Friday, January 25, 2008

Web 2.0 in 5 minutes

Looking for a cool illustration / timeline of the key changes in the mobile and internet sphere over the past decade. Any suggestions?

Meanwhile, here are some related "tech" ethnography vids:

The Machine is you/us (aka Web 2.0 in 5 minutes)


The information (r)evolution:

Thursday, January 17, 2008

Bamboozled for 25 points (and $25K!)

Most Facebook users have enjoyed playing (or gotten addicted to!) Scrabulous -- the hit online word game. Launched in 2005 by two 20-something Indian brothers, Scrabulous shot to fame as a Facebook application in 2007. Sadly, all of this may come to an end as Hasbro and Mattel (who own the collective IP rights for Scrabble globally) have issued a cease-and-desist order.

Is Scrabulous in hot water because of its name and functional similarity to Scrabble? Has the game's popularity (~600,000 daily active users, generating $25,000 a month via advertising space revenues) detracted from rather than complemented Scrabble's potential sales? Would this have happened if Facebook adopted a different advertising strategy or if the brothers had stuck to their original name -- Bingobinge? Better put your bingos down now!

Read more at this Financial Times article