As the year draws to an end, it's time to look back at what happened in the world of mobile gaming during 2009.

Equally, the lessons of history are useless without a future to demonstration what we've learnt, so as well as asking various notables about their view on the past 12 months, we're also getting them to look ahead to 2010.

You can see the full list of our end of year interviews here.

Social gaming network technology was the big story during 2009 in terms of iPhone middleware.

German/US outfit Scoreloop wasn't the first to launch its platform but quickly got up to speed, powering titles such as FDG's four million-shifting Parachute Panic, as well as highlighting flexibility for clients with the launch of its White Label service and support for Android.

Marc Gumpinger is its CEO.

Pocket Gamer: What was the most significant event of 2009?

Marc Gumpinger: To me the most significant event of 2009 was Apple allowing in-app purchases for free apps. This might sound like a small thing, but it means a major shift from selling a game once to monetising its use. This significantly lowers the entry barriers for users and allows them to decide what they want to pay for.

Of course, Scoreloop provides the complete infrastructure to help developers, studios and publishers make the most out of this huge opportunity, both on iPhone and Android.

What was the most significant event for Scoreloop?

Opening up our social technologies as both White Label and going cross-platform for the major game publishers were significant events. We listen to the market. We've focused on White Label services as the user and brand experience is a big part of providing a quality game experience. And being able to integrate our social and monetisation features directly into a game has sparked great creativity among studios who are working on new Scoreloop-enabled games.

The other factor is that game publishers are going cross-platform and Scoreloop is making it easy to do so. We've got this incredible value proposition for publishers in that we can help them pull their communities into one interactive gaming experience regardless of platform.

What was your favourite mobile game of 2009?

This is a tough one for me but one of my favourites is Parachute Panic. FDG created a fun, simple and addictive game that nicely integrates all the social features that drive discovery. The graphics, music and style of play are simple yet sophisticated and pull users into engaged play. Still, it's a tough call because I have to admit that the other guys in our team keep on winning my player challenges way too often...

What do you predict will be the most important trends in 2010?

Social will be the new imperative. Why? Because that's what games have been all about for ages. No one would have ever thought about playing chess, go or mahjong on their own.

Playing a game solo on mobile is just born out of technical limitations, and that's what Scoreloop stands to solve: providing the infrastructure to bring back the genuine interactive gaming experience since it's in our human DNA to play with or against others and brag about our achievements.

If you could enforce one New Year's resolution, what would it be?

That resolution would be to focus on quality and not just volume. Currently the market of mobile games feels like we're back in the times of the C64 where you'd buy games with fancy covers and disappointing content. That doesn't encourage people to buy more games.

We need to continue to collaborate and focus on quality and fun. Scoreloop's contribution to this is to offer our social features in such a way that allow for direct integration into the games. This enables a much better user experience than you get locking people into a closed platform.Thanks to Marc for his time.You can keep up to date with Scoreloop via web, Facebook and Twitter.