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We’re pleased to announce the release of version 1.0.09 of Playyoo. There are some significant changes here, but they’re mostly under the surface. We’ve made some fixes, and some enhancements, to the algorithm driving the Game Stream, which is Playyoo’s way of getting games to you. The biggest change is that the “sushi belt model” is now working. After you play a game from your main Game Stream channel on your phone (the default view), it is removed. You can find it afterwards in the “Recently Played” channel, and if you really like it, you can add to your “Favourites” channel. The idea here is that every time you access Playyoo on your phone, you’ll be presented with a new game to try.

You may notice a few other changes. For example, if you have ticked “Auto-accept pick of the day” in your Game Stream settings, unless you’ve played it before, then the current pick of the day will show up at the top of your game stream.

The Game Stream viewer navigation has also been changed, as shown below:

You can reset your Game Stream to recommended defaults by using the settings illustrated here.

We’ve got some good stuff in the pipeline, and we’re aiming to address a lot of the issues raised during the survey we carried out a while back. We’re always pleased to hear feedback, positive or negative (although we like positive even more!).

We’ve been a bit quiet recently on where we’re going with Playyoo, so here’s quick update.

Although on the face of it Playyoo has many similarities with other user generated content sites, we need to do quite a lot of heavy lifting behind the scenes to make sure we deliver correctly configured games to each phone model we support. Web developers get frustrated having to deal with browser incompatibilities across a handful of browser / operating system combinations, but mobile software developers have to deal with literally hundreds of devices on many, many networks. This was one of the initial challenges we set out to solve with Playyoo, and we’ve spent a lot of time on it.

For the first version, we had a lot of support from an external partner, who I can’t name for various reasons, but who I’d like to express our thanks to! However, now we’re on our own, with a relatively small in-house software development team working on enhancements and new features.

The first thing we’re tackling is to greatly improve the game selection process, which powers the Game Stream, to give users more control over it, and to provide better results out of the box. We’ve got a whole stack of other things lined up, many taking into account user feedback from the last few months.

You should see some changes starting to appear in the next few weeks or so, as we get back up to speed with development and releases.

We always appreciate and listen to feedback, good or bad, either here, by email, or on the forum. We’re pretty excited about the directions we’re going in with Playyoo, and I hope you will be too!

Animation magazine has reported on Cartoon Network’s successful launch of its Ben 10 Alien Force Game Creator which has seen more than 20 million game plays in its first week. Molly Chase, VP and executive producer of Cartoon Network New Media says “Our online fans are building and sharing this game and enjoying an unprecedented level of interaction with both a favorite show and their fellow fans. We see this type of game as a wave of the future for the online gaming market and have already begun work on expanding the experience to feature another popular network franchise.”

One of the more challenging games submitted to the Playyoo launch contest was Think Fast by Izam. It’s an educational game that challenges players to solve math questions, quicker answers are rewarded with more points. Our initial reaction was "What a great idea!".

Now, according to ReadWriteWeb, a book has been released by MIT professor and director of MIT’s Scheller Teacher Education Program Eric Klopfer which makes the case that mobile games can augment other education tools.

Adobe has announced its “Open Screen Project” aimed at ensuring a consistent rich internet experience across a broad range of digital screens including mobile devices. Part of this announcement reveals that licensing fees for Flash will be removed in the next major releases. Adobe expects this to cut a year off it’s previous forecasts to get Flash Lite penetration to one billion devices, now by 2009 instead of 2010.

According to my calendar 2009 is next year……