You take your pizza box, turn it upside down, cut out the Camaro car picture, hold it up to your webcam and then play the game using the car picture. You drive around the U.S. and they sprinkle pizza ads in the game.

Seems like a lot of work especially because you may have a piece of the pizza left and won’t want to cut open the box to get to the special decoder image. You can also printout a game piece from the website.

I like the concept but think it would be more usable if they stuck the game piece to the box rather than having to cutup some cardboard and carry around a greasy, pepper smelling box. In the video below, the woman actually seems to carry the entire pizza box upside down to her office – HA! The other questions for the agency who got the check to create this game are:

• does a person who just finished a pizza want offers for more pizza?
• to keep playing day after day as they suggest in the video, you would need to keep the pizza box around – that can’t be a good thing

It’s all about intent with promotions and since the transaction has already completed, I’d rather see PJ push to an email signup and keep the game clean. Or at a minimum they should know if the person has played the game for the first time provide no offers and on multiple return trips, then provide offers. They should also be able to tell whether a person is playing via the computer printout or the pizza box.

Here’s a video of how the game works…

Apparently the games are very hot and many rivalries have formed at colleges and universities across the U.S. PickTeams notes that hundreds of schools have teams playing their games. Reading their marketing deck, they call their service “social gaming”. I guess we have moved from the term “casual gaming” to “social gaming”.

They are projecting the following metrics for spring 2009:

• 8 million minutes on the site
• 1 million chat posts
• 100,000 dedicated players
• 10 minutes/session
• games lasting 3-8 weeks

PickTeams generates revenue from advertising and in-game sponsorships. The company is based in New York and has satellite offices in New Haven and San Francisco.

Libe Goad, Editor-in-Chief, AOL PlaySavvy said, "Playing video games is one of the top pastimes for children these days, almost more than watching TV. We created AOL PlaySavvy to help parents navigate through all the gaming information out there in order to decide what’s appropriate for their children."

PlaySavvy contains content in the following categories: gaming 101 (all about games), FAQ (apparently with feedback from a parental gaming panel), gaming reviews from a parent’s perspective but with the kids in mind and how-to articles including how to talk to your kids about gaming.

The login functionality uses AOL ids and some of the content is provided by third-parties. While I can’t imagine this site doing massive pageviews, it could help keep parents inside the AOL content network longer which is a good thing for AOL. 

The game can connect to an online community of other iPhone iBasketball players and as you take turns it updates the app so you know when your friend got a swish or hit a really tough 3-pointer.

I can only imagine what you must look like as you "shoot" your iPhone through the basket and then have to look quickly to see if you made the shot. I could just imagine what Penn Station will look like if there are delays.

The iBasketball app is available on the iTunes app store. I am looking forward to iPool, iFishing, iPacMan and iFrogger. The iFrogger should be fun as you get down and jump from pad to pad to cross the river.

Reflexive CEO Lars Brubaker noted on the acquisition:

As I’m sure you can all imagine this is a very exciting day for us at Reflexive. It means we’ll be able to expand our distribution network to include Amazon’s amazing distribution channel. With Amazon we will bring a huge new group of customers into play.

At Reflexive we have always prided ourselves on maintaining good relationships with everyone in the industry, and are excited that Amazon shares that philosophy. We intend to provide the best distribution platform anywhere, and to continue working openly with all the participants of the casual games space. Together it is our priority to continue this inclusive attitude going forward.

What this means for all you developers is that it’s time to get excited about your future with Reflexive. We can’t talk about everything yet, but we’ll be in touch shortly with more information. All of the features that you know and love about GameCenterSolution will still be available to you now and in the future, and you can continue to submit games through the Reflexive site. If you have any questions or concerns, please don’t hesitate to contact us at developersupport@gamecentersolution.com.

I’ve created enough casual games in my career to know that they were hot, are hot and will continue to be hot. They bring together players, developers, aggregators and advertisers into a unique opportunity where everyone benefits. SellMoreGames and Gamezebo have more details on the acquisition.

Photos can be submitted via email, MMS upload, or traditional upload from your computer. They are giving out prizes to the highest rated photos. Users can leave comments on photos. What makes this interesting to me is that you can see how others view a word or topic. I could see Snapherd adding groups to allow a circle of friends to explore how their views on a topic differ through photos.

Snapherd was founded by Joshua Gross. You might remember Joshua from our review of his other startup TapeFailure (now called Vistrac). When I spoke with Joshua about Snapherd last month, my suggestion was to partner with brands which could help Snapherd grow quickly and virally along with the real possibility of a business model. I could see brands like Coke, Pepsi, Apple, Microsoft, etc. A perfect example would be the "I’m a PC" campaign that Microsoft is currently running. 

Here’s how GPS Mission works: You create a mission for your friends to travel through. Each winner receives "gold" which helps them move up the leaderboard. Here’s an example of a mission from San Francisco named the Nob Hill Gold Rush.

What’s great about both GPS Mission and SCVNGR is that the games are played outside. This falls in line with my article the other day about the airplane mode function on cell phones. While the phones must be on to play the game, players are outside and away from the desk getting exercise, social interaction and sunlight.

SCVNGR

The actual game works very similar to any scavenger hunt but with more intelligence. Because everything is sent back via text message to SCVNGR, the system can appropriately send people to the next items and make sure that different groups are doing different things. A variety of commands can be sent via the moble to get tips, hints and current team scoring. The Web application is used to setup the actual scavenger hunt.

To-date the company has generated $25,000 in revenues including over $10,000 from a deal with a Philadelphia jewelry store. SCVNGR is currently targeting the university market segment and is expanding to the museum segment. 

SCVNGR has raised $125k to-date and they are looking for $650,000 for team expansion, technology and sales/business development.

The only thing Puma did wrong is not allowing the game to be embedded outside of the Puma Web site. This would have easily spread the game, Bolt and Puma further than keeping the game locked up on the site will. The game is a smart move for Puma and Bolt. Now that the Olympic Games are over, Bolt will slowly fade out of the spotlight. The game can keep him top-of-mind for casual game players and Puma Shoppers.

This game should see millions of plays a day if it gets the kind of traffic similar games I produced did. It’s a quick play and is addicting to hit the leaderboard. Can you beat my time above? Leave a comment with your best score.

I’ve created a number of online casual games over the past 10 years that had millions of plays a day. I was always a bit shocked at how game players (especially female players) interacted with the advertising we injected into the games.

Some of the highlights from the report include:

• The average game player is 35 years old
• 40% of game players are women, 60% are men
• 26% of gamers are over 50
• Halo 3 is the most popular video game over the past year; World of Warcraft is the most popular computer game
• 47% of online gaming is in one of these categories: Puzzle/Board/Game Show/Trivia/Card
• 41% of Americans have purchased or plan to purchase one or more games in 2008.

Update: I can’t find Scrabble on Facebook as of yet. Perhaps EA and Mattel shouldn’t put out press releases until said game is live?

Jordan over at Marketing Pilgrim has a look from April into who owns what. Basically Mattel owns the Scrabble rights outside the U.S. and Canada and they launched a Facebook version in April. Today’s announcement brings Scrabble to the worldwide Facebook audience. What’s silly is that two development teams built the same game – what a waste of company resources.

Back in January, Erick looked at Scrabulous and how the Facebook community came together to attempt to save the game. He noted that the  “Save Scrabulous” group has over 46,000 Facebook members.

Amit has a good look at how Scrabulous developers Jayant Agarwalla and Rajat Agarwalla, monetize their casual game using Google AdSense to the tune of $20,000 a month. Today’s announcement certainly will hurt – to what extent is still unknown.

EA and Mattel have also announced that Scrabble is available on the Pogo games network. The Pogo version will have additional hidden features that aren’t available in the Facebook version.

In case you are wondering how some tech blogs would do in Scrabble, here you go:

• SiliconAlleyInsider – 25 
• CenterNetworks – 23
• TechCrunch – 22
• Readwriteweb – 21
• Inquisitr – 18 (got the big Q but nothing else to boost)
• Venturebeat – 16
• Mashable – 15
• Webware – 14
• Profy – 13
• Gigaom – 10

(yes i get that the sites all have a different number of letters, just smile geez)

The VP for AARP’s Web Strategy and Operations says: "Boomers on the Internet spend more than 100 minutes of their leisure time per week playing video or computer games online.” I know that my mother won’t go to sleep until she wins at solitaire and I’ve seen that take hours.

The games are mostly puzzle games and the top game currently is Mahjongg Toy Chest with over 11,890,013 game plays to-date. It should be noted that the AARP game portal is a white label solution and my guess is that those numbers come from all plays across all networks. In any event, 2 bam, 3 crack!

What a smart idea this is for AARP. Get the seniors playing games and feed them important health information, deals, discounts and other marketing messages for AARP products.

It’s easy when you decide to work on a startup to only think about your demographic or whatever demographic the bloggers are discussing. But remember that there are so many other sets of people that can be marketed to. In this case, the 50+ set have lots of money to burn.

Burst Media

Burst describes today’s new ad network, "The Burst Gamers Network’s young, predominantly male, audience is technologically savvy, passionate about digital and video games and has an appetite for a host of products and services — ranging from electronic gadgets and entertainment to snack foods and the hottest sneaker styles." They will be hand selecting sites to become part of the network.

Burst also notes that they will offer new creative formats including: widgets, video cubes, storytelling modules, and mobile display ads. I’ve never seen any campaigns in these formats in 12 years with the company. If they are able to sell more 2008-ish formats, that’s a good thing.

We are part of the early adopters ad network but so far no campaigns have come our way. I’ve moved most of our inventory to Tribal Fusion as they seem to be the best of the remnant compaign providers. I want Burst to succeed – I almost feel like after being with them for 10+ years that I have a vested interest (yet of cours no financial interest). As I’ve written so many times before, Burst is still stuck in 1998. Sometimes you have to realize that it’s time for a new playbook, the old one won’t work no matter how you turn it.

Fyrebug

The game creator is a flash application which walks you through the steps to create the customized game. Fyrebug offers about 40 games that can be customized. For some reason, the boxing game appears to be the most popular game to customize. Games can be shared and embedded. I’ve embedded a sample game below. 

The Fyrebug customized game gallery shows about 100 games that have been created. The games are on the very basic side and probably won’t appeal to high-end gamers. But if you want to beat up your favorite blogger, Fyrebug works perfectly.

Jon at IndieStartups spoke with the Fyrebug founders regarding how he came up with the idea. Co-founder Jonathan Widro said, "My partner and I were working at 4kids Entertainment, and worked closely with flash games. We came up with the idea for Fyrebug, but kids cant upload their own images, so we decided to pursue the idea on our own."

Click here to make your own Fyrebug game

Current publishers include: Facebook, Bebo, Friendster, meebo and soon MySpace will be added. The initial third-party games announced includes Sierra Online’s web games Capital Defense and Boogie Bunnies and Come2Play’s Backgammon and Bigpoint’s two most popular games Dark Orbit and Sea Fight.

While not mentioned in the press release, apparently other large social networks could become publishers for Zynga as well.

So here’s how this works… if you are a casual game developer trying to market your game on Facebook, you could either do it yourself or sign on with Zynga and let them promote the game for you. If you promote it yourself, any income you generate is your own. With the Zynga deal, you share in the revenue generated by your games but you have a higher probability of making your game sticky as Zynga will be promoting it.

The company has raised $10 million from a variety of companies including NY-based Union Square Ventures. The company is in heavy hire mode.

While I still believe 2008 is the year of the widget, casual gaming is right up there too.