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Creative Profiles - iPhone developers - Little World Gifts

Thu, 12 Nov 2009

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Launching in time for Christmas, Little World Gifts hopes to bring a little added value to iPhone and iPod touch with a range of "gorgeous, handcrafted, 3D interactive gifts."

A team of developers and 3D designers based in Liverpool promise to redefine digital gifts so people see them as more than simply 32x32 pixel 2D icons.

Macworld caught up with Jonathan Deamer, Community and Communications Manager at Kisky Netmedia, to find out more about Little World Gifts.

Q. So why Little World Gifts?

Essentially, we wanted to use the iPhone to put some of the things that are cool about gifts and giving in the real world back into online gifts. No-one has yet created a compelling virtual gifts experience for mobile, and there are a lot of things that the iPhone allows you to do with a virtual gift giving experience that can't be done on the web.

By taking advantage of the unique features of the iPhone - touch, location-sensitivity, in-app purchasing, push notifications - to create a native mobile experience we can make virtual gifts more fun and interesting than ever.

For example, being able to physically unwrap your gift. Being able to play and interact with it in a tactile way. We love bringing back unique, hard-to-find items from travelling, so rather than make everything available everywhere we want to make some gifts only available in some locations.

Our Christmas shop is a bit of an early look at what we've got planned, but in the new year we'll be working with some well-loved partner brands to offer some amazing gifts from really cool destinations.

Q. Choosing to offer your app free, will you be able to generate any income from your efforts?

You're completely right - it's going to be a free app. This is the way we've always wanted to do things, as it makes it really easy for someone to receive and play with their gift, even if they've not yet downloaded the app. So we were hugely pleased when Apple recently announced that in-app purchases would be permitted in free apps.

At its core, Little World Gifts is a shop. And as with any shop, it's free to get in and have a browse, but the cost is when you want to buy something. And we're creating charming gifts with personality and inherent value that we think people will want to send and receive, so we do think we'll be able to generate income from the sale of these as part of a wider business.

Q. Do you think digital virtual gifts have appeal?

When done well, digital gifts have huge appeal. More and more of our lives are becoming digitised, and there are already a number of successful businesses operating around a model of virtual gifts and goods: Habbo Hotel, Tencent in China.

Facebook alone generates over $40million per year in revenue from virtual gifts. And we hope that by focusing on the iPhone we'll be able to redefine the way people think about virtual gifts by offering something vastly different to what's gone before.

One of the key differences that we think will make Little World Gifts appealing is that our gifts are sent and received in real-time, wherever you are. You receive them via push notification, without having to wait until the next time you log in to a social network.

And as mentioned above, we're going to be introducing lots of location-specific gifts in the future, turning them into postcards or souvenirs of real-life experiences which adds a real value beyond existing virtual gifts. So yes, there's lots of potential appeal.

Q. With 100, 000 apps in the App Store how do you intend to get people aware of LWG?

Simply, by existing outside of the App Store. We're putting together some partnerships with well-loved brands that allow us to leverage offline marketing and real-world locations. Further, the app integrates heavily with Facebook, allowing people to share and show off their gifts, which we think will greatly help grow awareness around the app.

Q. How will users send gifts?

This is where our Facebook integration is really useful! We found it would create a really bad user experience to have to fiddle about with address books, email addresses or even phone numbers - for SMS gift delivery. With email there's always the danger of getting lost in a spam folder, which we really don't want to happen when someone's sent a paid gift and heartfelt message to a loved one.

So gifts are sent by pulling in your friends list from Facebook. Then if they've got the app they'll get a push notification on their iPhone that will allow them to immediately unwrap and play with their gift.

It's no problem if they don't have the app though - when this is the case they'll get a message via Facebook telling them they've been sent a gift from a friend, and inviting them to download the app and/or show off their gift on their Facebook profile.

When sending a gift you can even set a "do not open before" date. We're going to be adding integration with other services in future, as well as more fun things like tracking how far your parcel has travelled and bringing more of a real-world giving experience to virtual gifts.

While we can't quite promise it'll be better to give than to receive, we do want to make giving and sending almost as much fun as receiving.



Little World Gifts - Demo from Katie Lips on Vimeo.

Q. Little World Gifts will clearly benefit from the Christmas and New Year celebrations, how will keep the momentum going into 2010?

The app we're launching with in December is specifically a Christmas gift store, but of course the festive season isn't the only time to give gifts.

So we'll be offering gifts around other occasions, festivals and holidays, as well as rolling out a lot of location-based functionality with partner brands.

There are a lot of things we want to do that don't quite fit with the Christmas theme, so we're really looking forward to showing some of them off in the new year!

Posted by: Nick Spence

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Comments received


Hannah Moffat said on Thursday, 12 November 2009

Love the Elvis!

Jonathan @ Little World Gifts said on Thursday, 12 November 2009

Glad you like him Hannah - we've got a special edition one for our Christmas store www.twitpic.com/p5hif

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