Flash Lite has been around on mobile phones for years, but when asked people often find it hard to think of a killer app that uses Flash Lite. Yoshikazu Tanaka, a Japanese entrepreneur, has made a social network of games built in Flash Lite called Gree.
How successful is Gree? It’s so popular in Japan that he has reportedly become a billionaire from the mobile gaming social network. Forbes Magazine recognized Yoshikazu Tanaka as being one of the first to make billions from social mobile games.
“Gree has operating margins of 57 percent and was ranked by Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu as the fastest growing tech company in Japan, with over 2,600 percent revenue growth over the past three years. It has 15 million users, up from eight million a year ago.”
The userbase Gree has generated may sound impressive, but it’s not the largest social network in Japan, that title goes to Mixi with somewhere between 18 and 25 million users depending on who does the counting.
“While Adobe is now moving to support Flash 10.1 on higher end phones, there will be a Flash Lite opportunity for years to come. Why? Because it’s not smartphone users who are the ideal target for socially-connected gaming. They may be cash rich, but most are time poor. Instead, it’s the low-end users with free time and some disposable income who are the ideal target.”
Of course, if you plan to pick up an iPad when it’s released for sale this April the Flash Lite version of Gree won’t run on it due to the lack of Flash support on the iPad.
Video via Scobleizer and Biskero.
Sources: Biskero and Mobile Entertainment
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