Friday, December 4, 2009

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Hi, My Name Is Mike And I'm A FishVille Addict Top
Rumor has it that actress Salma Hayek never smoked before filming the movie Frida . But she had to learn how to play artist Frida Kahlo, and after the movie she had trouble quitting. I know exactly how she feels. Because part of the fallout of all the Scamville posts I wrote last month is a lingering addiction to one of Zynga’s games, Fishville (yes, the game that Facebook shut down for three days for violations of their advertising rules). A lot of the information in those Scamville posts came from good old fashioned research. I played the games to see what would happen. At first I thought they were ridiculous. I was growing acai trees and milking cows on Farmville, slaying the undead on Vampire Wars, and hitting mafia bosses with crowbars on Mob Wars. And of course I clicked on the offers and even paid cash a few times for currency. It was all business of course. Until I noticed that I was going back to FishVille, even after the series was completed. I had 8 tanks going and hundreds of fish being grown from eggs to adults. Those were sold off and I bought more eggs and the cycle continued. Before long I was at level 34 – so high that there I had access to every kind of fish that you could buy. I’d racked up 808,647 experience points. I was proud of my tank’s pristine condition and cornucopia of decorations. Notice the bevy of happy, well-fed fish: A big part of these games is the urge to go back to them multiple times per day. To feed the fish. Or harvest the corn. Wait too long and the fish dies, the corn wilts, and you lose currency and experience points. I was making sure to check back in regularly on my fish so they didn’t die. I actually thought to myself at one point “wow, when I go on vacation I’ll need to plan ahead so the fish don’t starve.” At some point I was talking about FishVille in the office and a couple of people asked why in the hell I was still playing the game with the posts completed. I realized then, in a flash, that I had a problem. I was addicted to FishVille. Total. Loser. I quit that day. Cold turkey. I checked back in a couple of days later to see what kind of situation I had on my hands. It was ugly. Most of the fish were dead, the few left alive were starving and the aquarium was dirty and mucked up. I took a screenshot and got out quickly. And this morning I checked one last time on my FishVille situation. All of the fish are now extremely dead. The tank is a mess. Before you laugh too hard at me (or after you’re done), realize this: seventy million people a month play FarmVille on Facebookalone (it was 60 million last month). There are Facebook groups on FarmVille addiction. Here are some tips from an ex addict on how to avoid becoming addicted. And YouTube is littered with people admitting their addicted to these games. Social gaming addiction is a real problem. It may be a somewhat funny problem, but it’s still a problem. And it’s no wonder that kids without access to credit cards are taking all these sketchy offers to get game currency. They’re hooked. Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
Sources: Amazon And Vente-Privee In Talks Over $3 Billion Acquisition Top
US retailing giant Amazon is in deep and secret negotiations with Vente-Privee , the French private sales club which has taken the ecommerce and fashion industries by storm, our sources say. We asked Xavier Court, marketing director at Vente-Privee, on the record if Amazon had acquired Vente-Privee. His response was "Very flattering but not true at all." However, our sources say that although the two companies have not yet agreed anything, they are in fact negotiating a price close to 2 billion Euros, or $3.01 billion. In October we learned that Vente-Privee was looking for a sale of between $2 billion and $4 billion.
 
Eric Schmidt: Government Too Slow For Me, Comcast Made A Pretty Smart Move Top
In a brief interview with FOX Business Network, Google CEO Eric Schmidt talked about his views on the talking points of Obama’s Jobs Summit at The White House, which he attended. The full clip is embedded below, but here are some of the highlights of what Schmidt said: - small and medium sized businesses do much of the hiring in the U.S., so they should be running into less problems getting loans - banks should be forced by the government to provide SMBs with more loans, by means of regulatory changes - Google wants media companies to ‘make it’ because they depend critically on their content - Comcast’s move to acquire NBCU was ‘probably pretty smart’ on their part and Google is unlikely to ever go down such a road - The speed of operation at the government is so slow compared to Google’s that Schmidt deems it unlikely that he’d ever join President Obama’s cabinet Watch the latest business video at FOXBusiness.com Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
Bedrock Thinks Publishers Should Create Their Own Ads Top
The problem with most ads is that they suck. Publishers sign up for ad networks and they have to take what they are given, which is usually some weight-loss ad showing way too much belly flab. But what if Website publishers could create their own ads? They know their audience best, right? That’s the idea behind Bedrock , an ad network created by the founders of GumGum , which is itself an unconventional way to display shopping ads on celebrity photos . The way Bedrock works is that publishers create ads on their site, which could be as simple as a text ad, an image, or a Flash animation. Then they pass a set of keywords associated with that ad to Bedrock through APIs and Bedrock has advertisers bid on those keywords just like they do with search ads. Every time somebody clicks on the publisher-created ad, it goes to a different advertisers based on who is bidding the most for the underlying keywords in a realtime auction. Let me illustrate this through an example. If you run a gadget site and you have a bunch of forums where people like to talk about Plasma TVs, you could create a generic ad with a graphic that says “Buy a Plasma TV.” You pass Bedrock the keyword “plasma TV” and advertisers who want to buy that keyword bid for your clicks. In particular, though, Bedrock is aimed at non-standard real estate for ads, such as widgets, feeds, chat rooms, desktop clients and so on where standard online ads don’t work so well. For instance, DocStoc has been trying out the ads with its embeddable documents. Sounds simple. Except I could easily see publishers try to abuse the system by not clearly indicating what is an ad and what is content, or hiding the ad directly in the content. So Bedrock won’t necessarily result in better, more relevant ads. For instance, a publisher could simply hyperlink valuable keywords in an article and make that an ad, or place a line of text under real headlines as an ad, which borders on being an advertorial. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, except that advertorials also suck. The founders Ophir Tanz and Ari Mir suggest you don’t do that, but rather label the ads clearly as such. They created Bedrock for themselves because they needed to generate ad inventory for GumGum images. They already produce hundreds of millions of impressions a month through GumGum which they monetize in this fashion for themselves, and so Bedrock is a generalized service that came out of that. Investors in GumGum include MySpace COO and Userplane founder Michael Jones , First Round Capital, GRP Ventures, and CrossCut Ventures. What do you think, can publishers create better, higher-performing ads than advertisers? Here’s a video explaining what Bedrock does: Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
Mobile Roadie Partners With Ustream To Power Official iPhone App For LeWeb Top
As mobile web usage increases, conference attendees need real-time, updated information on the go that can be accessible from mobile devices. Mobile Roadie, a startup that helps develops iPhone apps, has developed the official iPhone app for LeWeb, the foremost European technology conference organized by French entrepreneur and Seesmic founder, Loic Le Meur and his wife, Geraldine. LeWeb 2009 is set to take place next week in Paris, France. The LeWeb App, which is free, essentially puts the entire conference in the pockets of show attendees and lets anyone who isn’t attending the conference watch a live stream of the events directly from their iPhones. The LeWeb App packs in the essentials for attendees, speakers, and participants, including a detailed show schedule and agenda, speaker bios, and directions. To help people network at the show, the app contains a list of show attendees with a link to their Twitter profiles. The application also supports Facebook Connect and Twitter integration, so that all comments and Tweets can be blasted back out to Facebook and Twitter with the hashtag for LeWeb. And the app features push notifications so administrators can send alerts and updates easily to iPhone users. Mobile Roadie has partnered with Ustream to enable iPhone users to watch LeWeb live inside its own app. For now, Mobile Roadie only offers iPhone apps but will soon offer the ability to develop apps for the Andoid in January. The beauty of Mobile Roadie’s platform is that it offers a dead simple mostly-automated system to build apps and have them posted to Apple's App Store in as little as a week. Launched earlier this year, the startup develops mobile apps for other conferences, events, and venues, as well as musicians, athletes, politicians, and other celebrities. Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 

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