Posts

Seeking Greater Relevance: Can it be Measured?

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What is Relevance and how do we measure it? The answer proves to be more elusive than one might think. Here's one take served up by the wisdom of the crowd on Yahoo! Answers: Relevance is a term used to describe how pertinent, connected, or applicable some information is to a given matter. It has unique significance in a variety of fields. Source(s): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relevance Relevant (bad pun) perhaps, on a subjective scale:  from irrelevant to completely relevant and everything imaginable in between.  But without specific context, not very useful. In the context of content optimization, relevance-related services are showing up with increasing frequency.  Take Efi Rodik for example, CEO and founder of Relevantor LLC. What is  Relevant Content  Anyway? « Relevantor relevant or.wordpress.com/.../what-is- relevant - content -anyway/ 2 Feb 2012 –  Relevant,  relevant content , relevancy. These have become very pop...

The Relevance Race?

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We, as content consumers, seem to have accepted infloglut (remember that 90's term?) as inevitable and now seek services to serve up greater relevance.  Recently, I read an article where the CEO of Bloomreach was promoting their new SaaS-based Relevance Engine.  The interview suggested we are now in a race - The Relevance Race. Okay, so maybe we're in a Relevance Race.  I have to admit, I'm still not quite out of the blocks in defining 'engagement' in a meaningful way.  In upcoming posts I'll look at the idea of 'relevance' and what makes one thing more relevant than another.  Can we measure the degree of relevance?  Bloomreach and other emerging players think so.  More to explore.  More to come on this topic.

Sava Transmedia - a new generation of F2P studio on the rise

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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...

Mozambique Reborn

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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.

Celebrating Curiousity

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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 ...

Yahoo! says 'Hey'....

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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.

Business Model Design for the Masses

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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...