Gossip Girl: Social Climbing Game Launches on Facebook: “earn rewards for climbing New York’s social ladder by attending virtual fashion shows, sample sales and club openings with their favorite characters. Players can also purchase in-game items to boost their progress and complete higher-level missions.”
Next gen iPads & iPhones to leverage NFC -
Apple’s plan to add near field communications (NFC) chips to its next generation iPhone and iPad products constitutes a major and hugely disruptive move into mobile payments, especially as iTunes already has credit card and purchase info.
Natalie Massenet previews plans for real time social shopping platform Net-A-Porter Live: #DLD11 http://bit.ly/fMPDxO (27:23)
Important observation on gamification by Gabe Zichermann via Chris Dixon and Jocelyn Leavitt: studies show that users value rewards, from most important to least important:
This is the exact inverse of the cost of providing these rewards.
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Zynga acquires social and real-world gaming company Area/Code -
“Area/Code has developed a number of games on Facebook and for mobile, including CSI: Crime City with partner Ubisoft, Facebook game Parking Wars and Drop7 for the iPhone. According to the startup’s site, the developer focused on highlighting ‘the connections between the interactive systems and imaginary landscapes inside of games and the real world around them.’ These connections could include, ‘online games that respond to broadcast TV in real time,’ ‘game systems that explore real-world social issues,’ ‘urban environments transformed into spaces for public play,’ or ‘game events driven by real-world data.’” More on the acquisition via the Area/Code blog: “Our ambition is to contribute in a major way to the evolution of games on social networks, to make games in this space that are deeper and more interesting, games that reward the time and attention of the millions of people who play them with complex, meaningful experiences.”
“
As I think about Google’s strategic initiatives in 2011, I realize they’re all about mobile.
We are at the point where, between the geolocation capability of the phone and the power of the phone’s browser platform, it is possible to deliver personalized information about where you are, what you could do there right now, and so forth—and to deliver such a service at scale.
” — Eric Schmidt
Today’s WWD on the rise of ‘edvertorial’ via createthegroup. More from The Business of Fashion on brands learning to think like media companies: http://bit.ly/8kdZow
Youtube = Youku? A look at China’s parallel Internet universe: http://is.gd/xjsRYN via @fastcompany
Brilliant @NewYorker piece on the rise of neuroscience: “The cognitive revolution of the past thirty years provides a different perspective on our lives, one that emphasizes the relative importance of emotion over pure reason, social connections over individual choice, moral intuition over abstract logic, perceptiveness over I.Q. It allows us to tell a different sort of success story, an inner story to go along with the conventional surface one.”
Brands Create Media Outlets Online, Bypassing Magazines -
Good David Carr piece in the New York Times on fashion brands learning to think like media companies and the integration of content and commerce. As I’ve said before, the future of retail is editorial. And the future of editorial is retail.
“Lucky magazine’s Brandon Holley wants to transform Luckymag.com into a “social shopping experience,” akin to eBay and etsy.com, where readers can create their own digital boutiques, perhaps giving a page in the print edition every month to the woman whose boutique sells the most. http://nyti.ms/eVEhKH”
The Failure of iPad Magazines -
Great blog post from former New York Times design director Khoi Vinh: “the reality that people just don’t like to consume magazine content in the monolithic, issue-centric form that these apps take has caught up with the irrational enthusiasm that we saw in 2010… It’s bordering on obstinate to think that something you care so much about can be salvaged by doing more or less the same thing that has failed magazines so consistently until now: continuing to ignore the fundamentals of digital user experience design and how they diverge from analog print design. Time to focus instead on coming up with new and genuinely different solutions to this admittedly vexing and unforgiving problem facing great print publications everywhere. So I say stop it, Condé Nast. Stop it, Hearst. Stop it Adobe. Stop it everyone who’s pursuing this all but discredited strategy. All of the money, time and effort that has gone into these misbegotten experiments amounts to a kind of neglect and misdirected focus that borders on a dereliction of duty.”
HBR: Shaping Strategy in a World of Constant Disruption
Shopping + User-Curation + Microblogs -
“Melding social networking and the style maven’s obsession with all things beautiful, sites like Fancy (thefancy.com) and Svpply (svpply.com) have emerged recently, letting users shop and fetishize while creating and sharing things they like with friends and followers, from clothes to art to gadgets.”