Gaming

Inspired by the now infamous virtual closet in Clueless, Netrobe, an iPhone app out of Athens, Greece, attempts exactly this, helping you remember the individual items from your wardrobe by giving you a tool to catalog them. Netrobe allows iPhone users to mix and match individual items of clothing or accessories on a Styleboard, create outfits for events, pack entire suitcases or add inspirational images to a Lookbook.

Just as Best Buy is wrapping up a campaign it launched on Zynga's CityVille, the game-maker is prepping a new virtual game - and presumably, new virtual promotion opportunities for relevant brands.

The teaser campaign is part of an elaborate marketing plan for Wrigley 5 gum. Wrigley introduced the brand in 2007 to try to bring teens and young adults back to chewing gum. The company was acquired by Mars Inc. in 2008. The gum maker's game, dubbed "The Human Preservation Project," claims to be recruiting players to take part in virtual experiments to save the human race by maintaining sensory experiences.

Google and its agency, Grow Interactive have created an interactive mobile format that uses AdMob's rich media capabilities. It debuted the format with an ad campaign called "Uncover Your World" that invites the user to explore a virtual cityscape and learn via a self-paced storyline how the Google Search app can "uncover" facts about the world with features like search with voice and search with the phone's camera.

For the next six months, the coffee and pastries sold by Dunkin' Donuts will be featured in the Sims Social Facebook game to be introduced on facebook.com by Electronic Arts. Financial terms of the deal are not being disclosed.

It worked for Facebook. Now, Google+ is getting into the gaming business. Not only is the move likely to send the social network's usage numbers soaring, but it gives game companies the chance to diversify and reduce their dependence on Facebook.

"Talk to Me," the latest exhibit from the Museum of Modern Art includes nearly 200 pieces of interactive art. To kick off the show, New York's venerable museum partnered with gaming magazine Kill Screen to produce an Arcade party highlighting some of the most artful creations in the world of video games.

Interactive TV games company, PlayJam, has launched a global games service on Samsung Smart TV's and Blu-ray players. The service, which is now live on Samsung's 2010 product range, is "a social and casual games network, available at Samsung Apps--the world's first HDTV-based application store offering about 640 paid and free apps globally that help people connect to their various passions," PlayJam states in its press materials.

Sony's PlayStation Network, an online entertainment hub for all Sony PlayStation platforms -- original programming, game integration, and Home, a social network -- is getting creative with in-game ad opportunites.

With Apple Thursday announcing more than 15 billion apps have been downloaded from the App Store to date, it's clear apps have become big business. But for developers, one of the dilemmas is whether to charge upfront for mobile apps or offer them free and make money from the small proportion of users who pay for higher-level access or make in-app purchases.