July column for Develop magazine

It was Woody Allen who gave us the movie Zelig. The eponymous Zelig has the ability to turn in to other people when surrounded by them. If he meets a fat person, he becomes fat, if he meets a doctor; he becomes a doctor and so on.

And so it goes with attending industry events. It's a terrible thing to listen to a set of speakers and then turn into them the next time you speak to somebody, but that's why companies pay thousands of pounds to attend - we all like to be interesting by association and we're all plagiarists by nature.

Such was the case last month after the ELSPA Games Summit in London. Tim Harrison, Simon Dean and Alan Welsman of Vodafone, O2 and Orange respectively all spoke intelligently in front of a packed house and gave this writer much content when he spoke the next day at the World Handset Forum in Amsterdam.

And what was this turbulent content? Yes, the need for the mobile games industry to concentrate on the here and now, not the there and whatever. Multiplayer, 3D and 3G are all great watersheds to wet ourselves over, but let's concentrate on today's post-tipping point.

The mobile games sector has evolved rapidly and there is much for people in the industry to be proud of. The runaway success of mobile games such as JAMDAT Mobile's Bowling are being matched by Iomo's Pub Pool and news of Mforma's recent $44 million round of funding all augur well. Care, however, should be taken with brands. JAMDAT's Lord of the Rings Bowling is probably taking things a little too far... nobody wants a brand to be skittled by over-zealous hobbits.

Even so, and completely against the point of this article, there is a 3G game that really is worth looking forward to. Wonderphone has recently been signed up by Vodafone live! to distribute its Java games catalogue that is co-published with Vivendi Universal Games International. Vodafone aren't silly to do this deal.

Wonderphone is producing Fahrenheit 3G, a video-based interactive game that will, indeed, be a 'super production' because it has a €10 million budget. €10 million! Now, for that amount, every mobile games content provider would gladly become Zelig for the length of that particular development process.