Posts Tagged ‘flickr’

mEgo lands another cool $2.5M in second round of funding

Thursday, January 22nd, 2009

Based on the simple premise of making managing and sharing your online personality a more coherent and fun user experience, Los Angeles based mEgo has just closed another round of funding, bringing home a cool $2.5M to fund further development.

Launched at the 2007 TechCrunch40 conference, mEgo has quite a bit to celebrate as of late.  Not only have they just refueled the dev. machine, but also recently reached the 1 millionth registered user milestone, with a twenty percent growth rate month over month.  Not too shabby.

mEgo’s concept is centered around a portable you that ties all your social connectivity together in one simple flash based widget.  Popular social sites like Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube are easily and painlessly integrated into your mEgo just by using your username.  No fancy RSS feeds or API keys to hunt down.  Just plug your basic info in and mEgo takes it from there.  Each info pull can then be assigned to a user-selected button, which can then be placed on the avatar anywhere the user so chooses.  For example, in the my mEgo below, hover over the ears and you’ll see updates from my last.fm account.  Likewise, hovering over my chest reveals my vital statistics.  If you’re feeling generous, shake my hand and have a view of my amazon.com wishlist.  A hover over the eyes should reveal thumbnails of my most recent YouTube favorites.  Personally, I’d like to see this default to my uploaded videos, but this feature is no further than a drop down menu away.

mEgo can be embedded on a wide variety of social networks and blogs, and reports that they’re seeing around 30M impressions per month.

A pretty neat concept, tying all your social activities into one avatar that not only looks cool, but is incredibly easy to set up and publish.

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Rocketon releases new features to alpha testers

Wednesday, September 17th, 2008

Private alpha phase virtual world Rocketon has announced a number of new features via an email dispatched to alpha testers.  The new developments can be split into two distinct areas.  First up, more activity please.  ‘Quests’ have now been introduced whereby players must stumble across quests in order to solve puzzles to receive in-game rewards.  Players can now also grow their own monster pet and fight in ‘Monster Fights’ against other players.  And now for a dash of goo – Players are now able to cover other avatars in slime, goo, and various non-niceties.

Rocketon goes social

Rocketon’s second upgrade comes via a variety of social features.  First and formost, users may now create their own personal rooms and invite other players over to take advantage of the virtual worlds main focus at the moment.  Within these rooms, players can aggregate content from all over the web including pictures and images from Flickr and videos from YouTube for example.  Rocketon has also included profile pages for it’s users, making it easier for others to find other players with similar likes and interests.
Rocketon is a virtual world that exists on top of a 2D web.  Third party websites make up the ‘landscape’.  Users can watch online videos together in a ‘screening room’ format, play Rocketon’s games, or simply visit other pages together.

The site currently features cartoonish avatars that are fully customizable via a microtransaciton mechanism.  No updates as of yet as to how and where the microtransaciton customizations will come into play, but hey…they’re still in alpha.  Let’s just keep our eye on these guys for a bit.

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Battlefield Heroes ‘Already Out’

Wednesday, August 27th, 2008

We got our first look at EA’s free-to-play ‘Battlefield Heroes’ last week at the Games Convention in Leipzig.  While I’ll admit, I didn’t spend as much time with the game as I’d like, I did return the next day to sit down with BH again the next day – a clear signal that EA is doing something right, as I was/am already addicted to this seemingly simple game.

There’s been a whole lot of noise over the past few days regarding BH, with everyone from gamespy to arstechnica to wired has written about the ‘already out’ Battlefield Heroes.  While this comes to a surprise to some, if you think about it, it really shouldn’t.  Since Battlefield Heroes is a free to play title, what exactly is EA selling?  In essence, for now at least, EA is selling only advertising space.  So in theory, they could release the product at any point in time with as little or as great fanfare as they so choose.  Producer Ben Cousins says that the game is essential “already out”, but has been a steady ramp up and release in bits and pieces.  The ‘official’ pomp and circumstance release is slated for the end of 2008 when all the facebook style social networking features will be implemented.

What does this mean for EA’s first foray into the free to play space?  By slowly releasing bits and pieces and letting more and more players in without calling the product ‘officially’ released, EA is playing it safe.  Not a bad move when you’re testing the waters of an unknown/unaccepted business model.  Let’s think of the BH ‘beta’ along the lines of Gmail and Flickr.  Google’s Gmail is still technically in beta, but grew virally by allowing one user to invite a number of other users.  Battlefield Heroes is following more or less the same path as Gmail (sans the ‘a friend can invite you in’ factor), Facebook, and Wikipedia.  That is to say – viral marketing.

While more and more reviews and thoughts and opinions are released surrounding Battlefield Heroes, there are a few key phrases that stick out: Fun, Addictive, Back for more.  In the untested Western waters of free-to-play, microtransaction, and in-game advertising world, this is music to our ears.

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