Twitch adds video calling to its Curse game chat app

Twitch may be the go-to destination for watching video game players stream their screens, but a whole network of third-party apps exist in and around Twitch’s service that the company would very much like to provide on its own. Now, the Amazon-owned company is taking aim at one of the most prominent of those third-party sectors: live game chat. Starting today, Twitch’s Curse communication app will support live video calling with up to five players, according to Engadget. The addition will let users stream a webcam feed to others in real time and allow for private screen sharing to highlight plays and share info with teammates.

Curse, much like game chat competitors Discord and Team speak, is a standalone game chat service. It’s designed for PC players, and allows multiple users to link their online game accounts for titles like League of Legends and World of Warcraft to a central hub where they can chat via text, host voice calls, and now conduct live video calls as well. It works by layering itself over any in-game experience, meaning you don’t have to rely on a game’s own chat features to communicate. Twitch bought Curse back in August in a clear demonstration of its interest in the area. Over time, the company plans to add new features to Curse to make it more enticing, in hopes that players will jump ship from Discord and Team speak, neither of which yet support features like video calls.

Home Is Where The Art Is

Charles Stag walked into the woods and decided to build something. Now, four years after his death, his daughter and grandson are trying to preserve his masterpiece.

Charles Stagg walked into the woods and decided to build something. There was a spot he liked in the pine forest about a quarter mile behind his parents’ house in the small Beaumont suburb of Vidor. Stagg chopped down the trees to make a field, then pulled bricks out of a landfill and hauled them out there, blazing a trail through shrubs and weeds along the way. Soon he was spending all day in the newly cleared patch, mixing concrete and laying the bricks. He only stopped when his mother came out to bring him meals.
A cluster of concrete buildings slowly rose up on the site, and Stagg began living in them full-time. The entryway was a room he called “The Church of the Swirl,” a concrete foyer topped-off with a narrow, swirling chimney that looked at home in between the pines. Beyond that was a small courtyard and then the centerpiece, a circular studio capped by a twenty-four-foot high hexagonal dome. There was a fireplace inside the studio along with a concrete chair and table that rose out of the floor. In almost all of these rooms—foyer and studio, but also bedroom, storage space, doghouse, even sauna—Stagg embedded glass bottles in the walls. When sunlight filtered through the trees and caught the glass, it produced gorgeous patterns of green, red, blue, and brown, but they were also functional. “The bottles collect warm air from the daylight and retain it through the night,” Stagg told Metropolitan Beaumont in 2004. “It is a little too hot in the summer but it is pretty comfortable to sleep here in the winter. I intend to have my ashes here one day.”But why did he do all of this? Because Stagg, perhaps, knew something that most wouldn’t understand until years later—his home would become his masterpiece, one that wouldn’t be finished when he died in 2012.

Nokia's phones return with Android in early 2017

The first Nokia-branded handsets running Android are due to arrive early next year. After announcing its plans to return to tablets and phones back in May, Nokia is providing more details today as it formalizes a licensing agreement with HMD Global (HMD). Also based in Finland, HMD global is the new home of Nokia phones under a brand licensing deal that will last for at least 10 years.

Nokia is launching a new phones section on its site today, marking the return of Nokia-branded smartphones and tablets after Microsoft acquired its phone business and killed off the Nokia brand in favor of Lumia for smartphones. The first Nokia-branded smartphones powered by Android will be available in the first half of 2017, alongside Nokia-branded feature phones.

Nokia already experimented with Android just ahead of Microsoft’s acquisition, and the company’s first device after that deal was an iPad mini clone running Android. A Nokia return to phones — even in brand, only — is an odd twist in the Nokia and Microsoft story of struggling to adapt to smartphones and Apple’s iPhone. We’ll be left waiting until early next year to see if the dream of an Android-powered Nokia phone is truly able to compete with Apple, Google, Samsung, and the many other Android phones on the market.

Westworld’s biggest twist came with a nasty side effect

This post contains Westworld spoilers. Proceed to the center of the maze with caution.

The ninth episode of Westworld was everything fans asked for. After eight hours of puzzling setup, the writers doled out answers like cheap Halloween candy. There are multiple timelines! Bernard was built in Arnold’s image! The center of the maze is an elevator to Arnold’s lab! Weeks of speculation, finally validated!

Maybe the cottage industry built atop Westworld spoiled the fun. There’s an argument to be made against the breathless theorizing. (I’ve admittedly been a part of that.) If each episode hadn’t been scrutinized by dozens of podcasts, hundreds of blogs, and thousands of Reddit comments, then these late-season reveals might feel surprising instead of inevitable. But great mysteries are good even after you know the twist. For example, The Prestige, co-written by Westworld co-creator Jonathan Nolan. A movie about magicians, filmmakers, and a mutual love for a well-performed sleight-of-hand, The Prestige is more enjoyable on repeated viewings. Its twists are manipulative, but they build directly onto the movie’s themes, enhancing the central ideas instead of diverting from them.

Theorizing is fun, and a number of shows have played with fans’ curiosity to great effect, including HBO’s own Game of Thrones. Even comedies like Arrested Development benefited from intense fan scrutiny. And while those shows’ merits are debatable, it’s hard to say their failings stem from letting puzzles supersede narrative coherency.

But the writing staff of Westworld invited this Zapruder-esque behavior, larding the show with countless clues and Easter eggs that could only be discovered by a team of thousands freeze-framing their way through 60 minutes of television a week. The creators simply went overboard. Westworld was constructed, as other writers have noted, as a game to be played by its viewers. It’s akin to resolving a dinner-theater murder-mystery instead of absorbing clearly presented, albeit non-interactive, drama.

For example, Bernard’s epiphanies in episode 9: Once Ford unlocks memories inside the mind of his loyal bot, Bernard and the viewers discover that a number of scenes from previous episodes were designed to conceal the truth — or in one particular case, outright lie. The shadowy figure that attacked Elsie? It was Bernard. That photo of Arnold that Ford showed Bernard? It featured a third person we (and Bernard) weren’t shown the first time around.

'Hollywood is living in a bubble' and stars shouldn't talk politics

Mark Wahlberg, who stars in the upcoming film Patriot’s Day, says it’s high time celebrities recognize that no one between the coasts cares what they think about the President-elect. 

Content Marketing :A Formula for Any Type of Organization

Digital, social, and mobile technologies have dramatically changed the world we live in. And no function has been more disrupted than marketing. Executives won’t fund marketing if it doesn’t demonstrate results.

But before we dig in to walk you through the formula to do this, here’s a secret: You need to build a content marketing destination, such as a blog or a content hub. It is easier to measure the value of an owned platform  relative to any other form of marketing.

Content formula for B2B organizations

If you have not done so already, you need to build the business case for content marketing to weary marketing executives.

It starts by looking at your marketing ROI overall. When I hear the question about the ROI of content marketing, I always ask: “Well, what’s the ROI of your marketing overall?” And too often, I hear the answer: “We don’t know.”

Think about this: The majority of content discovered by your audience comes from just three channels: email, search, and social. The best marketers focus their efforts on creating content that can be discovered across all of these.

Identify your potential audience

The business case for content marketing is to reach, engage, convert, and retain buyers you would have never seen if all you did was create promotional content and push it to social channels, publisher sites, or banners and other forms of ads that many of us ignore.

Start quantifying your business case by looking at how much unbranded search traffic you get from organic search. You can do this quickly using SEM Rush’s overview report. Or looking at your website analytics and group the traffic you get from keywords that are branded vs. unbranded.

Then you can quantify the opportunity in the size of that audience you are NOT reaching. You attract unbranded search traffic when you commit to customer-focused content instead of content that is about your company, product and services, which is inherent to most corporate websites.

Explore missed opportunities

If the math doesn’t convince executives, try tapping into fear. “Fear of loss” is considered one of the greatest human motivators. Executives are scared of being left behind their peers, and asking questions like the ones below are a great way to start the conversation:

• Do you show up first when someone searches for the category of your solution?
• Do you own the category like L’Oreal does with Makeup.com?
• Do you own the target audience like Adobe does with CMO.com?
• Are you one of the largest sources of education for your audience like Cleveland Clinic’s Health Essentials? (Congrats Amanda Todorovich on winning Content Marketer of the Year 2016; you can read how she has grown their website.)
• And is your content marketing the single largest source of new leads and revenue like American Express’ OPEN forum?

Move budget from programs that aren’t working

You don’t necessarily have to look for additional investment to fund content marketing activities. Instead, ask yourself questions like these:

• Is the content your team creates effective at reaching your target audience?
• Which marketing programs that your team has funded drove little or even no measurable results?
• What do you spend on paid search because you don’t rank organically for those keywords?

Once you’ve identified the content and programs that haven’t worked, shift a portion of those marketing dollars into funding an annual, consistent content marketing program.

Remember that traffic will increase over time

You can also explain to the CMO (and the CFO) that content marketing is an investment that produces a compounding rate of return.

Unlike campaigns that only achieve results while you are actively investing in them, content marketing requires a consistent investment over time, but you get increasing rates of return. This should be music to your CFO’s ears.

It’s like a retirement account. Invest a small percentage of your budget over time. The first dollar you invest continues to deliver value to your brand long after the publish date. You compound those returns by continually making that investment.

Show how traffic delivers leads and revenue

While looking at how your investment in content marketing is compounded over time, which leads to increased traffic, you also need to turn that traffic into leads and revenue. What is the best way to do this?

Subscribers. Subscription rates are not only one of the best ways to measure the value and engagement of your content, but they also measure real value. You can quantify email subscribers’ monetary value if your email database has ever been used to nurture leads or present direct offers to sales / revenue.

To calculate the value per email address, take the total revenue from email campaigns and divide by the number of emails in database. To calculate the value of subscribers, multiply the value per email address by total content marketing subscribers and that’s the value of your subscribers.

Email is one of the highest producing  tactics marketers employ. And email subscribers are many times more likely to convert to real customers than non-subscribers.

Don’t forget about mid-stage content

Mid-stage content offers that are gated are another opportunity to show the value of content marketing. Once you map content to the buyer journey, you will soon realize that most blog readers don’t immediately convert to customers. But if you offer them deep content to help them navigate their buyer journey, you can generate leads that ultimately convert to sales.

Content marketing can help retain customers

We’ve talked about the value of traffic, subscribers, and leads, but what about customer retention?

If you focus on subscribers, you can match customer email addresses with content subscribers. Then just do some simple math: How much more do subscribed customers spend vs. non-subscribed customers? How much longer do they stay as customers?

This is one of the best ways to demonstrate the value of content marketing. My clients who tracked customers who engage with their content marketing found these customers spend on average two to three times more and stayed three to four times longer than non-subscribed customers.

There is a formula to success with content marketing. And there are plenty of examples of businesses showing content marketing ROI. In short: Build the business case, find the budget, and measure the results.

Want more assistance to secure the budget and buy-in for a content marketing program that delivers ROI? Read CMI’s e-book on How to Win Your Battle for Content Marketing Buy-In (50 Stats).

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