Nexon Inc, one of the largest online multiplayer game publishers, announced a deal this week with several of their retail partners where they’ll be featuring virtual versions of these retailers within Nexon’s games. I can’t find the release online (it was emailed to me) but here’s the first part:

Nexon America Inc., the U.S. division of Asia’s leading online entertainment company Nexon Group, whose Game Cards are available at retail giants such as Target, Best Buy, and 7-Eleven, Inc., announced today plans to integrate its mega store partners into MapleStory, its most popular game. Nexon America is educating their players on the availability of the Nexon Game Cards through outlets such as Best Buy, CVS, Duane Reade and 7-Eleven, by bringing the stores to the players virtually.

This partnership between Nexon America, a leader in virtual goods sales, and major retailers is unprecedented. Nexon America will send its millions of MapleStory players to the virtual markets with themed quests that will promote both the retailers and the availability of Nexon Game Cards in these stores. The special quests will prompt users to complete various tasks and visit any of these chains to earn their own virtual Nexon Game Card, which will provide Maple Points, the in-game currency of MapleStory.

On the surface this doesn’t seem like a bad deal - several retailers have created virtual destinations in online worlds like Second Life, and unlike SL, MapleStory actually has a large and loyal fanbase. The target demographic is highly desirable - tweens and teens - and Nexon claims 3 million users in the US alone. While this is probably an overstatement, the game is big enough to have earned its very own segment on Fox about the dangers of online game addiction.

Gameplay video from MapleStory
The oddness of this deal becomes evident as soon as you see the game in action. Unlike Second Life, this isn’t a 3D semi-realistic world, it’s a cartoony 2D fantasy game. How will they represent a virtual 7-Eleven in a way that players will connect with a real store? Will the context in which they experience the brand be too different to translate into real-world equity, or will the interactivity make it better than regular one-way messaging? Either way it’s a deal worth watching, not least because it’s becoming harder and harder to effectively target that age group.As you might expect, Nexon themselves have learned a thing or two about communicating with teens & tweens.. not only do they have the requisite MySpace page with >40k friends, they’re also using MySpace as a test bed for ad creative - the fans are not exactly representative of the target group, but it’s a very quick (and very cheap) way to get initial feedback that would take days or weeks to gather via traditional focus groups.

Historically when you build a web site you had a choice to either design a specific, stripped down version for mobile devices or ignore them completely (the choice most sites make). After all, even after years of penetration, devices running Windows CE serve up less than 0.06% of all web pages according to HitsLink. But there is another interesting statistic buried in their report as highlighted by the Wall Street Journal today. iPhones are at 0.09% and that is for only a little over a million devices that have been around for a few months.

So the lesson learned from all these numbers? Design your site for devices with small screens running fully functional browsers and ignore everything else. Apple just forced handset manufacturers to give the public what it wants. So much for .mobi.

If you’ve got an iPhone and haven’t seen Facebook’s take on how to scale your site down for a small screen, make sure to check it out. They’ve done a good job.

A few days back there was a flurry of articles in both the mainstream press and the blogger community on what was perceived to be confirmation that Google was finally going to launch capability to allow all of us out here in the great wild world to store our files on its servers. The often rumored but never delivered GDrive might become a reality.

In other words, the Google cloud was going to be able to swallow pretty much anything we could throw at it rather that just the videos, pictures and other standardized media supported today. Of course this ability isn’t actually that new, given that xDrive and .Mac (and others) provide the same ability to store files online. For the most part the current solutions work, although they are limited and often tied to specific operating systems or computers.

What will be interesting to see is whether Google actually tackles the more complicated part of this problem. The real challenge isn’t just to provide an online backup of files that actually reside on the multiple hard drives we all seem to be accumulating these days (try counting them sometime…it is scary). The real challenge is to move the place that all our files live to the web and replicate them down to all those hard drives only when we need them.

So make your laptop, your desktop, you kids computer, your Xbox, iPhone, Blackberry, Tivo, external hard drive and maybe even portions of your work computer (suitably encrypted of course) just temporary storage and make the cloud the place it all lives. Oh yeah, and while you’re at it, remove the burden of keeping everything in sync so that it is automatic and just happens.

In other words, make it easy.

Welcome, wilkommen, bienvenue, irashyaimasu.. this blog will hopefully bring you a nugget or two, every now and then, about the wild and wonderful things going on out there on the Web, Internet, Metaverse, or whatever you call the virtual space between your computer screen and everybody else’s.

Back in 2002, a lot of us thought the whole Internet thing had been overhyped.. shards of the burst bubble crunched under our shabby shoes as we searched for new career directions.. but we despaired too soon. Just as we couldn’t have imagined 1999 back in 1996, we couldn’t have imagined 2007 back in 2003.

Who knows what 2010 will bring, but we can at least try to peer through the fog and hazard a few guesses every now and then.