Bits Blog: Ellen DeGeneres’ iPhone Game Quickly Becomes a Sensation

On her talk show, Ellen DeGeneres plays a game with celebrity guests where she holds a card up to her forehead showing a word or name, like “Justin Bieber.” The guest then gives clues to Ms. DeGeneres to help her guess the word.

It’s a game that many have played in college dorms or bars. Some call it Celebrity; others might call it Charades. Why not turn this into an iPhone game?

That’s the idea the producers of the Ellen show came up with in October. They hired an iPhone app development studio, Impending, to design and code the game, and released it Thursday in Apple’s App Store.

“Big news!” Ms. DeGeneres said on her Twitter account. “I’ve got a brand new game! Its called ‘Heads Up!’ and you’re appsolutely gonna love it.” Within several hours, Heads Up! had soared to the No. 1 spot on Apple’s list of best-selling apps.

In Heads Up!, you can pick a category like blockbuster movies, animals or music. Then you hold the iPhone up to your forehead with the screen showing the word, and your friends shout clues at you. After you guess it correctly, you put the phone face down and hand it to the next player, who gets a new word. The players pass the phone around, guessing as many words as they can until time runs out.

Unknown to most new players, the front-facing camera on the iPhone is recording a video of the whole game session. The players can save the video, share it on Facebook or even “Send to Ellen.” Sending the video to Ellen posts the video on the Ellen show’s Facebook page, and producers will pick out their favorite videos to play on the television show.

“We have 700 videos uploaded already,” said Daniel Leary, digital producer of “The Ellen DeGeneres Show” and a creator of the app. “We’re getting a video a minute, it’s pretty crazy.”

The game costs $1 in the App Store. Mr. Leary declined to comment on how the revenue would be divided between Warner Brothers, the Ellen show and the app developers. But Bob Mohler, a senior vice president of Telepictures Productions, which produced the game, said its purpose was to expand Ms. DeGeneres’ brand in digital media. The show already has accounts on Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest, he said.

“We expand Ellen’s digital footprint pretty broadly,” Mr. Mohler said. “We’re just constantly trying to find the next idea to continue to grow.”

Bits Blog: Ellen Pao, Who Sued Kleiner Perkins, Joins Reddit

Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers Ellen Pao, a former partner at the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

You still can’t ask Ellen Pao anything. But Reddit announced Thursday that the former venture capitalist will now be working with the social networking site, home of the popular Ask Me Anything chats.

Ms. Pao shocked Silicon Valley when she filed a discrimination suit last spring against her employer at the time, the legendary venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins. The suit was much debated but brought up widespread accusations that the Valley, for all its 21st-century tech, had medieval attitudes toward women. Ms. Pao has maintained her silence about the suit.

Yishan Wong, Reddit’s chief executive, said on the company’s blog that Ms. Pao had been “a formal and informal adviser to Reddit for more than a year, and recently decided to finally join us full time. She’ll be working on helping us build strategic partnerships that benefit the community.”

Ms. Pao herself went on to add: “I grew up in Maplewood, New Jersey, raised by enginerds on ‘Star Wars,’ computers and books. I live in San Francisco, via New York City, Boston and Hong Kong. I’ve worked with dozens of tech companies, traveling to 11 countries on five continents, to help build a variety of consumer and business platform companies.”

She said her favorite Reddit categories were Ask Me Anything and pareidolia, which is pictures of things that look like things they are not (trees that seem to have faces, etc). That is a perfect choice, because a court will eventually decide whether her suit is what it says it is or is something else entirely.