If you haven’t seen it already, you will soon when you are walking down the street. Every person you pass who is fervently looking at their phone is likely playing the No. 1 game in the country right now: Pokémon Go. You might think it’s popular because of the brand. Nintendo, which refused to make a Pokémon game for the longest time on a smartphone, has finally caved and brought… Read More
But before we go sagely nodding about the coming Augmented Reality revolution the Poképoaclypse foretells, maybe it’s best to take a step back and examine the components of Pokémon Go’s success, and its potential pitfalls. 1. Pokémon The franchise upon which Pokémon Go is based is one of the best-selling video game franchises of all time. It has sold upwards of 279 million… Read More
Hype check: Pokémon Go says more about Pokémon than it does about AR
The upsell we all fall for at fast food joints and places like Costco doesn’t seem to work on purchasers of in-game currencies, according to a study conducted on millions of Candy Crush players. Turns out the decision to buy fictional bars of gold isn’t quite rational, economically speaking. Who would have thought? Read More
Study of Candy Crush players finds virtual currency buyers don’t go for upsells
As large platforms like Facebook and Apple position themselves as the new go-to places to read news, an independent app that started in Japan has landed a new round of funding to raise its own game. SmartNews — a news aggregation app that works with some 1,500 publications and selects stories for you based on your reading activity in the app — has raised another $38 million in… Read More
News discovery app SmartNews nabs another $38M, now valued at $500M-$600M
I’ve been playing Pokémon Go for most of today because no force in heaven or on earth could stop me, and here are a few things that I’ve learned about the game, myself and life as a result. The new Pokémon professor is like real, real handsome but his shoes are terrible I don’t like to move very much or at all if possible I’m still cheaper than I am lazy because… Read More