Check the video.

They’ve also create a neat little google maps mashup showing the location of the Mini and where the players are.

On the surface it sounds like loads of fun, and I wish I could play the game to try out the design as I’ve got quite a few questions on how it plays out.

I can’t help wonder that they might have got the game mechanic slightly wrong. Basically this game is Halo Oddball played out in the real world but there is one key difference. In Oddball, the winner of the game is the person who has held onto the ball for the longest.

When you have the ball you can’t fire so you have to run like a headless chicken away from the hordes of people after you. When you don’t have the ball, everyone is piling in to get the ball. It’s a really skillful and tactical game and one you can be winning and losing every other second – This game is just total carnage.

With the Mini game, as the winner is the person who is holding onto the car at the end, there really isn’t any gameplay advantage for me to go get the car until near the very end. They’ve made the game area quite small and the prize large, so people will be stealing the car off each other but I just think if they’ve used the Oddball scoring system the game would have had a much better game dynamic.

You could argue that by making the game the way they did, they made it easy for new players to join at any time. Pro’s and con’s to both but I think the game would have relied on a lot more skill and cunning the Oddball way rather than just being ‘lucky’ to be the person who has the car at the end of the game.

This isn’t a criticism of their idea as it is brave, on brand and on strategy. Big plaudits to everyone who worked so hard on it as we need more of this type of work.

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So now, Orange can come out with a SIM card that allows your phone to behave just like your Oyster card or even a debit card. The phone could now pay for things on the underground/buses, vending machines, corner shops etc. If there was an over the air (OTA) way of topping up your phone then you would never be stuck getting on a bus with no credit – This is huge stuff in the world of contactless payments.

This technology could be used for creative ways – to trigger content but ‘touching’ the device on things. See the proof of concept below using an Iphone – check the very bulky NFC reader attached to the Iphone – If Nokia can roll out the NFC reader onto all handsets then this could be a major coup.

I need to check the tech but I would imagine that if two handsets ‘touched’ each other – you could pass on your business card or your social networking profiles – A way to share all your twitter/facebook/myspace names by touch would be just amazing.

Via Nokia Conversations

iPhone RFID: object-based media from timo on Vimeo.

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Futher into the presentation John does focus a little on apps as the way to solve a lot of these problems – I slightly disagree with this at the moment as mobile websites are much more relevant then apps, mainly due to that fact that robust OTA app stores are only available on iphone.

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