Did you like the ideas I presented? If so, I’m planning to collect a ton more information over the next six months–and present an uber-version of the presentation at South by Southwest in 2009. If you think it would make for an interesting subject, please vote for my SXSW panel.
Last week I was at a panel at the AlwaysOn OnHollywood event. The subject was on bringing social technology into online entertainment.
The panel was moderated by Kara Swisher (Wall Street Journal writer and co-producer of All Things Digital). My co-panelists were Drew Curtis (CEO of Fark.com), Rooly Eliezerov (CEO of Gigya) and Abdul Khan (Co-Founder, I Beat You).
My main takeaway from the panel: I think the entertainment industry is still a couple steps behind. Instead of talking about Facebook and MySpace, they should be talking about Glam and Clearspring (and, dare I say, GamerDNA). The old social-networking model that’s based on the virality of friend invites is at a point of market equilibrium in my opinion. We need newer, cooler approaches to attracting members.
While riding the T to work this morning, I noticed this advertisement on the Red Line:
Vecna Medical? Sorry, but keep your risky necromantic procedures to yourself. It is extremely well documented that the Eye of Vecna and Hand of Vecna are extremely dangerous and risky. I’m sure that some people would be willing to amputate their own limbs and replace them with otherworldly artifacts of incredible power yet dubious origin, but I won’t be one of them. Consider yourself warned.
I guess there were no Dungeons and Dragons players amongst the branding committee for this company.
In another example of how videogames have already become a part of mainstream media, there’s a new media campaign that ties together 7-Eleven (the chain convenience store that’s well-known for its “Slurpee” drink) along with Coca-Cola.
According to the original press release, 7-Eleven wants to associate with Guitar Hero to keep Slurpees “cool”–a clever pun, but also a real challenge that’s facing many aging consumer brands.
The key question is whether game tie-ins like this will help up the coolness-factor for a brand like Slurpee, while also keeping games true to their spirit and mission. The opportunity is to build new revenue streams, but the risk is that games might get perceived as just another glitzy way to promote a product. I think it’s definitely possible to craft win-wins, so I’ll be watching this campaign closely.
Another potential opportunity: beyond making Slurpees cool, will this result in any extra sales of Guitar Hero?
It used to be that machinima (the creation of stories and videos by using the content within videogames) was the domain of geeks. That started to change with the South Park episode featuring World of Warcraft–but lets face it, South Park already has a lot of geeks watching it.
Conan O’Brien did a segment containing a machinima based in Grand Theft Auto IV. You can view it below:
I don’t know what the geek-viewing public of Conan O’Brien’s audience is, but it strikes me that machinima–and video games in general–just keep getting more mainstream.
I mentioned yesterday how Marvel was threatening to sue TechCrunch over their Iron Man screening. It looks like it’s all over–there is a post from Marvel’s attorney on the TechCrunch blog, displaying a hip and self-deprecating way to back down in style.
I was concerned for Marvel. I don’t care for their legal strategy, but I’m a lifelong fan of the Marvel universe, and I was worried they were setting out on one of those backbiting, anti-fan crusades that can haunt you for years. There’s a huge risk anytime you take legal action in cyberspace that you’ll cause far more damage to yourself through negative PR than you’ll ever gain through your the courts–just consider RIAA’s ongoing self-inflicted smear campaign, or last year’s attempt to suppress the AACS encryption key used on HD-DVD players.
People have long known about the issues with trademarks in domain names–one of the earliest forms of trademark abuse was cybersquatters grabbing well-known brand names and registering them as .com domains. In some cases these were resolved through paid settlements, and in other cases it’s spawned piles of lawsuits and the creation of special regulations to handle trademark disputes.
But what about social networks? Aren’t they really a Web-based, hypermedia version of a virtual world?
My guess is that social media will be the next area this phenomena rears its head. When you’re registering a new brand, and collecting all the important domain names (.com, .org, .net and so forth) as well as the somewhat less important ones (.biz, .us, .eu and the like) there’s another thing you might consider: grab your names on the more popular blogs and social networks.
For example, we grabbed GamerDNA on the more popular blogging sites, like Wordpress, blogger and even some of the newer ones like tumblr. It wouldn’t be fun to find out that someone grabbed our brand and started running a blog about games there. Similarly, we’ve got accounts at Digg, StumbleUpon, Myspace and Yelp (we wouldn’t want anyone to think our staff has poor taste!).
There’s a business in here somewhere–monitoring not only brand names, but all the incarnations of names across all the virtual worlds, social networks and other environments. At the same time, I’m cringing. Names are important to protect, but I wouldn’t want to see Marvel-like tactics used to annoy the universe of websites out there.
The blogosphere is abuzz with news of Bing Gordon’s departure from EA to join the legendary venture capital firm of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. There’s a few take-aways from this:
Aside from losing one of the spiritual leaders of EA, it just lost one of the executives who really “got” the power of the Internet and social media within the game industry. He’s spoken about his love of projects like Warhammer (an MMORPG) and Spore (the game which is going to change how the industry thinks about games and social-media convergence). Those will be big shoes to fill.
Kleiner Perkins is going to be pouring a lot of money into opportunities around Facebook and/or the iPhone (just last month, they announced a $100MM fund to back Apple iPhone development). With Gordon on board, it seems obvious that Facebook and iPhone games will be one of the key areas of investment.
Make no mistake about it–games and consumer entertainment products are becoming a major area of VC investment; and with KPCB putting so much money in, there will be many more funds to follow.
When I read Steven Baker’s write-up on Facebook’s server farm–10,000 servers and counting–I was amazed. Why the heck does Facebook need that many servers? It isn’t apparent to me that Facebook needs more than a few hundred servers. Some other commenters observed the same. But perhaps there’s more to this than meets the eye.
Google’s server infrastructure was covered in Business Week’s Google and the Wisdom of Clouds in December 2007. I was awed by the huge amounts of money being spent to build their server infrastructure. Even the electric bill is running $25MM/year per datacenter! Nevertheless, it makes sense for them: Google runs a huge number of applications, and making their server infrastructure available to developers is a big new business for them. Amazon discovered the same thing–why not make the cloud available to everyone, and profit from the world’s hunger for server capacity?
The biggest “problem” with Facebook’s f8 platform (that’s the platform for creating Facebook applications) is that you need to provide your own servers. This has led to quality-of-service issues with a lot of applications, and also creates another barrier to getting developers to make things for you.Might Facebook be ramping up server capacity because they plan to enter the cloud business as well? It would make a hell of a lot of sense. They’ve got a platform for building social applications with a built-in distribution model; if they could also integrate it with ability to offer flexible scaling of server capacity, then they’ve got a win-win with developers that could potentially leapfrog Amazon and Google’s clouds.
I have no idea of Facebook’s intentions, but this certainly suggests some of the amazing possibilities with social media businesses as they continue to scale.
The point that got sparked the most debate was “Avoid the unhappy and unlucky,” based somewhat on a similar point from Robert Greene’s The 48 Laws of Power. I believe good companies are built by passionate optimists who love what they’re doing. The “luck” they’ve experienced is just the result of their hard work
WPI is doing a great job of introducing people to some of the more exciting areas of computer science, and their Interactive Media and Game Design department is producing some great students. If at least one person walked away from my talk feeling inspired to get involved with a startup, then I feel like it was worth it.
