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News org. teaming with Foursquare

// January 25th, 2010 // No Comments » // General musings, Social media

I first saw this morning and more news continues to come from it.

Metro, a free Canadian daily newspaper, has teamed with foursquare which will allow it to add their location-specific content to the foursquare service. This opens up worlds of possibilities in terms of advertising specials, business reviews and general content. No matter where you are, just check in and you could have specific news delivered straight to you.

Metro is even offering a contest to promote the new venture:

To promote this exciting new partnership, Metro is running a contest to win one of five iPhone 3GS units.  Over the next 4-weeks, Foursquare players who follow Metro and check-in near where they pick up Metro will unlock a special Metro Foursquare badge and be automatically entered to win. The contest is being promoted through in-paper ads across all 7 editions of Metro, and in English Canada, through Metro’s recently launched reader loyalty program, Club Metro.

Just awesome stuff. This should only be the beginning of what news organizations should be doing. Tapping into these markets can only help them reach audiences that may not be looking for their content. It’ll be fun to monitor this situation.

Read more: Poynter; Lost Remote; Metro News; Mashable

Mobile gaming’s future

// January 4th, 2010 // No Comments » // General musings, Social media

My first piece on mobile gaming was just posted over at Digital Media Buzz. This first installment focuses a little more on the profitability and the problems developers face when creating social games on different platforms, such as migrating popular Facebook games to the iPhone.

I was approached by my editor to begin work on a follow up to this story, so I’ll post more on that when it’s completed.

Personally, I’m a PS3 kind of guy and rarely play any games while on the move. I do follow the industry, though, and like what I see out of iPhone/iPod touch developments. Cheaper/downloadable games are what’s going to get it moving — most people can’t afford to dish out extra money on a PSP and then another $30 or so each time they want a game. That’s not a new thought, though, obviously.

I’m more interested in seeing the real-time games like Foursquare move forward. The socially-active games will take our online networks to another level. Speaking of which, Foursquare needs to release the BlackBerry app already.