Publicity via controversy: Kick-Ass vs VicRoads

HeathG Politics & Society

This week has seen a couple of examples of organisations generating publicity via controversy. Sometimes controversy works as a publicity tool and other times – one has to question whether it risks diluting or obscuring the real message.

For the promoters of the film Kick-Ass, upsetting groups like ‘Focus on Family‘ is probably great publicity. When your target audience is 16-24 year olds, having religious groups fulminating in a tabloid news story about the violence and lewdness of your film seems like a win. Perhaps the main complaint of the Kick-Ass promoters would be that the controversy seems to have died down too quickly.

Meanwhile, VicRoads looks to have generated more controversy than it originally intended with a series of YouTube videos targeted at young drivers.

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In CI – better answers start with better questions

HeathG General

Competitive intelligence (CI) is a discipline with the potential to provide organisations with valuable insights in to how to perform better. But like most things, the quality of the output is influenced by the quality of the inputs. In CI, one of the key inputs is the questions that it is expected to answer.

If you’re looking for a phrase to simultaneously sink the spirit of a CI practitioner and cause their blood pressure to rise, try making a request that sounds something like “Can you just tell me about our competitors…”

Requests that begin like this risk turning out to be too vague, too broad or too late to be genuinely useful. Whilst it’s part of the CI practitioner’s role to help clients refine their key intelligence question, having put some thought in to what you really want to know beforehand will impress your CI provider and help improve the insights that are delivered.

So how do you get your CI engagement off to a better start? Here’s three simple suggestions to get you started.

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Can Google shareholders gain from the China confrontation?

admin Gaming & Technology

It’s hard to see exit from the Chinese market as maximizing Google’s profits. China is, after all, very large (though Chinese growth in searching is slow).

It may be that Google is being, at least in part, high-minded. After all, it’s motto is “Don’t be evil” & it is reported that Sergey Brin’s aversion to totalitarian states played a role here. Yet, it is not Google’s fiduciary duty to be high-minded: rather the organization must act in its shareholder’s interests.

But there are two points to be made in favour of Google’s China stance:
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iiNet takes Netspace: The benefits of scale

HeathG Gaming & Technology

Having recently reached 460k broadband subscribers, TPG appeared to have  snatched third place in the fixed broadband market. But any glory was short lived,  with iiNet  reclaiming its number three position by announcing the acquisition of Melbourne based Netspace.   In exchange for $40m, iiNet has added ~70k broadband subscribers , bringing it to 520k broadband services in operation.

But is bigger better?

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What next for former BigPond boss?

HeathG Gaming & Technology

Interesting news from the Australian telecoms sector this weekend, with ‘The Australian’ reporting that former BigPond and Telstra Media boss Justin Milne, is quitting Telstra.  There’s already plenty of speculation over what this all means for Telstra, but the other interesting question which has received little attention so far is what is Mr Milne going to be doing post Telstra?

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Paying women to play games

HeathG Gaming & Technology

IGN ran a story today on a site called GameCrush.com. GameCrush reportedly decribes itself as “the first social site for adult gamers” and judging by the IGN article it’s trying to position itself as something of a cross between a gamers Facebook and a dating site.

The SMH article has a nice summary of their business model:

“On GameCrush guys (called “Players”) choose a girl (called “PlayDates”) to play with. Players then pay $US6.60 ($7.20) for about 10 minutes of gaming, and PlayDates keeps 60 per cent of the money,…GameCrush said PlayDates can earn up to $US30 an hour.” (SMH 26/03/2010)

When you throw in Gamecrush’s voice & video chat functions and the fact “PlayDates” get rated on looks and flirtiness (as well as gaming ability), Gamcrush seems to have more in common with a camgirl site than your typical social networking site.

What sets Gamecrush apart is that they have identified a specific market segment (gamers) and targeted this segment with a less stimagtised version of the camgirl business model. “Not that there’s anything wrong with that” as Jerry would say, but it will be interesting to see if Gamecrush can turn the server crushing torrent of global publicity into a sustained revenue and profit stream.

Palm needs more than Pixies to save it

HeathG Gaming & Technology

How the mighty have fallen. Once a pioneering leader in handheld computing, the smartphone market has not been kind to Palm Inc. Palm’s latest quarterly loss means the company is heading for its third year of losses in a row.

As ZDNet’s editor in Chief Larry Dignan points out, Palm now finds itself in a viscous cycle.

” Sales in the third quarter were weak. So weak that Palm’s sell through in the third quarter was 408,000 units vs. a sell-in of 960,000 units. That means Palm seriously overestimated demand for its devices….Now Palm will have to discount, take charges for inventory and suffer a gross margin hit to lower the inventory of Pre and Pixi devices.” (ZDNet 19/03/2010)

So just how bad are things looking for Palm?

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Emulation: Do not merely replicate known objects

admin Gaming & Technology

Brad Delong (linking to Marco.Org) pointed me toward Soulver, a rather nice calculator ap for the iPhone (the Mac version is much more expensive).

Most calculator aps replicate the real world object, which is handy as most of us know how to operate physical calculators, but that that should not constrain the developer.

Soulver does not have an equal key: output appears next to the input as you type.

This means there is a record of your inputs.

Soulver also allows separate calculations on different lines, & like a spreadsheet you can refer to different lines. This makes scenario calculations and comparisons v easy.

I love it!!

[I should have added that you can also save your calculations.]