Didmo launching ad-funded mobile games in the UK

Swedish firm Didmo is bringing its advertising-funded mobile games platform to the UK, as well as the US, Germany and Spain.

The service offers free games, with ads wrapped around them. However, they only last for 24 hours, after which you have to buy them to continue playing. Presumably the ads aren't shown after that. At least, we'd hope so.

The company says people are five times more likely to click through these ads than traditional WAP adverts. The ads last for four seconds, and are shown while the game loads, and at the end of the game.

When your 24 hours of freeplay are up, you can buy that game, or download a new game for another 24 hours.

In Scandinavia, two million people had downloaded the Didmo application by January, generating an average of 220,000 game downloads a month. Advertisers there include 7-Eleven, Activision and Unilever.

The company says it's aiming to get 3.5 million regular users by August this year by expanding abroad. Didmo also claims to support 99 per cent of all Java-enabled phones on the market today.

Our Nokia N81 8GB obviously fell into the other 1 per cent, as when we signed up via WAP push we were told no games were available for that handset. However, it worked for our W880i.

Once we'd downloaded the Didmo application, we were invited to play the game of the day – Splash Bomb – from Slovakian developer Inlogic. It's an addictive little puzzler that we certainly didn't mind trying out.

We've rooted around Didmo's website, and can't find a list of the publishers that it's signed up. But the technology is certainly intriguing, and the 24-hour limit is a different approach to its ad-funded rivals. We'll follow their progress with interest.

Fancy trying it out? You can sign up here.