Gaming

Tim's Pick: Fast-Food Chains Grab Most Location-Based Check-ins

Summary:

Fast feeders, early data shows you're indeed cool enough for check-ins.

Quick-service chains Subway, McDonald's, Starbucks and Burger King have the most unique check-ins on MyTown, a location-based game with more than 3 million users that provided the data. Subway has seen nearly 6.4 million check-ins from more than 500,000 users since the app launched in December.

Tim's Pick: 'DriverVille' To Help Launch '11 Mazda 2

Summary: Mazda is taking to social media to launch the 2011 Mazda 2. A branded game on Facebook, "DriverVille," is a virtual, multiplayer game where players get customizable "Your Inner Driver" avatars and use them to drive virtual cars to win Driver Bucks for virtual products and real weekly sweepstakes prizes.

Tim's Pick: 3D's everwhere: in a newspaper, games, on the desktop

Summary: 3D technology - now close to becoming mainstream with the movie industry - is slowing making its way to other, less obvious vehicles, as three recent announcements show.

Tim's Pick: Virtual Currency Co. BigDoor Gets Real Money

Summary: BigDoor, a provider of white-label virtual goods systems, on Tuesday said it closed a second round of funding worth $5 million. The financing was led by Foundry Group.

Seattle-based BigDoor helps publishers build game-like mechanics and loyalty programs and apps, which usually involve some type of points, badges, levels, leaderboards, virtual currency and virtual goods.

Tim's Pick: Digital Coupons by Geo-Location

Summary: Digital coupons are a high-growth area for online marketers; Foursquare is as well. The former, though, has a clear path to ROI for both buyers and sellers. Until recently, the same couldn’t have been said about the wildly popular game. Enter coupons targeted by geolocation - which is showing signs of becoming a robust  monetization strategy for Foursquare.

Tim's Pick: Why The Future Of Game-Related Advertising Looks Like EA’s Dr. Pepper Deal

Summary:

By many accounts, 2009 was the first year that interactive advertising budgets actually shrank. Stats for display were dismal, and even search struggled to show the kind of growth the industry has become accustomed to. Then there’s in-game advertising. Judging from the layoffs at Microsoft’s Massive and the pending sale of IGA Worldwide, you’d think that the whole industry died last year.

 

Tim's Pick: A new set of rules for social games

Summary:

The tractors, fuzzy pets, and mobster ambushes might be virtual, but the past few weeks have shown that the battle for social-gaming market share is very, very real.

Monday saw the long-rumored announcement of gamemaker Playfish's big-ticket sale to Electronic Arts, a big win for a product niche some had dismissed early on as faddish and silly. But it comes at a time when there's ongoing press blitz over how much social-gaming companies rely on lucrative but potentially misleading means of advertising in the form of lead-generating offers.