AFV’s best! DID YOU LIKE these America’s Funniest Home Videos? 999Cryptic has a very funny channel with over 75 hours (!) of fun videos like this. My NEW FAIL CHANNEL? www.youtube.com My FACEBOOK FANCLUB? www.facebook.com Funny home videos with great bloopers from all over the world, part 475.
4
One of the top social game developers, CrowdStar, announced the appointment of four new members to its executive team today. The company has recruited Pete Hawley as Vice President of Product Development, Mark Hull as Vice President of Product Marketing and Community, Mike Ouye as Vice President of Monetization and Merchandising, and Robert Einspruch as Director of Business Development.
Though we had noted the CrowdStar hiring of Ouye and Hawley already based on LinkedIn data, it appears that the social developer is making the hiring official along with Hull and Einspruch. With roughly 38.6 million monthly active users for CrowdStar games as a whole, the four new team members will be charged with the further growth of the company on a global scale.
15 year games industry veteran, Pete Hawley will be heading up the forefront of this worldwide user expansion in the games department most directly. He previously worked at major games studios for Electronic Arts and Sony Computer Entertainment Europe.
Mark Hull (pictured top) will focus, of course, on the marketing and user community sides of CrowdStar. A fitting role with his 14 years of experience in mass-market communities and games development. Past products worked on include Vivaty, iWin, and Yahoo.
With experience stemming from competitor Playdom (who earns around 42.1 million monthly active users, as a whole), Mike Ouye (pictured bottom), as Vice President of Monetization and Merchandising will have his role centralized around revenue-generating programs. With the millions of users the company’s apps already have, it will certainly be a full time ordeal.
As for Robert Einspruch, as the new Director of Business Development, he boasts over 15 years of finance, product management, and business development experience from Wall Street, Apple, and Amazon. Most recently, however, he worked as the Director of Digital Distribution and Business Development for downloadable games space, MumboJumbo.
Christopher Mack Read more: Inside Social Games
Having lagged behind much of the rest of the world, India is now among one of the fastest growing international regions for Facebook. Developers in the country are paying more attention, too, producing the sorts of apps that will be familiar to most users.
UTV Indiagames is one of those developers. Having made the experimental Cricket T20 World Championship sports app for Facebook, it now has another title out — a simple sharing app called Lucky Ganesha.
To provide a brief background on the concept, Ganesha is one of the deities in the Hindu religion. Easily recognizable due to the elephant visage, Ganesha extends into other religions, including Jainism and parts of Buddhism as well. Known as the Remover of Obstacles, Lord of Beginnings, and/or Lord of Obstacles, Ganesha is often associated with Lakshmi, the goddess of luck and prosperity, where the concept of this app likely took root.
So luck and prosperity is what the app wants to spread. Each day, when a user logs into Lucky Ganesha, they are greeted with a random proverb attributed to the deity, under various names. Examples:
Gaurisuta Says… “Do not mistake temptation for opportunity.”
Mundakarama Says… “May your thoughts be as glad as the shamrocks, may your heart be as light as a song, may each day bring you bright, happy hours that stay with you all the year long.”
Of course, these are only two examples, and there are dozens more to choose from. What is nice, however, is that there is more than just one’s daily “luck.” Users can spread the luck, as they see fit, in one of two ways. The first, and more general is simply receiving a random fortune or proverb and publishing it to all of one’s friends.
It’s basic, but if one is looking to be more personal, then they merely step on over to the apps’ simple gifting mechanic where they can pick and choose sayings to send to a friend directly. The only real downside, is that each “gift” can only be selected based on the character and not the saying. One doesn’t see the latter until after the pop-up to send it appears.
Beyond any of this, the only other element remaining within Lucky Ganesha is the “Luck Room.” It’s nothing terribly extravagant and merely acts as an archive of all the luck you have sent and/or received.
Considering that India is just now beginning to become heavily involved in Facebook (though mobile still appears stronger), it is expected that new games and applications would take a simpler route, as compared to some recent Facebook titles from older developers in places such as North America, China, and Japan. All the same, and as has been said a number of times before, simplicity means little so long as the package, in its entirety, is strong. While Lucky Ganesha is not an app that is going to appeal to everyone, for what it is, it works. As basic and dated as the concept of gifting anything is, each proverb and saying has enough depth to it to really make the reader stop and think and consider the going-ons in their own life. In the end, that’s probably the point of Lucky Ganesha, and in that, it does its job well.
Christopher Mack Read more: Inside Facebook
At Facebook, everything we do is about making the world more social and creating more personalized experiences. On Facebook, people do everything from remembering their friends’ birthdays to reuniting with old classmates to even finding people willing to donate their organs to save their lives. We think making the world more personal and social is having a profound impact on the way we relate to the people, communities and institutions around us.
In a more connected world, advertisers are social too. This gives you the chance to connect to the companies and brands you like and learn more about their products and services. We believe that more personalized social advertising complements the ways that people use Facebook every day—to discover, share and connect with the people and the world around them.
Whether it’s a new car, a local dentist or a t-shirt, many of the things you discover on Facebook come from your friends. Just as advertising has changed the experience of searching on the web, we think advertisers are a meaningful part of the social graph and the online experience as a whole.
We have designed Facebook to provide relevant and interesting advertising content to you in a way that protects your privacy completely. We never share your personal information with advertisers. We never sell your personal information to anyone. These protections are yours no matter what privacy settings you use; they apply equally to people who share openly with everyone and to people who share with only select friends.
We also protect your privacy by virtue of the way our advertising system works. Because our system chooses which ads to show you, we don’t need to share any of your personal information with advertisers in order to show you relevant ads. In order to advertise on Facebook, advertisers give us an ad they want us to display and tell us the kinds of people they want to reach. We deliver the ad to people who fit those criteria without revealing any personal information to the advertiser.
The only information we provide to advertisers is aggregate and anonymous data, so they can know how many people viewed their ad and general categories of information about them. Ultimately, this helps advertisers better understand how well their ads work so they can show better ads.
Advertisers can also request that we display ads based on the things you have said you liked in your profile. We think this means you will get ads that are more personalized to your real interests and this makes your experience on Facebook even better. For example, if you are a small business selling tents you might want to target adults ages 18-49 who have liked camping or hiking. Our advertising system only shows the number of people who fit those criteria.
Once the ad runs, we report how many people saw or clicked on the ad and we provide aggregate demographic information. We do not show individual profiles or personal information in our reporting tools.
If you are interested in seeing how this works, you can watch this video:
We have built—and are continuing to grow—a successful advertising business that gives you the opportunity to discover and connect to things you like while respecting your privacy no matter how you choose to share your information. We think an online advertising experience that is social and puts consumers at the center of an ongoing, two-way conversation is better for people and businesses alike.
Sheryl is Facebook’s chief operating officer.
Read more: Facebook Blog
Don’t Jealous Me Productions (C) So Funny
4
