Four years ago, I sat down and scrawled out some thoughts about what I would like to do to help the hobby game community. Over the last couple years, I’ve been able to support my family promoting games, and now it’s time to tackle some of the more ambitious ideas I had. (more…)
Posts Tagged ‘technology’
A Living Telecom Infrastructure
Friday, April 9th, 2010During the chaos that was 9/11 in NYC, mobile communications were a mess. The World Trade Center used to be an important hub the mobile architecture in lower Manhattan. Until mid-afternoon, it was virtually impossible to make contact with anyone, if you were relying on a cell phone. (more…)
Cheap and Compact Mobile Podcasting Rig
Sunday, April 4th, 2010You can spend a fortune on podcasting gear. If you’re an audiophile, part of the fun of podcasting is building different rigs for different uses. This can get expensive, though. More importantly, if you spend a lot of time on the road, it can be a logistical nightmare. Lugging around a ton of high-end A/V equipment can eat up valuable luggage space, especially if you want to do both audio and video recording. (more…)
Deep integration of iPhone applications
Monday, July 6th, 2009gamerati: Shel Holtz (FIR)
Tuesday, June 30th, 2009Shel Holtz has been helping companies communicate for over thirty years. In 2005, he started For Immediate Release: The Hobson & Holtz Report with his co-host Neville Hobson. Since then, they have produced over 450 shows discussing public relations and technology. I asked Shel to speak with me about podcasting and how it can help small publishers communicate with their customers. (more…)
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Augmented Reality
Sunday, April 26th, 2009If you’re not familiar with augmented reality, there are a number of Googleable references. This video from Matt Dickman will give you a good idea of what I’m talking about.
OK, so now that you know what it is, let’s talk about what gaming companies can do with it.
Privateer Press could imprint unique icons on the bottom of each Warmachine mini. When held up in front of your webcame, two things could happen: your account could be updated to note that you own that figure and an animation of that figure, moving and posing and ‘doing things’ could appear on the screen. Privateer could tie that animation to a set of keystrokes, allowing you to dictate which action or pose your virtual figure takes.
Your turn. What cool ideas can you come up with?
Targeted Ads for eBooks and POD
Tuesday, January 6th, 2009Modern online advertising technology (Google, Facebook, etc) allows an advertiser to target a specific demographic based on any number of criteria. As someone who manages advertising for a number of websites, one of the most important targeting criteria is geography. Service providers and retailers want to communicate with local clientele, not some random Joe.
This is great for websites, but how long will it take for this same ability to translate into other platforms?
Assume for a moment that I publish an eZine. I decide to sell a PDF edition and offer advertising space to companies who want to reach my readers. If I’m a speculative fiction rag, I might sell a full page to TOR, but I’m not going to be able to land one for the local book shop. It’s not economically feasible for the local shop to purchase advertising that will only be relevant for a small subset of those it will appear in front of.
What if I could geo-target advertising, though? What if I could allocate a single page for ads relevant to the subscriber’s mailing address? I could then offer a low-cost advertisement to a number of local stores. Each store would only appear in those issues that were sent to subscribers living in their local market.
The same logic could be used for POD as well, with ads being determined by the demographics of the purchaser.
Geo-tracking would be very cool. Taken a step further, you could have an HBO advertisement that changes based on age or gender—Sally sees one for Desperate Housewives, while Sam sees one for Deadwood.
So tell me, is this technology available today? If so, point me at it.