With the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco just looming over the horizon, what’s on tap for the industry? Any integral trends/issues that might be game changers?
For starters, what you don’t readily see is vitally important. UK-based, publicly-held Imagination Technologies creates and licenses multimedia IP cores for graphics, video, and display processing; licensees include many leading semiconductor and consumer electronics companies.
According to VP-Marketing Tony King-Smith, a key issue is improving texture compression in order to get the best quality game with the fastest download times.
“Increasingly in software downloads the total file size is dominated by texture data – indeed, up to 70% or more of a top game title may be textures,” says King-Smith. “This has had a massive impact on everything from app store download and update times through to device main memory usage.”
The most notable trend we’ll see this year is the shift to mobile games – from independent developers to traditional publishers, most companies are now directing their efforts around mobile strategies (smartphones, according to IndustryGamers, already comprise the majority of handheld gaming revenue).
Wanda Meloni, who heads up Encinitas, CA-based market research firm M2 Research, predicts the mobile games market will exceed $6 billion... Read more
Archive for February, 2012
iMedia upgrades to Facebook Timeline
We've done it! iMedia Connection just made the switch to Facebook Timeline. Take a look at the new and improved page.
Facebook recently announced it is expanding the Timeline to brand and business-focused pages. The new designs will take effect March 30, but admins can choose to publish earlier. Some new features include cover photos, private messaging capabilities, and a new dashboard called the Admin Panel. Also, admins can make certain posts appear larger and "pin" a new post to the top of the page each week. For more check out this blog from Tom Edwards.
So far, we like the new look. Except it takes longer to load (grumble...get with it, Zuckerberg).
How 1:1 Customer Engagement is Stealing the Spotlight from Traditional Segmentation
There’s been a lot of buzz in the media the past few weeks after the ‘all revealing’ NY Times article – How Companies Learn Your Secrets. According to the article, “one study from Duke University estimated that habits, rather than conscious decision-making, shape 45 percent of the choices we make every day, and recent discoveries have begun to change everything from the way we think about dieting to how doctors conceive treatments for anxiety, depression and addictions.”
So think about applying this to your mobile marketing strategy. Is how you engage with end users aligned to their daily routines – what they do day in and day out, how they actually behave – or solely based on ‘who’ they are? We’re all familiar with traditional segmentation. But what’s more helpful – knowing that I’m categorized as a “suburban sports enthusiast” or knowing that I make the same drive, around the same time each day and am 73% more likely to respond to a SMS offer in the morning rather than in the afternoon?
One might argue that marketing to ‘segments’ isn’t much better than mass marketing. So, what is the alternative? The alternative is having a ‘dynamic understanding of the user’. What... Read more
