MarCom Professional

 
Casual gaming has driven the adoption of mobile games to more than a quarter of mobile phone subscribers and more than one in five members of the U.S. population, according to the latest eMarketer estimates.

This year, 64 million people will play mobile games at least monthly, a number that will rise to 94.9 million by 2014. eMarketer's estimates exclude mobile users who play pre-installed games, which offer publishers decent brand exposure but little in the way of monetization opportunities.

While games are currently popular on both smartphones and feature phones, the composition of the mobile gaming audience will shift further toward smartphones as they increase in penetration across the population. More...

The results are in for the Speed kids’ review of social gaming platforms targeted at children. Moshi Monsters is the clear winner beating Club Penguin and Our World.

Today is bring your kids to work day at Speed; follow #speedkids on Twitter for updates.

We asked four of our offspring aged 10 to 13 years old to rate sites for game play, interest and engagement. Granted, their criteria do not stand up to much ‘professional’ scrutiny.

Freya and Tom (both aged 10) and Ellie (aged 11) gave Moshi Monsters top marks. They all plan to play the game again and recommend it to their friends. More...

Series 4, the new season of Mad Men, the cult drama about life in a 1960s New York ad agency, premiers on US TV broadcast networks tonight.

There’s not a lot that a 50-year old creative agency could teach about social media you’d have thought. But you’d be wrong.

Characters from the show have been tweeting in the run up to the launch of the new series. Its a delightful social media execution that is completely on-message for Mad Men.

Here are a couple of tweets that I’ve exchanged with the show’s Don Draper and Peggy Olson.

Unfortunately the show’s promotional strategy doesn’t extend to its digital rights management. More...

eMarketer reports that while most mainstream U.S. consumers may not care much about the broadband access speed that they have at home, they are very interested in continuing to gain access to the vast array of video content that's readily available to them via the public Internet.

The number of online video viewers continues to grow, while the number of videos viewed skyrockets. Nearly 183 million U.S. internet users watched an average of 186 videos per viewer during the month of May, for a total of 34 billion videos, according to comScore.

U.S. households are also becoming more networked, as consumers buy more and more internet-enabled consumer electronics (CE) devices. More...

Can't say I ever thought I'd write a post like this, but here you go...

In one fell swoop, Dannii Minogue - sister of singing star Kylie and a recording and TV personality in her own right - has managed to change public perceptions of her 'brand'.

Unless you've been living in a cave, you'd know that Dannii and boyfriend Kris Smith have just had a child, a little boy named Ethan.

Now, Dannii has always been a bit of a publicity junkie and is no stranger to the tabloid press or women's glossies. 

We quite rightly could have expected her to do what most other celebrities seem to do after giving birth - keep the bub under wraps before emerging several weeks later in some lowbrow glossy rag. 

The story would be an exclusive, of course, complete with airbrushed photos of the couple gushing about the new addition to their family. 

Often, money has changed hands. More...

Creating 3D video content is gaining momentum in Hollywood. The excitement over 3D has also found its way to the U.S. consumer electronics market. By 2013, one in five new televisions sold in America will be 3D, according to the latest market study by In-Stat.

Year-over-year shipment growth will be 231 percent between 2010 and 2011 -- resulting in a doubling of the U.S. installed base of units for 3D TVs from 2010 to 2011.

"High definition (HD) did create a wave of activity in the U.S. market, not seen since the introduction of color," says Stephanie Ethier, In-Stat analyst. "3DTV promises to be the next significant innovation wave for living room entertainment."

Despite many bright spots in the U.S. More...

Recently, I’ve taken a particular interest in technology in public places, probably due to spending too much time pondering my surroundings while waiting for the train. This latest example, discovered thanks to Michael Dales, is close to home just North of Cambridge. It’s so simple and it’s bound to make a lot of young people happy this summer.

Wondering what this is? It’s a rather clever contraption, apparently installed by Monster Play, a Hertfordshire-based company.

Built into the rain/sun shelter that sits on the edge of a new local skate park, this unit allows you to broadcast music to a small speaker from your phone, mp3 player, laptop, etc via Bluetooth. More...