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James shared a nice short story today:

Two monks are walking by the river. A prostitute is trying to cross. One of the monks carries her across and then sets her down. The two monks keep on walking. The monk who didn’t carry her gets more and more agitated. Finally he asks: “Why did you do that? You know we are not supposed to even touch women like that!”

And the monk who carried her said: “I left her by the river. Why are you still carrying her?”

As there are more and more people getting access to gaming devices in the world, making the overall number of gamer increase, the penetration of gaming is also still increasing in western society. The report mentioned on the Venturebeat only focuses on mobile, social and online games and excludes stand-alones. So the total number is even higher.

The study, Trends in Digital Gaming: Free-to-Play, Social, and Mobile Games, claims 135 million people play at least one hour per month compared to 56 million in 2008. Seventeen percent of all gamers have downloaded a title on their smartphones, up from 7 percent in 2008. About 80 percent play free-to-play (F2P) games on the PC or log into Facebook to spend time on the farm or frontier.

Read the full article

I shall be looking into the complete gamer demographic and perhaps distil some meaning out of the huge heap of info. Will share this with you of course!

Quick post on a subject I’m following quite intently; Zynga’s IPO. While I already wrote that I think the social gaming companies are overvalued based on my experience in the gaming market; now some Wall Street analysts sheds his light on it.

A similar social gaming company, Nexon, went public on the Tokyo Stock Exchange with a pre-trading market capitalization of $7 billion, although it closed the day down about 3 percent off its IPO price. The Asian online gaming giant raised $1.2 billion and it made net income of $260.1 million, up 14 percent, on revenue of $853.5 million, up 26.5 percent, for the nine months ended Sept. 30. By contrast, Zynga made a paltry $30.7 million on revenue of $828.9 million for the nine months ended Sept. 30.

Read the full article on VentureBeat

I keep struggling in sticking to what I set out to do; blog on a daily basis. Even for work (my company De Merkelijkheid) we can’t seem to manage even once a week. Still thinking it’s neccesary so will start working on it soon enough

Slashfilm.com’s Kees van Dijkhuizen made a nice montage of clips from Guy Ritchie’s movies. It’s like a trailer for a director.

[the films of] Guy Ritchie from Kees van Dijkhuizen jr. on Vimeo.

Or go directly to the post on slashfilm

Or at least this is what link shortener Bit.ly is telling us. Darren Rowse shared this on Google+ and it really peaked my interest:

In general, the half life of a bitly link is about 3 hours, unless you publish your links on youtube, where you can expect about 7 hours worth of attention. Many links last a lot less than 2 hours; other more sticky links last longer than 11 hours over all the referrers. This leads us to believe that the lifespan of your link is connected more to what content it points to than on where you post it: on the social web it’s all about what you share, not where you share it!

Full article on the bit.ly blog