it is right at this moment.