(* Kristen Nicole *) 

GameStrata began as a developer of community tools for gamers, and is now getting ready to launch a new online community of its own, in order to provide a more in depth look at the games you like to play, whether it be on a game console or on the PC.

There are forums, leader boards, and of course, the actual games that users can take part in online. Theres even a good amount of development going on within the gaming community to bring new products like chat and media-sharing options directly into the games themselves.

But GameStrata takes bits from most of these concepts and rolls it into a community for dedicated gamers. Think of it as a leaderboard on steroids, where you can see an even more detailed look at your own game, including your skills, the weapons you use, and more. GameStrata does this by working directly with the gaming companies, like EA Games, in order to get some interesting stats for the gamers that are signed up in the GameStrata community. So you can see not only your own stats, but the stats from others. What’s the weapon of choice, kills scored for specific classes, etc.

This brings an interesting look at players, the overarching trends taking place in gaming communities, and some key details that you would be hard pressed to find elsewhere. This type of data would be difficult to get in a centralized location, and the good thing about all this collected data is that it’s being used for the benefit of gamers themselves. Would game developers be intereted in this type of community?

Most likely. Developers like EA Games are working on increasing user engagement for game players in an online market, and research is a big part of that development. So having a community that’s benefiting from such quantitative information that’s also creating its own self-contained metadata is a unique look at overall trends.

Posted by brian tiong at 10:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

(* Source: Soshable.com *) 

It’s time to run down to the nearest electronics store and grab a video camera while they’re still available.  Many of the businesses who haven’t been posting videos to YouTube will be jumping on the bandwagon soon.

There were 34 news stories listed on Google news for January 17th and 18th, 2007, stemming from the latest comScore video metrix results that have Google video sites owning over 31% of the online video market.  YouTube accounts for a huge portion of that.

Alexa data shows over 18% of Internet users worldwide visit YouTube, while Compete data has YouTube approaching 60 million visitors a month.

Perhaps most importantly, Google, Yahoo!, and some other search engines are starting to give very strong rankings to videos in their natural search results, especially those from YouTube.

All of these things point to one conclusion: the rise of video spam. Read more

Posted by brian tiong at 10:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

(* Source: Soshable.com *) 

When a company has news that they want buried, they issue their information on a Friday night and hope nobody in the media notices on Monday morning.  Marred in controversy over their Beacon advertising platform, Facebook hoped that their latest attempt to gather more user-data would go unnoticed.

Developers will now be able to extend their Facebook applications to their own websites by using the formerly-closed JavaScript client library.  Since it does not require any server side code on the developer’s server, they can now create a Facebook application that can be hosted on any Web site that serves static HTML.  The result: putting a Facebook app on a website is now extremely simple.

As Mashable noted, “Users could now go about the Web, doing your own thing, but still be connected to their Facebook profiles.”

In the quest for more user-data, Facebook has exchanged its exclusivity on its apps for a free flow of cookie-based information.  By using web apps to follow users through cookies, Facebook will be able to collect user data on any site that uses the API.  This isn’t new, but by opening up the JS client library, the number of sites using Facebook apps will grow exponentially.

The timing of the release on their developer’s news page was perfect.  They cannot afford another storm of bad press associated with collecting user data.  Possibly in an effort to “smokescreen” it even more, they preceded the announcement with a “juicier” bit of news earlier that day, a partnership with Amazon Web Services.

Three important things were noted by Nick O’Neill on his unofficial Facebook blog:

1. “Somehow nobody has seemed to take note of this significant step.”
2. “Facebook has now implemented the ability to leverage cookies to access a user’s data even when they are not at your application.”
3. “This is a huge step in Facebook extending their platform beyond the Facebook.com domain and letting people leverage the power of the ’social graph’.”

The fact that nobody noticed the implications of this big news is by design. They will be better off easing this forward rather than blasting it over the intercom.  The last thing they need is another user data controversy.

John Potter, ZDNet’s chief of development, said in his article, “With this new library, the number of sites, and site owners, that can deploy Facebook applications just increased dramatically.”

Posted by brian tiong at 10:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

(* Source: Adam Sherwin *) 

Bold statements by QTrax, 25 million tracks, support from all major labels... Wow! Pls show me more...  

Adam says...

After a decade fighting to stop illegal file-sharing, the music industry will give fans today what they have always wanted: an unlimited supply of free and legal songs.

With CD sales in free fall and legal downloads yet to fill the gap, the music industry has reluctantly embraced the file-sharing technology that threatened to destroy it. Qtrax, a digital service announced today, promises a catalogue of more than 25 million songs that users can download to keep, free and with no limit on the number of tracks.

The service has been endorsed by the very same record companies - including EMI, Universal Music and Warner Music – that have chased file-sharers through the courts in a doomed attempt to prevent piracy. The gamble is that fans will put up with a limited amount of advertising around the Qtrax website’s jukebox in return for authorised use of almost every song available.

 More here

Posted by brian tiong at 09:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

(* Source: eMarketer *) 

(* Source Adam Ostrow *) 

Dan Frommer at Silicon Alley Insider alerts us to a new offering from Google: the ability to purchase ads within newspapers that contain a 2D bar code. If a consumer sees such an ad, they can capture a picture of the barcode, and special software will then de-code it and send them to a specified page on the mobile Web. Apparently, this advertising format is already gaining popularity in Japan.

Will it work in the US?

To be able to use barcode ads, you first need to download de-coding software to your phone. Google provides a link to a site Nokia has setup to download codes, as well as to a company called Kaywa that is offering a form of de-coding software. The problem here is that I know very few people who will go out of their way to download software that helps them participate in more advertising. For bar code ads to work, phones need to come pre-loaded with the software, meaning carriers and device manufacturers will ultimately decide when barcode ads take off, if ever.

What are the benefits?

For the most part, today’s print advertising is limited in terms of being able to measure response. You don’t necessarily know if someone is visiting your store or web site because of your ad. Google, through AdWords/AdSense has created perhaps the most advanced advertising measurement system in the world, and by making newspaper ads interactive, advertisers will have much more insight into how their ads are performing, and presumably, be able to get a better return on their investment. For consumers, the ad format beats writing down a phone number or cutting out a coupon.

When will it happen?

A mobile exec tells Frommer that probably only around 1% of phones in the US have the necessary software installed. Thus, while including a bar code in a print ad might be a nice novelty, it’s not likely to be a good investment at this time. That said, with Google Android ramping up this year with the support of most of the carriers, the company clearly has a plan for how to get the software on more phones. As usual, Google is aiming big on this one, and has a very clever strategy for making it work. However, I think it is likely still at least a few years until they get enough traction to make barcode ads commonplace.

Posted by brian tiong at 10:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

(* Source: Adam Ostrow *)

So, U2’s manager thinks “hippy technology and internet executives” are to blame for declining music sales. According to The Guardian:

“He likened [the technology companies] behaviour to a magazine publisher which “was advertising stolen cars, processing payments for them and arranging delivery”.

This follows the controversial launch of Qtrax over the weekend, who claimed to have all four of the big labels signed on to provide a free, ad-supported music service, only to have the record companies reply with a big “huh?” come Monday. Then, you’ve got artists like Jermaine Dupri (and many others) who don’t like the iTunes model of allowing consumers to buy individual tracks. Of course, we’d also be lying if we said consumers aren’t partly to blame, perennially jumping to the next free p2p network to grab free music until the lawyers get it shutdown. Thus, without further ado, today’s poll asks:

Poll here 

Posted by brian tiong at 10:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

(* Source: Erik Schonfeld *) 

An important part of any blockbuster movie’s revenues these days comes from merchandising deals—all the ancillary toys, T-shirts, and backpacks that flood stores after the release of a Harry Potter, Spiderman, or Star Wars movie. Now that virtual worlds are popping up where residents actually pay for digital representations of avatars, furniture, clothing, and other items, perhaps there is a new licensing opportunity there for the movie studios. Paramount Pictures and Habbo, a virtual teen hangout with 8 million members worldwide, may have just struck the first such deal.

In February, Habbo will begin selling virtual goods inspired by The Spiderwick Chronicles, timed for the release of that Paramount movie. It will later add virtual items from Beowolf and Mean Girls, two other Paramount films that have already come out. Habbo says it has 1.8 million members in North America, which is the area covered by the deal. It will be a long time before virtual merchandise licensing comes close to matching the revenues from real-world licensing (typically, each item costs less than $1), but for Paramount the money is almost a secondary consideration. As teenagers pass these things around on Habbo, it is great marketing for the films. They are giving the movies their own personal stamp of approval, and expressing their identity through the characters and virtual objects from the films.

Posted by brian tiong at 10:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

(* Source: Mark Hendrickson *)

Ah... the great thing about web2.0 is that whatever you're thinking, somebody has also thought about it already.  Here is a good example as just the other day, i was thinking someone should make self service widgets... here it is.

Mark says... 

A new application called Sprout, launching in private beta at DEMO today, promises to make the creation of Flash applets a whole lot easier.

Sprout is a browser-based, WYSIWYG editor for Flash with an interface reminiscent of Photoshop or Dreamweaver. Designers can use it to create, publish and track Flash widgets, websites and mashups, thereby obviating the need for them to work with programmers who would cost time and money, and who might not execute designs satisfactorily.

The application itself is entirely Flash/Flex-based and won’t require account registration for first-time users (that is, once the private beta period is over). As can be seen in the screenshot to the left, the interface consists of a staging area for construction of a so-called “sprout” (don’t call it a widget!), as well as several panels for tools, components, pages, properties, and more. I found that my experience with Photoshop served me well for creating a sprout (embedded below) that displays TechCrunch feeds, since the same editing concepts are applied by both programs. That said, it would be nice if Sprout had undo capabilities and proper layering, as found in Photoshop.

While all WYSIWYG editors lack at least some of the functionality achievable through direct programming, Sprout overcomes this limitation in part by providing a library of “components” that can be integrated into a given creation. The company has lined up general components such as video, slideshows and RSS feeds in addition to components from 3rd party web services such as Meebo, Yahoo Maps, PollDaddy and Ribbit.

Sprout is marketing its release as a better way for designers to create distributable widgets. The company has partnered up with Clearspring, Gigya, and SpringWidgets to provide both easy distribution and tracking/analytics. Sprout creators can track the usage of not only entire sprouts but the elements, such as buttons, within those sprouts. They can also use the application to make changes to sprouts that have already been distributed across the web.

While Sprout’s current focus is on the widget use case, its capabilities don’t end there. Since you can create sprouts of any dimensions, there’s nothing stopping you from creating entire websites using Sprout. Its pages and linking functionality certainly lend themselves to this type of creation. And since Sprout has incorporated 3rd party services, it can also be used to create mashup pages/portals. The range of possibilities will increase when Sprout releases an SDK in the following month, allowing outside developers to add to the components library.

Sprout should be publicly available in the next few weeks. Until then, the first 200 TechCrunch readers to sign up here will gain access to its private beta. A video demonstration of Sprout is provided below, alongside the RSS feed sprout I created for TechCrunch (hosted on their demo server so it may go down).

 

Posted by brian tiong at 09:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

(* Source: Erik Schonfeld *) 

For any aspiring guitarists out there, here is a site for you. iVideosongs is launching at DEMO today after two years in the making. It offers video tutorials on how to play guitar from world-class instructors, musicians and sidemen. You won’t find instruction videos from Slash here (yet), but there are guitar videos from Graham Nash, John Oates, and Alex Lifeson (the guitarist from Rush). This site seems to be aimed squarely at the aging Baby Boomer male who still wans to play guitar. And there are a lot of those. But, actually, anyone can learn from the videos, which are quite good. The videos are large and clearly show closeups of exactly what you need to do.

The startup was founded in 2006, and has raised $3 million in angel funding. It’s spent the past two years licensing rights to song libraries from all the major music publishers. The site offers some free tutorial videos, but most cost $5 (for instructor videos) or $10 (for artist videos). Compare this to $35 to $40 an hour for guitar lessons.

That’s the beauty of the Internet: you can be taught by the best instructors at a fraction of what they would charge you for a one-on-one session. With each download, you get one song, broken up into bite-sized chapters for learning a song’s intro, verse, chorus, bridge, and outro. Artist videos also include interiews where they talk about their influences, guitar-picking history, and inspiration for a particular song. The site is launching with a catalog of 50 songs, plus 25 free tutorials. By the end of the year, it hopes to have 1,000 different songs. Instructions for how to play the drums and keyboard are available as well.

Posted by brian tiong at 04:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

(* Source:  Nick Gonzalez *)

Social music is all about making music free, aggregating community and monetising the service with ads. It is still early days now but this is the way forward and where the record industry needs to be looking and investing for their future in this fragmented market.  It's really no different from the past and all about conversation that sells more music... Go Imeen Go!

Nick reports... 

"Both Imeem and Anywhere.FM saw a lot of synergy in the deal. Anywhere.FM has the best upload and player interfaces I’ve seen, but lacked a solid monetization method. Imeem will bring its music deals and sales team to bear on the service and hopes to leverage Anywhere’s client side iTunes sync uploader, buddy radio, and recommendation technology in particular. Anywhere’s uploader can upload your entire iTunes, WinAmp, or Windows Media Player libraries, including personal playlists, song ratings and play counts, with a single click. In an email correspondence, Imeem’s CEO Dalton Caldwell hinted at the company’s future saying, “I think that an excellent and complete product that is fully licensed will win vs. the fragmented market we are seeing out there right now.” I couldn’t agree more.

Although not currently announced, Anywhere.FM will likely have access to the same licensing deals Imeem struck with the major labels. The deals allow users to stream any of 5 million songs from their friends for free. Being included on the deals would mean Anywhere.FM could avoid web broadcasting rules that placed limits on how often and in what order songs could be played.

Inking deals with all the majors marked a major turn around in Imeem’s history by ending the lawsuits that earlier dogged the site. But the deals came with at least Universal exacting a pound of flesh in form of some stock and a large upfront cash payment. The Financial Times said the payment was $20 million, although Imeem disagrees. Michael Robertson of MP3tunes.com, and earlier MP3.com, called it a death sentence.

While the ad supported model by their executives own admission has yet to be proven, Imeem has a major leg up over the competition. They’re legal with a large library and currently have over 20 million monthly uniques and 65,000 new registered users each day according to their own stats. Comscore ranked them the top growing social site last September. If ad supported music is going to succeed, Imeem is the startup to watch."

Posted by brian tiong at 04:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

(* Source: Mark Hendrickson *)

The Hype Machine is a great music blog aggregator that we’ve somehow failed to write about until now.

The site continuously collects material, including reviews and songs, from the best music blogs on the net. Comparisons can be drawn to Techmeme, which curates a selection of the best tech news articles from the multitude published each day. The Hype Machine does the same for music, saving indie music aficionados the time it would take to scour the web for the hottest new songs.

Not interested on keeping tabs on the music scene on a daily basis? You’re in luck - The Hype Machine just released its 2007 Music Blog Zeitgeist, a collection of the best songs, albums, and bands of 2007. CEO Anthony Volodkin says that the year’s picks were made through extensive analysis of the data collected throughout 2007. The song picks are broken down into months so you can see what was popular in, say, January of last year. The site’s built-in player also lets you play the year’s songs back-to-back and instantaneously.

The Hype Machine was originally started in 2005. The site generates revenue through both on-site advertisements and music sales leads. Version 2 of the site was released just this past fall and featured greater personalization capabilities, such as favoriting and customized feed creation.

Posted by brian tiong at 11:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

(* Source: Dave Bullock *) 

We get strange Jacob’s Ladder flashbacks every time our musician friends ask us if we’re going to NAMM, but then we realize they're talking about the National Association of Music Merchants show. Chock full of motorized automated faders and digitally controlled blinking lights, NAMM 2008 was a digital producer's nirvana.

(Note: To get the full experience of the NAMM show floor while you view this gallery, take every MP3 you own and play them simultaneously while banging on some drums.)

Posted by brian tiong at 03:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

(* Source: eMarketer *) 

Either way, marketers are getting prepared.

Posted by brian tiong at 12:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

(* Source: Duncan Riley *) 

First the news on Googles' new platform to compete with Facebook late last year, then a whole bunch of other social networking sites (incl Myspace) then jump on the platform bangwagon, a data portability workgroup is then formed to help all these companies talk in the same language and now... Facebook pulls another rabbit from it hat.  Clever? only time will tell.

Facebook announced Friday a new JavaScript client library that will allow Facebook apps to be displayed on any website.

The client library allows users to make Facebook API calls from any web site and create Ajax Facebook applications on that website.

Wei Zhu from Facebook explains the benefits:

Since the library does not require any server-side code on your server, you can now create a Facebook application that can be hosted on any web site that serves static HTML. An application that uses this client library should be registered as an iframe type. This applies to either iframe Facebook apps that users access through the Facebook web site or apps that users access directly on the app’s own web sites. Almost all Facebook APIs are supported.

Nick O’Neill at All Facebook writes:

Want to build your own social gaming platform that resides on your own website but leverages the power of users’ Facebook relationships? Now you can! There had previously been applications that could leverage the Facebook API prior to the launch of the platform but there are some significant differences now versus before. The first significant difference is the broader access to Facebook’s core features that the platform provides.

I’m not sure anyone saw this move coming, but Facebook may have just changed the game again by essentially becoming an application host. It’s a clever move by Facebook in a year its competitors will get more serious about offering platforms themselves.

Posted by brian tiong at 10:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

(* Source: Techcrunch *) 

It sounds like finally (maybe) the labels have put DRM to rest.  Ad supported initiatives next? Maybe they should have a proper look at how these new digital distribution players are connecting with their users for a quick lesson on the music business today.  Stop pissing your customers off!  It's all there, you just have to look. Read on...

Mike says...

I know I’m starting to sound like a broken record, but in case you haven’t heard: The era of paid music downloads is coming to an end (despite the fact that online sales are growing).

Qtrax, which has signed all four major labels (EMI, SonyBMG, Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group), launched yesterday with 25 million songs (compared to around 3 m for Amazon and 6 m for iTunes)

It isn’t pretty - the downloaded songs are not compatible with iPods and have to be played via a proprietary player built on the Songbird platform. Ads are displayed during playback, even on music devices. For now the service is Windows only, so Mac users are left out. And right now the service is down completely from all the attention it’s getting.

For most people, BitTorrent and the music search engines are all they need for their illegal-but-highly-convenient music needs. Any additional hurdles means not a ton of usage. And since services like Imeem and Last.fm provide free on demand streaming music with ads, there is already real competition out there for Qtrax.

But the trend is clear - labels have given up on DRM completely and are willing to experiment with ad supported free downloads. Once they give up on the ad supported part of the model and just realize that recorded music is nothing more than marketing collateral for other revenue streams like live performances, we’ll have gotten somewhere. But my guess is that one of the labels has to go out of business first for that to happen.

Posted by brian tiong at 10:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

(* Source: eMarketer *) 

The unbiased opinion is trusted around the globe.

Posted by brian tiong at 01:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

(* Source: Eric Pfanner *) 

Eric says... 

As consumers lose interest in compact discs and balk at paying for the digital alternatives, the music industry is looking for new allies, including Internet service providers, lawmakers — even Chinese air guitarists.

The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry said Thursday that worldwide digital music sales rose to $2.9 billion last year, from $2.1 billion a year earlier. That was about 15 percent of overall sales, up from 11 percent a year earlier and less than 1 percent in 2003.

But digital sales have yet to make up for the shortfall in sales of compact discs, and overall sales of recorded music fell about 10 percent last year, to $17.6 billion, the federation estimated. A recovery in the music industry remains at least a year away.

 

More here 

Posted by brian tiong at 01:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

(* Source: Comscore *) 

The widget space is evolving as quickly as the audience is growing.  Have a look at some numbers Comscore has put together this time round...

Comscore reports... 

MySpace.com Widgets Reach Largest U.S. Audience

In November 2007, nearly 148 million U.S. Internet users viewed widgets, representing 81 percent of the total audience. MySpace.com widgets had the widest audience, reaching more than 57 million Internet users, while Slide.com ranked second with 39.2 million viewers. Google.com has the sixth widest widget-viewing audience with more than 19 million viewers.

*Facebook.com excluded from list due to different measurement methodology

** Clearspring is a widget platform and has independent objects; both are included in its total

“Top Friends” Tops Facebook Application Rankings

The inaugural Facebook application rankings revealed that more than 20 million Facebook visitors, or 61 percent of the site’s U.S. audience, engaged with an application in November. Visitors between the ages of 18-24 were twice as likely as the average Facebook visitor to engage with applications, while those aged 25 and older were less likely than average to exhibit this behavior.

“Top Friends” by Slide was the top ranked application during the month, with more than 6.2 million engaged viewers (18.5 percent of the Facebook audience), followed by Movies by Flixster with 5.2 million (15.4 percent), and SuperPoke! by Slide with 3.6 million (10.8 percent). Slide contributed three of the ten most engaged Facebook applications in November, while RockYou! contributed two.

* Rankings based on number of people that actively engaged with the application during the course of the month, which includes interacting with the object, downloads of the object or views of the application information page. The rankings may differ from Facebook.com’s own “Most Active User” rankings, which are based on daily active users.

Posted by brian tiong at 12:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

(* Source: eMarketer *)

Posted by brian tiong at 01:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

(* Source: eMarketer *)

Facebook might not be such a distant second.

Posted by brian tiong at 01:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

(* Source: Fang-Yu Lin *)

Posted by brian tiong at 06:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

(* Source: Dan Neumann *)

As convergence descends on the living room we are starting to see a lot of televisions designed to deliver web content over a broadband connection, bypassing a standalone PC. New models introduced by Sony, Samsung and Sharp at CES all showcased various ways of digesting online content. Of the three manufactures, Sharp’s Aquos Net offering was most the most promising. Televisions with Aquos Net include a browser by Netfront optimized for slightly lower resolutions of LCD TVs. What’s nice about the use of Netfront is that the company provides an SDK to help developers port and preview content to embedded platforms. In addition to the Netfront SDK, Sharp is providing its own SDK and developer program to support development of widgets. Sharp’s widgets are similar to desktop widgets in that they are downloaded from a gallery and are designed to be viewed while watching live TV.

I think Sharp has made some good choices with this product. By providing developer support from the outset they are likely to wind up with more content than competitors with closed delivery infrastructures. Let’s hope more manufacturers follow Sharp’s lead and, even better, that real standards emerge in the channel. It’s already a headache optimizing content for multiple browsers.  

Posted by brian tiong at 06:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

(* Source: Jeff Squires *) 

People just don't sit back and just listen to music anymore.  Music is consumed in various engaged ways as shown in this post.  Big future in music and advanced casual games and virtual worlds.  Read on...

It was surprising to see a record label emerge from a video game maker a couple of years ago when EA launched their own record label. It’s equally interesting to see how new music based video games such as “Rock Band” and “Guitar Hero” are driving digital downloads. In just two months since “Rock Band” was released, 2.5 million additional songs have been downloaded. Similarly, “Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock” has sold over 5 million songs since November. According to Reuters:

The original “Rock Band” and “Guitar Hero” games shipped with more than 50 licensed songs each, a mix of master recordings and covers. Since then, “Rock Band” has made new music available every week as either singles or in three-pack bundles that can be added as new playable levels for between 99 cents and $5.50. “Guitar Hero III” did the same, focusing on three-song bundles of new music and music featured in previous versions of the game.

As for which console is responsible for all the downloading, specific numbers have not been made available, but apparently the majority of downloads have been attributed to the Xbox. But bare in mind that the Xbox also sold about three times as many units as PlayStation 3.

While it’s unclear just how much of that profit is trickling down to the artists, MTV did announce that their Metallica three-pack of “Ride the Lightning,” “Blackened” and “And Justice for All” is the best-selling “Rock Band” download. We’re not quite sure how to react to this. Ironic?

Reuters: “Rock Band,” “Guitar Hero” drive digital song sales

Posted by brian tiong at 10:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

(* Source: Dan Taylor *)

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(* Source: Duncan Riley *)

Here is a round up of the winners of the Techcrunch 'Crunchies 2007'.  Happy surfing!

Duncan reports...

Best Overall: Facebook

Facebook revolutionized the idea of what social networking could be.

Best technology innovation / achievement: Earthmine

Earthmine picks up where Google Earth leaves off, bringing deep semantic data to 3D panoramas of the real world. Earthmine’s system can keep track of the objects found in the real world and attribute information to each of them, such as latitude, longitude, elevation, and other attributes.

Best Clean Tech Startup: Tesla Motors

Tesla’s green sports car has captured the imagination of a public who had come to expect electric cars to be dull are boring. Due to be released this year, the company has pre-orders from some of the biggest names in Entertainment and Technology.

Best video startup: Hulu

Hulu put television online. Their broadcasting system was modeled on the success of social video sites and drawn the praise of its previous critics.

Best user-generated content site: Digg

Digg’s simple voting system defined the emerging social media revolution. Getting “dugg” quickly became a badge of honor and established a coveted place in the geek lexicon.

Best mobile start-up: Twitter

Twitter, the new addictive microblogging platform. It wasn’t until after the South by Southwest conference that people realized the value of the incredibly simple microblogging platform.

Best International startup: Netvibes
Based in London, Tariq Karim and Freddy Mini’s Netvibes has made waves in the U.S. as a top personalized web portal.

Best consumer startup: Meebo
Meebo made instant messaging ubiquitous by bringing it online. They then developed it into a platform where anyone could add chat to their applications.

Best enterprise startup: Zoho

Zoho’s comprehensive online suite of 14 business applications ranging from document editing to CRM continues to lead the way in the move away from desktop computing to working in the cloud.

Best design: SmugMug

SmugMug is professional photo site. SmugMug’s attention to detail and design can command as much as $150 per year from their users.

Best new gadget/ device: Apple iPhone. See the Apple acceptance speech here.

Best business model: Zazzle

Looking for a Star Wars hat or memorable mug? Zazzle is an on-demand factory of consumer goods for top brands. It also lets consumers become producers by uploading their own images onto that T-shirt, mug, or mousepad. . Consumers can also receive a commission on products that they sell and design themselves

Best bootstrapped startup: Techmeme.
Founded and developed solely by Gabe Rivera, Techmeme serves as the front page of the tech blogosphere. The site’s advanced algorithms identify the day’s top stories by making sense of conversations across the web’s best blogs.

Best Startup Founder: Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook)

Does this really need any explanation? At 23 Mark has built one of the world’s leading online destinations that has recently been valued at $15 billion. A remarkable achievement for anyone, let alone someone at the still relatively young 23. A well deserved award.

Best Startup CEO: Toni Schneider (Automattic)

Schnieder has lead the company from its roots as a open source alternative to Movable Type into a multi-million dollar enterprise that saves the world from blog spam and offers a free hosted blogging solution that competes with Google’s Blogger.

Best new startup: iMedix

iMedix combines search and social networking to change the way people find health information online. Users are encouraged to help each other by sharing health experiences and links from around the web.

Most likely to succeed: Automattic (WordPress)

The open source blogging platform that powers the long tale and turned into a multi-million dollar spam fighting and hosted blogging service.

Best use of viral marketing: StumbleUpon

StumbleUpon’s service lets users bookmark and discover new sites they love. With only a $1.5 million investment in 2005, StumbleUpon gew to over 4 million Stumblers and was bought by eBay in 2007 for $75 million

Best time sink site: Kongregate

CEO Jim Greer describes Kongregate as XBox live for casual games. This site hosts some of the webs most addictive casual games. Remember Desktop Tower Defense? Moreover, the games are not only played by users, but also created by them in exchange for a share of advertising revenue and other rewards.

Most likely to make the world a better place: DonorsChose

DonorsChoose.org is dedicated to connecting classrooms in need with individuals who want to help.

Posted by brian tiong at 10:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

(* Source: Kristen Nicole *) 

The new application I speak of is called Blog Remix. It revolves around the concept of the creation of your very own mixtape. That’s something more web-based services are beginning to tackle as more music becomes available for integrated use with a variety of applications and tools. But what Blog Remix does in addition to provide access to music for mixtape creation is it adds music blog content as well. What you’ve got now is an audio and visual mixtape of sorts, that looks to bring you more contextual information about the music you love. This personalized approach to multimedia music as an industry working on the web is quite similar to idiomag, but you do all the work with Yahoo’s Blog Remix.

Additionally, it runs on Adobe AIR Runtime, which means it’s a downloadable application (yes, another downloadable app from Yahoo). If you don’t have AIR there are two downloads you’ll need: AIR and Blog Remix itself. Once you get past the daunting task of installing applications onto your desktop, you can begin to play around with Blog Remix.

 
Yahoo has taken the liberty of lining up some popular music blogs for you to start with. And in the same fashion as the MxPlay widget, Blog Remix will pull the music from the music blogs and enable you to add it to your playlist. If you’re a music buff, then you’ll know what some of the most popular music blogs are. Well, you won’t find all of them listed on Yahoo’s Blog Remix. That’s because Yahoo determines the best blogs based on the way in which they share content. The better a blog shares content, the easier it is for Blog Remix to gather it up and present it to you in a personalized mixtape package. And fortunately, your saved remixes can be exported to iTunes, or republished as an RSS or Atom feed.

But let’s talk about this application’s presence on your desktop, using AIR. I don’t entirely see the necessity of limiting users to this particular desktop model. Most applications that run on AIR also have sister websites for users to access through their browsers. Then, at the very least, users can access the majority of their account regardless of what computer they’re on. Yahoo tends to limit users to their desktops with a good portion of the services they roll out, including widgets, and this particular Blog Remix application is no different.

And as we’ve seen with MxPlay, there is the ability to make this concept work within the realms of a browser-based tool, which can then be added to Yahoo Widgets, even, as there is now the ability to make a widget compatible on Yahoo’s desktop widget client (that way a new tool could be distributed through an existing channel that Yahoo’s been looking to improve anyway). For Yahoo, this is an interesting start, and there are many directions in which this could go, but I imagine a less isolated approach would fare better for the company.

Posted by brian tiong at 11:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

(* Source: Adam Ostrow *) 

 As a publicly traded company, SNAP Interactive (formerly eTwine Holdings), the company behind Facebook apps “Meet New People” and “Are You Interested?” is required to file their earnings every quarter with the SEC. Thus, we’re able to get a peek into how much money Facebook applications are actually generating.

SNAP reported $388,000 in revenue for their fourth quarter, which was up from $35,383 in the third. They attribute the growth to their applications: “Are You Interested” finished December with 5.2 million users, while “Meet New People” claims 350,000. Thus, it can be determined that each user was worth about 7 cents in revenue to SNAP in the quarter, or about 28 cents per year (388,000/5,500,000 * 4).

As deals become more common in the Facebook application space, the question becomes how much is a user worth? As a publicly traded company, SNAP is sporting a market value of around $10 million. At its current pace, the company looks to pull in $1.5-$2 million in revenue this year, meaning its price-to-sales ratio is 5:1. If you assume a 5x price-to-sales ratio, that would mean each one of SNAP’s users is actually worth around $1.40 (each user pulls in $0.28/yr, if the company is valued at 5x sales, you arrive a $1.40 per user valuation).

As for SNAP Interactive’s stock (STVI.OB), shares are up more than 400% in the past 12 months. However, it’s important to note that the company is traded Over-the-Counter (OTC), which means it’s highly risky and speculative. Nonetheless, it’s an interesting company to watch, if for no other reason than it lets us see the actual financials of Facebook applications.

Considering recent deals in the Facebook application space reported in the low-seven figures for apps with a few million installs, $1.40 per user seems to be a reasonable approximation of what an app user is worth, at least for apps with an advertising-based revenue model.

Posted by brian tiong at 09:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

(* Source: Asi Sharabi *)

Asi has the following burning questions:-   

• How these social technologies weave into our offline social lives?
  
• What does it mean to poke someone?
  
• What social need is fulfilled by installing the Define Me application?
  
• Are there any common denominators between the most popular applications?
  
• Is it just life-mimicking or are these apps actually distort our social systems and generate new behaviors?
  

He looks at these 100 most popular applications a very interesting picture revealed. There are overall 3 categories that these applications can be organised into:

• Identity formation - 43%

• Smarter people already noted that large part of social networking activity is for the sake of working, tweaking and exercising our identities. Our facebook profiles are both extension of self and a public platform where we actively search and reflect both who we are, and who we want to be perceived as.

• Phatic Communication - 37%

• The second largest category is a group of applications that best defined as Phatic Communication. This refer to all the apps used for establishing an atmosphere or maintaining social contact rather than exchanging of ideas, or, in other words, apps used to communicate sociability more than information.

  Grant previously put it neatly: “The phatic messages “stack” nicely, each message presupposing and building on its predecessor.

• Other - 20%

• Social Oraganisation - 3% of these applications including #1 are tools for social organisation. Together with Circle of Friends and We’re Related these applications enable users to organise their friends and to some extant to create hierarchy/architecture of relationships. I suspect that as friends list will get longer, and context will interweave, these will grow in popularity as the need for an order and context will only increase.

  Communication tools - 9% of the applications are simply enhanced communication tools. Like the popular fun wall and super wall (#2 and #3 most popular applications with just under 15million installs, these platforms do not carry information - they enable/enhance/extend communications between users. Included in this category are the mobile, Instant and SMS messaging applications.

• Games - 8%. This is a tricky one as I couldn’t decide if it desrves a separate category or should actually be a sub-category (within the self presentation one, after all these are another decorations to one’s identity). For now I’ll leave it as a separate category. Games like pac-man, the inceasingly popular jetmen, puzzles and poker, some are social games some are solitary all facilitate non-verbal interaction and are just part of what w do when we ‘hang-out’ on facebook.

More here 

Posted by brian tiong at 04:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

(* Source: Adnomics *) 

Facebook Facts:

• There are 774,865,961 installs across 13,677 apps on Facebook with over 168,000 developers currently evaluating the platform.

• These applications were used 34,175,797 times in the last 24 hours and have a combined valuation of $413,713,332.

• Facebook had approximately 60 million Unique Active Users in the past 30 days and a valuation of $18 billion.
  

• This translates to $300 per active user.

Got your attention? Ever wonder how many people are getting bitten by vampires, getting poked or receiving some free beer?  Found this great site providing a stock-market-style analysis of the Facebook platform that enable developers, investors or any curious marketer to track application growth, activity, and valuation.

More here. 

Posted by brian tiong at 04:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

(* Source: Victoria Murphy Barret *)

Since RockYou’s founding two years ago, 90 million social networkers have downloaded its applications. For this, RockYou is making more than $100,000 a month in revenues showing ads alongside its mini-applications for brands like AT&T (nyse: T - news - people ) and Sony (nyse: SNE - news - people ), as well as by plugging other developers’ mini-apps (for a fee). The pitch to advertisers: We are where the kids hang out. Yet RockYou doesn’t know much else about its customers. Facebook doesn’t share data about members’ ages, locations, education or anything else it might know.

Jia Shen, the 27-year-old co-founder of RockYou, sat down with Forbes.com recently to talk about how to make money selling snack-size software and what Google's (nasdaq: GOOG - news - people ) new open platform means for Facebook and MySpace.

Forbes.com: How did RockYou begin?

Jia Shen: We started two years ago noticing that everyone on MySpace was trying to “bling out” their pages. But there was no easy way to do it. We decided to put together a slide show tool. It took one week to build. I worked while I was on vacation in Japan. In one month, we had 100,000 people using it. Then in three months there were one million.

Impressive growth. But were you making any money?

None. You can’t advertise on MySpace. Facebook changed that. So now we’re like any other Web site: We make money on page views. Sony Pictures wanted to promote the film Resident Evil and used our Zombies application for a sweepstakes event.

We also advertise other applications and take a cut. Yahoo! created an application that lets you post music videos on your Facebook profile page. Yahoo! had 8,000 downloads after one month, which is pretty slow. We started promoting the application in banners above our own applications. In a single day on our network of applications, Yahoo! got 120,000 downloads.

What is your initial reaction to Google's new open platform for social networks?

We’ve been helping Google for a while on this. In theory, it should be very cool. We tested it out with an application called Emote (Editor's note: This is a collection of happy, sad, flirty smiley faces). Before all these networks required different code, and it took us three days to re-write the same application for Facebook to get it to work on Orkut. With the new standards, it took us just 30 minutes to make the same application work on Plaxo. The real test comes two months from now. How many companies will really give us real estate on their Web sites?

Will Google's open platform give a boost to less popular social networks like Orkut, Friendster and the Hi5?

Sure, if it yields them more applications, it gives people more reasons to flock to their sites. Web traffic isn’t yet a zero-sum game

Is this bad news for Facebook? Will developers spend less time on Facebook apps?

People are making real money on Facebook. So there’s risk in going elsewhere. Am I really going to spend time going after Orkut’s Brazilian audience? I’m more likely to focus on the U.S. market. Facebook is still growing nicely.

Do you worry that the social networking sites, particularly Facebook, will start launching their own applications and compete with outside developers?

It is always a worry, but something that we've lived with since day one. MySpace eventually built a competing slideshow, but we already had big penetration, with a diverse set of widgets. Facebook does do little feature creeps here and there. But everything they've done so far has been non-competitive.

What will Microsoft get from its deal with Facebook? (Microsoft announced in October a $240 million investment for a 1.6% stake in Facebook, and is serving ads on the site.)

This isn’t traditional brand advertising. But my belief is that Microsoft didn’t want only access to the ad network. Microsoft wanted to make sure no one else got Facebook. (Google was reportedly bidding.)

What were you doing before RockYou?

I came to Silicon Valley in 2000 after majoring in computer science and electrical engineering at Johns Hopkins. The first start-up I landed at failed in three months, so did the second. I thought I was the kiss of death.

But I have a short attention span, so it was fine by me. This company is changing so much I may as well be working at a different place every three months.

Posted by brian tiong at 03:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

(* Source: eMarketer *) 

Posted by brian tiong at 02:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

(* Source: Tom Hodgekinson *)

We've heard so much over the past year on facebook. Who is behind it, surely not that young Mark guy.  Great article by Tom.  Read on for who is pulling  the strings behind facebook.

Tom says...

"Facebook claims 59 million active users, including 7 million in the UK, Facebook's third-biggest customer after the US and Canada. That's 59 million suckers, all of whom have volunteered their ID card information and consumer preferences to an American business they know nothing about. Right now, 2 million new people join each week. At the present rate of growth, Facebook will have more than 200 million active users by this time next year."

 

Facebook is a well-funded project, and the people behind the funding, a group of Silicon Valley venture capitalists, have a clearly thought out ideology that they are hoping to spread around the world.

Although the project was initially conceived by media cover star Mark Zuckerberg, the real face behind Facebook is the 40-year-old Silicon Valley venture capitalist and futurist philosopher Peter Thiel. There are only three board members on Facebook, and they are Thiel, Zuckerberg and a third investor called Jim Breyer from a venture capital firm called Accel Partners.

More here 

Posted by brian tiong at 04:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

(* Source: Duncan Riley *)

Facebook has announced that due to complaints about the over abundance of apps of user profile pages they will soon allow users to hide their apps.

The “profile clean-up” tool is compared to how a “computer’s desktop will remind you to get rid of unused icons” (note here, Facebook is comparing themselves to Windows) that will allow users to move profile boxes to an “extended portion” of their profile.

Users can choose to move any or all of the application boxes, but according to Facebook’s Julie Zhuo Facebook “will recommend that [users] keep the Friends Box, Mini-Feed, Wall, Basic and Personal Information as well as the top 12 application boxes they have added.” Each profile will then have a link at the bottom to “Show Extended Profile, ” that will allow visitors to then see all applications a user has running.

The changes is a good thing for users of Facebook, who have been bombarded with cluttered profile pages that are reminicent of MySpace (without the awful colors) since the Faceebook platform launched last year. App makers on the other hand might not be so impressed. Many rely on profile exposure to help spread their apps virally, and now users can hide their apps, taking that benefit away. Unfortunately though this is still window dressing stuff from Facebook, the non-stop stream of rubbish that emanates from some apps (Funwall and Superwall in particular) remains untouched.

Posted by brian tiong at 10:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

(* Source: Michael Arrington *) 

Oh dear, it's just getting from bad to worse in the decisions the music industry is making. Read on what Mike has to say.

Mike says... 

It is becoming more and more difficult for the music industry to ignore the basic economics of the their industry: unenforceable property rights (you can’t sue everyone) and zero marginal production costs (file sharing is ridiculously easy). All the big labels have now given up on DRM. They haven’t yet given up on trying to charge for their music, but it’s becoming more and more clear that as long as there is a free alternative (file sharing), the price of music will have to fall towards free.

You can disagree as to whether it’s “fair” that the price of recorded music will be zero or near zero, but you can’t disagree that it’s going to happen. I presented my arguments here last October. Subsequently, we noted that even offering the new RadioHead album for free didn’t stop massive file sharing on BitTorrent. More recently, NIN’s Trent Reznor was disheartened to see that, when offered a choice between downloading a new album for free and paying $5 (and, thereby “feel good about supporting the artist directly”), only 18.3%, or less than 1 in 5, chose to pay the $5.

Personally, I think a new era of free recorded music and paid live performances is a very good thing. Recorded music will become a marketing tool to get people to pay for concerts and merchandise. Overall the music industry will be smaller in terms of revenue. But the artists who are driven to create their art will continue to do so, and many will make a very good living from it.

But before that happens, the music industry is going to make one last stand to preserve their “bloated bureaucracies.” And that is going to be a call for a music tax to create guaranteed revenues.

Reznor called for it today, saying “I think if there was an ISP tax of some sort, we can say to the consumer, ‘All music is now available and able to be downloaded and put in your car and put in your iPod and put up your a– if you want and it’s $5 on your cable bill.’”

This isn’t the first time its popped up. Over a year ago, Peter Jenner (he was Pink Floyd’s first manager, as well as managing The Clash and other great artists) called for a mandatory monthly tax in the European Union on broadband Internet and mobile phones of around €4/month that allows consumers to download and consume all the music they want without DRM. I attacked his plan, and he responded here.

Mathew Ingram notes that similar efforts are being made in Canada. Last month the Songwriters Association of Canada called for a mandatory $5/month ISP music tax.

So far they’re just testing the water. The big push will come when the labels put lobbying dollars behind the effort, sometime in the next few years.

Music Taxes Will Kill Music Innovation

Forcing people to buy music whether they want to or not is not a solution to this problem. The incentives created by such a system are perverse - guaranteed revenue and guaranteed profits will remove any incentive to innovate and serve niche markets. It will be the death of music.

Music industry revenues will be a set size, regardless of the quality or type of music they release. Incentives to innovate will evaporate. There will only be competition for market share, with no attempt to build the size of market or serve less-popular niches. Forget labels building new brands and encouraging early artists to succeed - they’ll bleed existing big names for all they are worth and work hard to keep anything new - labels, artists, and songwriters - out of the market. New entrants just means more competition for a static amount of money. Collusion by existing players will run rampant.

Soon labels will complain that revenues aren’t high enough to sustain their businesses, and demand a higher tax. It will go up, but it will never go down.

As I said before, Asking the government to prop up a dying industry is always (always) a bad idea. In this case, it is a monumentally stupid, dangerous, and bad idea.

Posted by brian tiong at 11:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

(* Source: Ouriel Ohayon *)

It's great going out and having a blast of a night at a club. Now you have the option to listen all your favourite live DJ sets in the comforts of your own home.  Great!

While online music startups and most labels are trying to figure new rules for their business models, a small UK based startup has found a smart way to answer that question. Nearly all music services are based on providing access to a catalogue of recorded music whether it is on demand (eg: iTunes or Deezer) or on discovery mode (Pandora/Last.fm). But a big chunk of the quality music is not recorded and is played live is in clubs, fashion hotels, restaurants, shops, DJ festivals and other cool places (i leave aside radio music). This music usually ends up in CD collections because of its quality and uniqueness (think of the Buddha Bar collection, the Cafe del Mar and many more). And this is the music Awdio wants to provide you in real time wherever you are, 24/7, as long as you have an internet connection.

Awdio™ revolutionizes the way you listen to music! Real Time Music! What everyone can get now in one weekend is what music addicts would get in a year, touring around world’s best Live music sources… Straight from the sound systems of the most respected clubs, venues, hotels, shops, studios & festivals… from Electronic Music to Hip Hop, from new Jazz scenes to alternative Rock, from Lounge sessions to the most underground Dj sets, wherever you are, whatever you like, Awdio™ provides pure Live music. From San Francisco to Melbourne, New York to Paris, Sao Paulo to Hong Kong, Awdio™ is streaming 24/7 real time music content, from and on worldwide time zones.

Awdio spots the coolest places around the globe where live music is played and makes exclusive agreement to distribute and stream it live in real time. They gathered so far 50 hotspots like the super trendy Colette Shop in Paris, the 1015 in San Francisco or the Favela in London. They have created a technology that enables any live music source to be streamed over the internet with high quality sound. The Awdio Listener simply has to register and browse the selection of audio channels by time zone or by name. A station on air can be easily noticed with a small ticker. Once you chose your station the music is played directly via a desktop player (for now only iTunes and WMP). But in future versions you will be able to choose alternative players created by Awdio (web based i guess).

The business model is simple and smart. Listeners will pay a subscription for an unlimited access (9 euros/month or 54 euros a year). They become then “Awdio Addict Members” and will also have a personal space with relevant information according to their tastes (will include an electronic program guide) integrated in a social network. There will be a free ad-supported alternative and Awdio has built around their service an advertising platform that will enable brands to easily (geo)target users and offer them free “AwdioTime”. Right Now the music is streamed via your desktop player so i am not sure what kind of ad formats we are talking about. In their agreement with the music sources, Awdio takes in charges all the fixed and variable costs and pays sources 20% of the total income (based on the prorata time of each station) and an additional 10% for the performance of any guest artist. In addition partners will have access to a full dashboard soon available in order to get reporting and better knowledge of their “fans”.

I like the idea and the execution is good. I think this will be a nice additional revenue source for live music sources but also a cool experience for those who enjoy those places right from their living room. I wish one day they will extend the experience to video so you can fully enjoy the moment. I also wonder whether one day they give access to archives which would be great.

Although the project is based in the UK, most of the team is French and has extensive experience both in the music industry and the content delivery business. Awdio is financed by the designer Ora-Ito, you can feel his influence in the slick design of the website. I have tried the service and i must say it is of pretty good quality although this is a very early release. A new version with lots of new features (for streaming, browsing and interacting) will be up by the end of the month.

Posted by brian tiong at 11:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

(* Source: Billsdue *) 

The largest online gaming market in the world is in China.  I have always believed this for all of 2007 despite some reports and now this post shows the numbers, revenues and (huge) profits.  Interesting read to how and what Chinese gamers are into and what drives them.

Giant Online's (NYSE:GA) ZT Online (征途) MMORPG has almost 1,000,000 peak concurrent users, making it one of the largest MMORPGs in the world. It also quite a money spinner, generating USD $54M in revenue and USD $39M in net income in Q3 2007.

"Good equipment means money. Unlike other games, in this game there are no items dropped when killing monsters or completing missions. "We all want the best," said Lu Yang. "You have to go to the system's shops to buy materials, and then use the system smith to make them. Or, you could go gambling."

Paying to open a treasure chest is ZT Online's lottery, "like a casino slot machine."

"Gambling" means "opening the treasure chest." Gamers can buy keys and chests from the system for cheap: one yuan per set. When the key is applied to the chest, the screen will display a glittering chest opening. All kinds of materials and equipment spin inside the chest like the drums on a slot machine as the wheel of light spins. Where it stops indicates what you've won. Chests will frequently contain the high-class equipment that gamers desire, but the spinning light wheel always passes over them.

This clever set-up is infinitely alluring, and there are always countless people engaged in frenzied competition over chest numbers. 

As gamers unflaggingly open chests they sometimes chance upon something good, but the vast majority of the time they gain nothing. Each time they receive nothing, however, makes them all the more impatient to open the next chest. Their every click represents one yuan, one more yuan....like an endless sandglass, their money trickles away, becoming a stream as the clicks accumulate, a current heading toward the unseen system.

More here 

Posted by brian tiong at 10:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

(* Source: Duncan Riley *) 

Ah... it's good to be back from my safari vacation in Kenya for the past 2 weeks.  No data connection on my blackberry meant that I was completely in a data blackout in Africa.  It felt good but then not. The first thing I did when i got back was to check my mail and I soon realised how much facebook is part of my daily life now when half the mails I received were from facebook as most of my freinds now use it as an e-mail system... Now, reading this post from Duncan maybe shows how social networks will in 2008 be a permanent feature of our open web.  Open source prevails & will one day rule.

After publishing an invitation to Facebook to join the DataPortability Working Group January 4, we never thought that Facebook would accept it. Today changes everything you’ve ever thought about social-networking data and lock-in before, because today Facebook, Google and Plaxo have joined the DataPortability Workgroup.

Google and Plaxo joining are a positive, however given that both have previously joined together for platforms such as OpenSocial it’s not that significant, but Facebook is another matter. On January 4 Michael sort of defended Facebook’s stance against Plaxo pulling data from Facebook on the grounds that “Facebook also has a very good reason for protecting email addresses - user privacy.” Today, by joining the DataPortability Working Group Facebook is embracing open standards and open access, and that is a huge fundamental change from its previous stance on being locked in to closed standards.

I spoke with the head of the DataPortability Group Chris Saad prior to this post (Chris is also the CEO of Faraday Media.) After about 24 hours of correspondence, the following are to join the working group as official representatives of their respective companies: Joseph Smarr (Plaxo), Brad Fitzpatrick (Google) and Benjamin Ling (Facebook).

The DataPortability Workgroup is actively working to create the ‘DataPortability Reference Design’ to document the best practices for integrating existing open standards and protocols for maximum interoperability (and here’s the key area) to allow users to access their friends and media across all the applications, social networking sites and widgets that implement the design into their systems.

There has been no shortage of people who have knocked Facebook for their closed standards prior to today, perhaps many of whom had a legitimate point. Today Facebook has taken the first step towards open standards and data portability, and despite those previous gripes they should be congratulated for it.

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