The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘based-on-their’

Ever wanted to tell the world how much you love BMW, Coca-Cola, and any of the other biggest brand names on Earth? Here’s your chance: MyBrandz is a new community site that looks to let people talk about their favorite brands with other users, allowing them to share their favorite products, photos, and more. You may remember MyBrandz as the company that convinced a guy to tattoo the YouTube logo to his arm a few months back.

My initial reaction to the site was that it was a bit bizarre — is there really an audience of people who want to talk about how much they love these multibillion dollar corporations (many of which couldn’t give a hoot about their customers)? And then I remembered the throngs of die-hard Apple fans that police internet forums, and the Ferrari store in downtown San Francisco that sells $200+ leather jackets emblazoned with the classic logo. Yeah, there’s definitely an audience for this.

Once you’ve browsed to the fan page of the company you like, you can share notes, photos, video, and links with like-minded fans. To help boost engagement, the site is currently running a promotion that invites users to ‘own their brand’ — the top user for a given brand site will win a free stock certificate. The site is happy to point out that “a Google share is worth more than $600 and an Apple share over $200″, but doesn’t go out of its way to say that the top user on Playboy’s fan page can expect a windfall of $3.58.

The site has some nice touches, like a scrolling wall of logos to help you quickly build out a roster of your favorite brands, and a graph that plots the ranking of brands based on their market value and popularity. But, as with most social sites, it’s going to face a chicken-and-egg problem. And many of these brands have already spawned their own communities and forums — it’s going to be hard to get those to migrate to MyBrandz.

Brand fans may also want to check out Logorama, the brand-studded animated short that just won an Oscar.

I think Gagan is at GDC but he’s clearly not getting the good meetings. Firaxis is showing off Civ V and Kotaku has a nice run down, including a few new features. For starters, your opponents have definite AI based on their strengths and weakness

Originally posted here:
Meet Civ V: The cities have health bars

Slide, the online entertainment company founded by Max Levchin (who we just interviewed in Davos), has decided to stop development on two of its social games, Slide SuperPocus and Top Fish, and will be laying off “less than 10%” of its employees in the process. The company had around 40 employees working on the two games, some of whom will be reassigned to work on other projects. Prior to the layoffs, Slide had around 137 employees.

This is a somewhat surprising move, because Slide only launched the two Facebook applications last fall. The magic-themed SuperPocus launched in October, and Top Fish, a virtual aquarium app, launched in early November. Both games were designed to turn into virtual economies that revolved around virtual gifts. Clearly Slide has a ’sink-or-swim’ attitude with regard to its applications, and it’s ready to cut its losses quickly.  Slide VP of Strategy and Business Development Keith Rabois says that the company is continuously evaluating its games based on their growth, user retention, and monetization, and that the two games weren’t reaching their goals.  Rabois says that the company intends to release a new project later this month.

Slide has dabbled in quite a few areas related to social gaming and online communities over the years. It is behind some of Facebook’s most popular games, as well as other entertaining apps like SuperPoke. The company used to generate most of its revenue through advertising, but the majority of its income now comes from virtual goods.

Little World Gifts, the mobile virtual goods startup, has signed WWF as its first major brand partner. That’s WWF-UK, the world-renowned conservation charity, not the wrestling federation with the same initials.

More interesting, however, is where Little World Gifts is headed next: Location-based gifting. In a future update, users of the company’s iPhone app (iTunes link) will be prompted to purchase and receive virtual gifts based on their current location, moving the service a little towards the rewards element of the likes of Foursquare and Gowalla.

The New York Times Company has teamed up with RMG Networks to have some of its digital content displayed on part of the latter’s network of out-of-home screens. The partnership is said to bring NYTimes content to some 850 screens, located in district cafés and eateries in the New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, and San Francisco markets.

The new initiative, dubbed “NYTimes.com Today”, will feature the latest news headlines, photos, and a selection of videos exclusively from NYTimes.com – along with advertising units – on the digital location-based network operated by RMG Networks.

There’s also a mobile aspect to the story, as viewers can head to NYT2day.com on their phones to receive a direct link to the NYTimes.com Today mobile site, featuring the full articles displayed on the – smaller -screens.

Let’s take a closer look at the NYT’s newest distribution partner.

RMG Networks is headquartered in San Francisco but has local offices in New York, Chicago and Beijing. The company was founded in 2006 under the name Danoo and boasts an undisclosed amount of funding from National CineMedia, Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers and DAG Ventures – all investors also have one or more representatives on its board.

The company says it’s capable of delivering digital content and advertising to over 60,000 video screens nationwide, enabling it to reach up to nearly 25 million viewers every month.

RMG Networks’ management team is comprised of Garry McGuire (CEO), previously Chairman of Icon Internet Ventures, and former executives from companies such as Yahoo, LevelVision, Screenvision and McKinsey & Co.

Back in July 2009, when the company was still named Danoo, it acquired IdeaCast and rebranded the combined entity RMG Networks.

(Image via Venturebeat)

A Japanese company called Eamex claims it has found a way [JP] to increase the life of high-capacity lithium-ion batteries (that can be used in electric vehicles). Eamex says the new batteries can be charged and discharged over 10,000 times. Apparently, they can last about 20 years, too

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New technology extends lithium-ion battery life

Gun comb: because you just don’t get arrested enough already A true AFOL would carry one of these LEGO wallets Proximity sensing shirts light up within ten feet of each other THQ CEO says Sony’s motion controller is actually named Arc, not Gem What are you playing?

Original post:
Daily Crunch: Stop or My Comb Will Shoot Edition

It’s amazing. I agree 100% with this episode of Zero Punctuation . “And that’s Dark Void

Go here to read the rest:
Zero Punctuation: Dark Void

RadiusIM, the New York-based startup behind the eponymous location-aware instant messaging service, is actively trying to find a buyer, we’ve confirmed with multiple sources. We first caught wind of the company back in August 2006, and dubbed it ‘another proximity-based IM service’.

The company is not too shy about e-mailing all the usual suspects to see if they’d be interested in acquiring them outright, so either they wanted this to become public knowledge and we’re helping them, or they’re so desperate to find someone to take the service off their hands that they really had no other option left but to contact anyone who could be potentially interested by e-mail. Or both, of course.

RadiusIM bills itself as a social IM service. It’s a web-based application that enables people to communicate with their contacts on instant messaging networks such as Yahoo Messenger, Windows Live Messenger, AIM, Google Talk and Facebook Chat.

The startup saw early on that there would be demand for location-awareness features in communication services and made it possible for users to see where their friends were hanging out and meet new people based on their own geographical location.

Alas, apparently there wasn’t enough traction or enough interested advertisers to make the venture viable, so the company is resorting to e-mailing potential buyers to take over the service and its existing user base (they claim to have over 1 million registered users who have, according to their website, sent almost 2 billion messages to each other since its inception).

We’ve contacted the company for confirmation and/or more information, and will update when we hear back. But radiusIM is now officially on deadpool watch.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

This California TV regulation thing isn’t going to happen without a fight, no sir. Even though a bunch of LCD makers have said that they wouldn’t have too much of a problem complying with whatever the California commission comes up with, the LCD TV Association has just applied the brakes , saying that any such regulation will ultimately result in “TVs that have fewer features.” Of course, I don’t live in California—doesn’t the state have bigger things to worry about?—but such regulation could spread across the country.

Originally posted here: 
Shock: TV association complaining about possible new California green regulations