With some delightfully campy ESPN-ish high-octane graphics, eSport gaming in Korea has become a real spectator sport / game show. Arena-syle campaigns conducted by video gamer superstars, immense screens in the studio and large bass-thumping music make the whole thing worth more than a second television glance.

A good overview with some of these graphics, is available here:
http://www.monocle.com/sections/culture/Web-Articles/E-sports-in-Korea/

Competitive video gaming has been around for a while, but it is when TV begins to pick it up - that the real competition begins. Suddenly losers and winners are visible to large audiences. Suddenly there is a real venue for those targeting the video gamer's demographic dollar, and suddenly the Ad-Dollar is being spent to push the game even further.

In the US and a few other countries, the second season of the self-styled World Series of Video Games, the WSVG, has begun in May to the tune of 100,000-plus attendees in china. Their media stats: In 2006, the World Series of Video Games attracted more than 90,000 attendees, produced 250 hours of broadband video, and 20 hours of nationally broadcast programming led by CBS.

To me it is quite odd to imagine video games as a spectator sport seen on TV, but then I can't fathom golf or bowling being on TV either, so perhaps my sense of this is a bit off. I have found myself wondering when I have seen my little brother's girlfriend sit next to him and watch as he plays video games, but perhaps it is not as grotesque a passive pastime as I imagined.

The long and short of it is that people love these games. And now, we are finding, people love to watch people who are good at these games too - and not surprisingly, cheer on their favorite gamer heroes as they conquer the latest level.

How this spectator-sport will morph online is anyone's guess, and there are some great ideas too: from actually being present in the game as your hero fights to interactively being able to affect the outcome of the match. Regardless, it is worth keeping an eye on it as the newest spectator sport to hit the small screen will soon be on a computer near you.

Labels: sean_cohen, sport, video games, wsvg

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posted by Sean Cohen @ 4:25 PM 0 comments links to this post

As it turns out, according to Donald Gunn, the creative director at Leo Burnett advertising agency, there are 12 types of ads.

1. Demo. Example: Apple iPhone commercials
2. Show Need or Problem. Example: Those annoying Cingular ads where the voice drops out making what would have been a normal conversation terribly awkward.
3. Symbol, Analogy, Exaggeration. The product solves a problem. Example: Theraflu ogre ad.
4. Comparison. Example: Charles Schwab posterized ads.
5. Exemplary Story. Example: The VW commercials where the people in the car are just chatting it up and, then out of nowhere, boom! Crash.
6. Benefit Causes Story. Example: the Lynx ad. Probably the funnies ad of the lot, both for men and women – it's so far fetched. It's amazing what one can get away with in the name of comedy. Watch this one if nothing else.
7. Tell it. Example: UPS ad with man who needs a haircut drawing on a whiteboard.
8. On Going Characters and Celebrities. Example: Subway, Mercury, Geico, Energizer Bunny, etc.
9. Symbol, Analogy, Exaggeration. This time, instead of showing how the product solves a problem, the technique demonstrates a benefit of the product. Example: Starbucks, Metamucil, etc.
10. Associated User Imagery. This is all about connecting the product to the type of person the advertiser thinks would be using the product. Hoping for identification. Example: Nike.
11. Unique Personality Property. Example: Dyson Vacuums.
12. Parody of Borrowed Format. I love this format. Basically, make fun of something popular and then stick your logo at the end. Brilliant. Example: Reality TV – Geico.

That was fun, I am sure many of you enjoyed it as much as the next person. I can think of a couple of other types that were missed. Such as the ones that leave you hanging and puzzled with out a concrete message or a call to action. What are those called?

Anyway, what's the overlap between these formats and online advertising?

While we all know that there are many forms of online advertising, such as pay-per-lead, email, search engine keywords, adwords, etc – this next part only includes banner advertising.

Banner Advertising Classification:

1. Irritate the Hell Out of People by Making the Screen Shake. You’ve seen it. Mortgage companies love this tactic. Think right-hand column empire ads in Hotmail.
2. Whack-a-mole. Enough said. The point is to get people to click, right?
3. TV ad on the web. Very popular on sites like Yahoo! and Collegehumor.com. Literally, the ad space looks like a mini made-for-television ad.
4. Background Branding. Where the entire background of the website is leased out to an advertiser. If you want to check this out, go to Pandora.com and keep refreshing the screen until you see it.
5. Traditional. Simple typography, imagery, message, and call to action. An all time classic.
6. "Whoa, did you see that?" rich media. Very amazing, high impact ads that stay contained in their space until the user mousse over them – at which point, the ad "unfolds" on the page overtop the page's content, and a rich media experience is delivered. They are expensive to produce and expensive to run. But effective as hell.
7. Chameleon. The ads that look like content on the site. Trickery!
8. Buttons. These I don’t understand. The space is sold, and people click on them, otherwise they wouldn’t exist, right? Come on!

Ok, that’s all I have time for. I know I am missing some obvious ones, so please help me complete this list.

Labels: advertising, Apple, banner ads, iPhone, Online Advertising, Pandora, search engine optimization

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posted by Andres Zapata @ 12:46 PM 1 comments links to this post

It makes me wonder: How many of our favorite stories about american ingenuity are really tales of abundance, luck and affluence? Franklin was handy, the space race was amazing, Wibur and Orville Wright certainly made great leaps, and Edison was phenomenal... but how many of our country's most impressive accomplishments were achieved on a super-tight budget with the poorest as our audience? Very very few? How many of our achievements are meant to operate by the uninformed or are going to be constrained by power shortages? None that I know of. How many of our great innovations are meant to be used in some of the roughest and most unforgiving environments we know of - in a rowdy schoolroom in the poorest of neighborhoods?

Damned few of our accomplishments even attempt what the $100 laptop effort is considering - let alone partially succeed, which the laptop program seems poised to do.

Here are some of the features that popped out at me and I began to wonder, how come there isn't a way for me to spend thousands and get these features? The answer is that these innovations would never have been considered in any upmarket product, it is only within the constraints of a down-market customer-base that these kinds of innovations become a logistical necessity. And necessity, as we know, is the mother of invention.

The interface itself is a bit of a wonder, I haven't used it (you can run it in emulation mode, I haven't had the courage yet), but it appears to be quite exciting. Based on linux, developed in association with Pentagram and Red Hat, a OS called SUGER has been developed who's central metaphor is not windows/desktop based. Instead of programs or software there are activities, instead of files there are objects. Most of the programs -I am sorry- activities, center around things that children might be doing anyway, such as reading, writing, drawing, making music, etc.



The iconic interface is apparently quite intuitive and impressively deep for those children who wish to go down under the surface and examine the code.

The challengingly idealistic theme of "Love is a better master than duty" has driven the feature set of the laptop. Foremost among the themes is the idea that this is not a tool that should necessarily be for instructing so much as be for exploring and expressing.



The laptop has been test dropped from 5 ft and it survived wonderfully, it has been dunked in water for 10 minutes with no obvious effect. The entire thing is about half the weight of a normal laptop and it is made to be decorated so that each child can identify their own. There are also holes on it for scarves, belts or straps so that it can slung over the shoulder and carried for long distances.

The sealed keyboard is child-sized and relatively impervious to spillage, dust or even the occasional hammer.


The "rabbit ears" mesh network allows a computer to immediately establish a network with the computers around it (ever try this with windows vista?) and if 1 computer is within 2km of another computer with internet access, it can share that access (with some decrease in bandwidth).

The laptop has no moving parts so that nothing will break. It has flash memory instead of a harddrive, and no disk drive to let in the sand.


Numerous power sources have been provided, including a solar adapter and my favorite, this yo-yo-like pull string recharger, which runs the laptop for 10 minutes per 1 minute of pulling. Additionally, the screen is super low-power and the cpu goes immediately into power-saving mode when unused.

The message here is probably no surprise to devotees of Prahalad, who's book "The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty through Profits" basically makes the same point: there are tons of profit to be made by going down-market both because that market is fantastically large, but also because the process of going down-market requires extreme ingenuity which can be re-purposed at every level of the company.

Overall, I suppose I am asking a simple question: isn't there a time when cheaper is actually much much better? Aren't there constraints with enrich as well as impoverish, and isn't the prospect of expanding your market to a group who until now couldn't even consider your product an enticing prospect?

BBC's excellent description of the $100 laptop.

Labels: $100 laptop, Prahalad

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posted by Sean Cohen @ 2:51 PM 0 comments links to this post

Labels: businessweek, Nussbaum

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posted by Sean Cohen @ 11:31 AM 0 comments links to this post

The most compelling attribute about the iPhone is the touch screen and gestures that control it. Why? Because interfacing with this device is different, and some argue, more natural than other devises.

User experience and usability will continue to only see marginal improvements until onscreen interfaces can receive a different and more engaging form of input, as demonstrated by the iPhone.

As it turns out, the touch screen taping, dragging and gesturing are not all that unique or new. It’s known as “Surface Computing” which uses multi-touch and multi-users input and has been around since the 80’s.

This technology and interface is good for photos, videos, maps, etc… basically, anything that requires a simple command in order to do something, such as “play” or “pause”. More complex applications are sure to follow, especially in the military.

Microsoft has been working on something similar since 2001. However, their approach is more encompassing and integrated – it is its own software/hardware platform.

Microsoft Surface is a “me too” technology – for the most part, until you take into consideration the multi-device interface. Imagine putting your digital camera on the Microsoft Surface tabletop, and immediately seeing your pictures display on the screen. And then imagine dragging some pictures to your mobile phone – which you had also placed on the Microsoft Surface tabletop. No wires. Phones and cameras are just two of the devises that the Microsoft Surface tabletop will recognize… it will also recognize credit cards, music players, PDAs, etc.

I am really excited about all this because it allows for people to work together and simultaneously on the same computer, use fingers and gestures and all is done around a table – which has many positive socio-psychological attributes.

As with anything, it’s worth keeping an eye on any potential “gothas,” especially for the really young, really old, and those with low hand-eye coordination. Also, the gestures might be hard to learn – and maybe even frustrating.

Regardless, Microsoft Surface releases this winter. I want one.

Labels: Apple, iPhone, Microsoft, usability, user experience

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posted by Andres Zapata @ 4:35 PM 0 comments links to this post

Labels: Apple, iPhone, Newton

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posted by Hoby Albright @ 9:43 AM 0 comments links to this post