todaytest 04/02/2008

Social gaming picks up momentum  Annotated

tags: utr2

Social Gaming Network, whose games include War Book, spun off from Freewebs earlier this year and started operating in Palo Alto this month.

"We're in the Pong stages of social gaming," said Shervin Pishevar, CEO of Social Gaming. "In terms of building new ideas, you should expect to see innovation for what it means to be a game and tap into the social graph, the people you enjoy playing games with."

Veeple uses Flash to make videos come alive with ad links » VentureBeat  Annotated

tags: no_tag

The Los Gatos, Calif. company can embed anything — including advertising web page links — into videos. It does so by putting an interactive overlay on top of a video in the Adobe Flash format. It thus makes the video come alive with links and other creative features. Users can thus imprint their own thoughts on a video in the parts where they want and then share it with their friends.

You can place a “VeeSpot” on any part of a video and make that spot interactive. You can turn it into a speech or a thought bubble with a sarcastic message. You can also record a voice message that plays when someone clicks on the VeeSpot. If you want, you can quickly share that video with family, friends, or everyone you know.

Omnisio also uses its Flash overlay to allow people to make comments on videos. (Our coverage). PLYmedia also allows movie viewers to embed comments in speech bubbles in movies.

With Veeple, you can also embed an ad link, such as an eBay logo, into a video. Users who click upon Madonna’s sunglasses in a video can thus link directly to a site where they can buy those glasses.

Scott Broomfield, CEO of Veeple, says that Veeple can distinguish itself from its rivals in a variety of ways. The company has its own object recognition technology that it can use to find and recognize objects within a video. Hence, if an advertiser puts a VeeSpot on an object in a video, that VeeSpot will appear whenever that object appears in the video.

“We consider these links within a video to be unintrusive to the viewer,” Broomfield said. “Since viewers aren’t putting up with 30-second commercials, we consider this to be the next logical step for video advertising.”