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Small Screen Content on the Rise, Producers Still Searching for Right Methods

In an effort to create new forms of entertainment for people already inundated daily with media influences, Digital Chocolate is focusing exclusively on developing simple, unique and entertaining applications and games for mobile phones, writes The New York Times.

The social connection formed between a consumer and a product is very important to former Apple Computer employee Trip Hawkins, who is now the founder and chief executive of Digital Chocolate. According to Hawkins, “When you’re mobile, you’re the most socially needy and vulnerable and insecure, and that’s when the one platform you have is the mobile, wireless platform.”

This summer, Digital Chocolate will release The Hook-Up: Ava Flirting, a mobile phone application in which users pay $2.99 a month to create virtual images of themselves that interact with others in a virtual world.

With new media on the rise, companies are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to adapt their current brands that appear across traditional media to mobile phones and other interactive media. Though personalization may be the key to generating a profit while distributing mobile phone content, companies will need to adapt to the wants of customers and to the prices they’re willing to pay.

“Most content providers get it,” said John R. Burbank, vp for marketing at Cingular Wireless, understanding the company’s need to create entertaining new content. “But the fact is, no one knows what ‘it’ is.