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Games Magazine Best Party Game of the year 2007/2008

GiftTRAP wins GAMES Magazine’s “Best Party Game of the year 2007/2008”

What's the idea?

Click here to find out how we’ve turned gift giving into a hilarious social experience

Discover the fun!

Click to unwrap the fun.

Puts your gifts to the test!

GiftTRAP is the hilarious new game that’s taking the gaming world by storm and putting the social back into board games.

The goal is to really get to know your friends and family.

You win by knowing your friends and choosing the right gifts, but most of all it’s just fun to play and gets you talking about things that matter.

• 3-8 Players, 5+
• Playtime 45-75 mins
• Learn in 10 mins

• 1 full size game board
• 640 Gift Ideas
• Rules
• 8 Organza Gift Bags containing; scoring markers, gift & choice tokens plus advanced strategy cards

Love to play Trivial Pursuit, Cranium or Apples to Apples - You will love this family party game.

GiftTRAP is all the fun of Secret Santa without needing to shop or wrap.

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What kind of Gift Giver are you?

Cool Companies in the Product as a Service (PAAS) Space

It’s been a busy week or two in GiftTRAP land, so I’ve not been quite so active on the PAAS research as I’d have liked.

I posted a question on LinkedIn seeking example of PAAS companies and got some great responses, (on a side note I’m a huge LinkedIn fan and LinkedIn user - feel free to invite me to connect.)

Here’s a quick selection from the companies I was recommended, I’ve tried to cluster them into related groups.

Companies working on getting things made/delivered to the right place for less cost/effort

1. http://www.ponoko.com - (3D Printing or production of designs around the globe)
2. http://www.postful.com - (Local printing and delivery of mail around the globe)
3. http://www.bongous.com - (Package Forwarding and Mail Forwarding Services)
4. http://www.moo.com - (Physical printing from online resources such as Flickr)

Games or gaming companies mixing up virtual life and real life

1. http://www.perplexcity.com - (Online game that was accompanied/driven by sale of in-store collectible cards - neat re-implementation of the best selling book “Masquerade” by Kit Williams)
2. http://www.monopoly.co.uk - (Hasbro has been using crowd sourcing to reinvigorate and update their classic game by getting players to vote for which city should be included in the updated game)
3. http://www.streetwars.net - Real world implementation of MMOG scenarios
4. http://www.chorewars.com - Gain virtual Kudos for tidying up the real world
5. http://www.motionbased.com - Integrating geo-coding with Google Maps - new sport or Geocaching

Several examples of the reinvention of Radio - Sirius and XM are perfect examples of PAAS. I don’t think Last.FM has any physical retail connections

1. http://www.last.fm/
2. http://www.sirius.com/
3. http://www.xmradio.com

Crowd-sourced T-Shirt printing companies. I’m not sure these qualify from a retail perspective, but that perhaps just needs more research

1. http://www.threadless.com
2. http://www.lafraise.com
3. http://www.cafepress.com

1. http://www.zlio.com - (Here’s an example of a virtual store - perhaps it qualifies)

Innovations around the connection of real world and virtual worlds

1. Google AdWords - I think you can now have your online ads appear on real world billboard and the like (more investigation required)
2. http://irent2u.com - new service to let you rent your spare physical resources

In addition to these companies I’ve been directed to a number of business to business products with complimenting online services

For now I’ve simply included the name/website and a single comment in brackets. There are many more examples than I’d expected and I suspect there are many more.

I’m not really commenting here on these, more gathering a list of potential companies. I’ve found that blogging about these companies has caused other people to contact me and to further extend my research and my conclusions.

I recently watched a great video by Jane McGonigal about Web 2.0 and how Virtual Life is more proving more satisfying for many folk than real life. People are “Checking out” of real life in favor of time spent in virtual worlds - something that can’t ultimately be good for society.

Jane suggests that we can perhaps implement many of the benefits/features of “Virtual Worlds” to improve the quality of our real lives in the real world. It got me thinking that perhaps PAAS as I’ve defined it isn’t broad enough to explain the emerging trend - perhaps the bigger trend is that virtual and reality are working to become one. Perhaps the bigger trend is “Reality 2.0” - the reinvention of our physical world augmented by integated online services to provide more instant and gratuitous feedback of real life performance.

Prior to watching this video I’d thought of PAAS as a “go to market play” by complimenting a Product with an Online Service or complimenting an Online Service with a Physical Product sold in real stores. This partnership of virtual services and real world stores, I’d been arguing, was a cost effective way to dramatically extend the reach of you combined offering simply because it takes you to new markets and it gets new players to care about your success as company.

Now in the light of Jane’s suggestion I’m trying to grasp with rethinking these ideas to seek out one master trend where perhaps PAAS is a sub feature or implementation tactic to ensure the commercial success of your venture.

If you are involved with or have experiences with the companies I mention please get in touch or if you can suggest other companies that fit with this trend that I’m trying to describe. Contact me at “nick at gift trap dot com”