AT&T and Others Announcing Rival To Apple App Store
Image via CrunchBase
Twelve of the world’s biggest phone networks – including AT&T, Orange and Telefonica – will announce their rival technology tomorrow to Apple’s App Store. The combined audience for the app platform will be 2 billion customers. Phone manufacturers Samsung, LG and Sony Ericsson are also part of the alliance.
The announcement is expected to take place at tomorrow’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, writes the Times, and will be good news for consumers. With the fragmentation of app stores from Apple, Android and others, many handsets and operators will now support a single standard of apps that work across multiple devices.
There’s no word if there will be a single app store, but a single standard for apps on devices from multiple networks is expected. It’s also unclear if the technology itself will be unveiled tomorrow — we may simply see a statement of intent.
Terminator Salvation Launches Elaborate Twitter Game
The upcoming movie Terminator Salvation has come to Twitter, with the recent launch of the Resistance2018 game. The premise: Twitter users can help in the fight against Skynet and the Terminators, earning points that bump them up the leaderboard.
The rules, according to the Resistance2018 site, are as follows:
1. Follow Terminator Salvation on Twitter (@resistance2018)
2. Log In on 2018blog.com
3. Watch for tweets from @resistance2018
4. Send answers via @replies with hash tags to @resistance2018 or RT through the blog
5. You will receive a direct messages in Twitter with point updates
Marketing Becomes Entertaining: A Positive Trend
This may be a little involved for the casual Twitter user, and trivia games have seen the most success on the service. Nonetheless, we can agree that it’s a very good thing for marketers to experiment with engagement-based advertising, which focuses on making content interesting, useful or entertaining rather than just serving up banner ads.
This is absolutely the right way to use Twitter for marketing: completely opt-in, and incentivizing people to join in because it’s fun, rather than paying cash for Twitter buzz. We can only hope more marketers follow Sony Pictures’ lead.
See the full article at Mashable.
Video game industry posts big February gains
The video games industry continued to defy general economic realities in February, posting a 10 percent year-over-year sales increase and a 10.5 percent boost over January.
For the month of February, the industry recorded sales of $1.47 billion, up from $1.34 billion a year earlier, according to numbers released Thursday by industry analyst NPD Group. And the February numbers also outpaced January’s $1.33 billion. In February, software accounted for $733.5 million in sales, while hardware and accessories came in at $532.7 million and $207.1 million, respectively.
According to NPD, Microsoft‘s Xbox 360 had its second best non-holiday-season sales month since its launch, with 391,000 units sold. But once again, it was Nintendo that had the best overall performance. It sold 753,000 Wii consoles, as well as 588,000 DS handheld systems. Those numbers were up 10.8 percent and 15.1 percent, respectively, over January.
Sony’s PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 2 didn’t have quite as successful a February. The PS3 moved 276,000 units, while just 131,000 PS2s were sold. However, those figures did represent a 35.8 percent and a 29.4 percent jump over January. In February, Sony’s PSP sold 199,000 units.
Nintendo also dominated the software sales side of things. Six of the top 10 best-selling titles in February were for either the Wii or the DS, including the repeat No. 1 performer, Nintendo’s "Wii Fit.
NPD analyst Anita Frazier said March looks good for the industry as well, despite the recession, because of titles such as Halo Wars, Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars, Resident Evil 5, and more.
"The sheer quantity of great content coming to market early in the year should keep industry sales humming throughout 2009," Frazier said in a statement.
Source: CNET News.
