Harnden62

Great interest in seeing where game development/distribution will go next.  Many seasoned publishers believe the future is Free-to-Play (F2P) but with a social media / transmedia twist. Enter Sava Transmedia - out of Montreal - and their new game Rubber Tacos. They caught my eye as a company to watch, particularly, their partnership with Zynga to create and distribute... Rubber Tacos = Angry Birds + Cut the Rope + co-creation + friend challenges Their CEO, Alain Tascan (like many it seems) comes from the console world.  He is a past VP with EA and Ubisoft. http://ca.linkedin.com/pub/alain-tascan/0/853/b96 Elements of Sava Transmedia's business model: 1) Reach - rather than going after 300MM console players with AAA sequels, go after 1B+ with a new genre of social play. 2) Different Audience - F2P social gamers are a different audience, demanding a different experience 3) Designers - more than 50% female designers/developrs - to help engage...

Thanks to the efforts of people like Barbara Hofmann of ASEM International, Mozambique is on a path of recovery, surviving  scars from decades of civil war.  Art is an integral part of this healing process.  More on this topic soon.

Too good not to share:  Thank you " Did You Know? " archives. Here's a little taste... A Milky Way candy bar contains more energy than a stick of dynamite. Calorimetry reveals that a Milky Way® candy bar contains more energy than a stick of dynamite. The candy bar contains 200 food Calories. That’s 200,000 physicist calories or about 840,000 joules! Nearly a megajoule! A megajoule of energy from a candybar can perform enough work to lift an average 70-kilogram human being 1200 meters in the air. That’s higher than the cliff face of Yosemite’s El Capitan. No stick of dynamite can do that! In fact,an ounce of dynamite produces only one-quarter as many calories when it explodes as an ounce of sugar does when it burns. Of course, the body cannot convert all of the energy from one candybar into work. A lot of the energy goes into heat, and some of the work goes into digestion. Overall, less than 20 percent of the energy contained in food can be converted into ...

I've been updating my pics and decided to bite when Flickr (i.e. Yahoo!) invited me to login via FaceBook.  It was a smooth enough process.  Here's what ended up in my inbox: With all the identity porn going on these days, I have to admit these connections are making me a bit jumpy.  Not sure I want to see what comes up on Google with my name attached to it. Just seems Yahoo! needs to do something more than just say 'Hey' in this case.

It is fascinating to watch Osterwalder's Business Model Canvas catching on - and used for business ideas large and small across the globe.  With all the buzz about how to monetize this, how to monetize that, people are inevitably looking for an effective way to communicate their business ideas.  The Business Model Canvas provides that right balance of visualization and rigor to get the ball rolling. What starts for many as a simple value exchange... ...quickly grows into a much broader view of an open business model.  Without the right tools to express themselves, many innovators get bogged down early in showing how the idea works. Not Jörgen Dahlberg.  Here's his idea. It's about putting on a profitable stage racing (mountainbiking) event in 2012: The first iteration of his idea ( found here ) began as a reality show. The second iteration builds out the value proposition and the potential partnerships needed. In the third iteration the author adds a...

Here are some case studies on some relatively recent digital campaigns I thought I'd share.  See the Good, Bad and the Ugly in action: GOOD Nike Take Mokum and the Nike Run House in Amsterdam - online/offline http://bit.ly/jCGtey GOOD because it's a beautiful local celebration of art, of city, and the love of running. MORE GOOD, and a little BAD Coca-Cola in Israel:  The Recycling King (using Facebook Places) - Be global, act local http://bit.ly/keIxXh GOOD because it's a celebration of mobilizing people for a good cause. BAD because their 'Recycling King' crown feels like a Burger King ripoff ;-) UGLY Nestlé:  The Jesus KIT KAT Viral Campaign | Digital Buzz Blog http://bit.ly/kyagM9 UGLY because (IMHO) it uses mockery as a viral tool.  Just another form of bullying really.  What?  Can't take a joke.  Sure I can Nestlé, just leave the religious zealots out of it and create candy bar cure for diabetes would ya? Some other notab...

Recently, my wife Belinda and I attended Vancouver's EPiC conference on sustainability.  Richard Louv (pictured below) and George Strouboulopoulos (CBC talk show host) were guest speakers. Louv has popularized the term 'Nature-Deficit Disorder' in his book Last Child in the Woods .  It's a good read.  Here's a taste... "In medieval times, if someone displayed the symptoms we now identify as boredom, that person was thought to be committing something called acedia , a 'dangerous form of spiritual alienation' -- a devaluing of the world and its creator." He now has a new book out - The Nature Prinicipal:  Human Restoration and the End of Nature-Deficit Disorder.   It's on my to-read list.