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Dots' new game mode experiments with gravity and advertising

Dots' new game mode experiments with gravity and advertising

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Betaworks begins turning up the juice on its media business model

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Dots for Android
Dots for Android

Dots, the massively popular mobile game, is getting a new play mode, allowing users to collect unlimited dots through six levels using the "gravity mode shuffler." It's sponsored by GE, which is promoting its very geeky "Gravity Day" on September 8th (9.8 m/s² is the force of gravitational acceleration).

The partnership with GE is part of what Betaworks' CEO John Borthwick calls "a new stage in the long-term evolution of Betaworks from where we began — as a hit-driven startup factory — to what we dreamed to become: a data-driven media company capable of building and compounding value over time."

It's sponsored by GE, which is promoting its very geeky "Gravity Day" on September 8th

Fox Searchlight recently worked with three Betaworks companies — Digg, Tapestry, and Giphy — to promote its film, The Way, Way Back. The deal leveraged Betaworks' oddly diverse range of assets. Fox bought five Tapestry stories, each powered with animated GIFs from Giphy, and promoted them across Digg. Giphy recently made another stir in the advertising world when it created a way to embed GIFs on Facebook. As AdWeek not-so-subtly put it, "If the company were a GIF, it'd have to currently include the text 'Cha-Ching!'"

Gravity mode will arrive this Sunday on Android and iOS and be available for one week. Betaworks' SVP of product, Paul Murphy, describes how it will work. "You can think of it like a 'zen' mode for Dots. No timers, no restrictions, just connect as many dots as you'd like. If you get stuck, you can click the gravity button, which acts as a shuffler. To make it happen, our team implemented a physics engine so the dots appear to fall with gravity and move based on the angle of the phone."

Dots Gravity Mode

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