I stumbled across an interesting piece of intelligence today, which looked at the development of virtual goods in the market place. According to this, median spend on virtual goods by users in North America has climbed a whopping 67% year-on-year to $50 p.a.
Equally interestingly, males are the largest spenders and, broken down by ethnics, Asians (26%) lead Hispanics (20%) by some margin over whites (11%).
So far (sic!), most virtual goods (how many? I don’t know) are purchased from stand-alone web-based games (World of Warcraft anyone?) but 31% had bought items in social networks (that would be the Zyngas and Playfishs of this world) with 29% in “network-based games” (what are they, I wonder). Facebook credits were used by 16% of buyers. Mobile? No word. It’s coming though: do bear in mind that there are 3x more mobile subscribers in the world than Internet users! And, yes, that’s true…
Apple has released an 
It also highlights the increasing shift towards social discovery, and Facebook is – in my opinion (but then, and this is a disclaimer, given the work I do with 
The UK arm of 
I know, I know, there’s a ton of conferences out there at the moment but this one has some real goodies to offer. The 
It is this time of the year where people start looking forward (and back) and come up with clever analyses of things we have always known and those that we haven’t. And because Europe has always (?) been the thoughtful and fashionably skeptic part of the world, it is that one of the leading newspapers, the Guardian, 
Social media (Twitter included) is nothing in itself, it merely defines a group of tools. Therefore, it is not the emperor’s new clothes, it is – if anything – the emperor’s new herald: if the emperor has nothing new, interesting, noteworthy to tell, it will remain as dull and meaningless as before but social tools actually allow you to filter, to focus, to spread noteworthy, sensible and truly good stuff to a group of people that is much larger than you could have reached before at a cost that is (per capita and in toto) much lower than before. And that means it is one cool tool!
As with every tool (say, a hammer), social tools are more useful, the easier and intuitive they are to use. If it is self-explanatory on how to extract something positive (e.g. to get that bloody nail into that bloody board), the better (and if you can do it without walking away with a bloody thumb, even better). At the moment, many people walk away from Twitter because of a bloody thumb. But would you dismiss a hammer only because you hit yourself? Probably not. Unless you find a better hammer of course…
In my last post, I hinted that the 
Why is this more significant? Because it is (like Google/AdMob) a cross-platform play that (unlike Google/AdMob) also expands the basis of business models deployed. Playfish derives the majority of its revenues from so-called virtual currencies, and in particular also from lead-generation deals (which recently have