Augmented Reality Advertisement Enters Online Gaming World

Every once in a while a new online game takes over the internet and becomes the new big thing. Farmville,  MafiaWars, online Poker, Sims Social, the list goes on. All of these games have one thing in common – they attract millions of users worldwide, which translates to huge potential advertising revenues.

The problem with games advertisement today is that the ads, in forms of banners or pop-up ads, distract and aggravate players. Startup TicTacTi thinks it has found a solution for easy and quick monetization of games. TicTacTi’s says its technology enables dynamic insertion of advertisements into any game, application, or video.

“TicTacTi offers a unified cross device/operating system monetization platform. Our solution is natively architected for mobile, with seamless social network extensibility, [and] altogether eliminates the need for source code access for ad insertion, in so doing reducing game preparation time from days to just a few hours over any Flash or XNA game, application, or video content,” the company explains.

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TicTacTi uses augmented reality to insert advertisements in online games, without using the source code of the game. “The advertisement can be an item among other items in the game – for example a Nike shoe in a store in the game. Or you could have the option to watch a short video advertisement and get virtual items in return, for free,” says Hagshury, CTO and founder of TicTacTi.

The service works with live streaming videos as well. The company uses a relevance algorithm to analyze the site and video’s graphic information and speech recognition.

TicTacTi was founded in 2007 by Eyal Margalit and Nir Hagshury and has so far received $500,000 in funding from various investors. TicTacTi technology is already used by companies like Disney, Kellog’s, Google, MySpace and CBS.