PlanetPlay Makes Green Tuesday Moves

Tuesday

Leading games studios marked Earth Day by joining non-profit PlanetPlay’s new Make Green Tuesday Moves (MGTM) initiative, which will enable industry and gamers to make an impact in the fight against climate change.

SYBO (Subway Surfers), Lockwood Publishing (Avakin Life), Ten Square Games (Fishing Clash) and CM Games (Nitro Nation) have all been confirmed as proud MGTM launch partners.

On the first Tuesday of each month, starting June 4th 2024, each participating studio will launch a ‘green’ item (or bundle of items) within their game(s) that will be exclusive to the MGTM movement, remaining live until the next monthly activation begins.

The inaugural MGTM will see 100% of the proceeds from the sale of in-game items – which can comprise new and/or upcycled DLC goods such as characters, costumes and objects – invested into fully certified sustainability projects by not-for-profit digital platform PlanetPlay.

Throughout the year a number of the MGTM activations will be supported by a ‘Star of the Month’ from the world of entertainment, supported by a huge social media campaign, helping to inspire gamers all around the world to ‘Make Green Tuesday Moves’.

“The need for climate action is more pressing than ever, and the games industry is one of the most powerful agents to spark real-world change. Our founding MGTM partners boast some of the most popular games in the world right now, enabling us to collectively engage with global fanbases to help raise environmental awareness and fund great sustainability causes,” said Rhea Loucas, Founder and CEO, PlanetPlay

When celebrities are involved in the Movement, PlanetPlay will provide licenses to studios which means that they can create items/DLCs relating to the celebrities, following the theme of the active superstar – with a CTA around Make Green Tuesday Moves.

All gamers need to do is harness their #PassiveActivism, by continuing to play the games they love, with no change in style or habit required to contribute to amazing sustainability causes.

These sustainability causes include PlanetPlay’s flagship Hongera Project, which aims to help over 150,000 families in Kenya improve their living conditions by manufacturing and distributing clean cookstoves to local communities, resulting in around 2,000,000 tonnes of carbon emissions being saved.

A collaboration with Ten Square Games in the widely-played Fishing Clash resulted in an engaging in-game event, rallying 50,000 users and raising €20,000 for the WAI Wanaka water conservation project in New Zealand.

SYBO and PlanetPlay were able to offset over 2,000 tons of carbon emissions in the campaign’s three-week run, the equivalent of a concert with nearly 100,000 guests.

PlanetPlay is a not-for-profit digital platform that allows players around the world to contribute to climate action through in-game purchases and gameplay with affiliated game studios.

In the coming months, PlanetPlay will unveil more exciting Green Tuesday partnerships with game makers, fashion brands and music industries.

1 Business of Apps – https://www.businessofapps.com/data/subway-surfers-statistics/

2 PocketGamer.biz – https://www.pocketgamer.biz/news/81112/subway-surfers-hits-4bn-downloads/

Games and marketing giants embrace Ibiza

ibiza

After the success of the inaugural Ibiz Tech Forum earlier this year, Play the Game Agency, known for its expertise in the video games and digital entertainment sector, launched the Marketing & Gaming Ibiza Edition that attracted a select audience of influential guests from the leading brands in their respective sectors.

Brands such as La Liga, Riot Games, Visa, Epic Games, Xiaomi, EA, Dia, El Pozo, Finetwork, Iberia Express, G2A.COM, Asus, Simyo and others attended. Professionals from the marketing, advertising and video game industry also gathered to learn from experts in publishing, broadcasting, new social networks, media, promotions, metrics and esports.

Beyond offering networking and interesting talks, the first edition included the Video games Creative Awards, a creativity awards about the video game industry looking for strategy,
disruption and formats. They were presented by Néstor Santana, Business and Brand Disruptor at MAPFRE.

These awards provided visibility to advertising projects developedbbetween September 2022 and September 2023, involving prominent brands such as Coca-Cola, Gucci, HBO, Heineken, among others. The winner of the gold joystick was G2A.COM, thanks to their campaign in which they launched a graphic design contest with Artificial Intelligence.

Attendees were able to immerse themselves in a 360º experience, as they enjoyed exploring the wonders of Ibiza, both in terms of tourism and gastronomy.  Special thanks went to the Consell de Ibiza, not only for their support as official sponsor, but also for their vision and understanding of the importance of the videogame sector and new forms of digital entertainment.

Play The Game believe that this collaboration will continue in the future, opening new opportunities and exploring together the boundaries in this exciting industry.
Marketing & Gaming Ibiza Edition was notable for returning to the essence of more intimate and disruptive events, a trend that had not been experienced for a long time and was sorely missed.

REVIEW: Tranya Nova ANC Wireless Earbuds

Tranya Nova ANC wireless earbuds – exclusive 15% discount code – NOVA15US

nova 

Not everybody loves Apple and everything that Apple makes. Some prefer Android as a mobile operating system, some prefer a different type of laptop and some prefer earbuds that don’t cost the earth, but still supply great sound and a seamless listening experience.

So step forward, the Tranya Nova ANC wireless earbuds, a welcome alternative to other  expensive earbuds that are just as good, if not better, than their highly branded counterparts.

Retailing on Amazon at a reasonable $79.99 these earbuds come with all the necessary paraphrenalia and are easily connected through Bluetooth and especially Bluetooth 5.3, so two devices can be attached simultaneously and it’s easy to switch between them.

The case can be charged through a USB-C or wireless charging pad and the buds boast have a good nine hours of battery life. Using the case and it’s an   extra 27 hours, and the charge can be checked  at any time using the audio app.

There are three listening modes – ANC, transparency mode and norma and the ANC is especially effective in boosting the audio rather than blocking out any noise  while the transparency option lets noise in easily; call quality was also excellent.

The Novas are manipulated by touch controls; easy to use and dependable, something that isn’t always the case with budget wireless earbuds. This is a good product offering decent value for money. While they are not as ‘sexy’ as Apple’s EarPods, it depends on what the consumer is after.

In this case it is quality over branding and price over design. One for the pramatist rather than the slave to the brand.

The Tranya Nova earbuds are available at $79.99 (£62) from Amazon or the official site, with a discount of 15% off using the voucher code NOVA15US.

EasyTranslate Q&A: Frederik R. Pedersen, CEO

easytranslate

Welcome to Mob76 Outlook, Frederik. Please tell us about EasyTranslate

Thanks for the invitation. We enable customers to create and translate quality content at half the price of any other service, by enabling generative AI and LLM technologies. As a result of generative AI platforms such as ChatGPT, the translation industry is about to change forever.

We believe that combining AI-GC with ‘humans in the loop’ will enable businesses to create company-specific language models in any language. We won’t translate anymore, we will do ground-up content creation in any language.

We make complicated AI/LLM technologies accessible to everyone, so that customers can utilise the latest AI-technology hassle-free in their content process without any need of prompt-engineers or machine learning engineers.

This enables the customers of any size to communicate engaging content in any language in a single infrastructure that is scalable and future proof.

Wow, that’s a big change, you sound like you’re ahead of the curve

ChatGPT and other AI-GC models are the biggest hype since the start of the internet. Already, 100s of start-ups are getting built, but what it takes to add real and unique value to the customers is still not 100% clear.

Current models are still general in its wording and would need training for each customer to learn their language and by then create real value.

We have created one flow for all of a customers’ content, so they can make engaging content that is optimised towards SEO and we train on the human edits so they can stand out in this content-overload world.

Moreover, we’ve recently reached the finals of the LocWorld Process Innovation Challenge, a highly prestigious competition that awards the most innovative companies in the localisation industry. The winner will be unveiled in Malmo next month.

You recently raised your first funding for Easy Translate?

We decided that we wouldn’t go through the normal investment cycles and bootstrapped the company for a decade. However, as the industry was being fundamentally changed by generative AI products, we raised more than $3 million in January this year.

The funding coincides with the launch of an innovative integration of LLMs that provides automated content generation and translation services. The new funds create room for further development of the new functionality and add to the ambition of accelerating EasyTranslate’s organic growth. In addition, this strategic partnership enables EasyTranslate to grow its market share by realising strategic acquisitions.

We believe that training customer specific LLMs by including copywriters in the loop in any language enables a better and more localised content output which will increase customer engagement and improve organic search ranking.

By challenging the current state of translating content we will see a major shift in the industry towards generating content with trained LLMs within the customers tone of voice and question the need of translation in many marketing content aspects.

From the fine-tuning of GPT-engines, EasyTranslate is planning to build out their own infrastructure of mini-LLMs trained on customer level to reach better levels of accuracy and less hallucination than using OpenAI’s GPT4 out of the box.

What about the early days of the company?

EasyTranslate was founded in 2010 as an online translation agency. We were recognised as one of the fastest-growing companies in our industry in our first 6 years and the youngest company to enter the list of 100 biggest Language Service Providers.

The industry was facing major pressure on pricing as all language service providers sell words and have a mark-up on the freelancers.

In 2020 we decided to do a full pivoting of our market positioning and decided to build our current platform solution where we give away our marketplace of verified freelancers and seamless training of AI enabled in a software that streamlines all those content processes across platforms.

How long have you been in business?

We are a small Danish startup in Copenhagen. We serve customers from 21 different countries across three continents and our tech team is located in Skopje, Macedonia. We have more than 10 years’ experience in running marketplaces with a mission to make custom language accessible for everyone for free.

We will do this by enabling AI-GC training on the fly from the edits human copywriters are doing. These trained models can be used cross-service, which means they will also do foundation for customer specific machine translation when needed. Two birds, one stone.

We have taken all our knowledge from creating a quality marketplace for localisation and content creations in combination with AI-technologies. We will be the first company to support ‘out of the box’ AI/LLM learning from edits that creates customer-specific models in any language.

These models will work cross functionally, so that customers have the ability to increase quality in both AI-GC and machine translation. The technology will be tailored to create SEO content as well.

We grew our SaaS business by 250% from 2021 to 2022 and we are expecting to reach the same level of growth in 2023. We are handling more than 11,000 projects and more than six million words per month.

What is the problem EasyTranslate is solving?

Quality multilingual content at scale. We are creating more content than ever before. From 2020 to 2022 the global online content grew by more than 50% (33 zettabytes

It’s the closest to an infinitive amount of content as 1 zettabyte is equal to 1 billion terabytes. One terabyte is equal to 83 million pages. To stand out in the content overload, we have to create quality content that is worth engaging with and not ‘just content’.

Please walk us about the user experience

We have put our faith in a product-led growth strategy. This means, we are obsessed with the user experience from sign-up to creating the WOW moment. We provide our product as a Free/Freemium offering, so all users can expect to see value before they need to pay for our service.

We have around 300 company freemium signups monthly and they have the full self-service option to build their team of freelancers, integrate plug-ins to their CMS, PIM or directly to their Github repository to ensure the content flow runs smoothly and automatically without human interaction.

Customers can get started on a paid plan within our product without any interaction with sales reps. Starting price is 25 Euros per month for the annual subscription option.

We are educating customers about creating content in any language from ground up instead of translating content every time. One of the biggest challenges in the translation process is “garbage in, garbage out”.

The problem with low quality translation is often based on low quality source content. The end goal is to exit to an AI-GC or LSP, so we will need to make them aware and recognise that they need us to continue delivering value to their customers.

Why are you better than the other guys and who are your competitors? 

We are the only one combining the ‘Human in the loop seamlessly and at a cost price’ that enables the seamless build up of a custom AI that is future-sustainable and makes our product critical infrastructure for our customers.

Easytranslate is up against potential competitors for free/cheap Machine Translation such as Google Translate, DeepL, Microsoft translate or Language Service Providers including LanguageWire and TextMaster. Then there’s translation management software such as Lokalise, Crowdin and Phrase.

But more recently, our real competitors are major generative AI tools, such as  Jasper.ai.

Thanks, Frederik, it looks like great days are ahead for EasyTranslate. Prepare yourself for a trance of inbound from potential acquirers!

Thank you, Monty, a pleasure to have shared with your audience.

WEB3 BOOK REVIEW: The End of Business-As-Usual

web3

Web3 is the new old technology. While all the chat and the hype in yet another technology cycle is all about ChatGPT and its overlord   generative AI, there is another revolution that has been brewing even longer.

The Web3 buzzword is known by many, yet really understood by few. Is it a bird? Is it a plane? It is the metaverse? Is it crypto?

In this book by G C Cooke (ignore Graham’s use of his initials, it’s worth it), this coming, and already here, wave is nicely interpreted for those who know and those who are yet to know.

Whether it’s FinTech, entertainment, social networks or plain disruption, Cooke lays it out for us in easy-to-read, yet never simplistic, terms. Using heavily the business book of The Innovator’s Dilemma as the template for his ideas, it shows how we will all be affected.

There will be those who will profit by spotting the Web3 wave and those who will proser immensely by riding the wave, while others will sink below the surface, terrified of change, as much as I’m terrified by my overuse of water metaphors.

It also lays out what’s going to happen in Web 4 after explaining how we’re going to get there via the first two iterations. First there are protocols and then there are apps that run on these protocols. Web1.0 and Web3 are the same as are Web2 and Web4. Protocols followed by applications. Same as it ever was.

As somebody who has previously been a lunchtime adopter instead of an early adopter, in this case, as I suggest other readers of this book will find out, I have become an early adopter.

Moreover, there is no use of the C-word here, only explanations of AI and how it has a role to play in Web3. Personally, I think generated AI is the work of the devil (the use of such a term mean the machines have marked me down as a enemy and my days are numbered).

In the interim, before out mutual assured destruction, even by machines or water metaphors, I recommend this book, one that will have you swimming to your next success, come hell or high water. Boom!