The skinny on Sims Social

There are 22 million active players of the Sims Social game. And the game’s movers and shakers have shared more than 160 million gossips. Plus they’ve told 11 million dirty jokes. Most popular personality trait? Great Kisser. Bestselling female clothes item? Black dress. For men? Black hoodie. All this according to The Sims Social infographic from games publisher EA.


Inside the Intel tour, with will.i.am

william_intelArtist will.i.am – aka Intel’s director of creative innovation – is gearing up for world tour as part of the Intel Ultrabook Project, writes Mark Terry. The 12-city, 12-month tour, which will kick off in Mexico City at the end of the month, will deliver a dozen original pieces of music inspired by the cities will.i.am visits, and 10,000 downloads of each piece of music will be available exclusively on the Intel.com website.


Magnifying music with Google

google_musicGoogle Music has launched Magnified Artists to showcase unsigned artists in the Android music store and to perform at live events, writes Maria Stadtmueller. The search giant uses sales performance, buzz monitoring and editorial nous to select Magnified acts from its recently launched Artist Hub, a digital destination which allows bands to upload and sell music.


Looking for digital free

Price isn’t everything when it comes to digital, and if consumers have to pay to view content, they will instead look elsewhere for free, according to the Breakthrough For Online Streaming report from KPMG, writes Mark Terry.


Google by the ad dollar

Google pulled in revenues of close to $38 billion in 2011, 96% of which came from advertising. The biggest advertisers? Finance and insurance brands with a spend of $4 billion, ahead of retailers ($2.8 billion) and travel and tourism ($2.2 billion).


UN scores with the comic

The United Nations has launched on app on iTunes, Score The Goals. It’s an educational comic featuring 10 football UN Goodwill Ambassadors tasked with tackling ‘Millennium Development Goals’ while being saved from an island.


A Hertz for music

Hertz and Live Nation have rolled out the Hertz Ticket To Ride contest, the first promotion of the two brands’ Hertz Movin’ With Music recently launched marketing campaign.


Shirky on SOPA

This week SOPA did a good job of blacking out websites such as Wikipedia and Wordpress. What is SOPA? It’s the Stop Online Piracy Act, a bill before US Congress which many believe is a pretty poor idea. Among their number is a certain Mr Clay Shirky, who has a manifesto all his own for creating, discussing, linking and sharing digital content.