NEW DELHI: Mumbai-based Indiagames.com has finally arrived, having signed two big deals with Nokia and M1. While Nokia is the number one handset manufacturer, M1 is one of the leading cellular service providers in Singapore. With this deal Indiagames will now provide gaming titles to both Nokia for its 7650 series and to M1 for its mobile users.

In fact, Indiagames has been on the Nokia developers' community for the past four months now and this is the first big deal that has come through. And what is significant is that Indiagames has become the first Indian company to be providing content to the mobile handset leader. Vishal Gondal, founder and CEO of Indiagames, said, "This is a long term relationship with Nokia. We shall be providing content for its latest handsets soon to be launched as well as for future models."

With M1, Indiagames has an exclusive deal to provide Java-based games. Games have been one of the key drivers for the increased usage of airtime. Surveys have revealed that the most popular application on NTT's DoCoMo by far has been games. Not only do the Japanese spend a lot of time yakking, they spend an equal amount of time playing mobile games with each other.

With airtime costs increasingly coming down and with mobile operators desperate to fuel airtime usage, operators have been banking heavily on multi-media messaging and content. The advantage here is that operators can charge per download so the only challenge that remains here is differential tariff. Handset manufacturers have also been banking heavily on MMS as sales have either dipped or stagnated over the past year. Here also surveys have indicated that replacement purchase is soon going to dominate the sale of handsets worldwide spurring manufacturers to develop more and more feature-rich handsets.