BURBANK, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Racers – log onto your computers – and start your engines! Disney•Pixar World of Cars Online (www.world of cars.com), a new online virtual world for kids based on the hit animated movie “Cars,” debuted to fans, car enthusiasts and the press on Wednesday, as announced by Disney Online Studios, a unit of the Disney Interactive Media Group.

“Our teams worked tirelessly to ensure World of Cars Online authentically represents the characters and storylines that kids and families have come to know and love from the movies, and we’re looking forward to hearing what ‘Cars’ fans think of it.”

The World of Cars Online premiere event featured celebrity guests Cheech Marin and Jenifer Lewis, voices of “Ramone” and “Flo” from the Disney•Pixar animated feature “Cars” and new online video game, as well as Disney Channel stars, the Road Kings classic car club and other Hollywood families and fans. The event was held at California historical landmark, Bob’s Big Boy restaurant in Burbank, a real life example of the 1950s style “car hop” coffee shop, reminiscent of Radiator Springs’ Flo’s V-8 Café depicted in the “Cars” movie and virtual world.

“Our goal with World of Cars Online is to provide a creative and social environment where kids can have fun and use their imaginations in new ways,” says Lane Merrifield, executive vice president of Disney Online Studios. “Our teams worked tirelessly to ensure World of Cars Online authentically represents the characters and storylines that kids and families have come to know and love from the movies, and we’re looking forward to hearing what ‘Cars’ fans think of it.”

“At Pixar, we love seeing the worlds we create in our films extend into other media,” said Jay Ward, Cars Franchise Manager. “We are excited to bring the world of ‘Cars’ to online audiences in a fun and imaginative way.”

World of Cars Online is an expansive virtual world on the Internet that constantly changes with new games, adventures and community activities for kids and their friends to enjoy together. Features include:

•Create a Car – create a custom car with loads of modifications and upgrades to choose from
•Meet “Cars” Movie Characters – engage with quirky “Cars” characters in offbeat adventures and more
•Explore the Open Road – play fun games and activities in Radiator Springs and beyond
•Make New Friends – meet, chat and play with thousands of other Cars or race against them on a variety of tracks
•Start a Racing Career – race to become the new Piston Cup Champ. Cars can work their way up from local dirt tracks to the national circuit
•Build a Yard – outfit a yard for friends to check out and visit, and eventually build custom race tracks
There is no third party advertising in World of Cars Online, it is a free-to-play browser-based game. For access to additional features in the world, a sponsorship subscription of $5.95 a month is required.

A special parents section is featured in World of Cars Online, where parents can learn more about the game and parental controls that are offered. Parents may use the Account Manager to control a variety of community settings for their child’s car, including two chat options, SpeedChat and SpeedChat Plus. In addition to the parental controls, World of Cars Online employs a highly trained, on-site staff to continuously monitor the world and provide personalized player support. More information on the parents section can be found at: www.worldofcars.go.com/parents/.

About Disney•Pixar’s “CARS”

Disney•Pixar’s “Cars” has become among the fastest growing Disney franchises, generating nearly $2 billion per year in global retail sales of licensed merchandise since the film’s release. “Cars” is an unstoppable force delivering on boys’ classic play patterns and fueling imaginations with products that extend the storyline from the film to books and magazines and into the home with a lifestyle merchandising program from toys and home décor, apparel and stationery to food and personal care items. “Cars” continues to resonate strongly with consumers and is supported by a robust line of new titles from Disney Publishing Worldwide and DisneyDigitalBooks.com, “Cars Toons” animated interstitials on Disney Channel that offer ongoing connection with key characters, a franchise site at Disney.com/Cars and a new virtual world, World of Cars Online where users can create and customize their own virtual Car. The highly anticipated sequel “Cars 2” will release theatrically June 24, 2011 and promises to deliver a whole new adventure.

About Disney Online Studios

Disney Online Studios, a business unit of the Disney Interactive Media Group, produces an award-winning portfolio of online virtual worlds for kids and families including Disney Club Penguin, Disney’s Toontown Online, Disney Fairies Pixie Hollow, Pirates of the Caribbean Online and Disney•Pixar World of Cars Online. Guided by an unwavering commitment to safety and creativity, Disney’s virtual worlds offer continuously updated content and endless hours of online fun in rich, story-based environments filled with games, adventures, parties and special events.

Disney Interactive Media Group (DIMG) is an affiliate of The Walt Disney Company (NYSE: DIS).

About Pixar Animation Studios

Pixar Animation Studios, a wholly owned subsidiary of The Walt Disney Company, is an Academy Award®-winning film studio with world-renowned technical, creative and production capabilities in the art of computer animation. Creator of some of the most successful and beloved animated films of all time, including Toy Story, Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Cars, Ratatouille, WALL•E, Up and most recently, Toy Story 3. The Northern California studio has won 24 Academy Awards® and its eleven films have grossed more than $5.5 billion at the worldwide box office to date. The next film release from Disney•Pixar is Cars 2 (June 24, 2011).

For Game and Event Artwork go to:

•Disney•Pixar World of Cars Online Game Assets: http://corporate.disney.go.com/wdig/virtualWorlds/
•August 11, 2010 – Media Launch Event Photos: www.wireimage.com and http://bit.ly/9oRxRt

Contacts
Disney Online Studios
Dana Henry Benson
818-623-3420
Dana.Henry@disney.com
or
Disney Online Studios
Lindsay Plotkin
818-623-3720
Lindsay.X.Plotkin.-ND@disney.com

Currently in southern China there are five factory jobs available to each person. This labor shortage doesn’t just effect the lower paying factories but the higher waged workers as well. Workers have begun job-hopping from factory to factory causing factory owners to constantly train new workers. Traditionally price sensitive industries, such as the toy industry, are amongst the hardest hit when circumstances like this occur. Affordable labor is what made China so appetizing to our industry to begin with. Those margins are being stripped away every day. And now, with so many testing restrictions squeezing the factories, more and more rumors abound that Chinese-owned toy companies are looking inward rather than outward for future sales. With less of a need for U.S. partners, what’s the fate of our industry? We welcome your comments.

–

Originally posted on aNb Media Inc. here >>

By: Matt Nuccio, Design Edge

Design Edge is a New York-based graphic design and research development studio with office in Hong Kong. Matt Nuccio can be reached at (516) 377–0500 or at matt@designedge.net.

That is, the technorati of Silicon Valley believe that brick-and-mortar video game stores — GameStop has more than 6,000 of them — are about to go the way of music and movie video stores. But J. Paul Raines, chief executive of Grapevine, Texas-based GameStop, the biggest retailer of games in the country, said in an interview that isn’t happening. On top of that, he says GameStop is moving fast to embrace the digital online future. Putting a flagship store in the middle of Silicon Valley, just down the street from digital distribution rival OnLive, is a stake in the ground.

The new store is a model for how GameStop will marry online games with packaged goods. It has downloadable and Flash-based games on a web-connected PC. It has reward program kiosks, big displays for watching demos, and all sorts of other technology.

Seeking to avoid the fate of Hollywood Video, the video-rental business that shut more than 2,000 stores and laid off more than 19,000 employees, GameStop has bought Kongregate, an indie online game portal. And it also acquired Jolt Online Gaming, a maker of free-to-play online games. Raines said that GameStop has more than 500 million visitors a year to its stores and it can steer that foot traffic to its web sites and online gaming solutions.

The founders of San Francisco-based Kongregate, Jim and Emily Greer, were on hand to show that their site was up and running using the store’s high-speed internet connection. Thanks to Kongregate’s traffic, GameStop now has another 10 million unique visitors a month to its already-popular GameStop web site. In the past, GameStop might have been lucky to monetize maybe 1 percent of its web site traffic. But with Kongregate and some serious efforts at monetization, the stores can help convert more of that traffic to loyal, paying customers, said Chris Petrovic, general manager of GameStop Digital Ventures, which is preparing to invest $100 million a year in the online business.

The Palo Alto store is one of about 25 such stores that have already been built in marquee locations around the country. It shows how GameStop can keep its store customers more engaged through reward programs. Inside the store, there are lots of kiosks and displays that can keep gamers engaged. The store is around 2,700-square-feet, or about twice the size of the typical GameStop store. There is plenty of space to walk around and watch game demos. There’s also a big trading center, where users can buy and sell their used games, which are now 31 percent of the chain’s sales.

Tony Bartel, president of GameStop, showed me and Nintendo’s head of sales and marketing, Cammie Dunaway, how the kiosks work. You walk up to the big display and show your PowerUp Rewards Pro card to an optical scanner. Your name comes up on the screen and then displays the games you’ve bought. It also shows your wish list and allows you to add to it. You do so by grabbing a game from the racks and scanning its barcode. The game instantly pops up on the Interactive Game Guide kiosk display (below). You can share the information with your friends. And GameStop can give you more rewards and achievements the more you spend at the store.

Not only can you buy physical goods, you can also purchase downloadable content for your Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3 game console (the PS 3 is coming soon). Bartel showed how you could look up a Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 game and then tap on the description, read reviews, or tap on the downloadable content. You can then purchase the content, swipe a credit card, and then receive a validation code. Then you can go home and download the title. The content is priced the same as if you downloaded it at home, but if you buy it at GameStop, it counts toward your rewards.

Bartel said that early results show the PowerUp Rewards Pro is extremely popular with customers and that the kiosks are also a big draw. Dunaway asked how wide the demographic reach of the program is, given Nintendo’s audience is more mass market than hardcore. Bartel said that the results show that a broad swath of consumers are participating.

The company is in the midst of rolling out the kiosks as fast as it can. Although Raines and others say that digital distribution isn’t an insurmountable threat, there’s still pressure on earnings as the traditional console game sales slow down. GameStop missed its earnings target in its most recent quarter.

The digital strategy strikes me as wise and measured. But I’m still surprised that GameStop is still opening lots of stores. In the first half of the year, it opened 99 net new stores, adding some and closing older stores. Raines says the rate of store openings has slowed and the chain will probably add a net of 2 percent expansion of store square footage in the U.S.

It’s likely that the chain is adding the stores in a measured way, signing short-term leases so it can close them quickly if needed. In that sense, the recession is aiding GameStop. It has plenty of prime storefronts to choose from these days and can tap the old Hollywood video sites to open new flagship stores. But it better keep putting the pedal to the metal on the digital online expansion strategy, which includes acquiring new companies. The Greers acknowledge it’s a challenge, but they also say they know they are just the first big acquisition, not the last.

Bill Tai, a partner at Charles River Ventures, is an investor in online game companies such used game seller Glyde. He was at the opening, where he looked around and said, “They’re doing what they have to do to survive.”

The London 2012 mascot range will include soft and plastic toy and gift products and are available now from the London 2012 online shop www.shop.london2012.com, from the London 2012 store at St Pancras International in London and at John Lewis stores nationwide. Mascots Wenlock and Mandeville will join Clare Balding in Telford along with young people from across Shropshire as they oversee sample production in Golden Bear’s London 2012 design workshop.

Talking about the mascots, Clare Balding said: “I was delighted to take part in the national launch of the mascots on 19 May 2010. On that occasion I visited the Olympic Park so it seems only right that today I am unveiling the product range in Shropshire at the home of the mascot licensee, Golden Bear. The mascot range offers something for everyone, young and old, and I look forward to seeing Wenlock and Mandeville popping up across the UK as we get nearer to 2012”

David Moorcroft, Chair of the West Midlands Leadership Group for the 2012 Games said: “It is contracts such as the mascot, recognisable by people around the world that brings home what a huge opportunity the 2012 Games presents to businesses across the UK. I am particularly delighted that the organisation charged with creating the mascot product range is Shropshire-based, an area that is already so closely linked, through Much Wenlock, to the inspiration behind the modern Olympic Movement.”

Golden Bear’s licence for the 2012 Games will see the company manufacture a whole host of gift products including soft toy mascots of all sizes, key rings, charm accessories, collectable figurines, ‘stick on’ mascots and character backpacks.

Today online and mobile games generate about a third of all games software revenues globally. In five years’ time they are forecast to generate 50 percent of all games software revenue, or around a fifth more revenue than pure console games. This morning, market researcher iSuppli said that cell phone games are growing fast as console and handheld games sputter. Whether you have faith in the forecasts or not, executives from the major U.S., European and Asian publishers all tell me that this is what keeps them awake at night.

What excites me about the online and mobile games markets is that they are both high-growth and profitable, which is pretty rare. The leading competitors are growing revenue 100 percent-plus annually while also delivering 20 percent to 30 percent EBITDA (earnings before income tax, depreciation and amortization) margins. Add to that a fragmented industry structure, no dominant leaders yet, plus clear strategic exit options, and it looks like this is the time for strategic game and media companies, as well as financial investors, to invest.

However, major publishers aren’t structured to invest in online and mobile. Their core competencies focus on management of $20 million-plus serial, high risk, complex developments, launches and commercialization. Online and mobile games require rapid, multiple, small-scale parallel development platform investments. It’s a completely different business culture. As a result, major publishers aren’t driving investment in those games the same way they did console games.

In parallel, generalist venture capitalists are investing less in video games. Despite the rapid growth of the online and mobile games markets, VentureBeat’s own analysis shows investment in games companies dropping 36 percent from 2008 to 2009. Our analysis (which uses different definitions) shows VC investment across video games in 2009 had dropped by 60 percent from its high point in 2007. The drop has come from general VC market weakness, combined with limited knowledge and relationships across the complex, fast-moving online and mobile games sectors.

I am constantly being approached by high-quality, high-growth online and mobile video games companies from the U.S. and Europe who are finding it harder than you’d expect to get the funds they need to drive growth during this critical stage, before the industry consolidates. Quality demand is exceeding quality supply of investment and board representation.

Why a growth capital games fund could fill the investment gap

The opportunity now exists for major strategic video games, media and financial investors to maximize returns from online and mobile, so high quality deal flow is needed. Yet entrepreneurs typically avoid direct corporate investment prior to exit, so major strategic players aren’t seeing quality deals until merger and acquisition time when valuations are full or already prohibitively high. As before, the generalist VC market isn’t putting enough money to work here either.

I believe that a growth capital game fund is the most promising approach, investing in online and mobile games companies rather than more common and higher risk project-funding of individual games. A true growth capital game fund would invest in working capital (debt convertible into equity via convertible loan notes), venture capital first, second, or third rounds (early stage equity) and growth equity (later stage mix of equity and some debt) in multiple, parallel game business development platforms (not “one game” hit driven companies). That’s where the strategic and financial investors should be looking to invest across the U.S. and Europe. Asia is also interesting, but you need local partners to make it work.

In terms of focus, I like companies like Bigpoint, with a portfolio approach for both games (DarkOrbit, Deepolis, Farmerama) and distribution (limited reliance on Facebook). I also like online/mobile games B2B middleware companies like Live Gamer. I’m less enthusiastic about predominantly single game companies like Jagex (Runescape), and the Facebook players (Zynga, EA Playfish). These companies aren’t diversified enough. Primary dependence on one game or one distribution channel is a bit risky for my tastes, as any game can decline or Facebook can turn you off or charge increasing rents.

The real difference with this approach is the delivery of earlier stage investments than otherwise possible, meeting the needs of high-growth companies independent of stage while also managing investment risk. With the right relationships and management, this could yield high growth capital returns (greater than 30 percent internal rate of return) or three to six times money multiple (where the company sells for several times what went into it) due to investment at lower, earlier stage valuations than typical acquisitions. So long as the rules of engagement are clear, there is substantial opportunity to make money by investing in the growth of the best online and mobile games companies.

In short, the video game funding model needs to be reinvigorated in the same way that online and mobile are reinvigorating the video games industry as a whole. The console industry today looks a lot like the old media industry 10 years ago: cash generative, revenues flat to down and cost focused. Fortunately there is a real opportunity for the games industry to attract investment in online and mobile to avoid a declining future. I believe it will happen.

Tim Merel is a Corporate Finance Director at IBIS Capital with Video Games, Digital Media, Technology and Telecoms experience in industry, direct investment, financial services, growth company development and turnaround, across Europe, USA and Asia Pacific, with background in software engineering, law and business from Yale and Sydney University. Tim has the triumvirate of evil professions, having been a lawyer, worked for Rupert Murdoch, and now being an investment banker. When he’s not doing sensible things, Tim writes adventure stories and plays a mean guitar.

The first toy made with Borei’s technology is akin to Guitar Hero meets the iPhone. You tap on the plastic sheet that covers the toy and it makes the sound of a drum. You can play three different songs in several modes, trying to repeat the pattern of the drum beat as closely as you can. It may not sound impressive compared to your Xbox 360 game console. But it’s selling for $24.99 in Walgreen stores now and is a remarkable achievement in low-cost electronics. 628 Design, a toy design company in El Segundo, Calif., created the toy for toy maker WowWee.

San Jose, Calif.-based Borei found a way to mount capacitive touch technology — which is the same kind of touch-sensitive overlay used in iPhone and other touch screens — on plastic sheets. When you touch a part of the plastic, the pressure creates an electrical contact on a grid. The location of the finger touch is thus captured and transferred to the tiny microcontroller that runs the toy’s software, which triggers an action such as the sound of a drum.

The technology has been around for years. The plastic is made of the same material used in plastic drinking bottles. But Borei made the circuitry flexible enough to be packaged in just about anything at a very lost cost. The electronics in the Paper Jamz product, for instance, cost around $5 to manufacture, and it is paper-thin, as you can see from the image at the right.

The product was dreamed up by Chakriya Lao, chief executive of Borei; Khane Le, chief operating officer, and Khamvong Thammasouk. The latter was an executive at Synaptics, the touchpad sensor maker, which wasn’t interested in the toy market. They started Borei in late 2008 and early 2009, raising one round of angel funding. Paul Campbell, a former Hewlett-Packard executive who started five different businesses at HP, joined them in the spring of 2009.

“We saw that toys were losing the entertainment battle,” Campbell said in an interview. “There are online games, the internet, TV, and music. Our objective is to put more entertainment value into and play back into toys.”

So far, Borei has come a long way. Its first partner is WowWee, the robot toy maker that has a history of launching cool electronic toys such as Robosapien, Hoverod, and Perfect Puppy. WowWee is distributing the Paper Jamz toys to Walgreen stores now and will make them broadly available at retailers starting on Friday. The drum toys come with six different styles, such as country and western, and three pre-loaded songs. (Since the technology is so cheap, you can’t download new songs into these devices). The drum set can be played freestyle, where you just make all the noise you want, or in perfect play and rhythm modes where you can learn and mimic the drum sounds in familiar songs. The toy is targeted at kids 8 and up. WowWee is also making a paper-based faux guitar (pictured left) using a different technology.

“I tested it on my kids, and my daughter just took it into her room and played with it,” Campbell said.

Future versions could integrate more technology. On top of that, Borei has other technologies that could be used in other kinds of toys. It’s not just a one-technology company. The flexible circuit boards that Borei created can be used inside superhero action figures or dolls, making those toys able to react to touch.

While WowWee sells the Paper Jamz product, Borei gets a royalty. It also manufactures and sells the plastic sensor sheets in its factory near Shanghai.

At the upcoming toy conference in Dallas in October, Campbell says that there could be a dozen prototype toys from a variety of toy makers using Borei technology. The toy designers love the flexible touch-technology because it gives them more design freedom within a given cost budget.

The company has 25 employees and uses a variety of contractors in Silicon Valley, working on things such as printed circuit board layout. Factories in China and Thailand make the toys. Campbell says the company has figured out the right balance of sophisticated technology and low-cost.

Google made another play for the social networking space Friday with its acquisition of Slide, which makes games, applications and widgets for websites such as Facebook and MySpace.

The San Francisco developer provides free apps that Facebook users can install on their profiles in order to play simple games with friends or to arrange photo slide shows.

Slide’s SuperPoke application and its animal-centric variations, for example, are a family of popular social games with which players can virtually hug friends or raise a pet pig. A feature similar to Slide’s Top Friends was eventually implemented by Facebook into every profile, allowing users to rank online buddies.

Google didn’t immediately return a request for comment on the financial details of the deal, but a report on the website TechCrunch says Google has agreed to pay $182 million plus $46 million in employee bonuses.

Faced with the skyrocketing popularity of Facebook, Google has been searching for ways to make products that are more fun and collaborative.

Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt told the Wall Street Journal last week that the company would partner with Zynga Game Network. Zynga makes the wildly popular (and profitable) games FarmVille and Mafia Wars.

The Mountain View, Calif., search giant launched a competitor to Twitter in February called Google Buzz. The micro-blogging platform integrates with Google’s popular e-mail service Gmail and the mobile version of Google.com, but it has failed to retain users’ attention. And this week the company said it would shut down its Wave feature, an unpopular social product that it launched last year.

Slide also happens to make widgets for Orkut, a social network from Google that has gained popularity in Brazil but little elsewhere, as well as for Bebo, which AOL recently sold at a huge loss.

Google’s other acquisitions this year have focused more on its core businesses, such as advertising and search. Google is rumored to be working on a rival to Facebook called Google Me.

Zynga confirmed it has acquired Tokyo-based social game company Unoh for an undisclosed price.

The deal is part of Zynga’s geographic diversification strategy and expansion into the Japanese market. Unoh will serve as the foundation of Zynga Japan’s mobile game business. Last week, Zynga raised $150 million in venture money from SoftBank and said it would form a joint venture with SoftBank to make mobile games in Japan.

Robert Goldberg (formerly a VentureBeat advisor) will become chief executive of Zynga Japan. He said in a phone call that Zynga is in a good position now in Japan, having executed its expansion strategy there in the course of a few months.

“We are going to bring a lot of resources to bear,” he said.

Unoh, founded in 2001, is one of the top social game companies in Japan with titles such as Machitsuku!, Band Yarouyo! and Kaizoku Chronicle. Zynga Japan will keep Unoh’s games on the mobile game portals Mixi, Mobage-Town and Gree. And Zynga Japan will localize Zynga games for the Japanese market. Unoh’s chief executive and founder is Shintaro Yamada. Techcrunch previously reported the deal would be announced soon. The purchase price was reportedly around $30 million, but Goldberg declined to comment on that.

Zynga has more than 230 million monthly active users playing its game and is the biggest player in social games. But it is very dependent on Facebook for its revenues and needs to diversify if it is to fulfill its plans to go public. Goldberg said that the Japanese mobile social game market will probably be more than $1 billion in revenues this year. By 2012, it could double. That explains why Zynga moved so fast into the market.

Goldberg said that definite plans still have to be formed, but he believes that Zynga Japan will be able to bring its games to a variety of the platforms, including the mobile carriers and the mobile social networks such as Mixi, Mobage-Town, and Gree.

With endless talk about check-ins and mayorships it is easy to get swept away by the mystique of location-based marketing and for good reason. That famous anecdote about reaching an unsuspecting consumer with the very right offer as they stroll by a storefront is hard to ignore. The fact is, though, that mass adoption is still a bit away. But fire up Foursquare now because before we know it, all interactive marketing will be location-based.
Here are five reasons why and what is means for you…

Desktops are dead. A recent Student Monitor study found that only 2% of college students are planning on purchasing desktops (down from 7% in ‘04). The writing is on the wall: young people are going solely mobile with their computing. In short order, all computing devices will all have one thing in common: GPS integration. All digital marketing will soon have the ability to leverage game-changing geo-data.
Smartphone adoption will hit critical mass. Most marketers are shocked to learn that despite the industry mystique with iPhone apps, only 12% of all consumers under 24 actually even own an iPhone, according to a recent eMarketer study and less than a third own any type of smartphone. That is all about to change; Nielsen is predicting that half of all U.S. cell phone users will own a smartphone by the end of 2011. We are betting that far more of those under 24 will own one.
Privacy is not nearly as important for most teens as the media portrays it. Although studies will point you to both sides of this issue, most teens will tell you that they value staying connected and social far more than they do privacy. The fact is, when prompted to share their locations most teens will indeed opt-in at a disproportionate rate, fueling the location revolution exponentially.
Most young people are single. Make no mistake, the same core driver of Facebook will drive the growth of location-based services: hooking up. Teens and college students are drooling at the ability to let that special someone know exactly where they are and track those they are prowling for. Case in point, a recent Forrester study showed that 80% of Foursquare users are males, like on the hunt!
Mobile data costs are decreasing by upwards of 25% every year. This is a major inhibitor of smartphone growth as many parents currently don’t want to bear the costs of data access on top of traditional calling plans. Once data costs become a no-brainer, the current demand will quickly convert to market penetration.
What this all means is that soon all interactive marketing will be location-based. With rampant smartphone adoption, a market dying to share its location with the world, and the overwhelming desire to “hook up,” brands will be deluged with a real-time treasure trove of location information that will forever change the way we market.

Here are ways you can start preparing, right now:

Create integration points of loyalty and rewards systems. Game mechanics are seeping into nearly every aspect of our lives. Consumers will grow to expect rewards (both intrinsic and monetary) for not only shopping but actually visiting your location whether it is an actual store or a display within a big-box retailer.
Get ready to be hyper-local with your messaging. A consumer’s location will leapfrog to the top data point of behavioral targeting efforts. Brands will need to be equipped to get hyper-local with their messaging based on not only geographic information (L.A. vs. N.Y.) but place-based data (coffee shop vs. office vs. mall), equating to far more customization in creative content. The integration of open-graph data will make these data even more powerful.
Get “mobile social” … fast. Due to the lack of smartphone penetration among teens, mobile social is still in the dark ages, but the meteoric rise of social networking activities combined with accelerated smartphone adoption will force brands to enter this new space. The role of social media will soon evolve to connecting people physically rather than just virtually. Brands should be front and center in the facilitation of real-world connections.
The world is about to get a whole lot smaller for digital marketers. Geo-targeting will continue to birth a new wave of technologies, experts, and devices built to deliver relevant information based on where you are, not just who you are. Brands can prepare by adopting a new framework for how it will serve the expectations of consumers and it should be surprise that the youth market will once again be at the forefront of this revolution.

The Virtual Goods Conference takes place September 22-23, 2010 at the the Santa Clara Convention Center.

What a difference a year makes. Last year’s keynoter, Zynga, has gone from start-up to behemoth. Facebook is adopting its own virtual currency. Apple has implemented virtual goods in the iPad, iPhone, iTouch eco system. Virtual goods have gone from an alternative revenue stream to a key monetization solution for games, social media, mobile, licensed media, user generated content and more.

Virtual Goods Conference 2010 explores the next key growth challenges for companies eager to take advantage of microtransactions. The ecosystem has grown up. Vendor solutions have become more robust. We’ll give you the insight on how to leverage these best of breed technologies and strategies for the next wave of virtual goods and microtransactions.

Speakers Include:

John K. Bates
Platform Evangelist
Entropia Universe-Mindark

Gurbaksh Chahal
CEO
gWallet

Geoff Cook
CEO
myYearbook

Nir Eyal
CEO
AdNectar

Michael Gluck
President
VGMarket

Michael Gold
CEO
Electrotank

Rob Goldberg
Founder & CEO
GMG Entertainment

Jude Gomila
Co-Founder
Heyzap

Ron Hirson
SVP of Marketing and Biz Dev
BOKU

Jikhan Jung
CEO
Gala-Net

Karl Mehta
Co-Founder & CEO
Playspan

David Marcus
Founder & CEO
Zong

Andrew Schneider
President and Co-Founder
Live Gamer

Ravi Mehta
VP of Product Management
Viximo

Conrad Sheehan
CEO
mPayy

Sam Shrauger
VP of Global Product Strategy
PayPal

Dale Strang
CEO
Viximo