Game porting help goes virtual

Content providers and application developers often cite fragmentation as their most difficult and costly challenge. But like a handful of other startups, Mobile Complete sees the issue as an opportunity.
The 3-year-old San Mateo, Calif.-based startup is gaining attention with a virtual handset testing service that is designed to eliminate the need for mobile developers to buy phones and services to test their wares. Developers can access actual devices over the Internet with the offering, dubbed Direct-to-Device, and tweak the way the software interacts with the phones remotely.
While the offering doesn’t replace the headache of porting-indeed, the company counts Tira Wireless and other porting companies among its customers-it does aim to shorten the time-to-market for developers of mobile games and other applications.
The 100-employee firm uses mobile phone “farms”-handsets that are physically attached to computers-in three U.S. locations and London, allowing a developer in, say, California to test an application on a Vodafone U.K. handset. Mobile Complete hopes to expand its “farm” system to several European markets by the end of the year, before penetrating Asian markets.
“The general rule of thumb is that you need to test (applications) on real handsets,” said CEO and co-founder Faraz Syed. “Last year, 700 unique hands models were launched; almost 1,000 phones. If you want to support your applications, your products, you need to do this testing and validation on a very large number of handsets.”
Mobile Complete last month snared roughly $10 million in a Series B funding led by Motorola Corp., and the company’s customers include impressive names such as AOL, Microsoft Inc., Cingular Wireless L.L.C. and Sprint Nextel Corp. And as new handsets and technologies like Flash come to market, Syed hopes, players across the value chain increasingly will seek ways to address the countless variables in mobile content.