November 12th, 2008
Our good friends at Occipital, founded at TechStars.org in Boulder, CO by two genius former computer science student, Vikas and Jeff, are determined to organize your photographic memories over time and space, and are already revealing beautiful “life tapestries” comprised of your photos all over the internet and extracting important connections that you never knew existed. (You guys owe us for this plug.)
Occipital
Occipital found this pizza company, Red Baron, and the promotion printed on their boxes in grocery stores across America, and sent us a photo as evidence of our website name’s closely matching text. How thoughtful of them…
Red Baron
Amazingly, we received another email from a game developer who wanted to learn more about us, and came accross this same promotion. I am sure that these encounters will not be the last. I have his permission to quote a small part of his email:
“Does BPW (BuyPlayWin) develop food promotional materials, like the ‘EatPlayWin’ promotion on RedBaron Pizza boxes? Thanks.”
As funny as this was to our whole team, let it be known that BuyPlayWin is in no way affiliated with Red Baron pizza, their parent company, Schwan’s Consumer Brands North America, Inc, or the EatPlayWin promotion. BuyPlayWin is a startup company developing e-commerce and game technologies, part of a new and sensational service that is soon to be offered to consumers everywhere.
We must admit, Red Barron brand pizza does have good taste in their promotional slogans.
***for non-gamers, the title of this post references a leetspeak slang term, “PWNED”, which is not a typo and is derived from the word “own”. Pwn implies domination or humiliation of a rival, used primarily in the Internet gaming culture to taunt an opponent who has just been soundly defeated (e.g. “You just got pwned!”). One other meaning can be ‘perfect ownage’. To do this, you could be playing a fighting game, where your character defeats an opponent without receiving any damage (i.e. leaving him/her unscathed).***
November 4th, 2008
It’s always interesting to see which folks that write about video game and social network industry news actually play the games they write about. We’ve yet to hear much about the Agarwalla brothers re-release of Scrabulous under the new website and brand, lexulous.
Had you been a real fan of the Scrabulous game that captured Hasbro’s dim-witted attention and legal wrath on Facebook, you would be a registered user, and received an email like the one I got:
You can continue playing your favorite word game online at http://www.LEXULOUS.com.
Your old username “________” will work and your ratings have been preserved. In case you have forgotten your password, please visit - http://www.lexulous.com/forgot_password.php
For any help, please feel free to reply to this email and we shall get back to you within a few hours.
Best Regards,
Rajat & Jayant (The Lexulous Team)
P.S. All the old rooms like “The Lounge” and “Bingo Boomers” are now open.
They’ve put a lot of quality effort into their new release and have several versions available to play, and to license for your own private website. Check them out!
November 4th, 2008
We’ve been traveling the globe recently and met with some truly incredible people, who are doing incredible things. My business partner scoured major cities in China for development talent, and to meet with several game companies. I just got back from India, Singapore, Japan, and China where I met with developers, businessmen/women, and company founders.
I observed extreme variance in taste and preference with gaming and shopping from country to country, and it is evident in the way the product is catered to the intended audience.
Checkout GamezIndia:
If you’re an American, you probably don’t know what a DESI is, but all Indians know this term and use it popularly to refer to themselves. Hence the site’s motto: “the desi playground”.
Desi (or Deshi; pronounced [ˈd̪eːsi] or [ˈd̪eːʃi], Hindi: देसी, Urdu: دیسی, Punjabi: ਦੇਸੀ, دیسی) is a word originally from Sanskrit literally meaning “from the country” or “of the country”.
Desi is commonly used in conjunction with ABCD, a term for Indians that have relocated abroad, and are neither here nor there.
American-Born Confused Desi, or ABCD for short is a term used to refer to Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi Americans born in the United States, in contrast to those who were born overseas and later settled there.
These cultural nuances are vital to a business that operates within a nation’s borders, and I’ve gone to great lengths to learn some of them. In the example above, the term “Desi” allows residents of India to truly identify with the website, and builds loyalty. Thinking of expanding internationally? I suggest you do the same for any targeted region.
Have a similar unique characterisitc you’ve observed in another culture? Comment and share with us!
