GlobalMedia: EA nabs triple word Scrabble score from Oprah
Forget sports tournaments or new movie releases as boosters for game demand. Electronic Arts’ latest hero is America’s most famous chat show host.
Chief Executive John Riccitiello, at the Reuters Media summit, went out of his way to praise Oprah Winfrey, whose recent shout-out of Scrabble gave a new lease of life to the not-so-new word game.
“We’re very thankful to Oprah for mentioning Scrabble on iPad as one of her ultimate favorite gifts. There was a 400 percent pop … on her word.” He said. “I think there’s different grades of favorite so we were happy to be among her ultimate favorites.”
So did Riccitiello contact Oprah directly to say thanks? “My sense is that the number of people sending her flowers is too many for her to notice my petunias,” he said.
(Photo: Reuters)
Oprah Tweets: Blessing or Curse for Twitter?
Oprah Winfrey is expected to join the twitterati on Friday, as she posts her first message on Twitter.
According to her show’s web site: “Oprah’s getting ready to send her very first tweet! And, why Ashton Kutcher’s been crowned the King of Twitter.”
While the media mogul is certain to accumulate hundreds of thousands of followers in record time (she already has 66,000), we wonder: What does it mean for Twitter, the wildly popular mini-blogging service, which is essential to some, supremely confusing to others and whose business model (or lack of it) gives journalists fits.
PC Magazine’s Lance Ulanoff pulls no punches in a post titled: “Oprah and Ashton Will Destroy Twitter.” Their popularity alone will lead to repeated crashes of Twitter servers, he says. Then…
“…it will recover and get bigger than ever, but with more Twitter users like Ashton and Oprah, it will ultimately be hollow on the inside, just like a bubble. And we know what happens to them.”
There are already reports that the technology backbone at Twitter is not without its share of hiccups. And outages and service slowdowns in the Internet era could lead millions to other services, right?
Still all that gloomy talk doesn’t really address Twitter’s future as a business, and the very true cliche: If you build it, they will come. Build a service with millions of loyal subscribers and someone will pay handsomely to try to make money with it.
