Articles by David

We’re very pleased today to be launching our first advergame on Playyoo, in partnership with and on behalf of Biscaldi S.r.l, the Italian importer for the leading Japanese beer brand, Asahi.

An advergame functions pretty much like any other game on Playyoo. It is owned by a member, in this case “Asahi Super Dry”, representing Biscaldi’s marketing team. It has dedicated leaderboards, and appears in the game stream in the same way as any other game in Playyoo.

The difference is that the game and member pages on the web site are custom-branded, the game’s pre & post-roll sections carry brand-specific messages, and the game itself features some branding.

The game, “Sushi and Asahi Please!” was developed on behalf of Biscaldi by Playyoo in collaboration with Zen Graffiti Studios. They did a fantastic job in creating a fairly complex game whilst keeping within the quite tight restrictions of the Flash Lite 1.1 player.

This illustrates one of the ways in which Playyoo helps to create a market for Flash Lite developers to monetize their skills. The team at Zen Graffiti Studios have been enthusiastic participants in Playyoo since the beginning, and have been engaged in the Playyoo Developer Program. We’re very pleased that our efforts to build an ecosystem in which Flash Lite developers, Flash Lite media buyers, and of course Playyoo itself, all benefit, is beginning to come to fruition.

If you’re a Playyoo member, you should find “Sushi and Asahi Please!” in your game stream. You can also check it out now in the web Flash Lite emulator.

Finally, you can get the game delivered to your phone by texting “Asahi” to the number 00393399945642. Please note that standard operator tariffs on SMS and data apply, and be aware that these can be quite high if you are outside Italy.

Today, we’re releasing a major update to the Playyoo mobile site (m.playyoo.com). There are a lot of new features to discover, so here’s a quick run down of the major ones.

First up, the home page has changed significantly. We now show games from each of your streams in batches of 4.

You can play the game immediately by clicking on “Play now!”, or you can read about it, and access further options, such as adding to your favourites, by clicking on “More…”.

We’ve added a more personal touch to Playyoo mobile: you can now see who created the games you’re playing, and send them messages. You can also quickly discover other games they’ve created. Click on the member’s nickname to go to their mobile page.

Apart from accessing the games in your streams, you can now use the Search facility to retrieve games you might have seen on the web site, or you remember playing but can’t find. Just enter any part of the name, and a list of the top 10 matches will be returned (the search also looks at the game’s description)

And if you’re feeling lucky, click on “Random Game” to be offered a game dredged up from our vast archives.

The streams have also been slightly reorganised, and colour-coded for instant recognition.

When you access a stream, the header and footer will change colour based on the stream contents. The corresponding links are also colour-coded:

• Your Gamestream: green
• Your Favourites: sky blue
• Your Playlist: violet (previously called “Recently Played Games”)
• Random Game: pink
• Search Game: orange

We hope you enjoy the new mobile site, and we welcome your feedback, good or bad.

Ekleptica, Playyoo’s expert on Italian political satire scores a direct hit with her latest hilarious spoof on Silvio Berlusconi, “Silvio Sunshine”.

Watch the video….

…and then play the game. And forward it to a friend!

We try to make it as easy as possible to join Playyoo, so all we ask of you is your email address if you join via the web (so we can confirm you are really you), and your phone number if you join from mobile. If you join by clicking through a link, for example from your mobile carrier, you don’t have to supply anything, as Playyoo uses the credentials you’ve already supplied to your host.

However, there is a downside to this: your profile is very anonymous. Perhaps the most important part of your profile is your nickname. Since all members need a nickname to make things like the scoreboards work, we provide you with an automatically generated default nickname. Initially, these looked like “member1234″, but since we were running out of numbers, we changed it a month or so back to the form “playyer12345678″.

So, if you see the recently joined member list on Playyoo today, it looks like this:

This is ok for getting started, but you can easily make it more interesting. You can use the profile page on the web site to change and customise your profile to tell the world as much as you want to. You can reach your profile page by clicking on your nickname, or on “Edit your profile”:

Apart from changing your nickname, the profile section allows to change your avatar (photo), to write some stuff about yourself, to set up how Playyoo can interact with you (under Contacts) and, under “Your phone”, to set a limit on the amount of data you want to use for Playyoo downloads.

But most important, it lets you tell the world of Playyoo about yourself. Fact or fiction, we’re not checking!

(ENGLISH VERSION HERE)

E’ stata da poco introdotta una nuova funzionalità che ti permetterà di segnalare a qualche amico un gioco di Playyoo che ti è piaciuto particolarmente.

Di seguito trovi spiegato come fare.

1. Invia un gioco ad un amico

Dopo aver finito un gioco e aver inserito il punteggio, vedrai la classica sezione Playyoo “scorecard”, che è inclusa in tutti i giochi scaricati. Una volta connesso a Playyoo, quando I tuoi dati saranno stati aggiornati, vedrai il menu principale. Una delle opzioni del menu principale sarà “Invia a un amico”:

Se selezioni questa opzione, passerai automaticamente allo schermata “Invia a un amico”:

A questo punto puoi inserire il numero di telefono di un amico, e se preferisci, puoi aggiungere un breve messaggio. E’ necessario che tu inserisca manualmente il numero di telefono, senza poterlo cercare in Rubrica, alla quale non è possibile accedere da Playyoo. Stiamo comunque lavorando a un aggiornamento per rendere il processo un pò più rapido.

E’ necessario inoltre inserire l’intero numero di telefono, comprensivo di prefisso internazionale. Quindi, se il numero del tuo amico è 123456789, e si trova in Italia, dovrai inserire 39123456789.

Dopo aver inserito il numero di telefono e il messaggio (se vuoi) ti basta cliccare “Invia”, e Playyoo farà tutto il resto.

2. Ricevere un gioco

L’amico a cui hai inviato il gioco, non riceverà il gioco vero e proprio, bensì un SMS con un link diretto per scaricare il gioco, da parte tua. Questo per consentirci, se per caso il tuo amico ha un modello di cellulare diverso dal tuo, di codificare il gioco scelto al meglio per il tuo cellulare. Di seguito un esempio del messaggio:

Una volta aperto l’SMS, vedrai il link. La modalità per accedere al link varia leggermente a seconda del modello di telefono. Su questo Sony Ericsson K850i ad esempio, basta scorrere sul link fino a che non viene evidenziato, e cliccare:

A questo punto verrà caricata la pagina del gioco:

E finalmente il tuo amico avrà il suo gioco:

A fine gioco, il tuo amico sarà invitato ad iscriversi a Playyoo (se non è già iscritto) e ad aggiungere il proprio punteggio – ed esplorare tutto il divertentissimo mondo di Playyoo!

E questo è solo l’inizio. Stiamo lavorando a nuove funzionalità per permetterti di tracciare i risultati dei giochi che hai inviato, e per farti fare nuove sfide direttamente coi tuoi amici. E se incontri qualche piccolo bug qua e là…non preoccuparti! Stiamo lavorando senza sosta per sistemarli al meglio e rendere la tua esperienza con Playyoo sempre più divertente.