Disney mobile where my water

Bart Decrem discusses the importance of mobile to the US entertainment giant.

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Bart Decrem was the founder of games maker Tapulous, but became Disney's head of mobile after selling his company to the US entertainment giant. He feels that mobile is a "really critical" platform for firms like Disney, because there is now a "whole generation of kids growing up for whom the smartphone is their first screen".

Decrem feels that The Walt Disney Company, founded almost 90 years ago by Walt and Roy Disney, has always been "a leader in deploying innovations to bring magical moments to people". The firm helped pioneer mainstream animation in 1928 with Steamboat Willie. and then went on to innovate with the multiplane camera in the late 1930s and early auto-animatronics in the 1960s.

"Innovation is in the DNA of the company, and I know I might seem like a PR, but I really do believe that," said Decrem. "I have been at Disney for a year and a half, and the company really embraces change. We were among the first, I believe, to put TV content on iTunes and iPhone. And of course [the late Apple co-founder] Steve Jobs is our largest shareholder. So the company really gets into these things and deploys real capital. The cool thing for me when I joined the company was that nobody told me what I had to do. They just told me that I must focus on creating great ideas."

The ultimate goal for Decrem and his team is that one day they will go to Disneyland and see a character that they have created featured in the park. This may be Swampy, or it could be another character, but he feels that it is this ability to experiment with ideas that makes mobile such an important platform.

"Creating characters for TV or movie platforms is expensive, and Disney can only place so many of these bets in a year as that can take hundreds of millions of dollars in development," he said. "With Where's My Water?. it took six people six months to pull together a core of a game, release it and then see how people respond. We can experiment and we can create new characters, and then see what works. But we can't just throw anything out there; it has to have passion, and be five-star rated."