Master of 500 Hats

Very Close USA-China Olympic Medal Race (if you count points)

China is killing on gold medals. (pre-pubescent Chinese gymnasts tbd)
USA leading on total medals.

however, it's very close race if you count using points where:

• Gold = 3 points
• Silver = 2 points
• Bronze = 1 point

using this method, the results look like this:

World of Wifecraft

Genius, sheer genius.

Putting the Fun in Functional: Applying Game Mechanics to Functional Software (Amy Jo Kim)

I swear i've referenced & linked a million times to the presentation below Amy Jo Kim from ShuffleBrain gave at Etech 2006, and i recently had the pleasure of catching up with her in SF for a game geek dinner, then in San Diego for Graphing Social Patterns West.  It's one of my absolute favorite discussions on user engagement & how to think about app / web design & user engagement by using strategy from game mechanics.  Amy's one of the noted experts in the field, along with Raph Koster (A Theory of Fun) & a few others.  I highly recommend reading more by both of these folks.

After much begging & pleading, i was able to get Amy to upload her presentation to SlideShare.net for easier display & distribution, and she graciously obliged (thanks amy!).  Hopefully using SlideShare makes it more accessible for her fans (both current & new). i also chose a very basic SEO-friendly headline for this post to make it more findable.

With no further ado, i bring you:

Putting the Fun in Functional: Applying Game Mechanics to Functional Software

| View | Upload your own

for more on this topic, i suggest checking out both blog & website for Amy & Raph (linked above).  since i'm somewhat new to the field, i'm also interested in other references people are aware of -- please feel free to add more in the comments.  i know Jeremy Liew, Susan Wu, and Andrew Chen have written on these topics from startup / vc perspective as well.

Zynga & Marc Pincus -- Geeks & Games Party Monday @ Jillian's

  Geeks & Games @ Jillian's 
 

my friend Eric Marcoullier asked me to post this par-tay announcement... unfortunately i'll be out of town monday night in vegas, but sounds like a blast:

Marc Pincus & Zynga are hosting a party for GDC geeks & social games / casual games developers at Jillian's (Sony Metreon).  Go there & get your game on!

Marc & Zynga will be speaking on a panel along with Shervin / SGN + Mike Lazerow / Buddy Media, moderated by Jeremiy Liew / Lightspeed, at my Graphing Social Patterns conference in San Diego March 3-4.  Hope you can join us :)

Casual Games + Social Networking = "Social Games" (aka The New Hotness)

ok, i'm calling it right now:

Social Games is teh New Hotness.

seems like there's several new social game startups debuting lately, such as Zynga Game Networks founded by Mark Pincus (@ left with dog of same name). 

i'm probably late to the party, but i've been hearing more & more about companies in this space, and after the NY Times article on Zynga i'm guessing it's now officially the hot new VC investment category for 2008.

(note for bandwagon entrepreneurs: "hot" does not necessarily mean "smart" or "likely to make money", but it probably does mean we'll see more startups jumping in & VCs opening their wallets ;)

but wait a sec, what the hell is a "social" game?  aren't all games social by definition?  what's new here?

Social Games = Casual Games (user engagement) + Social Networking (viral distribution)

briefly: "Social Games" is the handle for a new group of startups that combine the user engagement / retention attributes of "Casual Games" (easy-to-learn games with a broad audience target) with the viral distribution potential of social networking platforms like Facebook, MySpace, and others.

why is this such an interesting area?  3 reasons i think:

1. social networks are a great environment for using & distributing games
2. "casual games" are accessible to a very broad audience of users
3. games drive deep[er] user engagement & retention (which might help monetization)

(btw: i'm still exploring this area & hardly an expert, so please feel free to comment / pile on / make corrections in the comments)

other companies in the space i'm aware of: Webs.com, Buddy Media (also created the FB app AceBucks), Hive7, and perhaps SocialMedia, which for the moment is positioned as a third-party ad network for Facebook. Kongregate is probably also in the mix, altho no social networking angle there yet that i'm aware of (did i miss it?)... still, would be pretty easy addition / integration for them (in fact, now that i think about it Kongregate might be an interesting acquisition target for Facebook).

others i missed?

links to folks who seem knowledgeable on casual games / social games:

• Raph Koster
• Amy Jo Kim
• Jeremy Liew
• Andrew Chen
• Naval Ravikant
• Nick O'Neill
• Saar Gur
• Susan Wu
• Jeff Clavier

again, i'm probably missing a few notables here... if any other companies / people i've overlooked please feel free to pile on in the comments.

UPDATE: "Hot" can also mean "getting sued" it seems... Hasbro (the owner of Scrabble) is suing to get the Scrabulous app taken off Facebook.

BluBet: Bet the World.

  BluBet: Bet the World. 
  Originally uploaded by dmc500hats.

this is gonna be big.

more to come soon...

Half-Baked dot Com @ E-tech '07

muppet labs photo by muppet wiki

Tomorrow night (wed 3/28) at E-tech i'll be leading a session called Half-Baked dot Com, an "exercise in entrepreneurial improv theater" that i originally created at last year's foo camp.  Following the first iteration we did last summer, it's been run several times by a variety of folks (including me at Citizen Agency) at a few un-conference events.

for those who haven't seen it performed live, Half-Baked dot Com works like this:

• 25 players count off into 5 teams of 5
• audience selects 50 random words for the teams to use
• each team selects 2 words to use for a name (ex: blank-blank.com)
• each team then has 10 minutes to create a biz plan
• in addition to their name, the biz plan is comprised of:
  •     1) a tagline
  •     2) a logo
  •     3) the product or service (your solution)
  •     4) the business model (how do you make money)
  •     5) the marketing plan (how do you get customers)
• each team then has 2 minutes to pitch their plan
• each plan is judged by our esteemed panel of VCs

hope you can join us, and get ready for barely controlled fun & insanity :)

---

UPDATE: the 5 half-baked teams who played chose the following names:

• AsymmetricLosr.com - american psycho 2.0
• SubliminalMonkey.com - you can't punch our monkey
• ChunkyCadaver.com - reinventing the afterlife
• CorpseTwitter.com - the longest tail (*** winner! ***)
• KamikazeCadaver.com - living death to the fullest

there was a notable focus on the deceased & disconnected for this session of half-baked...  either the Web 2.0 world is missing a big untapped market, or the Dead are making a comeback.

this round of half-baked was a close race between SubliminalMonkey.com (online subliminal advertising) and CorpseTwitter.com (SMS services for the departed), however the online presentation materials & logo for CorpseTwitter really stood out... particularly the reverse long-tail slide.  i'm waiting for a link from Kevin Marks for the slide deck, and will post as soon as i get it...

UPDATE2: winning presentation from CorpseTwitter.com here (7MB ppt)

UPDATE 3: extra credit for SubliminalMonkey.com, who now actually have their own site!  presentation on that link... check it out ;)

half-baked inspiration: beaker & dr. bunsen honeydew, from muppet labs

tags: half-baked half-baked.com beaker muppet labs etech etech07

Just Bowl It.

The other World Cup kicked off this week in the Caribbean / West Indies.

Meanwhile Nike went global with a cricket version of Just Do It, shot in a traffic jam on a crowded India street with star cricketers Zaheer Khan & Sreesanth.

now that looks like fun...

(hat-tip to Shri for the link)

ref: Cricket / wikipedia

The Truth Hurts

i'm not much of an online gamer, but i came across a list of Gaming's Top 50 Journalists by Kyle Orland, and just had to laugh at his top 10 reasons for why some folks didn't make the cut... in particular, reasons #7 and 9:

7. You’re an okay writer but nowhere near as talented as you’d like to believe.

9. You’re a dickhead and I derived no small pleasure in omitting your entry.

Foo Camp 2006, HalfBaked, & the Art of Geekery

So i've been a bit remiss in posting the rest of my Foo photos, and in blogging my thoughts from such a gloriously fun & educational weekend.  i'll try and get all the Flickr pix up soon (took over 200, still sorting them out), but in the meantime here are a few brief vignettes from my wondrous journey down the rabbit hole known as FOO camp 2006...

so i drove up to Foo with James Levine (my former colleague & partner in crime from SimplyHired) and Paul Rademacher, now a Googler and the Artist Formerly Known as the Mashup DJ of HousingMaps.  James & Paul are both alpha geeks i can't hold a candle to, so i felt privileged to shoot the shit with them on the roadtrip up to Sebastopol.  quick aside: i met Paul a year ago, but just a few months back while sharing a shabu shabu lunch we discovered we both grew up in West Virginia.  imagine, yet another hillbilly entrepreneur here in Silicon Valley... small world.

anyway, Paul & I had recently exchanged emails on what kind of talk we'd like to give at Foo (participants are encouraged to give presentations on their areas of interest / expertise, except that paul has lots of the latter & i only have lots of the former).  as usual, we were down to the wire and hadn't quite nailed down our topic.  we tossed around a few ideas about creating personalized agents and simplifying / automating search engines, but realized we better come up with something quick... by nightfall we'd have to choose a name for our talk on the Foo UnConference Board.  maybe our brains got fried from traffic on 101, but in the end we came up with something COMPLETELY DIFFERENT called HalfBaked.com: Entrepreneurial Improv Theatre.

Here's the concept behind HalfBaked:

• Act 1: start by having people yell out ~50 random words.
• Act 2: split into 5 teams, each chooses 2 words + ".com"
• Act 3: each team has ~10 min to prep their BlankBlank.com biz plan

(biz plan = product idea, revenue model, marketing plan, logo, tagline)

• Act 4: each team does a 5 minute pitch on their product to a VC
• Act 5: vote on who did the best job, then celebrate the insanity :)

Our winners (pictured above) were the imagineers of a business called BottlecapPorn.com, led by Rael Dornfest, Christine Herron, Greg Sadetsky, and a few other creative friends.  (and yes, they really did pull together that website DURING the session, in < 15 minutes... impressive extra credit!)

We were also fortunate to reel in David Hornik & Paul Graham as judges, who didn't quite realize what was going on until we had them cornered.  I know David pretty well and he's a gamer, but i must say a special thanks to Paul, who gave a talk earlier in the day on his experiences with Y Combinator that helped inspire our HalfBaked craziness.  David is one of my favorite and shortest VCs, and Paul is one of the most eloquent, stimulating entrepreneurs & thinkers around (if you haven't read Hackers & Painters, i encourage you to check it out).

Thanks to James for all the photos above... he captured several exquisite moments while i was emceeing the whole affair.  And many thanks to all the fun folks who came out for our session: Rael, Christine, Chris DiBona, HB, Avi Bryant, many others... we had a great time!

i'll post more stuff soon on the rest of Foo, Werewolf, more foo pix, and a few of the amazing sessions i got to attend.  thanks Tim!  what a weekend :)

(update: added link to Greg Sadetsky, CTO of BottlecapPorn... apologies Greg!)

tags: halfbaked halfbakeddotcom foocamp06