Chris Early, General Manager, Windows Gaming, Microsoft gave the end of day keynote at the LA Games Conference 2008 talking about Connected Gaming.

Chris describes himself as the Windows guy in the Xbox division. His talk focuses on connected gaming. Connected gaming has evolved from single device to cross platform connected games. That is being able to play Xbox games vs. people on the Windows platform. He points to ShadowRun as an example of this type of game.

It’s not just multi-player, multi-platform, it’s playing with friends. He says that people want to watch their friends play, to talk with friends while they play.

Why can’t all platforms, the phone, the PSP and the other platforms all work together? Why can’t my networks work together? If I have a great reputation on a Windows network, why can’t I have a great reputation on a Sony network?

Why do we want to connect? We want to play, watch, compare, share ,communicate , differentiate, group/belong. Why don’t we have that game? Why hasn’t Microsoft made a game with all these pieces? Chris says its brain melting hard to do this. It’s hard on the order of whether you can make money on putting all this together.

It’s really hard just to make a game that works between the Xbox and the PC. Mice are much better pointing devices the console handsets though are much better at managing movement. How do we make this kind of thing work across all platforms. It’s really hard.

The game companies are islands. The net result is that we all end up with fragmented communities.

Chris says that what the world wants is connected gaming, companion gaming, asynchronous gaming, to make my play valuable and persistent of data and character.

Most of all we want fun. We want to have fun with whatever device we have or platform we use.

Technorati Tags: LA Games Conference 2008, Chris Early, Microsoft

We are live blogging from the LA Games Conference. This session of the conference focuses on How to Win the Social Game - Harnessing the Power of Online Communities and Social Networks.

Panelists include:
Craig Alexander, Vice President, Product Development, Turbine
Ranah Edelin, Vice President, Electronic Arts
Mike Goslin, Vice President, Disney Online Studios
Scott VP Creative and User Experience, Gaia Online
Gabe Zichermann, CEO, rmbr.com
Moderator: Eric Goldberg, Managing Director, Crossover Technologies

Eric kicked things off by introducing the panel and asks them to describe their demographics.

Craig: We represent the oldest and most male demographic. Turbine has a number of medieval MMOGs such as Dungeons and Dragons and Lord of the Rings.

Ranah: Sims sold 100 million units last month. The Sims demographic is 60% female and predominantly under 30.

Mike: the primary focus is families and casual games. Ultimately, Disney would like to get the entire theme park audience.

Scott: Gaia demographic is teens with a skew towards girls.

Gabe: We are passionate about games and believe that every application can be made more fun using gaming techniques. The audience is everyone.

Eric: Asks about how social media relates to and promotes games.

Craig: We see social media changing the business a lot. Turbine has introduced a number of high barriers to getting started such as retail channels and big downloadables. By putting up a gaming portal with fee games people can be drawn into a relationship and ultimately up-sold to a subscription.

Ranah: The Sims 2 is the main platform for the core Sims game. There is an online community for Sims 2 which is focused on uploads and downloads of virtual items. It’s not monetized now. It’s treated as a bonus for the consumers. There is a lot of opportunity to grow that audience. EA wants to add to the experience in a controlled way and allow the audience to engage via other channels like YouTube etc.

Scott: Gaia started as a free site. It’s a platform for all these social aspects to be built. It’s designed for people to interact. Gaia has opportunities to monetize the audience by offering things that enhance the experience. Gaia is a hang out by nature with few rules, the opportunity to craft an identity and the forums with a million posts every day are the three social highlights that have made Gaia popular.

Mike: We want to cut down on the “griefers”, the guys who are obnoxious. We want to deliver a fun, friendly time in the space. It’s important that the feel comfortable in the space. As a result, there is a lot of effort to make the space safe.

Gabe: Facebook is the Napster of games. Not in the sense of piracy, but in the sense that socializing is the game. Socializing is the activity that people think is the most fun activity they can have. By stitching social game aspects on a community it’s turned Facebook into a tremendous success.

If you valued Pogo the same way you value Facebook it would be worth $4 billion. What’s going on: Other things are fun are not always games and by making socialization the game Facebook has created a lot of value.

Craig: Bringing lots of people together who have shared interest has great potential. We need more than just social, we need to give people experiences that they enjoy.

Gabe: Facebook is consuming an increasing amount of online time. Games are losing mindshare to Facebook.

Eric: What is the definition of a game to you?

Gabe: A game is whatever you think it is. As soon as you decide something is a game it can be a game. It’s the concept of funware. Game aspects can be built into any application that recognizes gaming interactions and fundamentals.

Scott: Game play is anything where we are challenged and have fun. You need some low barrier ways to participate. This needs to happen before you can get into deeper socializing.

Gabe: As soon as you put a leaderboard in place, it seems to cause a game like action. If you want to make something a game, a leaderboard is the place to start.

Gabe: Look at LinkedIn. There are people who have decided to make it a game by keeping track of how many connections they have. It’s the same dynamics of the hard core MMOG player

Eric: Is it possible that games will allow people to extract more money out of social media.

Ranah: It’s clear that Facebook monetization is low right now. The priority right now is to build an engaged audience. There are ways to monetize that audience once the audience is engaged. He describes an advertising campaign with Ford where they made downloadable virtual Fords that players could use in the game. It made Ford, Sims and the players happy.

Ranah: One word that hasn’t come up is communication. A communication platform like Facebook is really an important aspect of success. It’s needed to compliment the game techniques.

Technorati Tags: LA Games Conference 2008, social games

We are live blogging from the LA Games Conference. The conference is being held at the Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood, California. John Welch, Co-Founder and CEO of Playfirst, is giving the opening remarks. He’s running through 20 slides really fast providing an overview of Playfirst, a large publisher of casual games like Diner Dash, Wedding Dash, Dairy Dash, and Pet Shop Hop. All people read, watch and listen to diverse genres of media on diverse platforms. Are games really any different? Casual games got started with Bejewled and others like it. Then we moved to $20 downloadables. The casual game sector is projected to grow to $5B by 2010.

The casual game platform needs to be accessible to everyone. Casual games need to be attractive to a large number of people. John points to three tests for successful games: Is it an attractive them, is it enjoyable, will you invite others into the game.

Key questions for this event: Who will be the winners and losers in the fully connected world? What do consumers want? How will Moore’s law play out in the living room? Who really wants a game console? Will the console become the portal for the internet?

Who will win the social game? How will innovation, pricing and distribution change?

When we look at the changes in the casual game sector, we are seeing changes where casual games have become online/downloadable. While the game console isn’t casual, the Wii and games like Rock Band are driving the casualization of consoles.

In the last year, the VC’s got it. The Big game publishers are getting it and Hollywood is taking notice.

Technorati Tags: LA Games Conference 2008

Do you like to talk about the news? Want to find other people in your neck of the woods that also like to talk about the news? If so, you should check out Topix.

At the spring Digital Hollywood, I interviewed Chris Tolles, CEO of Topix, to discuss the social news site.

 

 Digital Podcast 47 [13:55m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (1540)

Chris describes how Topix takes news feeds from a vast array of news sites and uses sophisticated algorithms to process the news into locations and categories. The result is the Topix news feed. Want to find local news just put in your zip code and you get a filter which presents news relating to your area.

The really interesting part about Topix is the conversation about the news. The site only provides the title and an abstract of the article along with a link to the original story. The title and abstract kick off the conversation. The more provocative the topic, the more conversations buzzes.

This use of news topics as social objects allows you to find other people who are interested in the things that you’re interested in and other local people who are really into talking about the news.

For those of us working in the social media business, Topix also provides some interesting lessons how generate a conversation. The key is to lower the cost of participation as much as possible. Topix starts with a very simple subject and abstract. They then make is super simple to start talking. Right below the topic is a comment box. No registration required, just put in a name, your comment, and a 4 character code and then you can leave your comment.

The result is a powerful social object that makes the conversation the focus of attention.

Technorati Tags: Topix, Chris Tolles, Social News, Digital Hollywood

Microsoft has officially dropped it’s bid to buy Yahoo. It took quite a long time for Microsoft to see the light and it may only have been Yahoo holding out for a higher price that finally killed the deal.

I was quite skeptical that this deal wood be good for Microsoft or Yahoo, and believe the major beneficiary of it would have been Google. Neither Microsoft or Yahoo has a product that effectively competes with Google’s search and advertising products. Combining two huge computer systems or choosing between the two would have tied them up in knots for years.

Yahoo has some great potential if they can truly integrate their social assets and open them up as a new type of application platform. Perhaps the Microsoft bid was the spur that Yahoo needed to get it’s act together.

Yahoo’s shares will drop on Monday and Yahoo will be sued by shareholders who are frustrated by their inability to close a deal. It will be interesting to see if Yahoo continues to pursue the Google deal and if Microsoft emerges as competition for an AOL deal.

If Yahoo doesn’t take this chance and start delivering performance, then Microsoft or someone else will be back and buy them for much less than the $37 per share Yahoo wanted to agree to the deal.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft, Yahoo

John Batelle of Federated Media interviewed Marc Andreessen, founder of Netscape, Loudcloud and Ning.

John: At what point did you know when Netscape was going to be big?

Marc: It ramped really fast. Released it to 100 people and then it went viral. However, it wasn’t until they founded Netscape that he felt it would be big. At the time, the cable companies were advocating interactive TV and it wasn’t clear how it would play out.

John: Are you concerned about how the big players/cable companies are approaching the web now?

Marc: It depends on who you are speaking about. Most media companies are still not prepared for the shift. Newspapers are in a free fall and still don’t know how to respond. There The telecom players are huge enablers, but they are uneasy about being positioned as commoditized future so they are looking a pricing structures to protect themselves.

John

Marc: At the time, nobody was making money online. John Doerr believed in them. They launched three businesses – not-for profit, enterprise and advertiser supported browser. All three worked.

John: MS built what you built, what do you think about that?

Marc: MS even used the original Mosaic code to launch their browser. We didn’t know what the future business of the company would be. The enterprise software business was doing very well. The advertiser business grew quite large as well. We just knew we needed to adapt.

John: How might it have turned out differently?

Marc: the big surprise – how many things done early have lasted and done well. JavaScript is an example. At the time, it was needed. Then it went into a hiatus and had a resurgence. Cookies are another example. They came up with the idea over a weekend when they needed to figure out how to develop a persistent shopping cart. Another example is a back and forward button. At the time, they couldn’t think of anything better, now it has gone all over the place in the operating systems and into applications.

John: Talk about the cloud. What do you think about the idea of a web operating system?

Marc: I saw the browser as a half way step. The surprising thing has been the persistence of many of these things, including the browser. The browser is the access point for the audience, which creates a self-reinforcing trend to build the applications in the browser.

John: put on your industry observer hat. Talk about some of the big names. Start with Microsoft.

Marc: Wonderful company (laughing). I think they have a very important role to play. The mesh work that Ray and company are doing is great stuff. Today, there are more counterweights to MS. It seems to have splintered and fragmented.

John: What about MS buying Yahoo?

Marc: I think it will be successful if they do the deal and they could be successful separately. Other companies will still be successful. The underbrush will continue to be successful.

John: Ning raised a bunch of money – What do you mean by the coming nuclear winter?

Marc: I have no idea about what’s really going to happen. The credit markets are bursting. After the stock bubble, the money went into real estate and then into credit. While tech doesn’t have a lot to do with these industries, everything is linked together. If consumers spend less, companies cut back and tech gets hit.

John: Talk about Ning. Why is Ning not Facebook?

Marc: Ning allows people to build their own Facebook like applications. Over 250,000 networks. 1,500 networks per day….

John: How do you feel about the idea of data portability?

Marc: we are very pro data portability. They have lots of ways to get data in and out of the system. There is not a lot of demand for this yet, from either consumers or developers.

John: What about OpenSocial?

Marc: Facebook did an amazing thing opening up it’s platform for developers. It was a powerful idea. However, it was closed to Facebook. That created a need for an open standard, which led to OpenSocial.

Audience: Do you view yourselves as a platform or will you get into networks yourself?

Marc: we are a platform business. We have no intention of getting into networks ourselves.

John: How are CPMs. Are you getting your 17 cents?

Marc: Much higher than that. The networks being focused lend themselves to better advertising opportunities.

Audience: What can you say about Bill Gates?

Marc: He’s made a tremendous impact on the industry. It’s hard to see what things would be like if MS had not been able to standardize the operating system. Interesting, the mobile world is more like the PC industry before a standardized operating system. It’s holding things on mobile back.

Audience: What can we do about browser security leaks?

Marc: I can’t do anything about it. It’s just a continuous cat and mouse game that will be a continuing story to come.

Audience: what role can academia play in a conference like this and in the future?

Marc: Most of what happens in tech, is brewing in the university systems. They need to do a better job of teaching business skills to go along with the technology skills.

Here’s the video:

Technorati Tags: Marc Andreessen, Ning, Netscape, Web20Expo

Slide makes fun little widgets. They recently did a round of investment raising $50 million at a $500 million valuation. Max says that they will make money from these applications through selling advertising and direct to consumer sales. Max just returned from Asia where he sees virtual goods selling in the billions of dollars.

Max says that the widgets Slide makes are very engaging. They engage users in a way like Television and in some cases even more deeply. He describes how Juno the movie used Slide’s Super Poke application to do a Pregnancy Test action that 370,000 people voluntarily used the action.

Max describes how they are obsessed with collecting and analyzing data. Charlene asks about privacy. Max describes how their data analysis from the user level up. They aggregate the users into segments of like activities. However, they don’t know the user id or email because that’s not provided by the social networks that host their applications.

Charlene asks about the risks from the social network hosts. Max describes how once consumer finds something they like and actively seek it out. He uses the Adobe /MS to show how if you focus on something that is of real value, with lock in you have a protectable business.

What about application spam? Stop throwing sheep at me. Max says that this is one of the most challenging issues. The power of these networks is the ability to spread things at an incredible rate and the temptation to expand is quite strong.

He says that the spam problem breaks into to different types of problems. The first is, abusive users who spam people. That part will get handled as other abusive activity gets handled. The harder part is the genuine use by heavy users. It can be perceived as spam by light users. Max says they thing that the path ahead is giving the users control and filters to help them decide how they will participate.

What’s the secret sauce of success? Max’s first four startups failed, but the fifth did well and the Slide is the sixth. He says that one of the things he has learned is the importance of drive when hiring people. He says that the two things he watches are the number of people who embrace the applications world wide and the number of employees who will be millionaires on a IPO. He says that his one last piece of advice is from Winston Churchill – Never, never, never give up.

Here’s the video:

Technorati Tags: Max Levchin, Web20Expo, Slide

In what was certainly the funniest and most enjoyable presentation at Web 2.0 Expo, Dan Lyons AKA Fake Steve Jobs, discusses how he came to start the Fake Steve blog and explains why he thinks it works. Thanks to the Web 2.0 team for putting together this video and the other videos from the Web 2.0 Expo.

You can find more videos of the keynote presentations at Web2Expo channel on Blip.TV

Technorati Tags: Fake Steve Jobs, Dan Lyons, Web20Expo

Tim O’Reilly interviews Jonathan Schwartz, CEO of Sun. Sun pioneered the phrase the network is the computer.

Tim asks Jonathan about how he uses blogging to help run Sun.

J: Blogging as a term at some point will become achronistic. Its about communication. Why not use the internet to communicate effectively and authentically. One of the toughest parts of the job is communicating with the 33,000 employees. Why not communicate with them and everyone else at the same time.

T: Controversy part of the strategy?

J: If you talk about undifferentiated things that are expected then nobody cares. You have to take a position to have anyone care.

T: What’s the worst horror story for your PR department?

J: Most terrifying when GC started writing a blog (lol), never really terrified the PR department, but have scared the IR department at times. Required a link to safe harbor statement.

T: How should/could people use blogs?

J: View it as a way to communicate. Communicate in the way that’s most effective to you.

T: Recently bought MySQL. A billion dollars is a lot for a company that gives its product away.

J: Integration is going fantastically. MySQL is not a charity. It was making money and growing like a weed. They were in the midst of doing an IPO and we felt that there was a great synergy with what Sun does. They now get 70,000 downloads everyday so they get 70k new touch points every day that they can introduce Sun’s infrastructure to.

T. What about the network providers and cloud computing?

J: Whatever we can use to reach consumers and touch them. Increasingly the touch points will be everywhere.

T. The cloud creates the ability to create these really interesting data collections.

J: We have huge numbers of downloads and updates. We get a huge data exhaust from this that provides us with insight into what’s going on around the internet.

T. Do you view Amazon as a utility?

J. Clear pricing and substitutability are earmarks of utilities. The lack of substitutable APIs means that the don’t have the ability to move easily across providers. Users want that complete portability. If we get there, we will also get to clear pricing.

T. Talk about scientific computing. How do you see the low end and high end converging.

J. We see three pools of computing - business automation, erp, hr 90% of market. Two other segments - high computing and social infrastructure services that are both growing fast. These segments are growing really fast because the costs to do this have dropped so fast. He points to a company called Aggregate Knowledge - (an Amazon like collaborative filtering application that filters information across multiple data vendors). What he really needs is these really fast SMP machines that can handle the terabytes of data and huge computing really fast.

T. Asks about how Google is running on all these really small computers.

J. If you take a closer look, these are really high performance machines. More like what Sun sells.

T. What about virtualization?

J. We will be a leading provider of this and it will be free. We want everyting to be virtualized. We want them to be twice as efficient and that will likely result in twice as many being bought.

T. What about the power consumption?

J. We’ve already hit the problem. In Tokyo, the cost of the energy is higher than the cost of the computer. This is a problem. Still only half of the CTO’s are responsible for their energy costs.

T. How have you greened your infrastructure

J. The Niagra platforms an example of this. Went from 0 to $1billion within one year. It’s optimized for power efficiency.

T. Once the other half of those CTOs become aware of the power problem it will play into Sun’s cloud computing agenda

J. The other thing that’s interesting. When I asked the CTOs about whether they used MySQL, no one raised their hand. When I checked they had all downloaded it between 500 to 5,000 times.

T. Talk about the Black Box.

J. Moving air around is really inefficient. Power sources shift as well. We need to make it portable. The most portable thing is a shipping container. We are now in deployments of these mobile computer data centers.

T. Any last thoughts

J. The network is the computer, data is the currency. ZSF storage innovation is an important part of this. We’ve been very aggressive moving out to connect with the part of market that thinks about data. Free products and great ideas are the best way to connect with that market.

UPDATE: Here’s the video

Click To Play

Technorati Tags: Jonathan Schwartz, Sun, Web20Expo

Yahoo’s CTO Ari Balogh opened his speech at Web 2.0 Expo speaking about about 3 big bets: being the most important starting point for the web, being a must buy advertising property and being open.

He says that Yahoo has been open for a long time. They have lots of open API’s. Flickr is the second largest of these.

He wants to take “open” to a whole new place. He wants to open up all the assets to developers. They want to open up the social network that is Yahoo. It sounds like they have been learning from Facebook and OpenSocial. They seem to recognize that they have the ability to be the worlds largest social platform if they can get this right.

He announced the opening of the beta for search monkey. He says that Yahoo’s open strategy is not just about opening up the search page, but opening up all the aspects of Yahoo.

They will have an application platform and a social platform. They are going to unify profiles across Yahoo go make social possible. The third element is to re-wire all the properties of Yahoo so that there is a consistent API across the different experiences.

They want to rewire the entire Yahoo experience to be social. They don’t view social as a destination. He provides an example of social being used to highlight mail in email system, highlight what’s important to friends in My Yahoo or on the sports page.

Y! OS (open strategy)

• Rewiring Yahoo
• Open Yahoo to developers like never before
• Making Yahoo more social
• Making Yahoo portable.

Search Monkey now, much more later this year. The overall process will unfold over time. Look for releases over this year and next.

UPDATE: Here’s the video of the presentation:

Technorati Tags: Yahoo, Open Strategy, Web20Expo