Chris Dixon, co-founder of personalization service Hunch.com, takes a very different approach.
"I believe the (desktop & mobile) web will become increasingly personalized," he told us,
"and it will either be done in an opt-out way - through cookies and behind-the-scenes data trading that is out of the users' control - or it will be done in a way that is fully opt-in and users have full control of their personal information. Hunch is a completely premised on the opt-in, give-users-control approach. It takes longer for our approach to get to critical mass but we think will be worth the wait. All of our deals are and will be opt in.
Rapleaf is opt-out, making available data harvested from all around the Web. (For Rapleaf's side of the story about its practices, see the company's blog.)
This could be an incredible platform for innovation - or it could be a controversial way for marketers to make a quick grab of more information about you than you wish they had. They always had it, but now it's a lot cheaper and easier to get. That should mean that new innovators should be able to build incredible things we'll like - if the market has enough imagination to do more than just go for the crass money grab of direct marketing. Right now there are too few good examples of positive developments of beneficial software, social self-awareness, injustices rooted-out and opportunities discovered thanks to programmatically available personal information. That may or may not change in time.
Rapleaf was reported last month to have raised $15 million more in venture capital.
See Also: Meet the Firehose Seven Thousand Times Bigger Than Twitter's - Your Mobile Phone's Passive Signals
Capcom’s Smurfs’ Village has officially topped
Smurfs’ Village is a game where you control a group of smurfs (yes, those popular miniature blue creatures made popular by the comic and the 1980s cartoon) in order to build a functional village. You can grow crops, build houses, play mini-games and visit your friends’ villages, among other activities. If we had to compare it to another popular game, it would be FarmVille.
One thing that separates it from other top-grossing games though is its price: free. The game costs nothing to download. But the game is indeed the iPhone’s top-grossing app, so where does it make its money?
The answer: in-game purchases. One of the game’s main currencies is the “smurfberry,” which helps speed up activities in the game. Instead of waiting 12 hours to grow watermelons, you can grow them instantly by using one of these berries. Of course, the best way to get your hands on one is to purchase them.
They’re not cheap, either; it costs $4.99 to buy 50 berries, $11.99 to buy 150 berries and a whopping $59.99 to buy a wheelbarrow of 1,000 smurfberries.
While those are some eye-popping prices for an iPhone game, that’s not exactly what’s causing controversy. As Pocket Gamer speculates, a likely reason that Smurfs’ Village has risen to the top is because children are making unwanted smurfberry purchases through the app. As long as someone has used his or her username and password on the iPhone, the user doesn’t have to type it in again for the next 15 minutes to make purchases. With many children impatiently playing this game, they’re likely turning to easy-to-complete in-app purchases of Smurfberries to fuel their village-building obsession.
It’s unclear how many purchases in Smurfs’ Village are inadvertent, but the result is still the same: Capcom’s new game is the new king of the iPhone gaming world. Sorry, Angry Birds.
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