Archive for the ‘Entertainment’ Category

YouTube homepage is down…

Oh my! It has finally happened. Forget the 4 horsemen of the apocalypse! YOUTUBE ISN’T WORKING!

Or is it?

Amid mass hysteria about the video sharing site going down, it does not seemed to have occured to anyone to try clicking a link in YouTube. If they did, they would realise that it appears that only the homepage is not working.

My Tweetdeck nearly exploded when I added the search term ‘YouTube’. It took over 15 minutes before people realised the truth and started tweeting about.

I will follow up with blog talking about the impact of this within the next few days…

I refuse to grow up

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been paying rent and making budgets and studying stuff and thinking “career” for years now, but there are some things I simply won’t let go of.
 
I laugh giddily for no reason. I pull pranks on my colleagues here at the Attentio Brussels office regularly. I store snow balls in the freezer. I keep a ping pong ball and racket in my desk at all times just in case, and I religiously read Calvin and Hobbes. Those two give me great ideas as to what I should do on the weekend.
 
I also play video games. A lot. If I manage to stay away from the sauce on Friday nights, I’ll get up nice and early with my lady on Saturday morning, make her breakfast in bed. Then I’ll send her off to her weekend course and saunter on into my game room, complete with Wii, PC, Xbox 360, Playstation 3, Über flatscreen TV and telephone. The phone is there to call my for pizza.On these days I will be joined by thousands of gamers around the world – albeit most of them are a decade or more younger than me – ready to sit prone on the couch for the next 10 hours and do ostensibly nothing else then wiggle my fingers around and stare attentively at a screen. Of course Nina will come home after her course and expect the same man that brought her coffee, boiled eggs and toast in bed, but instead she’ll find Sgt. Paul Jackson of the USMC shooting Al-Asad soldier after Al-Asad soldier, while quite possibly having used the tomato sauce from the half-mauled pizza as face paint.

Truth be told, I couldn’t be the only grown-up playing video games. The video gaming industry is booming at such an alarming rate, it’s actually surpassed the film industry. According to recent NPD insights, North Americans now spend 29% of their entertainment Dollars, compared to 24% on movies and TV shows combined. To this end, I thought it would be interesting to monitor some of the online buzz revolving around these video game developers’ upcoming titles:

• Activision Blizzard’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2
• Electronic Arts’s Army of Two, 40th Day
• Ubisoft’s Avatar: The Game
• Bungie’s Halo: Reach
• Capcom’s Lost Planet 2
• LucasArts’s Star Wars Force Unleashed 2
• Sega’s Vancouver 2010
• Sony’s Bioshock 2
• Rockstar Games’s Grand Theft Auto: Episodes from Liberty City
• BioWare’s Mass Effect 2

Now the beauty of the Attentio Brand Dashboard is how we can collect and categorise the data. The Dashboard is designed with a three-tier approach. First, we collect the bulk of your data about your product or brand (or whatever, it’s completely open-ended and restricts your choices in no way). Then we create vertical categories based on your needs (these can be topics, products over brands, product ranges, even cities). After that we tell you what language the data is coming in, or what country.

Now that we have the games we’re going to track, maybe you’d like to suggest relevant topics you’d like to find out about with regards to these games? Just let me know below or mail me at marc@attentio.com, and we’ll see the results next week :)