Posted by: Karl Bunyan on: May 27, 2011
The team at Join the Company have returned from TechCrunch Disrupt where we were demoing PlayPass in the Startup Alley. It was an excellent event for us and we met a lot of interesting people who showed lots of enthusiasm for what we were doing and provided some excellent feedback on everything from user interface [...]
Posted by: Karl Bunyan on: May 4, 2011
Sebastian Deterding has posted another of his excellent presentations about the potential pitfalls of gamification. Some of the slides may be missing something without the commentary but there are still a lot of good points that come across even in this format. Whether this kind of thinking makes much of an impact on the games=points=marketing [...]
Posted by: Karl Bunyan on: October 29, 2010
Lipton’s brand guidelines have been made into an iPod game along the lines of “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire” to help brand managers remember the details better: BRIEF: Lipton approached us with a problem: no one was reading their brand guidelines. However, when was the last time anyone got excited by brand guidelines? SOLUTION: [...]
Posted by: Karl Bunyan on: October 19, 2010
The President of micro-lending site Kiva made an interesting story by claiming that their biggest competitor is a social gaming company. From Techcrunch: I think our biggest competitor is actually, probably Zynga. It’s not other nonprofits it’s actually competing for people’s attention. That fantasy football player in Canton, Ohio who might play two hours of [...]
Posted by: Karl Bunyan on: September 18, 2010
One of the problems with the “check-in at the store to get a free X” incentive model is that mobile phone services are notoriously susceptible to fake check-ins. The heart of the problem is that inside the store the phone’s GPS system generally won’t work and network triangulation is rarely accurate enough. As a result, [...]
Posted by: Karl Bunyan on: September 15, 2010
Soren Johnson has produced another post, previously published in Game Developer magazine, called The Social Revolution. In it he takes a look at some of the trends in social games such as Farmville and starts to think about how these might change the role of the game designer both in social and other games. I [...]
Posted by: Karl Bunyan on: August 10, 2010
There’s a board game coming out of Sid Meier’s “Civilisation” computer game. Looking at this review on Fantasy Flight Games, it appears to be rather complicated. I wonder if it’s more a case of a game being able to sell based on the license rather than being a good model for a board game, and [...]
Posted by: Karl Bunyan on: June 27, 2010
Electronic Arts was perfectly placed with games at the top of the Apple App Store charts last week, just in time for the launch of iPhone 4. “The company noted that it claimed 12 of the top 20 spots in the App Store on iPhone 4′s launch day.” It’s a great piece of PR, but [...]
Posted by: Karl Bunyan on: May 21, 2010
FarmVille is leaking out into the real world with the launch of Farm Cash rewards for buying Green Giant vegetable produce. It’s an interesting link-up: buying vegetables in the real world can help you to build your virtual farm. My first impression was: what an amazing concept. Real-world farm produce tied to virtual-world farm produce. [...]
Posted by: Karl Bunyan on: May 9, 2010
From an article about location-based advertising: 10% of cellphone owners use location-based mobile services at least once per week 63% of iPhone owners use location-based mobile services at least once per week Adults ages 25-34 are frequent users of location services, with 22% using them at least once a week. Consumers are interested in allowing [...]
