Social media outlets such as Facebook and Twitter offer a degree of connection from artist to fan, but offer little in the way of true content. iTunes, YouTube, Amazon, and Spotify are delivery vehicles for the content, but offer little interactivity or true fan engagement. And paradoxically, an artist’s branded website still offers perhaps the best opportunity to create a coherent fan-facing artistic vision, but increasingly has difficulty luring attention away from these other more regular stops on a fan’s daily surfing schedule. How is a modern artist to weave all of these identities together? UNLOCKED is a great attempt to solve this problem. The game creates a purpose and a roadmap for fans to explore Rihanna’s world online.

Of course, here at Monstrous, we feel like that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Turntable.fm is doing some fun things in this space. With longtime favorite Sir Mixalot performing “live” in their game (in a manner not unlike Kiss did with Nightclub City some months ago), fans are starting to rally around formats that offer a deeper level of artist and community interaction than old-school radio ever could.

Ultimately, a critical-mass of community and artistic content is required to make these formats ubiquitous to fan enjoyment of music. And we here at Monstro.us might just have something to say about that very soon…

Here at Monstrous, we’re big fans of Justin Bieber. (More on that soon!) In addition to the infectious pop hooks and irresistible boyish charm, Team Bieber has created a compelling international brand… A course of development every growing business can learn from.

Mark Suster at TechCrunch recently offered this great piece on the building of that brand. Salient points: the importance of core talent/technology, the need to lay the groundwork with a strong model and a stronger product, and the availability of new paths to success –including direct fan (or customer) engagement.

Ian Bogost recently proffered this piece in his blog, musing on the way human creativity works within whatever puzzle of constraints it finds itself contending with. Examples include the poetry of former Nigerian political prisoner Wole Soyinka, whose poems were limited by his memory during the day and the meager writing resources he could scrape together in secret by night. The result? Stark, penetrating works that earned him the 1986 Nobel Prize for Literature.

What we love about simple game mechanics is this: If you create the right kind of puzzle, the human imagination will naturally find a home inside it… and begin to work it’s magic. Gamification is about creating these challenges that unleash ingenuity and, in so doing, create a rewarding experience for the player. We’re excited to be creating this kind of environment for music fans. We sincerely hope to create an space where their imaginations can connect to music and the artists who make it in entirely new ways.

From it’s start in social networking apps such as Foursquare, location check-ins on GPS-enabled smartphones are becoming an indispensable mode of work for certain sectors.

Ushahidi is a non-profit specializing in tools for information collection, visualization, and mapping. Ushahidi’s tools were used to assess and document the damage from Japan’s recent earthquake, and have been used by aid workers in numerous other disasters and hot zones. The company recently added a GPS-enabled smartphone app that allows aid workers and response teams to “check-in” on a collaborative map, sharing data and location with other members of a team. In volatile environments, where the situation on the ground changes rapidly in often life-threatening ways, this is primed to be an integral part of a response team’s toolset –not just making work easier, but also potentially saving lives.

Yet another way in which social game mechanics are evolving from ‘toys’ to ‘tools’…

Check out the Soniverse site, and stay tuned for more details!

“This was the third consecutive quarter of mobile PC shipment declines in the US”

Chart shows PC growth rates. Click on image for a bigger view of it.

quoted:

“The green line shows the PC industry excluding both the Mac and the iPad. Although it might include Linux or computers sold without an OS, the label “Windows PC” is a fairly close approximation. It shows that the market excluding Apple entered contraction this quarter and is out of sync with overall economic recovery and growth.

The red line shows the behavior of the Mac franchise. It’s well ahead of the overall market with 2x to 3x the growth. This has been a pattern for over 18 quarters.  I had some thoughts on this in a November 2010 hypothesis.

But the most telling line is the orange line which includes both the Mac and the iPad. In an industry where growth is usually measured in single digits, the iPad business brings growth in three digits.”

Read more at the website

The newly unveiled movie poster for Cars 2 which is making the rounds throughout the online Disney world.

more info can be found here