The Big in Japan team is now working on several Facebook brand integration projects. Now that Facebook has opened their platform to allow development companies, like Big in Japan, to develop applications within the network, a new opportunity for brands has emerged. How can we help?
- License your brand for use in Facebook (i.e. we own the application)
- Customize and modify your existing application for use in Facebook
- Provide community assistance for operating your brand within Facebook
Our latest project is to incorporate a popular strategy game into Facebook’s community. The challenge? It isn’t porting the existing application into Facebook, it is helping leverage the social advantages the site can offer the game. Just putting the game inside the community won’t really extend the brand, but incorporating the game into the community can potentially enhance the companies relationship with the brand.
Posted by admin | May 30, 2007 - 3:29pm | No Comments
Category: Uncategorized | Tags: api, biginjapan, facebook
Less than a week after we decided to build and launch ServiceGuy, the final logo has arrived. Thank you for your comments, suggestions and ideas. What do you think:
Hopefully ServiceGuy grows on you. It is not certain that ServiceGuy will catch on outside of Dallas, but the team is excited enough to invest a week of their lives to see. The guys are in Portland for RailsConf and should start in earnest next week.
Posted by admin | May 18, 2007 - 8:05pm | No Comments
Category: Uncategorized | Tags: biggu, biginjapan, Dallas, railsconf, serviceguy
Earlier this week my son (Ethan) came to our offices to hang out. He knew we did work for Lego and found a stack of unopened Lego sets under one of the desks. We opened one of the boxes and he began building. When he left we just left the Legos on the conference table.
I had always hoped that as the team here at Big in Japan grew the interaction between our people would result in great new ideas. In reality we all get busy with projects and rarely have time to just ‘hang out’. Yesterday I woke up and decided that I would work on the business, instead of in the business for the day. Quickly I realized that I needed to engage the team directly in order to figure out what was ‘next’.
I tried to get everyone engaged, but with PDAs, cell phones, interruptions, Twitter, email and computers just laying around everywhere it was almost impossible to get everyone’s attention at the same time. One by one the team began ‘fiddling’ with the Lego parts on the table and our meeting shifted from a speech to a discussion. Mike came up with a great idea. Jake had a good point. Scott added a bunch. It was great. The Legos provided the guys with a harmless distraction from their ‘personal technology’ devices. It was still hard, my phone must have rang once every five minutes ~ I resisted the temptation to even look who was calling. Perhaps this will become a regular thing: harmless distractions to increase engagement!
Anyway, thanks Ethan! Great idea. . .
Posted by admin | May 12, 2007 - 9:58am | No Comments
Category: Uncategorized | Tags: biggu, biginjapan, lego
Back in December, Big in Japan began a project with LEGO on their recently announced Massively Multiplayer Online Game (MMOG). The project was only revealed to the world a week ago, but has been in discussion, development, and planning for a long time.
LEGO has partnered with NetDevil to create the game, and Big in Japan is helping out with community management. You see, this game takes a different tact to most games. We’re helping LEGO to engage various enthusiast groups in the actual development of the game. It is a LEGO game, after all!
Details are still thin due to confidentiality issues, but if you’re interested in finding out more, or pitching in on the project sign up for updates at:
www.lego.com/mmog
More and more details are going to be revealed in the coming months, so stay tuned. From what I’ve seen of the early development, this is going to be one fantastic game.
(On a related side note, check out this hilarious fan-created comic)
Posted by admin | March 16, 2007 - 10:58pm | No Comments
Category: Uncategorized | Tags: biggu, biginjapan, community, lego, mmog, Social Media
Since we released many of our tools publicly using an open source license lots of folks have set up their own versions. Most people have integrated the functionality into their own services. Relying on our free, no warranty, tools for your business is not a great idea due to the fact that it is so easy for mean people to overwhelm (i.e. that was the primary reason we released them for free).
Now we never really considered that some folks would launch our tools and then put them up for sale. Several folks have slapped on a new name and then posted them on ebay as fully functional businesses. For example,
[XYZ].com is a URL redirection service that has been operational for over a year. It generates $3,000 per month in ad sales from various startups. I need cash and will sell the site for $9,000 right now. You get pay back in six months. Who knows this thing might even grow faster. Email me right away at scammer@gmail.com.
Of course you don’t need to pay this scammer for the site as you can download the code and run your own version for free. Additionally, I know they have only been running for a month or so and the likelihood they have advertising revenue is very unlikely. I suspect that the ads are from shills and will go away once you buy the property. I thought about linking to these “scammers” here but thought better of it when my inner-lawyer came out.
Posted by admin | January 18, 2007 - 12:07pm | 2 Comments
Category: Uncategorized | Tags: biggu, biginjapan, opensource, Social Media
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