Handheld

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.

A new report from market-watcher Flurry Analytics finds that while Nintendo is still the dominant player in the portable gaming market, its marketshare is being rapidly eroded by the growing popularity of Android and Apple's iOS platform. According to Flurry, sales of Android and iOS games now account for 34 percent of the portable gaming market-and much of that growth comes at the expense of Sony's PSP and (to a much greater extend) Nintendo's portable gaming platforms.

Mobile video consumption continues to rise sharply. Forty percent more Americans were watching video on smartphones and other mobile devices like tablets and iPads in 2010 versus 2009, according to the Nielsen Company.

Rally Marketing Group is acquiring PassionFruit Games, a developer of casual video games aimed at female gamers. The agency points to importance of female shoppers to its client base as one reason as well as the growing numbers of casual female gamers. Female fans make up 40% of all video game players, according to the Entertainment Software Association, with women over the age of 18 representing a significantly greater portion of the game-playing population (33%) than boys age 17 or younger (20%).

When constructing the "Look What You Can Do"-themed campaign promoting the Olympus PEN E-PL1, the media and creative teams at the Boston office of Mullen wanted to put the camera in the hands of consumers.

Tablet computers are poised to transform the marketplace for personal computers and consumer electronics, according to eMarketer, which sees cumulative worldwide sales of tablet computers exceeding 140 million units by the end of 2012. That's a combined total of 15.7 million devices sold in 2010, plus a projected 43.6 million in 2011 and another 81.3 million in 2012.

Rummelhart joins a number of parents who have been horrified by purchases of Smurfberries and other virtual items in top App Store games. The 17 highest-rated comments on The Smurfs Village; in the App Store all complain about the high cost of the Smurfberries, and two commenters call it a scam.

As the Microsoft Kinect full-body controller for Xbox comes to market this week, the kids from Redmond are beside themselves with high expectations. The company had been projecting a very optimistic sales target of three million units sold in the final quarter. But based on pre-orders and retailer orders, they raised the forecast to 5 million.

The Jambox, which has roughly the dimensions of a blackboard eraser, allows you to play all kinds of sounds from your smartphone, Apple iPad or other Bluetooth-enabled device. It's small enough and, at about 12 ounces light enough, to toss into a suitcase or laptop bag, and simple enough that there's no learning curve to speak of.