Sesame street – step a side! Here come Baby Juno! I’m very excited to announce that I have joined the Juno Company advisory board. The Juno Company is an amazing little San Francisco based company that is focused creating a fun, witty and engaging musical experiences for pre-schoolers. The Juno [...]
Sesame street – step a side! Here come Baby Juno! I’m very excited to announce that I have joined the Juno Company advisory board. The Juno Company is an amazing little San Francisco based company that is focused creating a fun, witty and engaging musical experiences for pre-schoolers. The Juno Company have already won several Emmy Awards and was founded by classical composer and mom, Belinda Takahashim her husband Adam Adelman.
There are several reasons why I decided to get involved in this company, first of all my kids absolutely love Juno DVDs’ and toys. Second, as a passionate music lover, I was just blown away by Belinda’s beautifully orchestrated compositions recorded by real live orchestras. Juno also have very strong social responsibility program: For every for every Juno product sold through the company’s website, the company will donate a special music education DVD to a child in need through K.I.D.S. as a part of their One-For-All-program. This is a great initiative I’d like to help grow.
I really believe in this team and think that the Juno Company is going to be the next Sesame Street. They are already already killing it retail byt totally taking over FAO Schwartz store in New York, the biggest such launch FAO Schwartz have done for decades, selling nation wide through Buy Buy Baby & Amazon and soon rolling out in Toys-r-Us.
I will be helping the Juno Company with digital and social strategy. And I’m not alone, I am joining a great company of advisors: Brooke Shields (narrated all Juno books), Andrew McCollum (Facebook co-founder), Bernard Gershon (former Disney SVP & GM) Peter Safran (The Safran Company) and Dr. Dorothy Singer (Yale). The great thing is that these are not just passive advisors but very active advisors. The way it should be.
If you are interested in partnering or working with the Juno Company bringing highly engaging musical edutainment to kids, feel free to reach out and I’ll hook you up.
The Chinese Gaming company The9 has invested in AuroraFeint – makers of the OpenFeint platform to bring OpenFeint to China & Android. Very exciting times for Jason & the team. I first got involved with OpenFeint as and advisor last year after I left [...]
The Chinese Gaming company The9 has invested in AuroraFeint – makers of the OpenFeint platform to bring OpenFeint to China & Android. Very exciting times for Jason & the team. I first got involved with OpenFeint as and advisor last year after I left Facebook & have been very impressed by the speed Jason Citron & his team have executed on their vision under the guiding star of Peter Relan, founder of YouWeb who incubated the company.
OpenFeint has over 2,200 live games for the iPhone, and will soon have publishers such as Astraware, Digital Chocolate, Glu Mobile, Hudson Soft and others onboard.
With both Chinese and Japanese investors onboard (the Japanese gaming giant DeNA invested in the company last year) AuroraFeint is set up for a strong future presence in Asia.
Very excited to see how the how the story unfolds.
Disclaimer: I’m a former advisor & a small shareholder in AuroraFeint.
Congratulations to Jason & the Aurora Feint crew on launching OpenFeint X - the coolest thing since sliced awesome! Now you can build free-to-play iPhone games just like the ones on Facebook with virtual goods, micro-transactions, millions of players and all that stuff! Aurora Feint rocks the iPhone games market once again. If you are a game developer – don’t be a looser ! Integrate OpenFeint now & get that Xbox-live experience in your iPhone game + million of users. Nuff said. Disclaimer: I’m an advisor.
Digital Chocolate, one of the most frequent publishers of iphone games is going to use OpenFeint for scoreboards and achievements. This is a huge win for OpenFeint, that already has more than 3 million active users on its platform and more than 200 games in the app store. I have covered OpenFeint several times before here . Also check out the interview Jason Citron, Peter Relan & I gave to TUAW some time ago. If you are an iphone game developer integrate OpenFeint immediately! You won’t regret it. Follow: OpenFeint on Twitter for more frequent updates. Disclaimer: I’m on their advisory board.
A recent article in Wall Street Journal talks about virtual relationships and their affect on real relationships. According to a recent study cited we can learn the following about the cognitive processes in players brains:
- On a neurological level, players may not distinguish between virtual and real-life relationships
- People socializing in virtual worlds remain sensitive to subtle cues like eye contact – in one study, participants moved their avatars back if another character stood too close, even though the space violation was just virtual
- Our brains are not specialized for 21st-century media – There is not switch that says “Process this different because it is on the screen”.
More discussion at the MIT Advertising Lab and Neuromarketing
This is just awesome! Frets on Fire is a game about musical skill and fast fingers. The aim of the game is to play guitar with the keyboard as accurately as possible. It’s an open-source project with hundreds of songs composed by the community and supports multi platform. In short it is open source guitar hero! How cool is that!
Features:
- Unique inverted keyboard gameplay style
- Song editor form making your own tunes
- Compete iwth others on the World Charts
- Supports importing Guitar Hero I-II songs
- Multiplatform
- Open source
Technorati Tags: fretsonfire, games, opensource, guitar hero, music
I told you and showed you about HiPiHi – China’s Second Life. Hold the fort! Here comes Frenzoo – Second Life for teenage girls in Hong Kong..According to Brand Republic “Frenzoo, an Asia-centric 3D virtual world aimed at teenage girls, will soon come out of stealth mode to connect consumers in a Second Life-like experience.“.Via Angus.
Technorati Tags: Frenzoo, HiPiHi, Virtual Worlds, Hong Kong, Second Life, SL
Have you ever wondered why there are is no advertising on loading screens of Flash-heavy sites? So does Adverlab , and they really raised a good point. I actually tend to skip Flash-based sites if they don’t load at once, and I dont think I am alone. Taking advantage of the loading time is actually a very good idea for either advertising or information snippets.
Susan participated in an Avatar panel at SXSW in Austin and shared some of her notes with us on Avartars, Virtual worlds and Gaming. She also points to a very interesting academic study on Game Studies (download).
Main points:
- Games need more laughter in the slaughter
- Players want to help other players do well in the game even when the game is competitive
- Games need non-white characters who are not gangsters or criminals.
- Gamers are less social than you think they are, less social than even THEY think they are
- How do players learn to play? If it looks like a sniper, it should act like a sniper
- Gestural interfaces that make sense, make sense for specific reasons.
- You can quantify which factors matter most in immersive game design.
- There are multiple ways to approach realism
- There is such a thing as ethical videogame design
- Death matters..
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