Denuo - denuology.com

In our industry, collaboration is put into practice every day. Whether it’s a group of employees working towards a common objective, agencies swapping secrets to execute a campaign, or a community of fans working together to get their favorite actor cast as the next Peter Parker, the idea of coming together to achieve a shared goal is a beautiful thing. But what really gets us at Denuo excited is a new kind of collaboration in which brands directly engage with consumers to create something neither group could do on their own. You may think you’ve heard this pitch before, just with a different label: crowdsourcing. But true collaboration is something different.

As my first three months here at Denuo come to a close, I can’t help but compare my new environment to my old. I began here as an administrative assistant in January, leaving behind a career as a massage therapist. I went from working at a small but busy spa one mile from my apartment to working in a giant building in downtown Chicago. My five hour work days that began at 3PM have become 8.5 hour work days that start at 6AM. A casual stroll to work has become a full-speed walk to trains where I sit for 50 minutes trying to avoid eye contact with everyone around me. And really, let’s not even talk about the elevators.

As if there wasn’t enough to see as it was, Coachella went and added another tent this year. Unfortunately it’s yet more electronic acts – the one thing Coachella needs less of, not more. You’ll see that frustration show up in the heaping pile of DJs that reside at the bottom of my ratings. Other than that, I couldn’t be more excited for another year in the desert! Here first, a ratings key:

****  Do not miss this show

***    I really want to see this and will do everything I can

**      Would love to see but may get sidetracked by a churro

*        Let’s pretend these never happened

No April fooling, this issue of PLAYED comes screaming into spring with a heaping helping of insight and info that would make even the angriest of birds grin.

This month, we look at the exponential growth of the Angry Birds franchise and what it means for mobile gaming developers across the industry. Also, we see what lessons can be learned from the recent hiatus of the Guitar Hero brand which, until now, was one of the most popular gaming series in the world. Coming out of the annual Game Developer Conference, we analyze the growing debate over the value of social games, both to users and developers trying to decipher its success. Finally, we examine the trend of “gaming the system,” or exploiting a program to gain an edge. As our marketing programs become more interactive, is this something we should be aware of and how can we utilize this behavior for more interesting participation?

There’s a lot of data out there about us. In fact, it’s easy to forget just how much information various companies and organizations (and the Internet in general) know about us. The first page of Reflecteur this week looks at the ways two separate sites used infographics to display a huge amount of information with very different results:

* Where Americans are Moving looks at 2008 IRS data to map county to county moves. It’s your one stop shop to US migratory information and it only takes a few minutes of playing with the maps to realize that there are a lot of stories hidden within this data. Just click on ‘Detroit’.
* Watch a Phone Company Stalk a Customer is, not surprisingly based on the title, far more disturbing. This site maps, via a video, all of the data a phone company in Germany gathered on one of their customers over 6 months. It seems more spy movie thriller than real life.

Travel over to Page 2 for a bit more fun: