At the 2010 DICE Summit, Carnegie Mellon University Professor, Jesse Schell, gave a stellar presentation on how the world of game development is transforming popular culture.  As Jesse states in the presentation, games have “crept out and they are going everywhere.”  My favorite quote on this trend is his explanation of geo-caching:  “Because it’s cooler to go walking in the woods if there is a treasure chest at the end.”

The transformation of gaming from a niche audience to an influencer of popular culture is something that should be on the radar of every Brand Marketer.  The below embedded video is a great place to start in learning why.

Read more: http://g4tv.com/videos/44277/DICE-2010-Design-Outside-the-Box-Presentation#ixzz0gwDevhbm

Everyone loves a good video that captures interesting facts & figures.  In this latest take, digital agency JESS3 animated a video  that shows “The State of Internet” with a good collection of recent stats.

JESS3 / The State of The Internet from Jesse Thomas on Vimeo.

Thanks to a post by Augustine Fou, I came across this chart that breaks down which mobile platforms are being used by people of different ages.

Amazing to see that over 6 out of 10 iPod Touch users are 17 years old or younger.  And only 2 out of 10 are over the age of 25.  Talk about a strong statement for the iPod Touch being a targeted way to reach teens and tweens.

Several months ago, people were asking if Twitter’s growth had stalled thanks to several months of flat traffic.  But it appears those reports of Twitters “demise” were premature.  According to a recently released report from Pingdom, Twitter passed the one billion tweet mark in December.  The growth continued in January, with 1.2 billion tweets sent.  That averages out to over 40 million tweets per day.  Looks like Twitter continues to be the little engine that could.

Tod Sacerdoti, CEO of BrightRoll, sent me a note today about a new presentation his company just released that details why marketers should about attention to the online video advertising market.  Called “POV: Point of Video“, it includes some great stats such as:

• Video is larger than Search (33 billion video views vs 15 billion searches)
• Online Video Advertising will be a $4 billion dollar market in less than 4 years
• Almost 178MM unique users watch online video each month in the US

Definitely a worthwhile presentation for anyone thinking about online advertising.  Plus Tod deserves credit for actually sending the email himself instead of relying on a PR agency to do his dirty work.  That wins big points in my book.

The full presentation is embedded below for RSS readers.