News
Amazon Plays Catch-up And Buys Video Game Producer Reflexive
Tuesday, October 21st, 2008 | Business, Games, Marketing, News | No Comments
Following in Google’s footsteps, Amazon just announced today that they have acquired Orange County based video game company Reflexive for an undisclosed sum (translation: a whole lot of dough). Does this mean we might see a new player in the online advertising market? Is Amazon going to make a move to try and compete with Google for contextual ads? With million of Amazon stores & affiliates out there, could a new CPC offering be right around the corner? I sure hope so.
Founded in 1997, Reflexive has produced fifteen games for the Xbox 360, PC and Mac not to mention offers flash based games through their Reflexive Arcade website. In 2005 the company won 3 awards at the 2005 Independent Games Festival for Fable of Souls and Wik.
Quoting the company founder Lars Brubaker in an article taken from the Reflexive website:
It means we’ll be able to expand our distribution network to include Amazon’s amazing distribution channel. With Amazon we will bring a huge new group of customers into play
Should be interesting to see what happens next.
Google Releases v.6.5 Upgrade to AdWords Editor
Wednesday, October 8th, 2008 | google, News, SEM, Software Update, Tools, Utilities | No Comments
Google just released a new version to their stand-alone AdWords Editor application, making the most up-to-date version 6.5. This was rolled out simultaneously for both OS X and Windows XP/2000/Vista.
Some of the new features include Keyword utilities. Finally! Having to keep a browser open to the Google Keywords Tool is a pain, integrating it into the application will save a lot of time. They didn’t stop there though, in the new version of the AdWords Editor you can find a Keyword Multiplier, which combines lists of terms to form new keywords as well as a Keyword Expansion, which generates keyword ideas based on words or phrases (just like the web-based Keyword Tool). Now these tools will be great….. once I’m able to use them that is. I’ve installed the new version but after entering in my login information, it gives me an error saying that the application could not authenticate. This only occurs when trying to access the “Keyword Opportunities” section under the Tools menu.
Another key change is the new names for importing and exporting.
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You can view the release notes here.
Just Released: Google AdSense for Online Gaming
Wednesday, October 8th, 2008 | Beta, Business, Games, google, Marketing, News | No Comments
Google just announced the release of Google AdSense for Online Gaming. It works pretty much the same as your pre-existing AdSense program, where you place video, image or text ads within your application/game and it displays contextually targeted advertising based on the surrounding content.
From the official Google AdSense blog:
You’ll be able to show these ads in placements you define, such as interstitial frames before a game, after a level change, or when a game is over. Members of our AdWords team will sell your in-game ad placements directly to top brand advertisers, and you’ll also see contextually targeted text and image ads based on content and demographic information.
Now if you’re a budding flash developer, don’t go getting your hopes up just yet – in order to be eligible for this beta program your games must have a minimum of 500,000 “game plays” with at least 80% of the traffic originating from the US or UK. If you fit the mold, here’s a direct link to the application.
So far there are only three marketers listed as partners on the info page: Sprint, Sony Pictures and esurance. I’m sure it won’t be long before that list starts to grow, the publisher round-up is already full of major players in the online game realm: ArcadeTown, Konami, Armor Games, Boonty, Demand Media, Heavy Games, Grab.com, Mochimedia and cafe.com.
This move was inevitable for Google seeing how they recently acquired Adscape Media, a small in-game advertising startup based out of the San Francisco, CA area.
Surprisingly, they already have a “Success Story” listed on the about page for social networking game developer Playfish. These guys primarily produce games that you can add to your Facebook or MySpace profile, so it’s a ‘little’ deceiving in nature.
Identi.ca ‘dents’ vs. Twitter ‘tweets’ – Twitter Wins Again
Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008 | AIR, Beta, News, Tools, Twitter, WebApps | 2 Comments
Many different services have been touted as the “Twitter replacement” recently, including FriendFeed, Pownce, Plurk and even the Google-owned Jaiku. All enter the scene with much fan-fare, typically gaining temporary popularity as Twitter users migrate over to check out the new service, ultimately returning to Twitter after giving up on having to build a new community/following. So far FriendFeed has been the closest in becoming a viable alternative to the ever-growing Twitter community in that it allows for users to comment and track posts to a variety of different social media services (including Twitter). It’s basically a way to combine all your social-media/blogging habits into one stationary form for easy cataloguing of conversations. Conversations? If you’re like most people, upon reading that word you are either scrathing your head or are skipping the rest of the post to hit the “Post Comment” button – Twitter doesn’t allow for traditional “conversations!” Well, I hate to admit this, but FriendFeed enables you to not only hold a conversation by pinning all related comments to a post, but also export them in a variety of ways including a custom RSS feed. Because of features like this, bloggers have been continually talking about the merits behind FriendFeed vs. Twitter. When Twitter goes down, people scamper over to FriendFeed…when they succumb to information overload, they scamper back to Twitter. Now there’s a new dog on the circuit – Identi.ca.
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AT&T Allowing Home Activation For New iPhone 3G!
Friday, July 11th, 2008 | Apple, Business, News, Twitter | 2 Comments
Contrary to what AT&T and Apple have both been telling everyone, some stores are quietly selling iPhone 3G’s to customers and telling them to activate it at home via iTunes. A massive server overload this morning has rendered Apple’s Activation Servers useless at this moment, however representatives from Apple have already acknowledged this and are working to get them back online.
Until the activation servers go back online, anyone trying to purchase a new iPhone will find out that they have a “bricked” version – only allowing for Emergency calls as it will not have been synched with the wireless account.
Users trying to upgrade their 1st generation iPhones or iPod Touches will also “brick” their device, making it useless until Apple fixes their servers.
News of this, along with updates from stores all across the country, has been widely talked about on Twitter.com. A quick and easy way to search through ‘the noise’ on Twitter is to use a free service called Summize.com. Summize enables you to easily search for specific topics and arranges them based on the time/date that they were ‘tweeted.’ For example, to see all the messages posted to Twitter regarding the iphone activation servers, search on Summize for “iphone + activation.”
Apple should have been able to predict that there would have been a heavy strain on the servers with thousands of users trying to register, synch, and activate their Apple products simultaneously. This makes you think twice about using Apple’s server hardware in any production environment….bad move on their part.
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