Josh Chambers

Interesting Opportunities for Publishers

I wonder if this will actually take off…it does seem like an excellent blend between a print magazine and digital.

Gaming Is Growing – The Pyschology Of Gaming

Gaming isn’t going anywhere. In fact, it’s growing and it’s growing fast. And it’s not just black-t-shirt-and-square-rimmed-glasses-wearing-with-dirty-facial-hair-stuck-in-their-mom’s-basement-playing-WOW nerds. Gaming is invading reality, and everyone is playing:

• As of today, Farmville has 83,105,118 active monthly users and Mafia Wars has 25,080,678. Seriously?
• Farmville has more players than Twitter has accounts
• Two and a half years ago, Disney purchased Club Penguin for $350M – a game which at the time boasted 12 million accounts, 700,000 paid subscribers, and $40M in annual revenue. I’m sure the numbers are exponentially larger now
• As of February 20th, PlayStation has 20M users worldwide and Xbox Live has generated $1 billion dollars since its 2002 launch
• MyTown recently hit one million users after only two months in existence. And let’s not forget about Gowalla and Foursquare, and Causeworld
• Gameloft brought in $170M in iPhone App Store revenue – and that’s just one company

Not only is gaming not going anywhere; you can expect to see elements of gaming incorporated into just about everything – or so says Jesse Schell, owner of Schell Games and Professor of Entertainment Technology at Carnegie Mellon University. In his talk, “Is Your Life Just One Big RPG – Design Outside The Box” at the 2010 DICE Summit, Jesse hypothesizes that beyond the fun element of gaming, it’s actually the psychology behind gaming that makes it so appealing.

Here’s Jesse’s talk broken into three parts, and it is absolutely incredible. It is worth the 25 minutes, I promise (thanks to Nicholas for this find):

How to Integrate Bit.ly With iPhone’s Safari

There are a few apps out there that pull in some basic bit.ly stats, but to my knowledge, there’s no app that allows you to quickly shorten web pages you’re visiting in Safari for the iPhone via bit.ly. Here’s a quick, free, manual way to integrate iPhone/Safari and bit.ly:

You’ll need a desktop computer, and your iPhone.

On a desktop computer:

• Login to your bit.ly account
• Visit the bit.ly “Tools” page
• Scroll down to the “Standard bit.ly Bookmarklet” tool
• Right/option click the link that says “Shorten with bit.ly”
• Choose “Copy Link Location” (Or some variation of that – that’s Firefox language. I think Chrome says “Copy Link Address”)
• You should have a whole pile of JavaScript copied to your clipboard. Paste that into an email and email it to yourself so you can access it on your iPhone

On your iPhone:

• Open the email you sent yourself, copy the block of JavaScript
• Visit bit.ly via Safari
• Bookmark bit.ly in Safari
• Visit your bookmarks, click “edit”
• Click the bit.ly bookmark you just created
• Under the name of the bookmark is the actual URL of the bookmark
• Erase the URL
• Paste in the JavaScript you copied
• Save the bookmark

To shorten your link:

• When you’re on a page you’d like to shorten in Safari, visit your bookmarks
• Click the “bit.ly” bookmark
• A new bit.ly window will open with the shortened link
• Click “copy” and now you’ve got a shortened link to share via whatever app you’d like

Did it work for you?