Widgets: the latest distribution channel for mobile games

Ever heard of mobile widgets? If not, they're well worth reading up on.

They're the latest buzzword in the wider mobile industry, thanks to services like WidSets, Zumobi, Yahoo's Go for Mobile, and Qualcomm's recently announced Plaza platform.

In short, they're mobile applications which contain a number of widgets – usually within an iPhone-esque icon-based UI – enabling users to interact with mobile or web services.

So, you might have a Flickr widget to upload your photos to that site, a Gmail widget to access your inbox, a BBC News widget to get the latest headlines and so on.

Yet widgets can also be games, or at least connections to game sites. Talking to Zumobi's John SanGiovanni recently, he said that games are particularly popular widgets on his company's platform.

"Almost every user has at least two games," he said. "Even the knowledge workers, who you might think will just have stock news and other financial stuff, like to have video game news, or games."

Check out WidSets, Nokia's widget platform, and its library of widgets that includes 27 pages in the Fun and Games category. Yahoo's Go for Mobile application has lots of games widgets, too, while Zumobi's Games & Humor category is also worth a look.

The point is, all these new mobile widget platforms are getting increasing distribution.

WidSets is being preloaded on Nokia handsets, but also works on others. Zumobi is expanding beyond its Windows Mobile base, having just launched a BlackBerry version. Yahoo is pushing Go heavily, while Qualcomm is hoping to pitch Plaza to operators to offer to their users.

As a mobile games company, now's a good time to be investigating how you can use these widget platforms. Even if it's just to create a widget driving people to your WAP site (as Gameloft has done for Yahoo Go).

Talk to the mobile widget firms, and they'll tell you their platforms will at some point become the de facto way for mobile users to access and discover content over the mobile internet.

True? That's yet to be determined. But considering the relatively small effort required to experiment on these platforms, it would seem like a no-brainer for mobile games companies.

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