Editor's Note: The following is an excerpt of "The Modern Parent's Guide to Kids and Video Games," by Scott Steinberg, which is free to download at www.ParentsGuideBooks.com.
In addition to understanding the many real concerns that today's parents have with video games, it's also worth considering the benefits and positive aspects that contemporary interactive entertainment choices provide.
Christmas is long gone and the Superbowl is over, which can only mean one thing - Valentine's day is almost here. If you are anything like the CloudSpokes team, you struggle to find a great gift for the love (or "like") in your life by February 14. It's not a secret that we're in love with developers, but we know as well as anyone that the developers in our life have their own unique likes.
Given that there is only one week left until Valentine's Day, we wanted to make shopping for the special developer in your life a little easier. Here is a list of gift ideas for the developer love (or "like") in your life, crowdsourced from our community team.
News volume has moved from infoscarcity to infobesity. For the last hundred years, news in print was delivered in a container, called a newspaper, periodically, typically every twenty-four hours. The container constrained the product. The biggest constraints of the old paradigm were periodic delivery and limitations of column inches.
Now information continually bursts through our Google Readers, our cell phones, our tablets, display screens in elevators and grocery stores. Do we really need to read all 88,731 articles on the Bernie Madoff trial? Probably not. And that's the dilemma for news organizations.
In the old metaphor, column-inches was the constraint. In the new metaphor, reader attention span becomes the constraint.
It's almost a decade ago now that the 2002 film Minority Report showed the moral majority what the future will look like in 2054 when mobility, geo-location and targeted content technologies merge. While the movie looks at various elements of the digital future, the biggest 'ah ha' moment for both privacy advocates and marketers alike happens when John Anderton (Tom Cruise) has his retinas scanned as he exists the train and a digital billboard displays "John Anderton, you could use a Guinness right now."
So how long until you walk past a store and it offers the "other people like/bought" experience outside of the confines of a website? Services like AT&T's Shop Alerts show promise by linking customers proximity to stores and offers. But these aren't the "other people like you" recommendations based on behavior that go beyond the proximity to a store you already like (and have already subscribed to).
In 2008, President Barack Obama developed a unique strategy in order to connect with potential voters and raise much needed funds for a costly general election campaign. Instead of concentrating his efforts solely on wealthy donors, Obama decided to use the power of the social web to create a broad base of support among millions of Americans.
Led by social media leaders like Chris Hughes of Facebook, Obama managed to run circles around the Republican nominee, Arizona Senator John McCain. Whereas the Internet was only a secondary concern for McCain, Obama made the web a central part of his campaign. As such, it wasn't much of a surprise that Obama had more than 20 times as many Twitter followers than McCain at the time of the election. This helps to at least partially explain the $150 million fundraising advantage that Obama had during the 2008 presidential election.
In an article last year for the Sales Ops Council, I introduced the idea of the "invisible social enterprise," how employees are already using social networks to create real business value often without the knowledge of the executive team.
Things have changed a lot over the past year: Salesforce.com chose "Social Enterprise" as the theme for their Dreamforce 2011 conference, Google recently released their Google+ social network to enterprise customers, and more companies are using public social networks like Twitter as formal marketing and support channels to their customers.