Thoughts on product and innovation from an L.A. based PM and entrepeneur
Category
Games
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06.02.10Ding! You are now free to keep your points to yourselfYesterday, after returning from my trip to the Bay Area this weekend, I qualified for a free Rapid Rewards trip on Southwest airlines and received a confirmation email with the award codes. Yet the email did not include a link to post an announcement to Facebook or any other element of social interaction or social gaming--for example, to see which of my Facebook friends had qualified for trips or who had earned the most credits in the past year. In many ways, frequent flyer programs are the original social games. Users receive points for activity, they can level up based on ...
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05.19.10KlickFu invite list is openThis week we are starting the KlickFu private beta. For those who don't deal with the details of making software every day, a private beta means we are starting to distribute KlickFu to a small group of users to have them try it out and give us feedback, such as: do you like it, did it install correctly, did you have any issues downloading it, does it crash or conflict with any other programs on your machine, what do you like or not like about it, and how would you change it if you could? As you can tell, these early ...
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04.27.10Which way to HealthVille?The drug company, Bayer, recently introduced a glucose meter that attaches to the Nintendo DS called the Didget, "to help kids manage their diabetes by positively reinforcing consistent blood glucose testing habits and awarding points that kids can use to unlock new game levels and customize their gaming experience." On the one hand, it is great Bayer is applying gaming methods to helping kids manage type 1 (early onset) diabetes, which requires education and constant monitoring. On the other, it is quite worrisome the need for products to manage type 2 (adult onset) diabetes, which is often associated with obesity, is predicted to ...
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02.02.10KlickFu, Bruin editionLast week, we filed the provisional patent for the technology in KlickFu, so now we can gradually start coming out of stealth mode (finally!). One of the ways we are doing that is by running a KlickFu development contest with the UCLA ACM computer science student group. Last night was the kick-off meeting for the contest, in which UCLA CS students will create apps for KlickFu, then next month, we will bundle all the approved apps together in a special KlickFu UCLA version the developers can send to their friends at school. There was a great turn-out at the event ...
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09.25.09Looking for a few good testersWe hit two new milestones this week for KlickFu--one for developers and for end users--and we are fairly excited about both. For developers, we now have a full Python library to access the KlickFu SDK. This means developers can now write apps completely in Python to access all the functionality of the KlickFu platform. (Yet another reason to learn Python!) If you are a developer and you--or any of your friends--would be interested to learn more about how you can write apps in Python for KlickFu, contact us and we will get you set up with the SDK and the library. For ...
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09.22.09Who I follow… and whyA number of my friends and colleagues who do not work in high-tech or startups have mentioned recently they have read some of my blog entries and have a growing interest in consumer Internet and entrepreneurship. Several of them have asked for references to other blogs on the subject, so I thought it might be helpful to give a brief summary of the blogs and news sources I follow along with why I find them valuable. Below are some of the main ones, arranged in order by usefulness and the order I consume them. I read most of these in ...
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09.18.09Farmville, YoFarmville, the virtual farming game from Zynga, now has over 44 million active users and has become the most popular (and I believe, the fastest-growing) social game ever. I do not have much of a green thumb, and I have never been a major fan of simulation games, however, I wanted to get a better understanding of what makes FV so popular and why it is growing so quickly. I am a big believer there is no substitute for using a product yourself--so the past few days I have been diligently building my farm and interacting with friends to help them ...
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09.02.09Delete – Can a game be too addictive for its own good?I am making my way through Jesse Schell's excellent book, "The Art of Game Design." Jesse is a professor at Carnegie Mellon, where he teaches and does research on game design. The book is a series of "lenses," or aspects of game design to consider to make games more fun and compelling. This is a great approach to designing games and other products, as well as to enhancing creativity overall, which I will write more about in the future. As I was reading the book, it reminded me of an experience I had with a game recently, which led me to ...
