CES: Sennari brings ‘bling’ to Vodafone

Sennari, a developer of customer relationship management platforms for the mobile industry, announced at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week that its PrizePlay gaming service is now available to Vodafone live! customers throughout the U.K. Vodafone is the first major service provider to deploy the offering from Sennari, which arrived on the industry scene in May of last year with what it then claimed was a new approach to mobile gaming.

The PrizePlay offering, based on the vendor's mCRM platform, encourages frequent and repeat mobile game play by using a token-based payment model that allows customers to play games and earn "bling" points that can be applied to prizes, such as gift certificates, that can be redeemed from a directory embedded in the applications itself. That approach, which fans of Chuck E. Cheese restaurants and other physical-world arcades will recognize, could help kick-start a mobile gaming segment that carriers believe can be highly lucrative, but has yet to really pay off.

In fact, research last year from The NPD Group suggested that the majority of mobile gamers actually play the free or pre-loaded games offered by carriers more so than they pay for games. NPD analyst Clint Wheelock also said that carrier strategies for marketing and pricing games also remains in flux.

"It's a pay-for-play model--users pay for game tokens, and there are rewards for repeat play," said Bill Barhydt, CEO of Sennari. "It's not something that really requires a lot of carrier marketing." He said the initial PrizePlay game titles--PrizePlay Monopoly, PrizePlay Snakes and Ladders, PrizePlay Triple Towers and PrizePlay Goldenballs--have actually been available on the Vodafone live! game deck since before Christmas, and that even prior to this week's first public announcement, the games have "far surpassed our expectations for the amount of repeat play we thought they would get."

With the Vodafone service, customers pay for game tokens either by having the cost deducted from their pre-pay account, or added to their monthly bill. Each download includes six free plays, after which players buy tokens that can be used in any prize play game. All of the games give users the ability to win prizes, such as digital downloads, electronic goods and high street retail gift certificates, and the online prize catalogue includes several thousand options, Barhydt said. Once redeemed, the prizes are mailed to the customers.

Sennari has cut deals with other carriers besides Vodafone, and though the company wasn't ready to identify any of them this week, it is believed that an announcement of another major carrier customer is imminent. Sennari also will add new game titles to the PrizePlay family during the first quarter this year, Barhydt said.

He added that Sennari doesn't want to be in the business of developing games itself, and is interested in teaming with other developers to port their games to the platform. "Carrier acceptance of this isn't the hard part," he said. "The porting process is the more difficult part."