iPhone Is Now More Popular than DS and PSP Among Game Developers [Games]

http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/WPW7kdq_yhw/iphone-is-now-more-popular-than-ds-and-psp-among-game-developers

Game Developer Research says that Apple is winning the race among handheld game developers: 19 percent write now for the iPhone and iPod touch. That's more than double the amount of Nintendo DS and Sony PSP developers. Other interesting figures:

• Handheld games are now 25 percent of the whole gaming market, up from 12 percent before the iPhone/iPod touch phenomenon.
• During the last three quarters, all handheld game developers are writing for the Apple iPhone and iPod touch.

No wonder why Nintendo's President not a fan of the iPad. [Electronista]

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Venezuela’s Chavez: Twitter Messages Are Terrorist Threats

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Mashable/~3/swU8M_0Xbbs/

Venezuelans have been taking to Twitter to protest threats to journalism and freedom of expression, leading the hashtag #freevenezuela to become one of the largest trending Twitter topics this week.

President Hugo Chávez has responded to the outpouring of messages — many of which call for his resignation along with expanded freedom of the press — by asking the National Assembly to start preparing legislation that would regulate the Internet.

Similar to what we saw happening in Mexico this week, government officials in Venezuela are perceiving social networks such as Twitter to be a threat to the state. Chávez has apparently even gone as far as indicating that Twitter could be considered a “tool of terror,” and National Assembly deputies were quick to leap to the charge of “eliminating terrorist threats posed by social networks.”

We suspect this won’t be the last case we hear about governments feeling threatened by Twitter and other popular social networks. What do you think: Will Venezuela succeed in regulating networks like Twitter?

[awesome img credit: Semana.com]

[via Boing Boing]

Tags: government, Hugo Chavez, protests, regulation, social media, terrorism, twitter, Venezuela

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Google Maps Suggests New Places You Might Like

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Mashable/~3/lfVYMliBiaY/

Google keeps adding new features to Google Maps and Google Earth. The latest: As of today you can type in a restaurant or other place you like in Google Maps and receive recommendations of nearby places you might like just as much or more.

Sure, it’s not quite as radical as something like the rumored store interior pics in Google Street View, but it’s always good to see more robust location services. Yelp offers something vaguely similar with a “people who viewed this also viewed” box, but Google’s algorithm is probably more sophisticated.

Google has beaten location-focused services like Foursquare to the punch with this. That’s too bad, because we imagine Foursquare could in theory use your check-in history to provide much better suggestions just like Netflix suggests films based on which movies you’ve already rented or streamed and how you’ve rated them. It’s not surprising that Google did it first, though; Google has a lot more experience using algorithms to determine what you’re looking for than Yelp or Foursquare do.

Google wasn’t very clear about how its algorithm works in its blog post on the subject. You’ll just have to try it for yourself to see if the results are helpful to you, but your mileage may vary.

We viewed the place page for the Indie Cafe sushi and Asian fusion restaurant on the far north side of Chicago and received a bunch of — you guessed it — sushi and Asian fusion restaurant suggestions in adjacent neighborhoods. But when we looked up Big City Swing dance studio in the same city, the results were a bit less precise. Some were great, like the Lincoln Tap Room and Tango Chicago. Others made a lot less sense, like a barber shop and other unrelated venues in a distant suburb almost an hour’s drive away.

Try it out and let us know what you think: How does it work? Do you think it’s helpful enough that you’ll be using it regularly?

Tags: foursquare, Google, google earth, Google Maps, location services, yelp

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AT&T's New FamilyMap App: Track Your Family On the Go

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/readwriteweb/~3/cedqwOTn7LQ/atts_new_familytracker_iphone_app_locate_your_fami.php

att_logo_feb09.jpgAT&T just launched FamilyMap, the company's newest iPhone app, which allows you to track the location of your family members directly on your iPhone. The app (iTunes link) allows you to see the exact location of your cellphone toting family members. You can also set up recurring alerts, which allows you to check if your child arrived at school in the morning, for example. Given that this is an AT&T app, it doesn't come as a surprise that the service is only available if you pay a monthly subscription fee. Tracking the location of two phones costs $9.99 per month. For $14.99 per month, you can track up to five phones.

Sponsor

While AT&T already offered this service, you were only able to see your family member's location by using a desktop computer. Now, you can just use your iPhone to see a map with your family member's location. Your family members don't need to have an iPhone for this service to work. Most AT&T phones now support this feature. If your phone doesn't have a built-in GPS chip, AT&T will estimate a phone's location based on data from nearby cellphone towers.

att_family_map iphone.jpg

Interestingly, this launch comes just one day after Apple itself got a patent for a method of sharing location data during a phone call. While Apple's method is completely permission-based, though, AT&T's system isn't. Instead, any FamilyMap enabled phone - once you activate the service - will send location data back when requested, without prompting the receiver for confirmation. Given that AT&T is mostly marketing this service to parents, this makes sense, though some people (including children and teenagers) will surely feel a bit uneasy about this feature.

Discuss

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Moms on Facebook Are Savvy to Marketers [STATS]

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Mashable/~3/KTPjbksJr14/

2009 was a big year for social media moms, with brands like Huggies actively targeting this increasingly tech-savvy demographic. Brand outreach to moms via social networking will only increase in 2010, but as an eMarketer study points out, the method of that outreach is of vital importance — especially when using Facebook.

Lisa Finn and Lucid Marketing collected data from moms who are also Facebook users and found that most are neutral about ads that appear on Facebook, but 36% actively disliked Facebook ads.

However, in general, the study shows that moms are more receptive to marketing, as long as it is done in the right way. The survey showed that most moms use the social networking site to communicate with family and friends, but three-fourths of the respondents were Facebook fans of at least one brand. Even more interesting, perhaps, is the statistic that 16% of the respondents were fans of more than 10 companies or brands.

The most popular type of brand outreach for moms on Facebook? Coupons and pages with kid-oriented themes.

Here’s an excerpt from eMarketer’s blog post:

“Facebook is fertile ground for marketers to engage mothers and drive sales, but it needs to be done on their terms,” said Kevin Burke, president of lucid marketing, in a statement. “They have no time for brands that don’t ‘get it,’ but they do embrace brands that play by their rules.”

So what are the rules when marketing to moms on Facebook? This is what the survey recommends:

- Be respectful of their time

- Make it easy to share stuff like coupons

- Be straightforward

- Exclusive and special offers are a big pull

Are you a mom who uses Facebook? Tell us what you think of Facebook marketing in the comments!

Tags: facebook, facebook marketing, MARKETING, Moms, money

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Will the Emmys Ditch Tape Delay?

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Mashable/~3/3zbHsoWWLF0/

According to Broadcasting & Cable, NBC is planning to broadcast the Emmy Awards live nationwide without tape delay this year, following up on the success of the Golden Globe Awards, whose previous live show garnered the network a ratings jump of 14% in total viewers.

The Golden Globes marked the best ratings NBC had in that time slot (excluding sports) in six years. We’ll have to see how the Emmys fare on August 29.


Social Media and Time Delay


Historically, most award shows have been broadcast to the West Coast and Mountain Time zones on a time delay. While this has slowly started to change for some shows (The Academy Awards has aired live for several years), it has remained a choice for broadcasters who fear decreased viewership if they air before primetime. While most big award shows are now broadcast on Sunday night, in the past, when shows have been broadcast on weekdays, holding them back for primetime just made sense. There’s no use in broadcasting an event if your West Coast audience is still at work (or is trying to eat dinner).

However, this started to change about 15 years ago. When the Internet and World Wide Web became mainstream, the disadvantages of time delay started to become apparent. Viewers in California would often know who won before the preshow starting rolling.

Like sporting events, the live nature of award shows is important — you watch because you don’t know what is going to happen.

Social media has only made the need for live programming even more clear. In the old days, web forums or IM chats or liveblogs could give people the play-by-play, but people had to know where to look. Now, live events immediately take over Twitter and Facebook streams. If you don’t want the surprise to be spoiled, you pretty much have to stay off any social network during the live telecast.

As I opined last week with regard to the Grammy Awards, Twitter is becoming the new water cooler. As we as a culture move to discuss events as they are happening (rather than after they are over), social networking can drive interest to watching award shows live. That same factor could also potentially drive viewers away from watching on a time delay.


Don’t Say Goodbye Just Yet


However, as we reported last week (and as Broadcasting & Cable notes), ratings for the Grammy Awards were up year-over-year, too. In fact, the increase in viewers for the Grammys was a staggering 35%, and this was with a tape delay.

Broadcasting & Cable makes an interesting assessment:

“And just as the Twitterfication of award-winner info can be used as an argument for live telecasts of Oscars and Emmys, it could also be argued that new media is a factor for driving the Grammys as well, as word on the web spreads about must-see performances like singer Pink’s suspended, nearly-naked routine this year.”

This is very true. With or without a time delay, social media has the ability to impact viewership. In my opinion, the big advantage that skipping the time delay brings is that if a Kanye West moment doesn’t happen, you don’t risk those viewers not tuning in based on what they hear online. They might change the channel anyway, but networks can at least combat the “read the Cliff’s Notes, skipped the book” effect that instant communication has afforded us all with regards to award shows.

West Coast readers, would you like to see the Emmys live, without delay? What do you think about how social media impacts live events? Let us know!

(via Business Insider)

Tags: award shows, emmy awards, Emmys, Film, media, tape delay, television, televison

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Zuckerberg says 400 million people on Facebook!

Six Years of Making Connections
Today we're celebrating our sixth birthday, and this week there will be 400 million people on Facebook. Just one year ago we served less than half as many people, and thanks to you we've made great progress over the last year towards making the world more open and connected.

Facebook began six years ago today as a product that my roommates and I built to help people around us connect easily, share information and understand one another better. We hoped Facebook would improve people's lives in important ways. So it's rewarding to see that as Facebook has grown, people around the world are using the service to share information about events big and small and to stay connected to everyone they care about.

For me personally, this has meant being able to remain close and connected to schoolmates, family and colleagues while working hard at building Facebook over the past six years. It has also been especially meaningful to me and to everyone at Facebook to see people using Facebook to seek help, share news and lend support during crises.

Whether in times of tragedy or joy, people want to share and help one another. This human need is what inspires us to continue to innovate and build things that allow people to connect easily and share their lives with one another.

So to celebrate six years of Facebook and the 400 million people on the service, we're doing what we like doing most—building and launching products for people. Tonight we'll host a celebration at Facebook headquarters, and we'll release a handful of new things that will improve people's Facebook experience, including a couple that people have requested a lot. We'll post more details to our blog in a few hours.

After the launch we're going to celebrate with a Hackathon—an event where all of us stay up all night coding and building out our new ideas for our next wave of products for you.

Thanks again for making Facebook a part of your life. Happy sixth birthday to Facebook and our whole community. We look forward to building more things and continuing to serve you for many more years to come.

Facebook Marketing Goes to the Super Bowl

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/InsideFacebook/~3/xADapgGp7Y8/

Sunday’s Super Bowl game promises to bring in about 100 million television viewers if it’s on par with last year’s game. But this year many corporate advertisers are taking their million-dollar spots to the next level by pairing them with Facebook campaigns.

It’s what some have called the Web 3.0 phase of Super Bowl marketing where Facebook is no longer a peripheral part of a company’s game day advertising, but rather, part of its core strategy.

Top examples include Coca-Cola and Budweiser, while PepsiCo., Inc. — which spent an estimated $254 million in Super Bowl ads during the past 20 years — has opted out of running a $3 million per 30 seconds ad in favor of its celebrity-studded Refresh Everything charity project. Eventually the project is set to award $20 million in community grants to charity based upon online voting.

“Instead of getting 30 seconds to connect with their customers, they’re getting 30 days,” Mike Murphy, vice-president of global sales at Facebook told theFinancial Times of Pepsi’s decision to go all Facebook this year.

Pepsi’s parent company, PepsiCo, has not pulled out of the event entirely.

Doritos, part of Frito-Lay North America — a division of PepsiCo — is currently incorporating television and Facebook by asking fans on its page there to vote on six fan-created videos to determine which three will run during the Super Bowl.

Several other companies are going the way of combining tradition and new media this Super Bowl.

Budweiser is this year’s biggest advertiser, with five minutes of air time that will be filled, in part, based on votes from Facebook users. On the company’s Facebook page, users are asked to view three videos and vote on their favorite for the Super Bowl, and then asked to publish the results to their wall so that it may enter the news feed for their friends to see. More than 2,000 people have posted comments on the voting since it opened Friday.

Such a strategy definitely maximizes the audience of 100 million (or so) Super Bowl watchers and the approximately equal number of U.S. Facebook users, giving Budweiser potentially twice the audience for its buck.

Coca-Cola is another company that decided to pursue this strategy in the 2010 Super Bowl, coupling its commercial not only with Facebook marketing — but a charity campaign that combines virtual gifts with a sneak peak at the anticipated commercials for Facebook fans.

In a web conference last week Coca-Cola Chief Marketing Officer, Katie Bayne spoke at a Boys & Girls Clubs of America center in New York to announce the company’s Live Positively campaign. Essentially the campaign aims to raise at least $250,000 for the organization, a non-profit that provides recreational programs for children, not only through its Super Bowl and print media ads, but also through its Facebook page.

The Live Positively tab on Coca-Cola’s Facebook page allows users to send a virtual gift of a Coke, publish the result to your news stream, and then allows you a sneak peek at the company’s Super Bowl ads. For every virtual gift sent, Coca-Cola donates $1 to the Boys & Girls Club. After publishing a gift to your stream on Facebook, you have the option to send more gifts or donate your Facebook status to promote charity. The company also said it would match donations of time, money or Coke Rewards points to the Boys & Girls Club.

Coca-Cola is one of the world’s most recognized brand names and Bayne said combining television and Facebook during a mass social event like the Super Bowl allows the company to add more texture to their messages and maximize that message in each medium given that fact that many consumers live multi-dimensional lives where they use many different media in tandem.

“Our mission is to make any one of these fantastic live television events partnered with our efforts on the digital side two or three times more effective,” Baynes said. “Our core messages aren’t strong enough if you can’t figure out how to use them best in all these mediums.”

Coca-Cola isn’t the only company getting into virtual goods during the Super Bowl, as reported earlier by Inside Social Games, various developers have also opted to get in on Super Bowl marketing by offering a litany of virtual goods.

Zynga’s FarmVille, with 75 million monthly active users, rolled out 10 limited edition football-themed virtual goods, including a Football Tree, Gnome Ref and Line Quacker (a duck with a football helmet), all of which may be purchased using in-game currency or Farm Cash, virtual currency that may be purchased.

Although the goods are Super Bowl-themed, the colors and logos are not official, only approximations and are available for only six days.

The reshuffling of Super Bowl campaigns to integrate Facebook is a seemingly natural step for a medium that consumes hours’ worth of the lives of 100 million Americans daily and is likely something that will be increasingly popular. Exactly how to do so is the interesting part here — whether virtual goods, funny videos or ducks with football helmets is the best way to go has yet to be fully figured out.

Also, Pepsi’s decision to opt-out of television advertising is an interesting natural experiment, as it will be possible to compare the reverberations of their campaign to those of Coca-Cola and Budweiser later this year. The results will surely have implications for the tone of this conversation in 2011.

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Video of Mark Zuckerberg, Chris Cox Announcing New Facebook Products Tonight

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/InsideFacebook/~3/v3Kv2LYX-kY/

Earlier this evening, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg formally announced the launch of six new products at the company’s headquarters, as Facebook also celebrated its 6th birthday. To watch Zuckerberg and VP of Product Chris Cox walk through each of the new releases, and reflect on the company’s first 6 years – including the day the News Feed launched on September 6, 2006 – check out each of the videos below. At the end, Product Manager Peter Deng and Ari Steinberg “flip the switch,” pushing the new products live.

(For those who don’t see the videos in your reader, click here to view.)

Tonight’s product releases included:

  • The new home page to 80 million of Facebook’s now 400 million users worldwide
  • Better chat accessibility (“Improving chat is the biggest request we get from our users,” Zuckerberg said.)
  • The games and apps dashboards
  • New search type-ahead, and a new method of finding and displaying people whether or not they are your friends
  • A new image uploader, built from the ground up by Facebook (“We’ve been using an ActiveX control for years,” Zuckerberg said.)
  • HipHop, the new project it open-sourced earlier this week.

Here’s a look at Facebook’s worldwide audience growth to date:

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