SocialAds, that’s what they’re calling it in advance of Facebook’s announcement about it’s own social ad network on the 6th.
What does it mean? Basically Facesoft will serve ads based on your social stream, even use that information to serve ads on third party sites within the Microsoft ad network.
If internet privacy is not already a concern of yours then this is probably akin to having your wallet stolen, unsettling, but not life threatening, I mean they could have stolen an organ or a limb or something. If internet privacy is a concern then things just got a bit armageddon on yo ass. Read the rest of this entry »
We took possession of the new London office this morning and then had to search for a priest to exorcise the spirit of Fatness we took to said possession. It was messy and involved crosses, a jigsaw blade, a Bulgarian van driver who was the spit of Boris Karloff and the playing of some phantom darts.
One of the tables wobbles a bit, the sofa bed is going and the red ethernet cables are going to clash awfully with the dark brown wooden floor but all in all it’s a nice little corner of deepest, most spandex’d Shoreditch and there’s a skip in the basement I can steal stuff from, yippee…
‘Areae’s Metaplace platform wants to revolutionize the virtual worlds space. Their platform will provide an open, easy-to-use interface which will allow users to create virtual worlds that can run anywhere. Metaplace-created virtual worlds will be robust with users being able to play games, socialize, create content and conduct commerce. ‘ (TC)
If and when we get the chance to play with this metawetdream we’ll be better able to say how brands might easily create their own virtual worlds, but for now we’ll just have to invent the spurious term, ‘brandual’ half brand, half virtual and nothing whatsoever to do with the word ‘granule’ which it sounds a bit like.
I’ve been thinking about virtual goods for sometime in parallel the emergence of the gaming industry as the most significant form of entertainment in the 21st Century.
Whether you’re a Wii bastard or a Second Lifer (no parole) you can not fail to recognise how virtual trading has become a business to be reckoned with, from sending a virtual bunch of daffs in HotorNot to hurling a pixelated spare rib in Facebook or buying a Level 60 Warlock in World of Warcraft.
Susan Wu wrote a fantastic article for Techcrunch in the summer about this trend and with 80 lengthy comments it is certainly a contentious subject. Some choice quotes from her piece:
‘People spend over $1.5 billion on virtual items every year. Pets, coins, avatars, and bling: these virtual objects are nothing more than a series of digital 1s and 0s stored on a remote database somewhere in the ether.’Read the rest of this entry »
Back in deepest darkest September, the 12th to be specific, I made up a word.
Appvertising: branded web application
It had 3 Google entries all referring to the Appalachian Mountain Range. My challenge to myself was to see if I couldn’t up the Google listings a bit, which for the sake of pure entertainment, we’ll call Google Gaming (even better played on a Wii).
I wrote a few posts about appvertising revelling in it’s perfectly formed wordiness, the prodigal child of advertising and application I approached the marketing directors of EasyJet and Virgin to tell them all about the appvert we could build them and how digi funky they’d be. Figuring I was writing from a weight gain company they never replied.
‘Daft Punk, the French electronic duo known for making music that scares your cat and using robots for live shows, are being hip again. This time, they’ve decided to promote their new live album, Alive, with an embeddable widget, which allows visitors to listen to previews of new tracks, buy the single, read Daft Punk’s biography, read the newsletter, and see a photo gallery of the band.
The widget below is yet another proof that “standard” promotional tools are giving way to web based promotion and social networking. And, since the creation of such a widget costs next to nothing, we expect to see more and more bands take this route and move much of their marketing activities online.’ (via Mashable)
It’s Friday and normally Friday posts are lite hearted web porn lite, but I uncovered this story from the 2500 posts I’ve yet to read through in my RSS reader. At Fat Man Towers we’ve been binge eating and developing widget concepts as promotional tools so this is sweet electro funk to our ears. The widget sphere is open for innovation and savvy content creators and brands should be looking to provide ‘value’ widgets, micro applications that people can share, or to return to a familiar theme, appvertising made portable.
So the blogosphere and news aggregators are buzzing with Microsoft’s $240million investment in Facebook in return for the rights to sell third party ads on the social operating system du jour and a 1.6% stake, valuing Facesoft at $15billion.
Well blow me down with a modified hacked hairdryer that’s enough money to buy Bulgaria.
Om Malik has a good breakdown of what this might mean, but I wanted to pick up on the whole ‘does Microsoft now have access to our personal data?’ issue. Read the rest of this entry »
All hail Digg, thou mightiest of social news aggregators.
I used to think that a lot, always followed by a weary, ‘darn (I cuss in American) I wish I’d thought of building something like that’. It’s a slick piece of kit Digg with some truly innovative and addictive data visualization… but and it’s a big butt, Digg is also lowest common denominator tech affiliate noise. Not a day goes by without a Top 10 something and today I witnessed and duly clicked on a story on the front page entitled ‘Pikachu’s Vagina Brings Happiness to Children’. Truth be told I seethed with envy, that’s the sort of posting title I wish I’d dreamed up. Combining manga, frontal lobe stimulus and the next generation, it’s sweet noobie nerd heaven. It’s top spot in the ‘Top 10 in all Topics’ with a staggering 3391 Digg’s. Read the rest of this entry »
Beatriz Farfan, creative director of Fat-Man Collective will undergo surgery today. We all wish her the best of luck with the operation and can’t wait to have her back. The surgery will take place at 4pm GMT, in Bogotá, Colombia.
We will post news of the operation later this week.
Please use the comment field to send her your best wishes.
Fat Man
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SocialAds, that’s what they’re calling it in advance of Facebook’s announcement about it’s own social ad network on the 6th.
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