Mobile World Congress 2013

Tomorrow morning I will be leaving for Barcelona to attend this year’s Mobile World Congress. MWC is of course the biggest event for all things mobile in the world and this will be the first time I attend it. After attending last year’s Build in Redmond, WA and Microsoft Partner Conference the year before in LA, CA I guess I am getting the hang of going to big technology related and non-academic conferences for the first time :) After finishing my PhD last year, this seems like the next best thing, since I’ve been to quite a few academic conferences during my studying time anyway.

So back to Barcelona, MWC will take place between February 25 and February 28 in a new venue, not that I knew the old venue. The new venue is called Fira Fran Via which is apparently an awesome state of the art event space. I am sure the venue cannot possible beat being to Microsoft’s HQ building complex in November, but I’ve been to Barcelona 3 times already and I like the city and the people, so at least it will be much closer to where I live (no more crossing the Atlantic ocean – yey) and in Europe for a change.

I will arrive on Sunday and attend the Mobile Sunday event, where apparently will be lots of cool people and free beer tasting. The event  will begin at 6pm, look for me there if you want to meet up and discuss games over beers (what better way is there?). I will be wearing my MonsterUp t-shirt if it’s not too cold:) I will try to where these everywhere (I have a few of them) so you can find me:)

On Monday I will be attending Nokia’s separate event all day long. There is a keynote at 11am where I hope we get to see all new shiny awesome Lumia phones and (why not) the first Nokia tablet. That would be awesome ;) There are quite a few interesting sessions throughout the day, including game development sessions which I will make sure not to miss (in both Track 1 and Track 2) but the main thing I will try to do is talk to Nokia people about working with them for more Lumia games from Karios Games.

Tuesday will be a bit more relaxed. I think about going to Connected Living and Clicksoftware sessions about HTML5. I already have a couple of games on Facebook and Chrome Store using HTML5 so there might be a few things to learn there.

On Wednesday there are a few interesting things. I will try to attend the Generation ‘M’ session as well as the App Planet Open Forum.  After the congress, I will also try to be at WIPJam and Mobile Mixology parties. They are not very close to each other but I will do my best!

Finally, Thursday is going to be WIP-ADC day. Many interesting topics there so I will most likely spend the whole day attending these. After this, straight to the airport.

So if you are there, drop a line! I will try to tweet and otherwise write about the event here and on my twitter account (@marioskar) so if you are interested about WMC, make sure to follow me!

Good news everyone!

Karios Games, my personal-project-to-become-a-company-very-soon is accelerating its growth. I’ve recently pitched in front of a jury and will be receiving my first “kick” from Venture Kick in Switzerland. Venture Kick is a non profit organization that helps young entrepreneurs get off the ground in Switzerland. All one needs is a good idea and some pitching skills (and some luck I guess). I have had more than a good idea, since I’ve launched a lot of games as you know already in 5 different platforms (facebook, chrome store, windows phone, ios and windows 8) and I got lucky, since I was chosen to receive the first “kick”, namely a small grant from the organization.

Things are starting to pick up from there and I will be doing my best to organize Karios Games into an awesome games making machine, like I always wanted it to be. I will not be hiring just yet, but since I am working on it full time now, I expect to be doing that also soon.

As always, there are a few games in the pipeline already, small and bigger projects, and I will be announcing new stuff when the time is right. Until then, patience!

Both MonsterUp and MonsterUp Adventures have recently received updates that allow Windows Phone 8 users to use the built-in wallet function to buy stuff in the games.

More specifically, in MonsterUp Adventures, you can now buy diamonds and rubies from the island store as well as buy all the levels of the island at once. The gems are of course used to unlock other things in the store, like new monsters and the game’s ringtone while the island levels are unlocked permanently.

In the original MonsterUp, you can buy all the available monsters at once.

Enjoy!