Here are 4 questions to Jamie McDonald CEO Phoload :

Can you tell us more about your service?
Phoload is a new community website designed to make it simple, easy, and fun to discover and download free mobile phone games and applications. Users of the website can rate, review and recommend the software they download. As we built Phoload, we focused on ease of use and ensuring that users only download software that is compatible with their phone.

We launched on Wednesday, 3rd September and, initially, we are offering software built for the Java Micro Edition platform. Our hope is that Phoload will encourage more people to download mobile software and use their existing phone to its full capabilities. The software is uploaded directly to the site by mobile software developers. Thanks to them, we offer an excellent portfolio of over 200 games and applications, ranging from location based app and social networks, through to classic arcade and puzzle games.

What is your business model?
We are not in a hurry to monetize the website. The main revenue stream will eventually be advertising, but there are other possibilities depending on how the site develops.

What are the projects, additional features you’re preparing?
This first project is to add support for more software platforms, starting with Symbian and Android. Smartphone adoption is increasing rapidly, as is consumer awareness of mobile software as a whole. So, with Smartphones crossing over to everyday use, it is important to us to fully support them. We have quite a few enhancements for both the user and developer interfaces lined up. User feedback will determine which new features we add first, and will be crucial in determining the future direction of Phoload.

What are the current users’ feedback, your learnings on the service’s usage?
The website has only just launched, so it is difficult to be sure about patterns of usage yet. But we have a made a few observations.The download numbers appear to be split pretty evenly between games and applications. We have also noticed that we have a lot of users with smartphones such as Blackberrys and Nokia N series phones. So, this also inspires us to fully support the smartphone platforms.

With regards to feedback, the mobile software developers who have submitted their software to Phoload have been particularly complimentary. They have been impressed with the developer interface and the process used for uploading, and specifying phone compatibility mappings for multiple versions of a single item of software.