Space on the Deck: Gaming the Application Front Pages
by Ewan Spence
One of the most interesting challenges that the mobile application industry has is how to get their third party applications on to the phone – with only one or two third party apps shipped in the firmwares of high end devices, many rely on a shareware style demo in the box CD, but that still requires a fair bit of searching by the user. There is also the unrelated problem of the carriers wanting to somehow make more money from their subscriber base.
So if companies are already paying for the privellege, I’ve had a wild thought using game-theory. Why not throw the two together and make a market?
A market for space on the top of the deck.
For those of you not aware of the deck, the term is a holdover from the days when Wap was the mobile internet, but essentially it is the catalogue of games and applications (although it’s mostly games) that a network portal offers to their customers. Out of all the tiles that are available via search, the majority of purchases are from those which are listed in the small umber of slots (let’s say there are five) which are initially presented to the end-user. If a publisher can get their application into that batch of five, then sales are pretty much guaranteed.
With a finite resource such as this, the allocation of this space at the whim of the network is a black and muddy art. So why not lift that veil, and make some money at the same time? Every application that passes a network testing regime receives a number of credits. Now split the day up into, say 5 minute slots, and allow people to bid with these credits on each slot during the day and night. Naturally you can buy more credits from the operator, over and above the credits you might possibly earn each time your app gets purchased.
But why stop there? Let’s take it further than that, and allow people to not only trade credits between them (vital if you have twenty applications, allowing you to pull everything for your wicked version of something that’s almost, but not quite, Bejewelled), but to trade on the open market the slot times that you have earned, for the aforementioned credits.
All you need to finish this off is the facility to revert credits back to cold hard cash (go on, a fluctuating currency market) and you’ve got an entire eco system designed to make sure that the best, strongest applications rise to the top of the deck (in the handset sense and the metaphysical sense), and a completely open system that takes the hidden murkiness away from the operators.
Now… discuss!
