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... =)

Facebook Status: "Albert is... FBFunded"

News is a little late (yesterday), but thought I'd still share the great news: Kontagent has been selected as winner of the FBFund.

Been working with the great folks at Facebook for months (always a pleasure to visit their offices as well, we always get offered really yummy fruit drinks)... so I'm delighted to finally see a public endorsement and support from Facebook. =)

Always good to get further validation.

As a side note: we are the only Non-App company that was selected.  Which I guess makes us also the only analytics platform supported by FBfund.

Lots of stuff happening at Kontagent, so its been keeping me away from updating this blog.  Sigh.

Anyways, lots more exciting news to come!

Oh how Condo Fire Alarms and CityPlace Sucks.

Firealarm keeps going off again and again.

This is insane. This happens multiple times a year. All night.

I can't sleep.

I am going to have to look into moving to a non CityPlace building.

Does anyone know of fire alarms that allow you to adjust the volume (within reason) of their alarms? (our speakers are unnecessarily loud... you could hear it though 10 foot walls)

Does anyone else have stupid fire alarm problems with their condos due to poor design (our alarms go off usually due to condensation in the piping or breakage of pipes in the sprinkler system somewhere...)?

Furthermore... I'm surprised I wasn't able to find a good source of info about condos. Like a Yelp/epinions of Condos. Anyone know of a well done one? I'd sure as hell contribute to it. The challenge I guess would be filtering out the noise/realtors/astroturfers. Which I guess could be eliminated with the use of some sort of identity/trust system (facebook connect?)

Crazy Awesome & Other Random Midnight Rantings

Sometimes, when you feel like the whole world is against you, or you wonder why you're doing whatever its is you're doing, or you just don't feel like you're up for it -- something pops into view that changes everthing.

Today I saw two things that inspired/motivated me.

1) Seeing Will Wright's newest baby: Spore being played/demoed to me by an office mate for the first time (on a 30" monitor no-less).  Wow.  It is so insanely cool and genre demolishing that it left me mostly speechless. 

2) Seeing my name publically recommended by Reid Hoffman (founder of LinkedIn) as one of three people that would make for a good speaker for a conference.  I remember having only met Reid once many years ago in my eariest days of building BubbleShare, and sought him out early as even then when he was recongized as a respected early stage investor.  Damn.

Random Sidenote #1: I read in an interview that it took Will Wright 7 years to create The Sims (best selling PC game in history), and it took him 7 years to create Spore.  One of the things that I had immediately stubled into was -- given the option, would I pick creating two very good products/business in 7 years or one great product every 7 years.  While it would be great to have a world changing product in 7 years -- and its easy to pick the option that grants you "greatness" -- it really does take a ton of skill, courage AND patients to work on one thing for 7 years.  As someone that's used to seeing things happen in 2-3 year cycles, I think one of my personal goals as I enter into my 5th venture will be try to take a longer and more patient view.

Random Sidenote #2: Ironically, one of the people Reid had kindly told me to follow up with (from years ago now), and someone that I should have kept in touch with, was BJ Fogg.  BJ directs the Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford. Now years later, he was the professor behind the first Facebook only course at Stanford along with my friend Dave McClure.  Which of course I was interested in given my invovlment with Kontagent.  BJ as we later found out after our chat with Reid, was at the time (circa super early days of BubbleShare ~2004) was experimenting with voice inputs/recording on the web as an alternative group communication and social networking method.  BubbleShare at the time was one of the first to use voice clips with photos several years ago, and later I found out that BJ was experimenting with voice + web as an altnerative asyronous communication method)

 

"Kontagent: Game Changing Analytics"

"Kontagent: Game Changing Analytics" - VentureBeat

Here's a great article on Kontagent.

Wish I could be blogging here more... but been busy with the company blog as well.

(Updated Aug/04: Link was broken)

Facebook News(feed) Flash

Besides the obvious user experience improvements, greater flexiblity for advertising for facebook, and general polishing -- the new design also signals an interesting move by facebook with its new empahsis on the feed: Control.

With the new user experience emphasis on the newsfeed, not only does it enable more interesting user interactions, but provides facebook with a way to have greater control over how its applications connect with its end users.

We're seeing an obvious decline over the use of profiles, but it'll certainly be interesting for developers to see if there's going to be a shift in the effectiveness and use of the other viral channels.

The Launch Rush.

Yep.

We launched Kontagent, our viral analytics tool.

Have gotten some great feedback from the developer community at F8 today. While this might sound a bit cocky, I can honestly say that we had fully expected given the feedback we had gathered from a number of discussions during our earlier private trials and discussions with some of the top thought leaders in the space.

The F8 conference was very well organized. Rumored to have cost 1 Million to host the 1000 attendees.

After 22 hours straight run with what ended up being about 2 hours of sleep the night before, and a few snags on the news release, "public day" #1 is done.

I don't think there's anything more exciting than the "day before the launch" rush -- where months of work accumulate to one jammed packed day of unexpected events and feedback loops.

With this being the 5th startup now, the rush of the launch is still as addcitive as ever.

Whats been an amazing experience with building this bi-coastal this time is that some of the things that have happened would have never happened if I had done this exclusively out of Toronto as I had with most of my previous startups.

By having a presence in the mist of the action in "the valley" (technically, its San Francisco) is the flow of information and networks. Even prior to our public launch, while still in stealth mode, we've had an astonishing number of parties that came to the table with serious acquisition interest.

Thankfully, I was not in a position to have to sell early, as is often is the case with startups that are undercapitalized due to limited access to early stage financing. That's not to say that I don't beleive in "sell early and sell often" (truth is that "it depends") -- as was the advice that I had given to my friend Greg of YoVille (congrats Greg on the sale to Zynga! -- go London Ontario!) -- just that when one is well capitalized or in an enviorment where there is more access to capital, the option to grow further vs. selling too early are often much less stressful choices.