T minus four days

Things are starting to come together.

Things are starting to come together so much that I thought it justified my first blog post in almost two months.

(it will get a bit livelier around here in a week or so.)

RPI: We're coming. It will obviously be a work in progress, but it's coming and it is happening on Monday.

The number of people who are excited about the upcoming GXC launch is just incredible. On the insistence of our fans who don't go to an ivy league school, RPI, Rice, BC, WPI, WashU, MIT or Drexel, we're going to be creating an "open game" that anyone can join at some point in the coming month or so.

Thus, the purpose of this post is to ask a simple question: What should the open game be? Anyone will be allowed to join any team, although you can only join a team once (obviously... no switching back and forth).

The game should fit the following characteristics:

1) Almost all people (Americans, at least) have a strong affiliation for one team.
2) Teams will have roughly the same number of people*.
3) Two to ten teams.

*When played by a very tech-friendly audience. "IE vs Firefox vs Other" might actually be a viable game. Plus, we can autodetect the browser.

Examples that might work: Democrats vs Republicans, East Coast vs West Coast, Browser Wars.

Make a suggestion (in the comments, por favor), and if we like it we might just make it a game.

Seven Ways to Make a Terrible Startup

(Note: This post is an homage to Jason Kapalka's brilliant "10 Ways to Make a Terrible Casual Game." Jason is the Chief Creative Officer at PopCap games.)

Ever since GXC has started getting a lot of traction, people have tried to pick our brains more than a few times. This is great, but I often see young teams making the same few mistakes. So I've been thinking about how to help entrepreneurs at the earliest of stages... typically, college students with little more than an idea.

So let's do a piss-poor job of starting a business. Here goes:

7. Don't tell anyone! Especially not anyone of any importance. I don't care if Eric Schmidt wants to sit down with us! The CEO of Google is totally going to steal our idea, especially since we have this really sweet demo that they want to test in their office. After all, it's not like top-level executives have anything better to do.

6. Dropdown menus? We don't need no steekin' dropdown menus. See, here's a text box! The user can type whatever they want in. Okay, so maybe there's only five valid inputs, but we use text validation to check it on our end! This is a perfectly good demo to show the investors.

5. Okay, I have an idea. Now let's form a legal entity. Because after all, nothing will be more helpful six months down the road than that half-baked Connecticut LLC we self-submitted. I'm sure it's easy to get rid of if we don't need it, anyway.

4. I can't code very well, but spending a year making a mediocre demo is better than giving up equity to bring on a developer. Equity is precious! I'm either going to make it by myself or it's all going to fail. I can't see how another person could help me out, even if they could code this login page in a twentieth of the time it's taking me.

3. This is really awkward. I can't possibly talk about equity division with my partners. They're my partners, after all! This seems so greedy and corporate. Ah, screw it, let's just split it all equally.

2. We only need $18,075 to reach profitability. You see, this is really simple. Servers are $2,000 apiece, and I'll need nine of them. I think they'll all fit in my RA's room. The other $75? That's how much the State of Delaware's website says it costs to file a C Corp. Now where's my venture funding?

1. I am certain that this idea is going to make me unbelievably rich. The experience I gain doesn't matter. The contacts I make--they're not important. Life is short, and I want my money when I can still live like Mark Wahlberg in Entourage. That's what entrepreneurship is all about, right? Get rich or die tryin'.

The takeaways:

Your idea is not the Manhattan Project. Unless, of course, your business is developing nuclear weapons. In which case you probably have larger issues than someone stealing your idea.

The user is your deity, and you worship Him (or Her) by making a really sweet interface.

Leave legal things to lawyers.

If your team is lacking in a key talent (such as software development), bring on the right person. It's worth it.

You're awkward. You might as well embrace it and talk to your partners about equity.

You will always need more money than you think you will. And unless you are a former Rackspace employee, you will not be able to maintain nine servers in your dorm room. To top it off, you will probably get an angry letter from your university for crashing the network if your project takes off.

Recruitment in Ireland, Competition vs. Cooperation, and Facebook

In addition to working on GoCrossCampus this summer, I'm living in Ireland with a day job at a specialist recruitment and consulting agency called Osborne Recruitment. I'm working as a consultant, creating new marketing and digital strategy solutions for the company, and also learning quite a bit about the recruitment industry in Dublin. The Irish recruitment industry is a interesting beast. Because the Irish economy has been rapidly expanding the past 10-15 years, an enormous number of Irish businesses are increasing their workforces and expanding their staff needs. Thus, there is a constant, ubiquitous need for the service of finding the right candidate (potential employee) for the right client (potential employer). In Dublin alone, there are literally hundreds of recruitment agencies working to attract qualified workers and place them in specific roles offered by employers. The thing is, it's an extremely competitive and quite saturated market, with almost no barrier to entry. Irish recruitment agencies come in all shapes and sizes, from multi-national behemoths to tiny basement-office operations. All are competing for what is essentially the same candidate market: Ireland has almost zero cyclical unemployment (and indeed, most recruitment services in Ireland deal purely in the realm of frictional unemployment), and the workforce has predictable immigration/emigration trends.

So what does this have to do with the web? Everything. While traditional brick-and-mortar recruit agencies abound in Dublin, there are only a few core online job posting sites that have worked to capture the market. High-traffic job portals like Monster.ie, IrishJobs.ie, and RecruitIreland.ie have all done well to create lucrative online businesses, attracting high candidate traffic and listing thousands of open job vacancies. These job portals are so successful because they capture two markets in one: first, they serve as an easy, low-cost way for employers to post job openings and attract candidates, circumventing the need for a traditional recruitment agency. However, these sites also serve as a recruitment agency's recruitment agency, offering a great job-advertising opportunity for recruiters to post their listings and attract high candidate traffic. This dual-market business model of job-post portals is an interesting phenomenon -- in Ireland, the whole idea of competition in the online sphere of the recruitment industry is breaking down, the line between competitor and partner becoming blurred. Online job portals serve as both a business opponent and a business cohort for physical, consultant-centric recruitment agencies. But while traditional recruiters constantly struggle against their fellow agencies to carve out higher margins, job portals are laughing all the way to the bank, capturing ad revenues from every recruitment agency in Dublin who posts on their site.

What does this mean for the nature of traditional competition in the increasingly online-focused world of recruitment? Traditional print/radio/TV advertising is still the bread and butter of Irish recruiters, but as more and more candidates are finding all they need on the web, recruiter focus is shifting along with the trends. Will brick-and-mortar recruitment agencies become an antiquated feature of Ireland's past, replaced by the all-encompassing and ever-increasing services of online job-portals? Not yet, at least as long as Irish employers stick to using the tried-and-true recruitment services of physical agencies they know and understand. (For example, Osborne has a wealth of clients who would never even think about going elsewhere.) But this is a good analogy for other web-connected industries to take to heart. While the 1990's saw many e-businesses competing directly against brick-and-mortars as equals (and failing), the 2000's have seen an extra dimension added to the playing field, with countless online businesses out-innovating traditional companies by both cooperating and competing with them simultaneously.

In this increasingly interconnected web-world, new online ventures aren't looking to strike out on their own in direct competition with preexistng businesses. No more will the "go it alone" mentality fly on the internet. Instead, startups are increasingly looking for ways to synergize their services with technologies, conventions, and mindsets already on the web, grappling for as much inter-connectivity they can get their hands on. Just take a look at the exponential success of Facebook apps -- developers across the web are building applications that integrate into Facebook's vast social media dominion, often plugging their own site's services directly into the Facebook platform. Facebook gets increased functionality and immersiveness from the new app, and the developer gets an awesome new avenue for connecting to users. Talk about a win-win.

Cheers,
-MOB

Taking MMOG to New Markets

If you haven't checked out Club Penguin yet, do it. It's worth dealing with the registration feature, which is (rightly) ultra-skeptical of anyone over fourteen attempting to sign up. In case you really don't want to bother, there is a great Wikipedia article here.

In case it's not immediately obvious, Club Penguin is the hottest site for kids aged 8 to 14. It's a great case study for a company marketing a game to a demographic that hasn't touched such things before. In Club Penguin's case, the effect is multiplied by the fact that not only have these individuals never played games, but their demographic has never played these sorts of games for a variety of reasons. Yet they seem to be doing a solid job of it. I'm going to assume that they foresaw the plethora of ultra-popular penguin-themed movies.

Further, Club Penguin illustrates a form of demographic arbitrage which is becoming increasingly common in the hardware industry. Simply put, it's a lot easier to get people who are doing something for the first time to adopt your way of doing it rather than win converts from another platform. The best example of this out there of this is the conflict between Linux and Microsoft over the One Laptop per Child program, which is planning to ship 5 to 10 million units this year, mostly to individuals who have never previously owned a computer. The OS shipped on those laptops, in all likelihood, will be the favored OS for those individuals for years to come.

In this case, the gameplay style and feeling of Club Penguin will be imprinted on these kids for years to come. I've been a strategy gamer for years, probably due to the fact that I spent the entirety of fourth grade playing SimCity.

Club Penguin is simply capturing a market by lowering the age at which people start playing multiplayer games. In my opinion, it was bound to happen, since the lower side of the 8-14 market has only been served by the "educational games" sector. This implies that gaming is entirely a purchase decision made for them by parents and educators. If a 10 year old girl can decide to wear makeup on her own, why can't she bug her parents to pay for a MMOG?

- Brad

The Learning Curve and Game Immersion

TIME seems to have some strong words for Second Life.

With all the constant hype surrounding SL, it's nice to see some calm realism from TIME. While there's no question how incredibly successful Second Life has proven itself to be, the learning curve issue is a huge one, and it is indeed the thorn in the side of any immersive game. That's what makes casual games so effective -- easy to learn, easy to play... but less immersive than the super-complex 3D world-type games. The key, then, is allowing for a broader scope of gameplay, allowing for each individual user to enter into the game and play at his or her own personal level of intensity and involvement. Ideally, this concept would be implemented in the style of first-degree price discrimination, to borrow a microeconomics term. It's easy for a game to appeal to specific player subset or psychographic. However, it's quite harder (and quite more lucrative) for a game to offer a substantiated slope of game immersion, connecting the most casual user with the hardcore grand strategist into a single, unified game. It's a tough challenge, but it's a challenge we aspire to overcome with GoCrossCampus.

Also, for a related funny: Get a First Life

-MOB

(Supposed) Vision: The Solvency, the Deficiency, and the Opportunity

And now, please welcome a lovely bit of GXC ego:

Despite the incredible cultural solvency inherent in the college-age market, few brands have sought to interact with student society on a truly evocative level. The intricate social networks of college students living together combined with a hunger for new and exciting forms of personal entertainment add up to a potent mix of cultural capital waiting to be realized, compiled and packaged in branded form. The 360-degree, 24/7 onslaught of today’s mediascape leaves college youth awash in cultural ambiguity and information overload without engaging them in meaningful, sustainable, and motivating ways. To engage the modern student social landscape, something decidedly more rigorous and engrossing is quite needed.

The bloated and stagnating world of online “social networking” sites have been limited in their insight and vision by attempting to provide a single social environment for every student user while declining to invest themselves in the actual social makeup of each individual school. And without the specialized architecture to do so, these “social networking” websites have fallen prey to deadly cultural ambiguation, giving their very users little room (or reason) to fully involve themselves in the online offerings these brands have created.

Yet hope still remains! By bringing the vigorous world of casual gaming to the college market, we hope GoCrossCampus will facilitate a new wave of social interaction online for students by providing custom-built gaming engines for every campus in the country. Not only does GoCrossCampus feature a world of dynamic social interplay on-site, the platform also facilitates meaningful and highly motivated interaction between students through the infinite complexities of open strategic gameplay. By uniquely tapping into the wealth of preexisting competitive spirit and team pride inherent on all college campuses, GoCrossCampus succeeds in engaging the student populous not only in the online realm but in the real world of their actual college campus as well. In this sense, GoCrossCampus captures and engages the prime college market with meaningful social interaction, strategic gameplay, and great fun -- overall, an inspiring new opportunity for the business world today.

-MOB

The Art of Astroturf

Astroturf never got off easy. While it is typically associated with corporate dirty tricks at best and Orwellian propaganda tactics at worst, I feel that there are some benign marketing applications of Astroturf that remain to be explored.

What if, rather than directly manipulating media to give the false impression of a grassroots movement, the mission was reengineered to inspire a well-orchestrated grassroots push that, while feeling amateur and genuine, was coordinated to feel as such? While probably overreferenced, the Swift Boat Attacks are a good example. The Bush campaign didn't make those veterans up -- it simply defined its mission in such a way to inspire genuine sentiments, which it then incentivized and captured. Obviously the ads were funded by the Bushies; however, the veterans and their feelings were real.

It may have been morally questionable on Bush's part, but it worked. And when it's two competing companies instead of politicans, the ethical questions are significantly less thorny.

How is this applicable to anything? First, it can change the way marketing is done, especially to crowds particularly sensitive to grassroots efforts. Instead of presenting a coordinated, Web 2.0 face to college students, perhaps subdividing the market and presenting a "localized" face to the audience is a better fit. Rather than appearing as a corporation attempting to market a product, acting as a behind-the-scenes technology provider and letting the local reps do the work as "fake grass" may be worth a try.

Depending on the implementation, branding could be nearly nonexistent. But when approaching cynical and anti-corporate markets, is this a bad thing?

- Brad