Sony Corp. has announced its intentions to sell 17.72 million shares of DeNA stock to Nomura Securities. The stock in the online gaming company is worth roughly $440 million and will be added to the company’s Q4 earnings.
“Sony is transforming its business portfolio and reorganizing its assets in an effort to strengthen its corporate structure,” said Sony in a statement. “This sale is made as a part of that initiative.”
Jerry Bruckheimer Games is confirmed to no longer be a functioning entity. Founding presidents Jim Veevaert and Jay Cohen have moved on to Zynga and the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences, respectively.
“Jerry Bruckheimer Games is no longer active,” a representative said.
While his “game incubation studio” no longer exists Bruckheimer continues to produce blockbuster movies for Hollywood. He is currently set to produce the next National Treasure and Pirates of the Caribbean movies and the upcoming Lone Ranger.
Source: Gamespot.com
Facebook has turned to outside ad targeting networks Datalogix, Epsilon, Acxiom, and BlueKai to boost targeting and reach for advertisers. It says the move will deliver better results and more effective campaigns.
It also means Facebook is moving beyond the ‘user likes’ approach for targeting. Partnering with these networks will help it expand beyond its own graph of strictly social media behavior, for example reaching users based on shopping habits on and off the internet. The expectation is better ROI for its advertisers.
To prove it, Facebook is circulating a couple of examples. Kingnet, a Hong Kong-based game developer, claims it reduced cost-per-install for its apps by 40 percent using Facebook’s enhanced targeting. A car dealership in Chicago says it had 24 times better ROI on its ad spend by building a Facebook campaign around the new service.
Facebook spelled out one way to take advantage of the new service in its blog, “For example, an auto dealer may want to customize an offer to people who are looking to buy a new car. To do this today, many businesses work with third parties to better understand how to identify and reach that audience. With today’s updates businesses can now do this same thing by showing ads to people on Facebook who may be in the market for a new car.”
Source Facebook
More than 50 speakers from companies working in mobile games gathered in New York in January at Mobile Gaming USA East and [a]list summit NY. The events looked at the booming mobile game category, a $9 billion global market last year and growing 32 percent annually, according to research firm Newzoo. The category is facing a big boom challenge – fierce competition.
Newzoo CEO Peter Warman put it this way, “Mobile gaming growth is huge . . . it will continue to grow. So everybody wants a share of that pie.”
Here, a cross-section of speakers present their views on how mobile game companies can overcome hurdles such as app discoverability issues and rising marketing costs as the category becomes more and more cluttered.
The fan-driven fight tournament for Injustice: Gods Among Us has concluded round 4! The campaign dubbed “Injustice Battle Arena” is the brainchild of Warner Bros. marketing and Ayzenberg.
Watch celebrities and fans share their pre-fight speculation on this week’s titanic match ups – Superman versus Sinestro and Hawkgirl versus Green Arrow – then check out who won here.
Activision rolled out a trailer for Skylanders Swap Force, showing the dozens of combinations that can be made to the soundtrack of Fatboy Slim’s Weapon of Choice. Occasionally, Kaos interjects and is impeccably voiced by Richard Horvitz.
Facebook announced that it has agreed to buy advertising technology from Microsoft designed to measure the effectiveness of ads on its website; terms of this deal with Facebook were not disclosed. The Atlas Advertiser Suite should help benefit Facebook in its fight against Google for online display advertising revenue.
“Although the statement announcing the deal focused on Atlas’ measurement tools rather than its ad targeting technology, we expect that Atlas will soon be using Facebook’s data to target sponsorships, in-stream ads, and other rich ad formats across the entire web, and that’s big news,” said Forrester analyst Nate Elliott. “The question now is how quickly and successfully Facebook can integrate its data with Atlas’ tools, and whether they can avoid a privacy backlash as they do so. History suggests they’ll struggle on both counts.â€
Atlas was originally brought on by Microsoft with its $6.3 billion acquisition of digital ad agency aQuantive in 2007. Microsoft wrote off $6.2 billion of the aQuantive deal’s value last year.
Separately, Facebook announced that it is partnering with several outside ad networks to help advertisers with better reach and targeting on the social net.
Source: Reuters.com
The Internet allows information both large and small to be conveyed in text, but sometimes that’s not enough. As countless memes have proven, a picture can be worth a thousand words, and an animated image can express thousands more.
“How did we get here Through the evolution of an early, entirely functional file format, the GIF. Originally meant to transform the Internet into a more visual world, the GIF is now the common platform for portable, delightfully out-of-context entertainment,” writes Maury Postal. “The genesis of this newfound fanaticism over small units of repetitive scenery is firmly rooted in past and present human behavior. Throughout history, there have been many instances of honest entertainment starting with the observation and celebration of simple, memorable moments in the physical world.”
While GIFs are popular around the Internet, they are completely underused for marketing purposes. Using simple imagery can be compelling and relateable.
“Embracing and understanding the cultural nuances of the moving image is only part of the equation. Applying those learnings in a smart, fluid and expressive manner is the only way for a modern brand to form a tightly knit emotional bond with the very people who communicate and share with their hearts, instead of solely listening to their heads,” Postal adds.
“For Lincoln, for example, we challenged ourselves to redefine what the essence of the brand would look like to a group of people that now communicate through emotion-defining imagery. To do this, we couldn’t pull from the past. Instead, we had to interpret what larger cultural elements would resonate and reinforce the soul of the reborn automaker. We focused on how an entire state of mind could characterize a simple moment in time: seducing and enchanting the cultural zeitgeist into being a part of our animated Shangri-La, while preparing a new future for the brand,” he concludes,
Source: DigiDay.com
Red Hot Labs has raised $1.5 million to create a mobile development platform and titles to demonstrate how the platform works. The San Francisco-based company was founded by Amitt Mahajan and Joel Poloney, who created the technology that helped Zynga develop FarmVille.
“It’s an approach where we’re eating our own dog food,” said Mahajan. “In the last few years, the combination of powerful technology combined with intuitive user interfaces built on top of Facebook has disrupted the industry and changed the way consumers interact with one another. We believe mobile is the obvious next disruptive platform, but the tools to realize its potential do not yet exist. Our focus is on creating better ways of building and distributing applications that will be essential to companies and consumers in an increasingly mobile-centric world.”
Source: VentureBeat
Ouya has announced that it has hired Kellee Santiago as the company’s new head of developer relations. Santiago previously worked at Thatgamecompany on the games Journey and Flower.
“We’ve been looking for someone to lead our outreach to developers, someone who really ‘gets’ how developers work, someone who can help devs bring their most creative, exciting work to Ouya,” wrote Ouya CEO Julie Uhrman. “We are thrilled to share that Kellee Santiago, co-founder of Thatgamecompany (the maker of Journey) and partner at Indie Fund, will be joining us to lead developer relations. We’re calling her Ouya’s DBF (Developer’s Best Friend).”
“Ouya gets it. This is the first console company that really understands how important it is to remove the barriers to development,” Santiago said. “By freeing up the development process, Ouya is opening up new doors in console gaming.”
