Birmingham Post - Business Blog

The Scrabble for supremacy

Tue, 15 Apr 2008 10:00:10 +0000

If you'd have mentioned 'Scrabulous' to someone last year you'd have probably forgiven them for thinking you were talking about some kind of nefarious skin complaint rather than the Facebook-based unauthorized version of the traditional boardgame, Scrabble.

With more than 600,000 players using the Scrabulous application daily, game company Mattel has launched an official Scrabble application to rival the unauthorised version. Unfortunately for Mattel, early signs are that people are sticking with what they know with the official version only attracting 2000 daily views.

Have Mattel missed the boat or can they tempt users over to the official version? More importantly, should they be trying to best their rival or instead take advantage somehow of the renewed interest it seems to have generated in their product?

Free... it's the magic number

Mon, 31 Mar 2008 13:20:42 +0000

We all love free stuff. It doesn't matter if it's a free t-shirt that we will only ever wear to decorate in or the buy one get one free offer on rollmops at your local supermarket (just how much pickled herring does one actually need?), it's not so much what you get free, more the feeling that getting something for free gives you.

I'm going to keep this post short(ish) because a lot of what I was going to say has already been said better, and in more detail, by Dan Ariely his book Predictably Irrational (you can read an extract here).

How often are our decisions influenced by the opportunity to get something for free? Given the choice would you choose a 2 for 1 offer on a product you weren't going to choose over what you were planning to buy? Have you ever bought something extra on Amazon to 'save' on postage costs?

Taking the credits

Thu, 06 Mar 2008 20:43:02 +0000

This post is tinged with a health and safety caveat. My drive to work in the morning is often a time for me to mull over the tasks for the day before I get stuck in, which means I have a lot of different thoughts competing for limted attention. Add to this the concentration required to negotiate the M42 bottleneck safely and I confess I can't remember the name of the woman who appeared on Radio 4's Today programme on Monday talking about television credits. Sorry.

Whoever she was, she was arguing against the trend for TV credits to be squished into split screens, talked over and sped up. She claimed that the viewers were being denied the opportunity to fully experience the credits, although she did grudgingly admit that credits were as much, if not more, for the benefit of the people involved in production of the TV programme as they were for the viewer.

Facebook Reunited

Tue, 04 Mar 2008 11:16:41 +0000

Remember Friends Reunited? Before Social Networking was a buzz word and in the days when MySpace was microscopic, Friends Reunited were blazing a trail that saw the company valued at astronomical sums and spawned a breed of copycat sites and spin-off merchandising.

And then it all seemed to fizzle out. The site is still up and running and listing over 19 million members - myself being one - but until just now, I hadn't checked the site for a couple of years. I knew where it was if I wanted it but after the initial excitement faded, I quickly lost interest.

Blogs: It's (not) all about me

Wed, 27 Feb 2008 13:28:10 +0000

"Of the 12,000 new blogs created every day, 50% focus on exactly the same subject - the blogger".

At least that's the claim that Sarfraz Manzoor makes in his recent Esquire feature on the New Narcissism movement that this generation that are so plugged into the social media movement has spawned. So, in light of that I'm going to keep this introductory post short and sweet and try to make it not so much about me.

The digital landscape is starting to grow up, at least out of its infancy and into a slightly more self-aware adolescent phase. Those of us who work within the digital industry are finding that along with the raft of opportunities that the latest developments bring along with them comes a need for a new, more intelligent approach.