According to a recent AdDuplex blog post, Windows Phone 8 is being used by more than 50% of the current Windows Phone 8. This is really interesting news, since Windows Phone 8 is a relatively new version and it caught up rather quickly. This means that the Windows Phone market share is rapidly expanding, now more than ever. In the US, the numbers are even more interesting since Windows Phone 8 users account for 70% of all Windows Phone users, but this actually means that not many people were considering Windows Phone before the awesome Lumia 920. But how do these numbers look from an everyday Windows Phone developer, like, say, me ?

In my case, WP8 looks much smaller than this. For the past month, only about 20% of my users for MonsterUp Adventures were using Windows Phone 8.

May 13-June 13 2013 – MonsterUp Adventures WP OS

The month before that, the number was about 16%. For the original MonsterUp the numbers are pretty similar, with 18.4% and 10% respectively.

May 13-June 13 2013 – MonsterUp WP OS

So what can I understand from these numbers? For starters, Windows Phone 8 is a much bigger success and is working much better than Windows Phone 7.x when it comes to customer acquisition. The other thing of course is that people who used to play my games, still love them and still play them :)

A couple of weeks ago, I was interviewed by Ben Riga, senior technical evangelist at Microsoft and Alan Mendelevich from AdDuplex for the bi-weekly AppBizDev podcast. It was quite an enjoyable talk with some very interesting questions (and hopefully answers). One thing is for sure, Ben had done his homework :) We talked about everything, game development on Windows Phone and the Amiga, MonoGame and Unity and more. You can listen the interview over at the official podcast page here:
http://www.appbizdev.com/2013/03/episode-12-marios-builds-monsters-up.html

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!