clubv3

Facebook’s UK August statistics have been issued and are available through this link.



Facebook continues to be the outright leader in social networking sites in the UK, with far more users than its competitors: Twitter, Flickr, MySpace, and Linkedin.

“These statistics underline why at Clubv3 we have invested heavily in our Facebook games engine and development team. The market is growing rapidly, as is the demand for games top quality development in this space. Having already completed games for a number of high-profile brands, we have also been getting great feedback on our own in-house projects and the underlying system from partners across many different industries,” commented Richard M Holmes, Director at Clubv3. “Contact us for a demo if you are interested in bringing your IP to social networks.”

Douglas, Isle of Man

Isle of Man-based social network games and media specialist Clubv3 today announced the launch of its dedicated social media strategy agency, Mushbloom and the website www.mushbloom.com.

Clubv3 is a leading developer and publisher of social network games. Having grown from the initial two directors to a team of over 25 people in the Isle of Man, UK, Romania, Ukraine, USA, the Philippines and China, Social Media Strategist Adrian Niculescu has now joined the team to build the Mushbloom brand and client base.

Social media strategy is the term used for a company’s and/or brand’s management of its presence on online social media platforms such as Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, Linkedin and many others, as well as the use of blogs and virtual goods applications (including games) on the internet. [...]

Clubv3 is attending China Joy – the 8th China Digital Entertainment and Expo. This show, the Chinese equivalent of E3, hosts Blizzard China, Ubisoft China and Crytek China, as well as a host of Chinese household names in the Chinese videogames and online games industries. “We are meeting with Chinese partners looking for co-production opportunities and Chinese developers and publishers looking for a publishing partner for their games outside of China,” said Dominic Mason, Clubv3 Director, who is attending the show on Wednesday and Thursday.



Clubv3 为我们的全球客户如宝洁、肯德基、还
有在数字领域新成立的公司制作游戏和互动娱乐项目。我
们在很多平台和技术领域有丰富的经验：网络、社交游
戏、智能电话如 iPhone，Android and Ovi，以及移动通信网。我
们很自豪能够回答客户很多这样的问题，如：“我的品牌
作为一个游戏看上去会是什么样子的？”

What do you say when someone asks you to introduce them to: “African nations”? Normally, you’d assume they were from a big company or a government, wanting to talk to people in power about strategic initiatives. What would you say if the follow-up question was: “and do you know how to put a satellite over Africa?” Yes, CMMB (China Mobile Multimedia Broadcasting) don’t mean ‘African nations’ one at a time, they mean all of them.



CMMB is simply put, the largest wireless broadcast network in the world, using a mix of UHF transmitters and S-band satellite broadcasting. They reach 328 cities in China with a reach of 29 out of the 31 provinces, have 600 transmission points in China and a reach of 2.6bn people across Asia. More than a thousand Chinese companies make CMMB signal compatible equipments. [...]

How long do you think people will watch mobile TV for? 1, 2, 5, 10 minutes? Well, it appears that the case for short form mobile content is not as cut and dried as we may expect. In China, even when broadcast TV has thousands of channels and a range of local and national subjects, long-form mobile TV is hot stuff.



The Director of New Media at CRI (Chinese Radio International) is forced to cut his feature length TV mobile TV programs into 3 sections. “We do this to avoid people overheating their mobiles.” Yes, counter-intuitive to our UK methods of media consumption, CRI’s 1m subscribers are watching feature length TV dramas and movies on their mobiles. Of these 1m, paying an average of 10RMB a month, they are watching an average of 30 minutes in a session.

[...]

I have moved on to Shanghai for more meetings, Shanghai Expo VIP evening reception and the China Joy games show – China’s E3.

However, travelling is not fun without meeting new people, so I am meeting up with Shanghai rag trade doyen, Betty Wong. Betty is an associate of a fashion designer friend from Brighton, Erika Knight.



Betty arrives and orders a Princess Margaret* to my Virgin Mary, whilst launching into a tirade against her spoilt niece who is staying with her but won’t finish her architectural degree dissertation. She’s been talking for 15 minutes in before I even get out a feeble ‘Ni hao’.

We talk about textiles, iPhone, fashion, games, Skype, China, Hong Kong and other topics as late afternoon turns to night. The view from the Sky Bar of the Okura Garden Hotel turns from impressive to spectacular.

[...]

I have arrived in Beijing. Our first briefing at the British Embassy started immediately and the stats have started to hit me.

- Aspire’s daily MMS newspaper has 50m subscribers;
- CCTV.com has 2.5m subscribers to their mobile TV service paying 6RMB a month on a 2G network; [...]

We are still in the air en route to Beijing and I’ve decided to wander around and chat to one of my fellow UKTI trade mission travellers.

Paul Laikin from www.unanico.com has been to Beijing before, has an office there and an assistant joining him for the visit.

I ask what Beijing is like. “It’s big,” he says of Beijing, “quite extraordinarily big.” Paul’s advice reminds me of The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy‘s comments on the size of the Universe being so incomprehensibly vast that it effectively has a size of infinity and thus a population of zero*. I’ll leave you to peruse the maths on that one.
[...]

My journey to Beijing to Shanghai to Hong Kong begins with a nice surprise. Two new partners confirmed that I would be taking a patented mobile service (complete with Transformers content) and Premiership mobile content with me as part of our offering.

Both emails arrived just as I wrapped up my bag and kit for the first leg of my journey, with UKTI’s BA flight from Terminal 5 at Heathrow.
Good timing there, guys. [...]

Common game elements like points, badges, leaderboards, and levels are proven (and increasingly popular) ways to engage customers and encourage profit-driving consumer behaviour, according to this article.

“It’s that secret blend of rewarding not just the perceived ‘correct’ behaviour, but many, varied behaviours,” says Dominic Mason, Clubv3 Group Director. [...]