gamesGRABR opens up to Facebook and console gamers

HomepageGames veteran and entrepreneur Tony Pearce has unveiled his new venture gamesGRABR, a social network dedicated to casual, social, console and hardcore gamers.

With backing from some of the biggest names in the industry, gamesGRABR has entered its beta phase. The network allows users to ‘grab’ games for free across a wide range of platforms. Continue reading

gamesGRABR prepares its social network for gamers

TeePee Games has unveiled details of its latest games venture gamesGRABR, an innovative social network for gamers that will launch in Q1 2013.

The press release descrbes it as a ‘pinboard-style’ website and smartphone app tailored for gaming culture that will allow users to create, discover and manage game-based collections. Continue reading

The voice of social media is (apparently) mobile music messaging

Melod.io, a mobile music messaging platform, has raised $300K to launch a service that lets users of social networks create and share personalised music and audio messages.

Using an onscreen slider, users can preview and download different music packs and search across genres for rhythms and vocal styles. They can create their own backing music using pre-loaded effects, loops and beats before recording their voice messages over the top of the backing track and sharing the track across social.

According to the company, social media users want to do more than send text-only communication because it doesn’t allow them to express themselves enough. It also suggest that music and audio messaging can be a new m-commerce platform that can lead to sell-through and retention. Time will tell… it might have a chance.

The service is available os a freemium no-ads model on the Apple iTunes Store and is ‘coming soon’ on the Google Play store for Android. The company will release a freemium version with ads and a premium model later this year.

In the Lebanon… play and avoid flying shisha pipes for iPad and UNESCO

Lebanon-based iOS developer Game Cooks has launched its new game Run for Peace on the iPad and 5% of all proceeds will be donated to UNESCO.

The game sells for $1.99 so that’s 10 cents per download and follows the adventures of one Salim who ‘avoids dangerous obstacles on the way to bringing peace to the Middle East’ starting in Saudi Arabia and ending in Algeria.

The press release describes the difficulty of being a developer in the Middle East because of ‘fighting outside of (sic) your office’, which is a little melodramatic, have they never heard of South London?

However, the part that most appealed to me were the flying shisha pipes that Salim has to avoid. That’s GOT to be worth $1.99…

Little Grey Cells #2… any implied ‘how you should do it’ – you should throw away

* Anthony Rose has been inventing since his teens. Having been hired by the BBC to execute the iPlayer and now having launched the Zeebox, Monty’s Outlook catches up with him for a look at his Little Grey Cells:

Good digital design is all about:

Creating propositions that fulfil their audience’s need, are easy for the man in the street to understand and use, and that never make you feel foolish or frustrated.

I got into technology when I was about 12 years old:

I made a hot belt surface mount reflow machine and a robot pick-and-place machine. It was a robot system to assemble circuit boards with miniaturised technology – probably not something the average school kid had in his bedroom.

I designed circuit-boards for Panasonic and Apple. I made ones that were explosion-proof and that could go down coal mines, and I made consumer electronics. I formed my own one-man company – and then at some point, I figured I needed to grow the company or figure out something else to do.

Maybe I was tired of getting my hair burnt with the soldering iron, but a friend said there was an opportunity to get into real-time 3D graphics, and put together a software team making interactive movies, for the SEGA platform.

In the 1990s I decided to switch from hardware to software. I have been in consumer media propositions since then. First with real-time 3D graphics, then with a digital music store, then Kazaa, then with BBC iPlayer and now on Zeebox. Continue reading