Paul Benetis Dot Com

EDIT: My account was re-enabled the same day.  The form that I filled out actually was read by the team, and they took action.  WHEW!!!  Google STOP SCARING ME LIKE THAT!!!!

Today I found out that my Gmail account – paulbenetis@gmail.com – was disabled.  My buddy sent me an IM and said that he received a bounce back when trying to send me an email.  This account was mainly set up as an additional email address and was forwarding all my emails to my other Gmail account, and I give it out to people so it easy from them to remember.  Therefore, I don’t ever go to Gmail and login to this particular account.

Right away I went to mail.google.com and tried to log in and received “Sorry, your account has been disabled.” error.  No explanation, no anything!

There was a link provided to get some help and I was able to fill out a form to submit to Google.  I am not sure if Google will ever get back to me…

This really worries me however as my main Gmail account has a lot information that is valuable to me.  I use Google’ services with confidence that the services they provide will be there for a long time to come, but situations like these are really discouraging.  How can I trust the service on my other account will stay active?

I understand that if you use the account to send spam emails but this wasn’t the case at all.  This was my personal account!  I really hope the form I filled out gets me somewhere.

Another really weird thing that I noticed:  I tried to sign up for another Gmail account just now, trying to use paul.benetis@gmail.com, and instead of saying that this name is already taken, it gave me a message that this particular user name has been disabled!  Is my name becoming some blacklisted name with Google?   NOOOOOOO!

I read an article in The Economist and it had some really cool info about the evolving in-game advertising.

With DVRs gaining popularity, the companies are afraid that they are not reaching all of the viewers with their continuous bombardments of our TVs. New ways of reaching the consumer are required and video games are one of the channels that are not yet exploited.

So far companies have been able to place ads in video games, but there is a problem with placing an ad in an environment where the consumer is not forced to look at the ad. For example, you watch the commercials (if you don’t have a DVR) while waiting for the show to continue. You might not pay much attention to them, but there they are in your face and that is what companies care about. In a video game, however, the ads are placed in the environment around you but that doesn’t mean you have to stare at it – after all, you are busy playing the game. If you do, however, look at an in-game ad, these companies want to know that. They want to know if their ad is reaching the audience. There is really no way of knowing whether or not I looked at the Intel ad while blasting away some aliens. Without this information advertisers are unable to create any strategy for their ad campaigns.

So here is the point of this post. Marketing company Neue Digitale, based in Germany, says that they have found a way to help advertisers with their dilemma. Supposedly, they developed the technology that will record players’ in-game actions which will provide very detailed information about the ads that are placed in the game’s environment. Such actions include how many times the players looked at the ad, at what angle, and for how long. If these guys can actually execute what they are promising, I am sure they will be raking in some serious money in no time.