Icapture – watching you, watching ads
October 28th, 2008 § 1 Comment
Russell Davies has been writing some excellent stuff lately about the widening gap between designers’ beautiful, optimistic visions for spimes and augmented reality, and the increasingly noisy way that advertising is colonising public space. Davies points out that whilst design thinkers see a future which is (to use Matt Jones and Tom Coates‘ phrase) ‘Polite, Pertinent and Pretty‘; the reality is likely to be rude, irrelevant, and messy:
“And, what’s worse, we’re going to see the same mess writ even larger – all over our cities. If we thought urban spam was bad. Wait until it’s animated, live and augmented, skinned onto our buildings and beamed into our spex”
But its not just enough that our attention is being hijacked by intrusive commercial messages – they’re starting to look back at us as well. TruMedia’s iCapture system places a webcam in advertising displays that captures images of people looking at the ads. They then use a facial recognition system to create a demographic analysis of the people watching the ads for reporting back to the client. Here’s how it works:
The system currently anonymises all data, and doesn’t keep any of the images after extracting the data, but still – sends a shiver down your spine, doesn’t it?
Casual games buck the crunch
October 28th, 2008 § Leave a Comment
Mike Butcher reports on TechCrunch UK that Playfish has rasied $17m in a second round of funding. In any climate, that would be a phenomenal 2nd round, but in the current financial situation, its absolutely extraordinary. It demonstrates how important gaming is to the next wave of innovation on the web. Forget the semantic web – its gaming that will lead the innovation of new interaction models, engagement and monetisation. Especially with stats like these:
“Playfish now has over 10 million monthly active users on Facebook (around 1.5 million daily) and two billion monthly minutes of play time in under a year.”
That last stat is astonishing. If I interpret it correctly (2bn minutes of play by users per month) then that is one *heck* of a lot of attention – comparable to the attention garnered by a broadcast TV channel. If that is still growing, and they can turn that attention into cash, then $17m will quickly look like a very cheap investment.
