We had some fun and blew up a new iPad3.

[Eclectic]

A great staff fun day out as you can see. I am the one in the brown coat.



Youtube link | Pop Up

[Tommet]

Wow.

[Jordanrracer]

Could of gave it away for a contest at least.

[Quazonk]

Not only was it dumb to waste an iPad 3 like that, the video wasn't even fun to watch. What a waste.

[earthclaw]

One Word.............. FAKE. The old bait n switch, gets them all the time.

[BrEaKBEaT]

Fake or real, it was generally just rubbish to watch. Not a patch on those guys who smash consoles on launch day infront of queues waiting to buy. Oh well, if nothing else, you've inspired me to seek out some of those vids.

[tygamr]

Dunno why people always freak out when someone destroys an expensive device. It's their money- not yours. Also, it isn't hard to obtain an iPad 3. Last few Apple stores I've been to had loads of the things.

I think blowing up a device is better than slowly ruining it- you know, the people that eat messy food while using whatever it is, going to the beach with it- embedding it with sand and scratching it up, constantly dropping it, letting lay around wherever leading to people accidentally stepping on it... You get the point. I've known a few people that do that, and it bugs me, especially when they wonder why it stopped working.

[TakenXXDeadly]

Originally Posted by tygamr

Dunno why people always freak out when someone destroys an expensive device. It's their money- not yours. Also, it isn't hard to obtain an iPad 3. Last few Apple stores I've been to had loads of the things.

I think blowing up a device is better than slowly ruining it- you know, the people that eat messy food while using whatever it is, going to the beach with it- embedding it with sand and scratching it up, constantly dropping it, letting lay around wherever leading to people accidentally stepping on it... You get the point. I've known a few people that do that, and it bugs me, especially when they wonder why it stopped working.

I agree.

[Eclectic]

A huge problem in the app marketplace is gaining visibility. Many hundreds of new apps are released every day, all vying for the attention of journalists and the public. It is immensely difficult to get your app noticed at all. If you go to the forums where the indie developers hang out you can see that this is their biggest problem. As Oscar Wilde said, there is only one thing worse than being talked about and that is not being talked about.

There are two ways out of this that are commonly used, one is to throw money at the problem, to buy visibility. We don’t really want to do this at Kwalee if we can help it. The other is to cross promote between a catalog of existing apps on the app store. But Kwalee only has one app out there, Gobang Social.

Gobang Social is a great fun game to play with your Facebook friends. We developed it as a technology demonstrator, to prove that we could do many different things that are involved in developing and publishing an app. Also as the testbed to create our turn based server technology. This simple, fun game was ideal for the task and enabled us to climb all sorts of learning curves.

However we do need to have players using the game in order to test and develop what we are doing. So we need to do some marketing to attract these people. And as we already know, this is difficult in an extremely crowded marketplace.

Our solution was to create a really wacky video and to incorporate a competition. In marketing terms this was very inexpensive indeed. And it has worked, it has done exactly the job it was intended to do. Not only that, the staff had a great fun day out. And we continued to build our brand image as a company that doesn’t take itself too seriously and which has a laugh.

[Eclectic]

Originally Posted by earthclaw

One Word.............. FAKE. The old bait n switch, gets them all the time.

It wasn't fake. Why would we fake it?
You can see the screen operating right up to the explosion.
And after it has been blown up you can clearly see that it is the iPad we started with.
The cost of the iPad was not significant at all in marketing terms.

We have kept the remains and are framing them to put on the office wall. Anyone lucky enough to visit us will be able to clearly see the bigger camera that marks this out as being an iPad 3.