SimianLogic

As Rory Breaker, the villain of Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels said, “If the milk turns sour, I ain’t the kind of [cat] to drink it.”

I saw over on SlickDeals that WalMart has a promotion running on PS3s that gives you a $100 gift certificate along with the purchase of a 40 GB PS3 at $399. Obviously, you can’t use the $100 on the PS3 itself, but so many peripherals are needed along with a system purchase that it might as well be $100 off. The posting on the deal said Best Buy was matching it, and I try to avoid WalMart on the weekend if I can avoid it (I’m not a huge fan of insane crowds).

Just to make sure, I called up the closest Best Buy, got a manager on the phone, and asked if they were honoring the $100 gift card deal. They were. In the 45 minutes it took me to drive down there, pick out a few peripherals ($80 for an HDMI cable, $60 on an extra controller, $60 each for two games, $25 each for two Blu-Ray movies, and $40 for the non-Blu-Ray-but-recently-released season 3 of Rescue Me), they received an email from corporate that WalMart was out of stock, so they no longer had to honor the deal. When I got to the checkout counter, he told me there was no way he could give me the $100 off coupon. Read the rest of this entry »

In my mind, practically all the reasons you’d want to own a house instead of rent an apartment lie in the back yard: a grill, a small garden, and space for a dog to run around during the day. With it being Memorial Day weekend, I couldn’t wait any longer to knock item #1 off my list. I’m from Atlanta, birthplace of the Big Green Egg–and my dad has had one for probably 10 years now. They’re expensive, but they pretty much blow all the other grills I’ve seen out of the water. I was lucky to find a BGE store locally (the aptly named Eggs by the Bay). The BGE corporate website listed a few distributors that were closer to my new house in Redwood City, but for me it was worth it to drive a little further to give a sale to a small business. The extra driving was rewarded, incidentally. The owner had the large Egg I wanted, but but not the large-sized table for it. He was nice enough to loan me a nest (basically metal legs for the grill) until he could get the table in–plus a few days to allow me to paint and lacquer the new table. I sincerely doubt that any large specialty retailer would’ve been willing to do the same. The Eggs by the Bay store is actually having a sale later in the summer for gently used demo eggs (basically used for their one-day barbecue festival), but forgoing any grilling for an entire month+ just to save $100 or so wasn’t quite worth it for me. Besides, my economic stimulus check was burning a hole in my pocket (though that only covered about half of it…). Read the rest of this entry »

I went up to the little Interplay conference yesterday, so I thought I’d post a few notes.

The Future of Social Gaming
This panel had guys from Kongregate and Meebo (two companies I actually like) and guys from SGN and Xynga (companies I’m not sold on yet).  Of the last two, they get a fair amount of Facebook traffic (some of which is organic and some of which they’ve merely bought).  From what I heard, the two hate each other… but both of them had their diplomatic hats on and mentioned that creating a genre (social games) was more important than any one company.

I found one thing the Xynga guy said pretty funny: “Every couple of months, the networks ratchet it up and make it harder to be viral.”  In my mind, what he’s basically saying is that every couple of months the networks make it harder to spam users.  If the content is good, and it really stands on its own, you don’t need spam for it to go viral.  That he’s bemoaning the anti-spam filters lead me to believe that they’re a little lacking in substance.  By building a single, large game channel, though, they’re essentially cutting Facebook out of the regulation picture.  Once their install base is high enough, they can actually just spam within their current users to drive eyeballs to their new apps.

10 Ways to Monetize Social Applications
I didn’t notice on the agenda that this was a “sponsored panel.”  It could’ve been called “10 Ways to integrate OfferPal into your Facebook Application.”  They quoted some pretty obscene eCPMs (>$200), before later revealing that was only from the actual “complete an offer” page that 5% of the users visited.  I have no doubt that this sort of thing works for teenagers (or anyone without a credit card), but these things are the sleeziest types of offers in my opinion.  Unless I was designing an application purely to make a buck, I don’t think I could stomach their system from a user-experience point of view (and I’ve actually got a couple of ideas that would work perfectly for it).  The funniest thing about their presentation was how many people got up and left right in the middle of it (as soon as it became apparent that it was a sales pitch)–it was really like rats fleeing a sinking ship.

The State of Social Games
This was one of the more interesting talks, in that at least Developer Analytics had some data to share.  After crunching a number of applications, they boiled pageviews per daily active user into some pretty interesting numbers:

• Messaging Apps (Wall, Poke, etc) generate 3 page views per DAU
• Dating Apps generate 20 page views per DAU
• Social Gaming Apps generate 50 page views per DA

They basically saw only a handful of monetization channels for social games: digital goods, virtual currency, microtransactions, and CPA type offers.  They estimated that a successful app in today’s market generates around $40 per 1,000 DAU per month.

Funding the Social Gaming Sphere
This was a panel of three venture capitalists (Accel, Lightspeed, Hit Forge).  The moderator was a bit of a pain, but there was some interesting info.  One of them mentioned that current apps are seeing about $0.50 per DAU per month (right in line with Developer Analytics’ estimates).  The biggest way to make money, they suggested, was to let the guys who can spend $1000/month spend that much and let the guys who can’t afford $0.25/month play for free.  In America, though, gamers have been VERY resistant to letting players pay for a competitive advantage–essentially limiting the market to purely cosmetic items (i.e. Pimp My Avatar).  They also made a noteworthy distinction that Social Games are not just multiplayer games.  With multiplayer games, you are willing to play with anyone.  With social games, part of the fun is derived from playing with people you actually have relationships with.

Jeremy Liew of Lightspeed mentioned that they look at applications that see a total of around 100 million minutes of engagement per month.  I don’t have any actual stats on Filler’s average playtime, but I’d peg it conservatively at 5 minutes.  It’s well into its long tail by now, and averaging around 10,000 views a day.  Doing some basic math, 10k views/day * 30 days * 5 minutes per user… that’s about 1.5 million minutes of engagement per month.  Flash games and social games are different in that flash doesn’t serve up multiple page views (or create meaningful interactions between friends… yet), but I think it’s worthwhile to compare the two.  There has been huge inflation in sponsorship costs over the last year or so (basically since MochiAds hit), but the money tossed around for flash games is still nowhere near what some of these social apps are getting.  I see the difference in the two, but I don’t see the difference as being THAT huge–both are essentially diversions.  I think the money for flash games will continue to rise while the money paid for social apps will decline over the next year or two.

They also mentioned a few criteria for apps (or really, the developers behind the apps) who might get venture funding:

1. Applications that are user content-driven (and therefore inherently more viral)
2. Applications developed by someone with a portfolio of hits
3. Applications which hit a stable niche (i.e. Poker) and own that niche

The question that they didn’t really answer, though, is why any of these applications need venture capital at all.  Most of the apps have next-to-nil production budgets, and those that become hits are likely profitable already.  Without any sort of cash burn to deal with, I don’t really see the need to give up part of your company for VC money–unless, perhaps, you want to quit your day job and do app development full time (I doubt a VC would invest in someone who wanted to keep doing development on nights & weekends).

Building a Successful Business
The founder of PlayFish gave a great talk on how they’ve been so successful so far.  I hadn’t heard of them, but after seeing their apps and hearing about their processes, I think these guys are going to make a mint.  Essentially their core value proposition is that they want to elevate the overall quality of Social Games to a level on par with a Nintendo DS or Wii title.  He gave five bullet points on how to build a successful business:

1. Think Like a CFO (i.e. you should plan with the bottom line in mind, not what’s necessarily the most “creative”).  This will allow you to manage risk and learn how to manufacture hits over time.
2. Create Great Product.  By this, he meant be the #1 or #2 in your competitive field, as this will create exponentially higher value in the long run.  I agree with his sentiment, but I’m not entirely sure it works for Flash Games (where there’s a new #1 or #2 every week).
3. Kill Product.  Learn to pull the plug when something isn’t going the right way, and never look at that as a failure.  Make bold decisions if necessary and don’t look back.
4. Build Platform.  Develop and document your tools and processes.  Not only will this improve efficiency, you’ll actually have an artifact repository that creates “enterprise value” (i.e. something that can be sold to someone else).
5. Budgets Increase.  Plan ahead that the budgets will always increase.

Advertising and Marketing on Social Games
This was a panel on in-game advertising featuring DoubleFusion (I think… I was grabbing a Coke when they said the first guy’s name), OfferPal, NeoEdge, EA, and MochiMedia.  Perhaps because I was already so familiar with the space, I didn’t take much away from this panel.  The NeoEdge guy spoke most of the time, but the lady from OfferPal jumped in as often as possible to reiterate her sales pitch (”We have FIVE PhDs working to make you money!”).  Everyone on the panel was fairly subdued, but she looked a little out of place.  Not to sound sexist, but she would’ve fit in better as one of those hosts on QVC or some other home shopping network–just a little too overdressed and just a little too eager to sell you something.

Microtransactions and Virtual Goods
I didn’t really learn anything from this one, but it was interesting to hear the guys from Friends For Sale and Packrat talk about various problems they’ve had to deal with in regards to cheating, inflation, etc…  The panel moderator made very sure to explain the concept of monetary faucets and sinks SEVERAL times (though I’m sure the crowd was probably familiar with the idea already).
All in all, the conference started out kind of slow but ended with a few nuggets of information.  A friend of mine who’s interested in entering the space has been to a few of these things in the last couple of months and said most of the info has already been mentioned at other conferences.  Their was an open bar afterwards, so I at least got to feel like my $100 was well spent.

I went to the Yahoo! SearchMonkey (one word apparently) launch party/developer presentation thing tonight (a friend of mine works there and told me that there’d be free t-shirts, food, and beer involved… SOLD!). After I got back, I whipped up the little example above just to test the system out. All it does is scrape the Lottery Button, figure out how many tickets have been issued today, and supplement the search results with that data. Other than the fact that no one actually searches for it and that no one claims any tickets, the tech works pretty well… for me.

The biggest problem I have with the current SearchMonkey implementation is that it seems to be awesome for large, well-known publishers and utterly useless for small websites. Each SearchMonkey application has to be added manually by the end-user, which means that unless you search across a single website’s pages many many times (and see the “enhanced search results button”), you’re likely never going to feel the need to add that application. Worse, this will actually drive business away from the little guys in favor of the big guys.

Imagine Bob, who sells widgets. Bob was one of the first people to sell widgets, so he comes up first in the search results. A month or two after Bob’s shop started selling these widgets, Amazon also started to sell them. Bob’s page still comes up first in the Yahoo! search results, but now Amazon is second. Bob has almost no traffic (compared to Amazon, anyway), so no one ever bothered to add his SearchMonkey application (assuming the struggling small business Bob operates is even aware that it exists, and that he has enough time to build an application). Amazon, on the other hand, is an early adopter. Their search result, though second in the listings, shows a photo of the widget, used and new prices, a 4-star rating, and a user review–along with links to similar products. Which links is the average consumer going to click on?

Until the distribution model for SearchMonkey applications goes automatic (meaning site owners can verify that they do in fact own the site and automagically make people’s search results add their applications), I’m afraid it’s going to be bad news for the little guys.

I was poking around with Google’s webmaster toolkit today, and I came to the somewhat shocking realization that not a single one of my blog posts is in the Google index.  Whaaaaat?  I’d assumed that WordPress in general would be fairly SEO friendly, but such is not the case.  I’ve done robots.txt files and sitemaps for other little side projects in the last year or so, but this site has been around so long that it never even crossed my mind to get on the search engine bandwagon.  After digging around for approximately half a second, I “found” a pretty sweet plugin to auto-generate a sitemap.  I use Yahoo!’s one-click install of WP (still rocking version 2.0.2), so I had to dig around a little for a legacy version of the plugin.  While I’m a huge fan of the all-online interface for web-hosting (using Y! for 7 or 8-odd years now is one of the things that makes Heroku so appealing to me), but one thing it doesn’t allow you to do is fun stuff like CHMOD (the sitemap generator needs the sitemap.xml file to be at 777).  After looking around a bit further, I found Cyberduck… which also fairly rocks–and made doing the quick CHMOD a cinch.

I’d be a little more excited about my “discoveries” if I wasn’t fairly sure that the rest of the world has known about them for years.  Such is life–but hopefully I should start to see a little more Google traffic (already ~50% of my traffic) to pages other than the blog’s home page.  Next up on the list–create an actual home page.

I love how Flex’s (talking Flex 2 here, we haven’t jumped to Flex 3 yet at the day-job) LinkBar looks, but I’m not a big fan of view stacks. I wanted to use one just as you would normally use a ToggleButtonBar, but by default the LinkBar only grays out the “selected” item if its dataProvider is actually a ViewStack. Solution: subclass it and toss in a little hack that gets the results we want. Without further adieu, here’s the code to turn a link bar into a toggle bar:

package {

import mx.controls.*;
import mx.events.*;

public class ToggleLinkBar extends LinkBar {

public function ToggleLinkBar() {
super();
addEventListener(ItemClickEvent.ITEM_CLICK,changeToggle);
}

private function changeToggle(e:ItemClickEvent):void {
for(var i:int = 0; i < numChildren; i++) {
Button(getChildAt(i)).enabled = (selectedIndex != i);
}
}
}
}

Works like a charm!

Another day, another kooky web idea. This time, it’s the Stock Moose. We’ve had a lot of debate at work on how to gather data, how to present that data, and how to make that collection/presentation process engaging enough that someone might actually enjoy doing it just for the sake of doing it (rather than tying it to some future promise of “Oh, we’ll give you an edge on the trading room floor”). Back when the college football season was in full swing, Yahoo! introduced what they called the Team Ranker. The concept is incredibly simple: pick two teams out of a hat and display them both (with perhaps a few bits of useful info such as a win-loss record or… a stock chart). The user simply has to click on the one they think is better. Period.

Whichever team (or in this case, stock) has the best win percent is rated as #1, and the rest are sorted accordingly. The system was far too simple to game, at least for football. What this usually meant is that earlier in the day (when the East Coast is awake and voting) highly ranked teams in the SEC and other eastern conferences dominated the rankings. When it got later in the afternoon, teams with East Coast fan bases slipped in the rankings while PAC-10 teams rose into the top spots. This is unavoidable for something like football, where fans are fiercely loyal to their own teams over all others–but is the same true for stocks?

Would users on the East coast sway the list towards East-coast stalwarts like Coke and Home Depot while the West coast might favor silicon valley darlings over all others? It’s hard to say–especially considering that I limited the field to the Nasdaq 100, which is primarily dominated by tech stocks. Read the rest of this entry »

When I read about insoshi on Mashable and TechCrunch this morning, it got my mind buzzing… and immediately my thoughts turned to another Y Combinator startup–Heroku. I’ve been using Heroku for quite awhile now, and both my fondness for Ruby on Rails and my disdain (so far) for Google’s Big Table make it my prototyping engine of choice for the time being. The integration is not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but here’s a quick and dirty way to get an insoshi install running on Heroku (assuming you have an acccount):

First Steps

1. Download the insoshi tarball
2. Create a new heroku app
3. Import the insoshi tarball (how convenient is it that the heroku app importer wants a tarball!)
4. Run rake db:migrate (this will run a ton of migrations… once complete you can press escape to close the little popup)
5. Run rake install (this will create the default preferences file and the default forum.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve had a Google App Engine account for around a week or so now, but my biggest problem with it is that I don’t have any time to spend developing an app for it. I’ve got plenty of website ideas kicking around in my head (some that’ve been kicking around entirely too long), but not a whole lot of time to spend developing them (between working at a startup, working on a contract game, and preparing to move into a new house). Finally, I decided to just do something dirt simple. Dirt. Simple.

Introducing www.lotterybutton.com.

Rather than spend any money on advertising, I’m going to spend $100 and see where it gets me (well, $20 on registering two domains and $80 on giveaways).  The idea is so ludicrously simple that I’m sure it’s been done before. People come to the site, then press a button to claim a ticket. Advertisers pay me money to show them ads. I take half and raffle off the rest. I would never even bother trying something like this on my own, as doing a secure user registration system alone would be more of a pain than it’s worth (whereas Google is already doing it for me).

Read the rest of this entry »

After scrimping a bit for the last month or so (and getting a nice fat refund check from Uncle Sam via direct deposit), I sent off $4000 to my Roth IRA as my 2007 contribution this morning. As far as I can tell, I’m completely done with my 2007 taxes now. Besides having income in both Georgia (while in grad school) and California, I can pretty much say that will be my last “tame” tax year. Income from Filler didn’t start rolling in until January of this year, but things should be pretty interesting this time next year. The IRS wants receipts for everything, but I’m wondering just how much they’ve done to catch up to the digital age. I can certainly prove exactly how much has come in via bank statements and PayPal transfer logs, but tracking digital expenses (for various hosting services, sound effects, etc…) might prove to be another animal altogether. Read the rest of this entry »