RSSMix.com Mix ID 34497

All Points Bulletin: Delayed to Q3 2010

Google To Challenge Facebook Again

EA Claims Title Of "Number 1 Packaged Goods Publisher" In Western World [Business]

Offerpal Announces New Way To Gain In-Game Virtual Currency: Online Tasks

OfferPal the social media advertising and monetization company that allows users to gain virtual currency by participating in offers, surveys and more has announced a new method of monetization: Tasks. Specifically, they are utilizing Amazons Mechanical Turk artificial intelligence system to source the tasks. Amazons MT system enables people to do small tasks that cant be completed by computers themselves, and the broker of the transaction (here, Offerpal), receives a bit of compensation for the task.

Specifically, users that engage with Offerpal will now see an option to use Offerpal Tasks, which will present them the option of signing in with their Amazon login. The method here, which is evidenced by the screenshots, is that users will gain real-money through their selection of Amazons Human Intelligence Tasks, and they will then be shown the option of converting that real money into virtual currency (as shown in the second screenshot). Sample tasks include include rating search results, categorizing web sites or articles, and answering questions.

There have been moves like this before. Specifically, Gambit announced this functionality last year, and the functionality is very much the same. Gambit emphasized that the tasks are activities that are hard for software to master, but extremely easy for humans especially social game-playing, Internet-savvy humans who are incentivized by the prospect of earning your virtual currency.

Offerpal was one of the first players to monetize the social gaming scene, by providing offers to social game publishers who could then incent users to gain in-game currency by completing surveys and offers through Offerpal. The practice was extremely successful on early games like Mob Wars and Texas Hold Em Poker, and the competitors arose. Zynga was a big user of Offerpal, while Playfish used TrialPay. Zyngas Mark Pincus reported that 33% of revenues came from offers, and the market was rosy until Facebook added strict guidelines to the ad guidelines for these offers.

Offerpal had to fight a lot of controversy late last year regarding the potential scams within the offer stratosphere, and after a public confrontation with Mike Arrington, Offerpals CEO Anu Shukla was replaced with George Garrick, with Shukla staying on to continue (as she is the majority stakeholder). The company has been making a steady stream of interesting product announcements since, and seems to have steadied out.

The Ten Biggest Advertising Publishers On The Web

Last year, Yahoo still dominated display advertising on the Web in terms of sheer number of ad impressions on its properties, but social networking sites MySpace and Facebook came on strong. Some new data from comScore in its just-released 2009 U.S. Digital Year in Review ranks the top Web properties by the number of display ad impressions.

Yahoo served up an estimated 521 billion impressions last year, according to the report, followed by Fox Interactive Media (i.e. MySpace) with 368 billion, and Facebook with 330 billion. Microsoft sites (No.4) only served up 218 billion display ads, whereas Google (No. 6) served up only 70 billion. (These numbers do not include paid search text ads)

Heres the full ranking:

Top Ten Publishers Of Display Ads

Yahoo! Sites: 521 billion
Fox Interactive Media (MySPace): 368 billion
Facebook: 330 billion
Microsoft Sites: 218 billion
AOL: 192 billion
Google Sites: 7o billion
eBay: 36 billion
Glam Media: 25 billion
Amazon Sites: 22 billion
United Online: 20 billion

Obviously, the biggest sites with the most visitors serve up the most display ads. This year, Facebook doubled in size to the point where it is well past MySpace and catching up to Yahoo in audience size. It is already bigger than Yahoo in terms of pageviews.

Facebook has more advertising inventory than it knows what to do with, although not all of it is desirable. But Facebook is now selling all of its display ad inventory itself after it renegotiated its ad deal with Microsoft.

Biggest doesnt mean most profitable. Facebook might be serving up more ads than almost anyone else, but they are still selling at very low ad rates because they perform poorly for the most part. If Facebook can figure out a way to make the ads on its site become more relevant and useful, it has a lot of room to boost its ad rates.

You can download the entire comScore report at this 2009 U.S. Digital Year in Reviewlink.

CrunchBase Information

Facebook

Yahoo!

comScore

Information provided by CrunchBase

EA Announces Madden For Facebook

Today Electronic Arts President Peter Moore announced that its Madden NFL football video game franchise would be the next in its EA Sports portfolio to go online and social. The social game version of Madden NFL will be published primarily on the Facebook platform, but there is no official launch date set for the new game. Moore did confirm that Madden NFL on Facebook would be a "simpler" experience than the console versions of the game.

EA just last week announced a freemium online version of soccer franchise FIFA Online, while its freemium online golf title Tiger Woods PGA Tour Online is currently in beta. Both of these games monetize through sales of virtual goods and it seems extremely likely that Madden NFL will do so as well. On consoles, titles in the Madden NFL franchise have sold a grand total of 63 million copies across all platforms.

Madden NFL's success on consoles will not guarantee success in the social gaming sphere, which has yet to be dominated by major gaming brands. Traditionally Madden NFL titles sell to the core gaming demographic of men aged 18-35 demographic, but this is not the dominant demographic in social gaming. Gaming portal Kongregate has reported results suggesting it can achieve greater success with social games aimed at this core gaming demographic than Facebook.

There is a major factor in EA's favor when it comes to making Madden NFL work on Facebook, however: the company's recent acquisition of Playfish. Last week Playfish President and General Manager Kristian Segerstrale announced that Playfish was currently developing a social game based on a major EA IP set to debut in the next 12 to 24 months. If Playfish is in fact developing the Madden NFL social game, then we could see one of the first combinations of proven social gaming development skill and major brand appeal.

Oracle Drops Sun's Commitment To Accessibility

Top-10 Most Popular Magento Extensions This Week (Jan 31 - Feb. 5)

Turns Out You Actually Can Be Bored To Death

Electronic Arts beats reduced earnings forecasts

Electronic Arts reported third fiscal quarter results today that were in line with the reduced expectations analysts had.

For the third fiscal quarter ended Dec. 31, EA reported revenue of $1.24 billion, down from $1.64 billion a year ago. Net loss was $82 million, compared to a net loss of $641 million a year ago. Loss per share was 25 cents compared to a loss of $2 per share a year ago. On a non-GAAP basis, earnings per share were 33 cents, compared with 56 cents a share a year ago. Non-GAAP revenues were $1.35 billion, down 23 percent from $1.74 billion a year ago.

Analysts had expected non-GAAP revenues of $1.34 billion and non-GAAP earnings per share of 31 cents. EA had set its own guidance at $1.33 billion to $1.35 billion and EPS of 29 cents to 33 cents. EA had warned that it was going to have another tough quarter last month.

The good thing is that EAs fourth fiscal quarter line-up looks good. The company has already released Mass Effect 2, which generated more than 2 million unit sales in its first week and high review scores, including a 9 out of 10 review rating by me. EA also released Army of Two: The 40th day in January. Still to come are Command & Conquer 4: Tiberian Twilight, Battlefield: Bad Company 2, and Dantes Inferno (pictured), which debuts tomorrow.

Michael Pachter, an analyst at Wedbush Morgan, said in a note released last week that investors are likely to stay skeptical about EA until the fourth fiscal quarter is finished. EA is focusing on quality titles in its core console games business, but it has been forced to cut back on staff a couple of times due to weak sales in the past year.

Even as it lays off staff, it acquired Playfish, a maker of social games on Facebook, for as much as $400 million last fall. It is also investing heavily in free-to-play online games, the iPhone, and other new game platforms. EA said recently it will launch its NFL Madden football property on Facebook.

During the third fiscal quarter, EAs big sellers were Dragon Age: Origins, which sold 2.7 million units on the PC, PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360; and Left 4 Dead 2, which sold 2.9 million units on the PC and Xbox 360. EA said such titles helped it gain market share during 2009 in the core packaged goods games sold in physical stores business.

Packaged good sales for EA was down 9 percent in the third fiscal quarter. The business is becoming more focused on major hits. The top 20 games in all of the console game industry were 48 percent of sales, compared to 38 percent back in 2006.

EA said it has sold 9.7 million copies of its latest Fifa soccer game. Digital revenue, such as money from free-to-play online games, was an all-time high at $152 million in the quarter, up 30 percent from a year ago and at about $500 million on an annual basis. The digital business is profitable and it has a pro forma operating margin of about 20 percent. And EA said it has cut more than $100 million in operating expenses compared to a year ago. EA has a total of 1.9 million online game subscribers, and EA Mobiles revenue this quarter was $57 million, up 14 percent from a year ago.

For its fourth fiscal quarter, EA forecasts it will have revenue of $925 million to $1 billion, on a GAAP basis. Non-GAAP revenue is expected to be $800 $850 million. Non-GAAP earnings per share are expected to be 2 6 cents. For the first fiscal quarter ending June 30, EA expects a loss of 35 40 cents per share on a non-GAAP basis. Revenues are expected to be $710 $750 million on a GAAP basis and $460 $500 million on a non-GAAP basis.

For the fiscal year ended March 31, 2011, EA expects GAAP revenues of $3.45 $3.70 billion and non-GAAP revenues of $3.65 $3.9 billion. It expects non-GAAP earnings per share of 50 70 cents. EA said that in 2009, it shipped 19 games with 80 or better ratings on Metacritic, a review aggregator. The next-closest rival had only six such titles.

EA said it had closed five locations and was about two-thirds of the way through cutting 1,500 jobs that EA said earlier it would eliminate. It expects to end the fiscal year in March with about 8,120 employees and it expects to stay about that level during the next fiscal year.

Only two days left for SOE's ConnectDING event!

Push To End Online Gambling Ban Gains Steam

Quick Stat: Free Realms Hits 8M Users

Sony Online Entertainment announced today that its free-to-play, casual MMO Free Realms has registered over 8 million users. Free Realms has been quickly building steam since its April 2009 launch. It registered over 1 million users in its first 17 days, 2 million within its first month, and over 5 million by September. At the time of the last milestone, SOE President John Smedley attributed part of the success to the company's detailed tracking and data crunching, down to the point of opt-outs in the registration process, as well as the game itself.

Free Realms is more than just a virtual world for our players; it is a portal for imagination. A place where players transform their house into a jumping maze for friends to compete or a petting zoo that boasts all their pets, Smedley said in a statement. Our job as developers is to listen to and predict what they want and give them the tools that inspire and compel them to share their experiences with eight million others.

Ad expert: Googles Super Bowl spot was a live traffic test

Google CEO Eric Schmidt wants you to believe that Googles 52-second Parisian Love ad that ran in the third quarter of yesterdays Super Bowl was a spontaneous decision to take a popular YouTube video and share it with a wider audience.

Aw, a present. You shouldnt have!

They didnt. We got an email this morning from Martin McNulty, director of online ad agency Forward3D. Maybe because hes a Brit, McNulty can see past Super Bowl mania.

Google is nothing if not experimental, McNulty wrote. What better way to learn the true potential of the worlds most expensive slot than to buy it.

Exactly. This is the company that tested 41 shades of blue, and demanded that one of their designers test 4-pixel borders on a page versus 3 pixels and 5 pixels to justify his artistic eye.

By spending $3 million to run a popular YouTube clip during the third quarter of Sundays game, Google was able to monitor and measure the exact effect of a Super Bowl TV ad on Googles own traffic. My only question is, what took them so long?

Superbowl Tech Ads, 1976 Present

Unity Technologies strikes multi-year deal with LEGO for 3-D browser games

Unity Technologies is announcing today it has struck a three-year deal with LEGO in which the toy company will use Unitys 3-D animation engine in its upcoming online games.

San Francisco-based Unity makes a game engine, which is a set of tools that makes it easy to create a game. While many online games are based on Adobes Flash technology, those games tend to be two-dimensional and cartoon-like. Unity enables game developers using it to create 3-D games.

LEGO will generate a lot of content using our engine, said David Helgason (pictured below), chief executive of Unity.

The deal is an important recognition for Unity, which is proving that it is possible to create a high-quality 3-D game using a game engine that doesnt require a download. Unitys technology enables browser-based games. Thats important because lots of casual gamers wont download anything. If they can play games within a web browser without a big download, then that greases the skids for the players to spend more time on the game and more money playing it. About a million players a month are installing Unitys plug-in, which is required to play the browser-based 3-D games.

For LEGO, Unity is important in the creation of games in the LEGO Star Wars category, one of the popular genres that has revived LEGOs fortunes in the video game business.

So far, Unity has more than 90,000 registered developers, up from just 13,000 in October. It makes money through standard licensing fees for software. A tool set to make iPhone games, for instance, costs $400. But in October, Unity also launched a free version of its engine for hobbyists to use. That explains the huge rise in developers registered to use Unity. As a result, the company is enabling a new era of garage developers, or people who are making games on low budgets for web-based platforms.

The conventional wisdom used to be that 2-D games were far easier to make than 3-D games. But Helgason said the barrier to 3-D is coming down. A typical programmer can create a 3-D building in perhaps 20 minutes.

Meanwhile, the LEGO deal will help Unity gain corporate respect as well. Other big entities using the Unity engine are NASA, the Cartoon Network, and Electronic Arts. Unity has 60 employees and is funded by Sequoia Capital.

David Helgason will be a speaker on a panel on Disruptive Innovation at our GamesBeat@GDC conference on March 10 in San Francisco.

Cryptic clarifies what one million accounts actually means

Facebook to Launch a Full-On Email Client [Email]

Mozilla Warns of Two Firefox Extensions Containing Trojan Malware [Security]

Dummy Image Generator Is the Lorem Ipsum of Images [Design]

Wine Tasting in TuscanyI mean, Oregon

Tue, 02 Sep 2008 23:28:54 -0400

IMG_2185

Originally uploaded by sdeyecandy

We haven’t taken a honeymoon yet, but over this past Labor Day weekend, Liz and I went to Oregon for a wedding, finding some valuable time for Wine tasting. One of the couples that toured the town of Dundee, OR with us assured us that the experience was “just like” Tuscany, so we could just tell people that we were in Italy. Take a look and see for yourself:

Flickr: Wine Tasting in Oregon

Our first picnic @ Humphreys

Tue, 02 Sep 2008 22:22:53 -0400

IMG_2149.JPG

Originally uploaded by sdeyecandy

Here is a pic from our first kayak / picnic to the Humphrey’s By The Bay Summer Concert Series. I don’t even remember who it was that we saw, but we enjoyed a fine feast of trail mix and wine-in-a-box. Next time, we are going to spend more time planning the menu.

Im Married!

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 12:43:45 -0400

The big day finally arrived, and the wedding went off in Gloucester without a hitch. Liz and I have been absolutely humbled by the number of people that have sent us photos from the wedding. I have put together links to each of the albums below so that we can track them all in one spot. I have also included a link to our professional photos from Sharon’s Studio of Gloucester.

We owe a big thank you for everyone that took photos for us and captured this special day. Despite a few small “hiccups”, the entire day seemed to just fly by! Sorry for the non-”Business” interruption… Now its back to work!

Sharon’s Studio of Gloucester

Wedding Photos

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 00:18:18 -0400

We owe a big thank you for everyone that took photos for us and captured this special day. Despite a few small “hiccups”, the entire day seemed to just fly by!

Sharon’s Studio of Gloucester

Engagement Announcement

Wed, 02 Apr 2008 17:02:13 -0400

Although we have been engaged since September, we finally got around to discussing the engagement announcement. Here is what Liz came up with:

"Elizabeth Purdy Colangelo and Matthew Augustus Howell are happy to announce their engagement.
Elizabeth is the daughter of Kathleen Purdy of Gloucester and Leonard Colangelo of East Boston. She is a graduate of Gloucester High School, class of 1996, and received a B.S. in Biology from Tufts University and a Ph.D. in Biology from Dartmouth College. She moved to San Diego, CA for her position as a Research Associate at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies.
Matthew is the son of John and Lucy Howell of Phoenix, AZ. He is a graduate of Brophy College Preparatory and received a B.A. in Computer Information Systems and Business Law from Loyola Marymount University.
His career also brought him to San Diego, where he is the Senior Technical Product Manager at Del Mar Database.
The proposal message was displayed on the main sail of the family’s racing boat and the couple celebrated their engagement with a dinner on San Diego Bay surrounded by family and friends. They plan a June 14th, 2008 ceremony and reception in Annisquam MA followed by a September 20th reception in San Diego."

There are pictures of the actual proposal below…

Flickr Album

Liz’ Photos on Shutterfly

Holistic Approaches to Web Reporting

Mon, 31 Mar 2008 11:11:50 -0400

Recently, I noticed that one of my coworkers had submitted a question to LinkedIn Answers, regarding web monitoring. I didn’t see the question until after it was already closed out by LinkedIn, but I responded to him privately. I figured after going to the trouble of outlining all this, I might as well share it with the world:

In my consulting, I have typically suggested a comprehensive plan for getting inside the head of visitors. In my opinion there is not one "all encompassing" solution for monitoring a web site, campaign, or in some cases each persona, since each organization’s objectives are different. I believe that the full view can only be achieved by reviewing a site from multiple angles:

UI Design & Content Popularity:

Frequency: Weekly
Suggestions: Google Analytics

I was a HUGE fan of Urchin’s analytics before Google bought them. Unfortunately, since they were acquired, some of the more advanced features have been removed, but they still offer an excellent package. A number of “premium” packages (ie: Webtrends) are available, but most organizations don’t know how to take advantage of the types of detail provided by WebTrends.

With Google’s latest refresh of their Analytics package, there really is no reason to use “heat map” tools like Crazy Egg or ClickTracks. Google’s package now includes similar functionality (although more basic), called “Site Overlays” making Google’s the most comprehensive of tools in its class. I am not a big fan of running multiple remote analytics tools simultaneously on the same site, because they typically rely on embedded Javascript loaded from the vendor’s server, and if their analytics environment ever goes down, it can lead to page rendering issues or perceived slowness. This threat can be mitigated by limiting the analysis to only one embedded vendor (ie: Google)

E-Mailing campaigns:
Frequency: Monthly / Quarterly
Suggestions: Constant Contact

I would imagine this is an area most Marcom reps are already well versed in but its worth mentioning, as often your mailing / e-mailing strategy will fold directly into your Conversion tracking. Along these lines, you may find the following article from a couple days ago helpful:

http://www.marketingcharts.com/direct/senior-marketers-little-confidence-in-ability-to-track-multichannel-campaigns-3171/

Profitability / Conversion:

Frequency: Weekly / Monthly / Annually
Suggestions: Google Analytics or custom implementation

Conversion can be difficult to track accurately, on some platforms. Depending on how your site / application tracks a user’s session data, you may have to get creative in how remote applications (ie: Google) interpret the visitor’s navigation paths towards conversion. In the last 12 months, I have seen a number of web content management systems (CMS) implement internal reporting to address this; examples being Wordpress, DotNetNuke, and Plone.

Additionally, if you are planning an Adwords / Adsense campaign, there is no substitute for Google, when monitoring conversion from these services.

Reliability / Speed / Availability:

Frequency: Daily / Weekly / Monthly / Quarterly / Annually
Suggestions: DotComMonitor or host-tracker.com (both free / inexpensive)

This is an angle that too many people forget to consider. No one likes a slow site, and any number of factors could slow down the perceived speed of your site: Browser Quirks, slow DNS requests, a broken Javascript, etc. Solutions like host-tracker.com (I use this for my own domains) have a swarm of geographically distributed servers that can provide you with a geographically significant uptime statistic, as well as break down how much time each phase of the web request is taking (ie: 10 seconds total to load a page, of which 5 seconds is DNS, and 3 seconds is requesting the HTML, and 2 seconds is all other images). Watching these numbers often uncovers bottlenecks in the delivery and rendering of a site, and may explain erratic navigation paths in a site.

New Site! (Now hosted on Wordpress)

Mon, 31 Mar 2008 10:07:08 -0400

For what seems like the 100th time (more like the 5th), I have migrated my web site to a new framework. I am putting the finishing touches on my new site to take over for my previous Python / Plone-based site. Some people might think this is the absolute craziest time in my life to be taking on such a big project (I am getting married in June, among other things), but thats exactly why "now" is the perfect time to do this. In the next couple months / years I hope to have a lot going on both personally and professionally, so I have restructured things to provide a home for these different audiences and activities. The site is now broken up into two major areas:

Strictly Business
This community will serve as a home for all things related to my career and professional hobbies. I have a number of small software projects that I have kept around and I plan on releasing here from time to time. Additionally, I believe that a career-focused site is a great way to centralize my involvement in other web communities (YouTube, Flickr, LinkedIn, etc.).
A Lighter Side…
Although my goal for this area of the site is similar to Strictly Business, I envision that the content and audience will be much different. I plan to use this community as a vehicle to share my personal accomplishments, hobbies, and media. My hope is to share much of the personal content that made it on my previous site that typically focused on Sailing, Labrador Rescue, and family activities.

The Geeky Stuff: A bit of history…
I have used previous re-inventions of my own site / brand as a chance to show that I "eat my own dog food", and also as an exercise to stay up on new / popular platforms. I initially bought matticus.com back when I was still working for Path Communications, in Marina Del Rey, CA. I had a coworker who constantly called my Matticus whenever I walked in, and after a while, it stuck. I hacked together a Linux server in my dorm room and didn’t really do much with it until a year or so later.

My senior year at LMU, I assisted in teaching a Senior-level Computer Science course aimed at taking students through a typical Software Development Lifecycle. The class was two semesters long, beginning with a semester for gathering requirements, and a second semester to actually develop the project. We structured the class project around my love affair at the time, Jakarta Struts (I was still employed at Path and they were exclusively Java). As Senior year came to a close, I wanted to continue experimenting with Struts, so I wrote my own Blog engine to track my progress across Europe, for a trip I took after I graduated (a great story for another time).

After returning home to the real world, and continuing my career, I spent some time exploring the .NET world, creating various incarnations of my site based on DasBlog, DotNetNuke (DNN), and briefly Sharepoint. Each platform had its own pro’s and con’s, but inevitably, each framework had a quirk that would feed my desire to experiment with something new. Most recently, I have been spending a considerable amount of time working on the Plone CMS Framework. Built on top of the powerful Zope server, I find Plone to be a very compelling solution for small and medium sized businesses. In my case, I chose to move on to Wordpress not for a lack of functionality in Plone, but instead to find features in other tools that could compliment Plone. Which brings us to the new site…

Why Wordpress Mu?
I arrived at Wordpress one afternoon while looking for a solution to rapidly prototype an idea I had for a Blog Media Plugin (now available in Projects as Media Link). The Wordpress platform has a large number of plugins already available, and since its based on PHP, that means a lot of example code. I sat down over a weekend, having never worked on PHP, or Wordpress, and had a proof of concept running of MediaLink in a matter of a couple hours. It became clear to me that Wordpress would make an ideal platform for the next incarnation of my site. I had also been playing around with the idea of having a separate career-driven and family-driven community, so the Multi-blog version, Wordpress Mu, was an ideal choice.

Regardless of whether you are a friend, family member, coworker, or random visitor that stumbled in from off the street, I hope this site will help you find answers. Also, please feel free to introduce yourself below!

Visiting Disneyland

Sat, 13 Oct 2007 17:02:14 -0400

Pics and video from Disneyland

YouTube Video

Flickr Album