As part of its strategy to build relationships with game developers Nokia announced two initiatives at its developer day last Thurs, the 27th of March 2003 in the Guinness Store House.

The first will see the company launch a mobile game development competition in April in association with an Irish company, UpStart Games. This competition will encourage Irish individuals to develop a game for Nokia series 30, 40 and 60 mobile phones and java versions of the game for other phones. The winner of the competition will get a cash advance to commercially produce their game and an internship at a digital media training facility abroad. The initiative is designed to encourage more Irish people to develop mobile games.

The second was their investment in the development of gamedevelopers.ie. All delegates at the one day event received a flier about the launch of this new website and Gavin Barrett, Business Development Manager with Nokia in Ireland, spoke about his hopes for the site.

The rest of the day saw a number of speakers discuss developing content for mobile phones using Java and X-html. Nokia also introduced their new range of mobile phones including the N-Gage games phone, the Nokia 3300 which plays MP3s and has a built in FM radio and the 3650, a new camera phone.

More info:
http://www.forum.nokia.com/main.html