Source:Valleywag
Nearly 7 out of 10 Americans play videogames, spending a combined $7.4 billion to feed their habit. But if the attraction of playing games was an escape from nonstop marketing in the real world, they’re in for a disappointment. Greedy advertisers want a piece of the action and are expected to drive in-game advertising sales up to $852 million by 2011, according to ABI Research. Startup Double Fusion plans to help spike the numbers by allowing developers to add ads to games without hardcoding spots during development.
For instance, ads served in Ubisoft’s Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six: Vegas appear on virtual billboard kiosks — the kind you’d run into in a mall — that held fake ads themed to the game’s environment. Even after Ubisoft launched its in-game advertising service early this year, real ads could only appear in the kiosks. With Double Fusion’s software, Ubisoft would be able to create spots on the fly. Billboards could appear on any surface. If it works, Double Fusion has created a boon for publishers and developers — and a bane for game players everywhere.
Source:Valleywag
Congratulations to Scott Morrison, the former editor of RedHerring.com, on escaping the troubled publication and landing a new job in the San Francisco bureau of Dow Jones. No matter what they say, Rupert Murdoch has to be a better boss than Alex Vieux. We suspected he was on to greener pastures when coworkers told us he started missing work, but an announcement on the website of the The Society of American Business Editors and Writers confirms the new position for us. And for the rest of his colleagues, too. Note to Scott, next time you switch gigs, it might be more polite to send out an internal email before your underlings find out via an industry newsletter. Or some scurrilous gossip rag.
Source:Valleywag
Time Warner’s troubled Internet unit, having resorted to me-too strategies in search, copying Google, and in portals, copying Yahoo, is now copying itself, going back to its old ways of mass layoffs. At Silicon Alley Insider, Henry Blodget crunches the numbers on various layoff scenarios. And here’s the thing: It’s not like AOL is losing money. Far from it. It’s simply not as obscenely profitable, as, say, Google, which is adding employees as fast as AOL seems to be shedding them. A layoff of a quarter of its staff would lift AOL’s profit margins from 39 percent to 52 percent, Blodget estimates. Given the constant dwindling of its Internet-access business, and the uncertain growth of its online advertising sales, cutbacks, while regrettable, seem logical. Let’s just not pretend Time Warner’s doing this to keep AOL alive; they’re doing this to keep AOL gushing cash.
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on Tuesday, September 4th, 2007 at 4:07 pm and is filed under AOL, Layoffs.
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