EA Games Chief: Transmedia Entertainment Is About IP - via PSFK

On Monday EA Games president Frank Gibeau talked to us about the strategic direction of the company, as well as its disagreement with Activision over charging for social connectivity.

In today’s concluding section, he covers transmedia entertainment, the need for original games and the rise of digital. There’s also more on the company’s offensive against the Modern Warfare machine …

We’ve currently got this transmedia concept blooming – the idea that games are part of an entertainment package that includes “linear media” such as books and movies. Is this a serious part of the EA strategy, too?
The expansion into linear is more tactical than strategic for us. It’s about getting the intellectual property into more hands and exposing more people to it. If you do a film and it’s good, everybody has a great time, but it doesn’t change our value as a company.

What we have thought about differently though since last year is the idea of games as IP universes that then express themselves across different platforms. What’s really important is thinking about, say Need For Speed as an intellectual property – real cars, real fast – but you can play it as a free-to-play title on the PC, you can play it on a mobile device or a console, but they’re interoperable, they talk to each other. Because, on the server side, I know from your nucleus account how you registered, where you’re coming in from, what you like, what type of games you enjoy, how long you play, and other titles you’d potentially be interested in – and I can offer those up to you to opt into if you want.

So when you think of an IP universe you stop thinking about ‘what are my Xbox 360 sales?’ and you think about “how big is my worldwide audience?” Now, linear media plays a little bit of a role in there, because if you have a TV show or a comic, it expands the IP, but what happened with Need for Speed last year is far more interesting to me – we got Criterion in on the game, we put it out as Hot Pursuit, we grew the audience, grew the sales on console, but at the same time we launched Need for Speed Online as a free-to-play title and quickly had 5 million registered users. And what we found was, the majority of those users were new to NFS, because we could see if they’d ever check in with a nucleus account before. And our top markets were Russia and Brazil, where we don’t even sell packaged goods – they just get pirated!

ooo.... ARGs at UTexas | HASTAC

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By Scott Nelson (excerpt):

"This past spring, the Digital Writing and Research Lab at the University of Texas at Austin playtested one clue from an upcoming alternate reality game. We designed the game to coincide with our next year's first-year forum book, a text that all students in Rhetoric 306 use. Next year's book is The Death and Life of the Great American School System, a critique of the business model of K-12 education. We wanted to take these larger concerns of government involvement in education and apply them to both past and current situations at the University of Texas, but more importantly, we wanted to engage students with the rich history and communities in Austin.

As a genre, alternate reality games lend themselves to this type of engagement. Players explore real and virtual spaces in search of clues, and puzzles are often too complex to be solved by one individual. Thus, players leverage the power of collective intelligence by forming teams with heterogeneous backgrounds. The more diverse a group's expertise, the more likely they will have the necessary information to solve the puzzles.

Beyond the benefits of collaboration, alternate reality games draw upon a wide range of digital media skills. In designing our game, we wanted players to use the usual tools of ARGs web searches, cryptography, message boards, and wikis -- but we also wanted players to learn multimedia production tools like Adobe Photoshop and Apples GarageBand...."

Dominik Rausch, Producer of 'Easy To Assemble' Launches United Motion Entertainment, First Hollywood Transmedia Production Company, Launches - BroadcastNewsroom

United Motion Entertainment, First Hollywood Transmedia Production Company, Launches

Company to Develop 360-Degree Cross-Platform Stories With Brands, Studios, Labels, and Publishers

June 15, 2011 --

DMN Newswire--2011-6-15-- Normal 0 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 United Motion Entertainment (UME), the first Hollywood transmedia production company, today announced the launch of its business. The company comprised of branded entertainment veteran Dominik Rausch as CEO and producer-actor-musician Kelly Blatz as vice president of strategic partnerships is a hybrid production company/marketing firm that is set to revolutionize the way that entertainment is produced, distributed and promoted. The company is expanding its line of production services to include legal, accounting, and post-production supervision in order to offer a full production package to advertising agencies, studios, and production companies alike, in keeping with the companys motto, ?You bring the concept, we deliver the product.

UME is represented by Attorneys Jason Russell, of Jacobson, Russell, Saltz & Fingerman LLP and Jesse Berg, from General Counsel Law Ventures. Connie Ardito and David Saenz of CPA firm Neuman, Steinhauser, Saenz & Ardito LLP handle accounting for UME.

UME is poised to deliver a new level of transmedia experience for brands that range from film, music, and publishing to consumer products. At the nexus of the UME value proposition lies the United Motion Marketing concept, a 21st-century entertainment and media promotion engine that delivers organic entertainment, allowing stories to evolve in a natural way for wide audiences and diverse demographics.

Damn Useful Post! Grazie! 10 Tools for Digital Storytelling in Class | The Whiteboard Blog

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Digital storytelling is simply using computer-based tools to tell stories. There are many different ways to do this – from making movies, recording voices, creating animations or electronic books. In schools they can help to take a task that might be seen as mundane – write a report, write a story, explain a process, describe an experiment – and turn it into something a whole lot more interesting.
There are a great many tools out there that could be used for digital storytelling. I am going to give you just a few:

1. Storybird - http://www.storybird.com

2. Lego Comic Builder : http://city.lego.com/en-us/comicbuilder/intro.aspx

3. Storyjumper - http://www.storyjumper.com

4. Make Beliefs Comix : http://www.makebeliefscomix.com/

5. My Story Maker : http://www.carnegielibrary.org/kids/storymaker/embed.cfm

6. Tikatok: http://www.tikatok.com/classroom"

more resources & more deets on site!

Love that Creating a Story for Droid Changed Loathing to Love: How the Android Ecosystem Threatens the iPhone | via Wired

By Fred Vogelstein

Andy Rubin needed a hit. It was January 2009, three years since Google had bought the company he cofounded, a little startup called Android.

Rubin had created a slick operating system for mobile phones that allowed customers to surf the web, send email, play music, and install apps. He had hoped that Google’s money and power would help turn Android into a major force in the burgeoning smartphone industry. Instead, Android had been a disappointment. Despite months of press buildup, the first phone to run the system, HTC’s T-Mobile G1, was greeted with tepid reviews and lackluster sales. Rubin had tried to find a bigger wireless carrier that would agree to partner with Android—he and his team, including Android cofounders Rich Miner and Nick Sears, had lobbied Verizon for the better part of a year—but without success. And then there was Android’s biggest competitor, the iPhone. Introduced in 2007, it had become an instant commercial and cultural phenomenon. Unless Rubin could come up with a breakthrough Android phone, and quick, he might have to concede the entire business to Steve Jobs.

Fortunately for Rubin, Sanjay Jha was in just as dire a position. Jha, the new co-CEO of Motorola, had been talking to Rubin for months, hoping to persuade him to let Motorola build the next Android phone. Once the dominant mobile device maker in the world, Motorola hadn’t had a major success since the Razr—in 2004. Jha had been hired in August 2008 to resurrect Motorola’s handset business, and he had pursued an all-or-nothing strategy, laying off thousands and betting Motorola’s future on his ability to build a hit Android phone.

Now Jha had come to Google headquarters to unveil his design—and it was impressive. Jha promised a device that would be far faster than any other smartphone. He said its touchscreen would have a higher resolution than the iPhone. He said it would come with a full keyboard, for customers who didn’t like the iPhone’s virtual keys. He promised a phone that was thin and sleek, one that could compete with the iPhone on pure aesthetics. And, thanks to his longstanding relationship with Verizon, he offered the potential of a partnership with the country’s then second-largest wireless carrier; in fact, Motorola and Verizon had already discussed building a smartphone together. “We were all kind of jazzed,” says Hiroshi Lockheimer, one of Rubin’s chief lieutenants, who was at the meeting. “I think we said OK on the spot.”

Motorola came back with the first prototype of the new Android phone. It was hideous.

But that optimism faded a few months later, in the spring of 2009, when the first prototype arrived in the Android offices. To Rubin’s eyes, they looked nothing like the designs Jha had presented. Indeed, they were hideous. Yes, there is always a gap between a manufacturer’s sketches and the eventual prototype, but Rubin and his team had so much faith in Jha that they expected him to deliver a phone much closer to the one he had pitched. Despair set in. “It looked like a weapon. It was so sharp and jagged and full of hard lines. It looked like you could cut yourself on the edges,” says someone who saw the prototype. “We were really concerned. There were a lot of conversations where we asked, ‘Is this really the device we want to do? Should we try to talk Motorola out of it?’”

read the full article on Wired.com

How the user-generated film 'Life in a Day' was made (via Wired UK)

By Katie Scott,17 June 11

""Herculean" is how film editor Joe Walker describes the task that faced his team in the production of Life in a Day -- the user-generated film that hits UK screen today.

To make this 90-minute menagerie, which documents one day -- 24 July, 2010 -- around the world, his team watched and logged key words for 80,000 videos from 197 countries. "We sat the team in front of iMacs, gave them a lot of coffee, chocolate and biscuits, and told to get on with viewing," Walker told Wired.co.uk.

In fact, they watched 4,500 hours of footage, which had been uploaded to YouTube in response to a request by film director and documentary maker Kevin MacDonald (One Day in September and Touching the Void)...."

Marky Mark! Mark Wahlberg purchases $12M Yorkville penthouse in Toronto, the city that saved his life | To Market, To Market

TIFF is still a few months away, but the celebrity sightings are already starting. In the last week alone, Robert Pattinson made an appearance at Goodnight, Martha Stewart dined at O&B Canteen and Rihanna proclaimed her love for the T-dot on Twitter. Then, yesterday, the Toronto Star reported that Mark Wahlberg, the man who would’ve been on one of the two L.A.-bound Boston jets crashed by the 9/11 hijackers were it not for a last-minute trip to Toronto, just bought a $12-million condo in Yorkville. Sure, he didn’t spend a record $28 million on his new digs—but who needs an unnamed international man of mystery when you can have Marky Mark?

The penthouse is slated for completion in 2013 and comes with all the luxuries you’d expect at such a hefty price tag, including enough space to house the entire Funky Bunch. Wahlberg will occupy the top floor of the seven-storey building, and we hope for his neighbours’ sake that he’s not much of a partier—they might not want to feel those good vibrations (even though they’re a sweet sensation).

Intel Launches “The Escape” Integrating YouTube « via USA Market News

On Thursday Intel Corporation (NASDAQ:INTC) launched, “The Escape,” which is an entertaining thriller that permits its YouTube (a Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) interactive featured website that allows users to upload their very best moments videos, favorite songs and movies on a singular platform) spectators to take part in the exciting activity. “The Escape” incorporates YouTube, interactivity and social networking into a sole flawless experience for the very first time.

Enthused by Intel’s previous movie, “The Chase,” “The Escape” smashes through YouTube’s third wall and crafts the audience as the hero, slightly piloting drones and clashing with attackers to help the movie’s femme fatale in her tasks.

On talking about the video, Stephanie Gan, regional manager of advertising and digital programs for Intel Asia Pacific, commented that we desired to get attach with users in a private, engaging and interactive way while representing the visual abilities of the 2nd Generation Intel Core processor family. While YouTube gave the ideal stage for building this experience, it was significant to make some of the social connections with Facebook integration.”

She further added that just as Intel’s 2nd Generation Core processors modifies your computing experience similarly this movement will alter the way you look at the YouTube platform. You have never seen YouTube quite like this after this integration.