Press Release - For immediate release

6-11-08
Famegame.com , the website owned and operated by media company Fame Theory LLC, has seen explosive growth over the past few months and continues to expand both its member base and its features. This week, Fame Game released the beta tag on its “Movers and Shakers” feature, a feature which tracks and publishes the fastest rising individuals in specific industries according to the Fame Game ANDY algorithm. ANDY is a proprietary technology tool that measures and analyzes media and press mentions, event photography, user-generated content, and other offline and online data sources to find the most prominent, influential, talked about people across the culture industries in New York.

“Movers and Shakers” takes the top 3,000 people in the system each week, classifies them according to six industries – Arts, Society and Philanthropy, Fashion, Media and Digital, Entertainment, and Business – and then calculates which top five individuals in each category were the fastest rising from the previous 7 days rankings. Jen Novak, CEO of Fame Theory says, “Fame Game continues to look for innovative ways to classify, categorize, and quantify the various segments of the ‘culture industry’ in New York City. Movers and Shakers is just another way to cross cut the data that we automatically gather on a real-time basis.” The Fame Game algorithm picks up on trends already evident in the media from the prior week, such as a movie premiere. For example, Kim Catrall; was the fastest rising individual in “Entertainment” last week, which can be attributed to the premiere of the Sex and the City movie. This week’s Movers and Shakers includes prominent names such as Nadja Swarovski, Eva Mendes and Victoria Beckham, as well as up and comers such as fashion designer Alexander Wang, Czech-born model Hana Soukupova, and painter/sculptor Kenny Scharf.

In addition to “Movers and Shakers”, Fame Game also recently launched a new feature that allows people to compare any two profiles on the Fame Game system. “Fame Game Match Up” stacks up any two profiles and compares them side by side according to an attention meter, best ranking, current rank, people connections, events attended, and news mentions. Novak says, “This is a fun feature for anyone to play around with and get familiar with the way our system works and how people get attention by supporting causes and projects they care about.”

Fame Game has continued to grow in membership and viewership and has tentative plans to expand to other cities in the fall of 2008. Ultimately, Fame Game seeks to become the next generation PR company – tracking, analyzing, and making visible the ways in which people and ideas become famous. As Fame Theory co-founder Jose Serrano-Reyes notes, “The mission of Fame Game is to unite the social world and the creative world in harmony under a shared vision, to create a sustainable marketplace for original ideas, and give more leverage to artists, philanthropists, and progressive brands.”

About Fame Game:

FAME GAME is a rapidly-growing website that maps the social and creative networks that drive New York’s cultural economy. FAME GAME creates public facing “social network” profiles for the 100,000+ most visible players in the New York media, and ranks their fame based on their cultural footprint: events attended, influential connections, and media mentions. People and organizations tracked by FAME GAME can claim their profile and actively affect it, both online and off. The result is a multi-media “game” whereby players can increase the score of other people, parties, and projects by lending their fame, thereby increasing their own score/fame in the process. The goal is to influence culture and bring attention to new ideas by playing in the media.

FAME GAME is owned and operated by New York based FAME THEORY LLC, co-founded by Seth Aylmer, Jose Serrano Reyes, and Tatiana Platt.

PR Contacts:

Jennifer Novak, jen@famegame.com

Ryan Brown, ryan@famegame.com

610-742-7107

 p.s., this is Jen, btw. Hi again!

Fame Game has seen continued rapid growth in content, users, and traffic over the past few months and with that comes some exciting new changes… Wanted to update you all on a few things going on that we are excited about.

The first, you may have seen, is our new “Movers and Shakers” list, based on our algorithm ANDY. Movers and Shakers is a weekly metric used to showcase those individuals in various industries who are movin’ and shakin’ so to speak (i.e. doing and producing interesting cultural things, attending events, being photographed, being written about in the media, and being searched for by others.) Among those making this weeks list include media mogul Jared Kusher, artist Jeff Koons, Fashionista-turned Candy store owner Dylan Lauren, and supermodel Karolina Kurkova.

Movers and Shakers will update automatically every Monday morning with the previous week’s tally, so make sure to check back. Oh, and please remember: we didn’t make the rules, we’re just keeping score! ANDY (and Movers and Shakers) is based on media mentions, search trends, and event photography - so, you’ve gotta get yourself out there to get on the list!

Next, we’re just weeks away from launching our new blog PLAY. PLAY will be a cultural exploration of sorts, and we are bringing in writers from all over to help contribute. PLAY will feature commentary on interesting events such as this one, a party sponsored by AMEX and hosted by our friends at Envirolution, announcing the launch of their new website (Fame Game friend and photographer Stephanie Hodges was there to capture the event - check out pictures here.)

PLAY will also feature thoughts on fame, media, and the state of luxury branding — insights into the larger themes of Fame Theory — all in an attempt to illuminate the bigger picture and why we seem to care so much about these celebrity-types and things like algorithms, rank, news, data, and attention. (I know you’re all waiting in anticipation.)

Jen

jen [at] famegame

p.s., I’m Jen, the newest full time employee at Fame Game. Hi, hello, nice to meet you. I’m just getting into this blogging thing, so bear with me.

Fame Game has scanned over 10,000 events to create connections between 2,500 organizations and more than 130,000 individual people. At this point, we’ve helped over 1,300 people claim those profiles. Which means that one percent of those profiled have accepted their invitation to play the Fame Game. This is pretty tremendous for us, especially considering that we’re still building out the core functionality of the system (we’re almost done, I swear). It also means that we’ve become a bit of an unavoidable force in the social/nightlife/arts and promotions community here in New York, which is exactly what we’ve been aiming for…

The idea, of course, is to catalogue this community but also to bring greater attention to other cultural endeavors and philanthropic efforts in the city. We’re also working on new ways of helping brands, PR agencies and charities bring attention to their collaborative campaigns.

Let’s keep playing!

Ryan

ryan [at] famegame.com

Few updates:

We changed the color of the logo (really, white is better).

We’ve fixed many of the event and news feeds, so all of your events should be updating much quicker.

We brought on an advertising parter, and are really excited to work with other brands as well to help bring their PR online. (check our Advertising Page, to learn more)

We’re working on some really fun new iniatives, and also the ability for users to add events to their profiles (finally!)

As always, write in with any questions!

Ryan

ryan [at] famegame.com

Fame Game is really starting to cook, so thanks for visiting and telling your friends. A lot has changed, and we hope you’re enjoying the ride. One of the cooler things we’re noticing, is the extent to which everyone googles each other to land on Fame Game.  Nearly all of the top searches that bring visitors to Fame Game are the result of people searches. While we don’t intend on becoming the next Who’s Who Guide, we’re pretty jazzed that people inquiring about this select community come here first. Slowly, but surely, we’re becoming the record of New York cultural life.

At the same time, this isn’t coming out of the blue. We did build this site to be searchable in this capacity, we just never knew the extent to which it would interesting. Turns out, it’ a big deal — the Pew Internet and American Life Project reported that “47 percent of U.S. adult Internet users have Googled themselves.”

Its also funny that this idea, namely that people are more important the more searchable they are, has entered the cultural zeitgeist in some weird ways. Start by looking here, then watch this ridiculous video.

Ryan

ryan [at] famegame.com

Quick update: we made a simple revision to the way that all the pages on fame game look and feel. Its also really, really red.

We’re constantly trying to improve the experience, and we think this makes getting around the site a lot easier.

Let us know what you think…

Ryan

Ryan [at] famegame.com

We’ve moved our entire system to a new host, and in doing so, greatly improved the speed and efficiency of Fame Game. However, we’re still a few minor glitches away from where we’d like to be. Ie, Tag/Scene pages have yet to come back (so you can’t see who else is tagged with, for example, “awesome”) and we’re also noticing some other minor problems with the photo uploading.

As always, if you run into any trouble, please tell us about it by writing to feedback [at] famegame.com or ryan [at] famegame.com.

We’ve got a lot planned for the next few weeks, so do stay tuned. It’s going to get fun.

Ryan

ryan [at] famegame.com

After only 3 hours Fame Game is back up and speedy as ever. There are still a few little things I need to fix in the next few hours, but were screaming like an eagle right now. There is a little problem with the Mailing List, ill be fixing that asap. Hopefully in the next few days i’ll roll over our new header. Thats it for now. If you see problems on the site please email me!

Thanks,

-tim

tim[at]famegame[dot]com

Fame Game Down MONDAY NIGHT / TUESDAY MORNING 10pm - 6am EST

I’m going to be taking down Fame Game for six hours tonight, while i move everything onto two new servers. The servers are really powerful and should speed up everything! Sorry you won’t be able to check your sites tonight, but tomorrow its gonna be fast.

Cheers,

Tim

tim [at] famegame.com

fun with google charts
The audience for Fame Game has grown considerably in the last few months, and we are starting to wonder how well we really know you. For starters (and using our traffic data) I know that roughly 90% of you come from the United States. I also know that the majority of you are from New York. Though helpful, that’s not really much fun.

If you wouldn’t mind filling out our simple survey, we’d greatly appreciate it. It will surely help us to better understand our users and how to better help them.When you’re done, you can enter your email at the bottom to join the mailing list.

Ryan

ryan [at] famegame.com