Huge McLeod is The Man

... and so is Joey deVilla for posting THIS, and David/Jevon for hosting him at StartUp Empire (which I missed, but heard was a success).

The short version is here, the longer version is here, and the ChangeThis version is here.

Here are some highlights for me...

"The reason we work in this field is that we want to build stuff — fun stuff"

"What really drives us? The "C" word: creativity"

"Put the hours in; do it for long enough and magical life-transforming things hapen eventually"

"Do it anyway."

"Remain frugal."

"If you can accept the pain, it cannot hurt you."

"Failure is part of the process"

WarCraft in Your Pocket

Image by mhuang via Flickr

On October 28th of 2008 - just under four years after its launch - Blizzard announced that World of Warcraft had reached eleven million subscribers around the world। To put those numbers in perspective: there are more people playing WoW than there are living in Tokyo, Seoul, Shanghai, or New York City.

If Azeroth were a country, it would be the 75th most populated country in the world (right after Greece).
from: Escapist Magazine

I can't claim to be a avid World of Warcraft player (I wish I was, but there's this Kontagent thing that keeps getting in the way), but what I can claim to be is an early beta tester of the very first graphical MMOG, Ultima Online in 1997 (as well as being an early player of 'massively multiplayer asynchronous BBS games' like the old school, text based TradeWars on a 2400baud modem in the late 80's).

What prompted me to write this is the absolutly amazing wealth of opportunities around MMOGs on emerging devices like the iPhone, Andriod, and consumer oriented Berries -- and the emerging bridges from Mobile Phone and social networks (think Facebook Connect/etc. on iPhone -- i.e. Zynga's Texas Holdem Poker)


The difference in the opportunity that developers today have with MMOGs on emerging device vs. Warcraft on the PC include having access to....:

1) Billing Infrastructure: i.e. iphone app store
2) Impulse Billing Infrastructure: i.e. premium SMS and/or future social network connected currency platforms. iPhone app store... not so much... yet
3) Social Graph: Play with real friends, access personal data/images
4) GPS / LBS: use location as input, play/battle with people around you
5) Always On Access: Unlike your PC, your game can be always-on, in your users pocket, allow them to lose their jobs even faster!

6) Social Analytics =): (Yes, that was a blatant plug) This is of course assuming you're building a social game on an existing social network platform like some of our customers

Vote for Pedro...er...Obama...er...Kontagent!

Now that the US elections are over and have some of you have had some pratice voting, come vote for Kontagent in the fBFund contest! For those of you that have wondered what the live system looks like beyond the screenshots, check this out:


Kontagent in 30 Seconds from albert lai on Vimeo.
(sorry about the lack of audio... we hope to have another updated version soon)

Hey Facebook, Go Steal Xiaonei's Payment System!

Hey Facebook, we all know that Xiaonei (China's FB clone) stole your design.

But maybe now you can you steal this payment system -- which would obviously have a huge positive impact on the app ecosystem.

We all know folks are using PayPal and/or CPA offers from the likes of Offerpal and others.

But come on, lets get that FBwallet online -- I've already given you my name, address, email, a list of all my friends, and all my photos, I'm ready to give you my credit-card so I can store and take cash from my friends.  How about turning that social utility into a financial/social-micropayment utility as well?

And of course Kotagent is ready to help you track all the money swooshing back and forth... =)