Tag: iphone

Take It Out Your Pocket and Show It: Pocket God’s a Hit on the iPhone

Show it Off
Show it Off

The poet T-Pain once said: “Got money, and you know it, take it out your pocket and show it.”

While Pain was certainly referring to a roll of cash, little did he know that he also had created the perfect metaphor for the viral, word-of-mouth buzz that drives iPhone app sales.

In a recent story on the FinancialTimes.com tech writer Chris Nuttall explored some of the reasons for the resounding success of Pocket God on the iPhone. With sales now well over 1.2 million units, Pocket God is a true blockbuster hit on the nascent platform.

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Innovation Peer Pressures

heathers_5

Could the geographic proximity of Twitter to Facebook and vice-versa be hurting each other’s development as they shadowbox over how users update status?

A good deal of modern American upbringing is teaching awareness of (and mostly resistance to) peer pressure.   Fiction has no shortage of such tales, and in quantitative Asch Conformity Experiments we know it’s real: people appear to deliberately trump their judgments to give wrong answers more in conformity with what others have answered before.   Peer pressure can of course have its benefits.  One is production itself — to keep up with the Joneses; it is a solvent to the instinct for resting on ones laurels, and almost a synonym for creative destruction.  The downside is conformity, keeping up with the Heathers.

I think it was either Paul Graham or Eric Ries (or someone else?  Let me know!) who said start ups shouldn’t live in San Francisco because you spend too much time going to parties listening to other people’s business plans.  This was expressed as a concern for the time waste, but I think the greater peril is the subtle gravity it effects on ones own business plan.   Ironically, the further away companies are from the center of the activity mass,  the more innovative I’ve found their product to be.  There is some selection bias in my sample, but even so, these far-flung companies tend to be less confident about the absolute prospects of their product.

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iPhone Game PR – A Case Study

IGN Real Racing

Australian mobile developer Firemint came to us a few months ago with one goal in mind: to make their new iPhone game stand out among the crowd. Of course, this is no small task given the extraordinary rate of proliferation of iPhone games appearing on the App Store since the beginning of the year. But Firemint had something unique: a car racing simulator called Real Racing that had been in development for more than a year and specifically designed with the unique feature set of the iPhone and iPod touch in mind.

Firemint’s unique challenge was that they had a little over two months to officially announce, promote, and differentiate Real Racing from the competition before it launched. And the main competitor in this instance was EA’s Need for Speed iPhone title, a game launching in the same period that had enjoyed months of marketing and PR support from the industry’s biggest game publisher.

Talk about an underdog situation.

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GPS-based Game Seek ‘n Spell Debuts on the iPhone

Seek 'n Spell LogoThe Retronyms released their new iPhone app Seek ‘n Spell on Earth Day! Seek ‘n Spell transforms iPhone gaming from a solo, sedentary experience to an active and social outdoor contest! Combining real outdoor spaces with virtual letters, Seek ‘n Spell is a word game where you and your friends compete to gather letter tiles and create words to score the most points.

Seek ‘n Spell makes full use of the iPhone’s GPS capabilities, using your actual physical location on Earth to drive the gameplay. Gathering in a park or other large outdoor space, players then race one another around the field to capture up to 10 letter tiles at a time, which they use to create words. Coveted gold tiles will appear randomly on the field, earning players a doubled score when used in words. Points are earned based on the length of the words players spell, and the player with the most points when time runs out wins.

The Seek ‘n Spell is available for download from the iTunes App Store at a retail price of $2.99 by visiting http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=307726640&mt=8

To see Seek ‘n Spell in action, view the live-action trailer here:

The game’s creators host local Seek ‘n Spell competitions in San Francisco and Cleveland. To join in, visit the Meetup.com pages:
San Francisco: http://www.meetup.com/sf-seeknspell/
Cleveland: http://www.meetup.com/cle-seeknspell/