Archive for entertainment

Respawn

On March 1, 2010 Activision reported the firing of two senior employees to the Security and Exchange Commission. One of these employees was Jason West the Infinity Ward president, game director, co-CCO, and CTO. The other was Vince Zampella the CEO and co-founder of Infinity Ward.

They were dismissed and replaced by Activision, the same company who helped fund their own company Infinity Ward during the golden days of their Call of Duty franchise.

-Jason West on left and Vince Zampella on right

On April 12, 2010, the Los Angeles Times wrote an article about West and Zampella’s new ambitious venture. They were forming a new game developing studio called Respawn Entertainment.

West and Zampella got funding from Electronic Arts (EA) while keeping all intellectual property. After hearing about West and Zampella leaving and starting a new project, a bunch of their old employees from Infinity Ward left to join thier LLC, Respawn.

In June 2013, they debuted Titanfall their new and revolutionary take on first person shooters. The game was released on March 11, 2014 only for xbox. By October 5th of 2015 IGN reported that Titanfall’s sales passed 10 million globally (awesome for a game only on xbox). Recently they have been even more successful with their multi-platform sequel, Titanfall 2.

-Respawn developing team

Official site: http://www.respawn.com/

Los Angeles Times article on Respawn: http://articles.latimes.com/2010/apr/12/entertainment/la-et-ct-callofduty12-2010apr12

IGN article on 1o million in Titanfall sales: http://www.ign.com/articles/2015/10/05/titanfall-sales-pass-10-million-globally

 

Get sick, to get rich.

Pete Cashmore has a fire burning in his belly for social media and blogging the news. Literally.

At the age of 13 Cashmore developed appendicitis and had an appendectomy, that left him sick and unable to attend school. Because of his absence from school, and disconnectedness from his education and friends, he began pouring himself into computers and blogs. He completely invested himself in computers during his time at home and began to subscribe to every blog he could find. So, in a very short while he learned an extensive amount about the blogging industry. A fire for dispersing information and blogging began to burn in Pete’s stomach, which led him at the age of 19 to create “Mashable.”

Created in 2005, Mashable, is an inclusive entertainment and news blog, which is now considered the leading source of information for the “connected generation.”  Time magazine has noted it as one of the top 25 best blogs in 2005, and has listed Cashmore as one of its top 100 most influential people in 2012.  Mashable has come to be known as the, ” ‘one stop shop,’ for social media,” and to this day reaches over 24,000,000 people per a month.

What inspires me the most about Pete Cashmore is his passion and his zealous personality. He had a fire in his belly. He saw a need for innovation in a market that was saturated, (literally the media/ news market) and developed something that people liked and wanted. Mashable  has synthesized the entertainment industry with news media, into a one stop shop for our generation.  Now, because Cashmore was passionate and innovative, he has begun to change the way we communicate and gather information.

 

 

http://www.inc.com/chris-beier-and-daniel-wolfman/how-pete-cashmore-founded-mashable.html