developers in the middle of implementation,” he says. Geocade built Soft Landing on its own as a demonstration.
While the leader boards add an element of local competition to game play, there’s another incentive for developers to sign up as Geocade partners: advertising revenue. The company shows mobile ads provided by AdMob above the leader boards, and gives game developers a cut based on volume. The ads themselves can be customized using location information—a Domino’s ad, for example, might include the phone number for the closest Domino’s pizzeria, and later on, even more “hyperlocal” ads could be included, perhaps bringing in premium advertising rates.
At the moment, though, mobile advertising inventories are sparse, so the location-based advertising are largely theoretical. Another limitation: Geocade’s leader boards lump together players by zip code, which is partly a reflection of the error built into location measurements obtained through older methods cell-tower triangulation. But for users with GPS-capable devices like the iPhone 3G, Caralis says, Geocade is working on applications that could pit players against competitors stationed only yards away. “For example, you could have Red Sox and Yankees fans playing against each other at Fenway while the game is happening,” he says. “That level of location specificity wasn’t really possible until GPS. We’re working with one company on some really cool concept games based on that technology right now.”
The location-based leader boards are only available for iPhone games so far, but Caralis says Geocade’s system will work equally well with games written for the Google’s Android phone operating system and Nokia’s Symbian. He hopes that the company, which was founded in September 2008 with investments from Caralis’s friends and family and has an office at the Cambridge Innovation Center at One Broadway, will eventually grow into a general platform for social gaming. “Location-based leader boards are just the first step toward that goal,” Caralis says. “It’s really about having people share their gaming experiences with communities.”
