Recent Posts

  • A quick way into Steve Blank’s Customer Developement methodology
  • Touchscreen web apps
  • Smart phones as sensor platforms for health tracking
  • 3D TV and vendor push
  • Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-09-05

Archives

Categories

iPhone takes major market share in mobile games

As this graphic from Flurry Analytics shows the iPhone OS is killing the Nintendo DS and PSP in the portable games market – original story on Techcrunch. To put some numbers around that, Flurry believe that $500m of iPhone games were sold through the App Store in the US last year, up [...]

Games publisher value add in an iPhone world

At the GDC conference in Cologne this morning I attended a panel session which was addressing the question of how games publishers add value to games developers in the iPhone ecosystem.  This is a topical question because in traditional games publishing the ability to deliver retail shelf space was beyond most [...]

Gaming – web beating consoles and distributed just getting started

Comscore data out on Friday shows that online gaming audiences grew 22% in the 12 months to May 2009, which contrast sharply with the 17% drop on console game sales over the same twelve month period.

Console gaming has long been the one area in which closed proprietary platforms have won over the long [...]

The future of games: Trip Hawkins, CEO of Digital Chocolate

Digital Chocolate is now the number one game company on the iPhone and Trip’s view is the future for games is casual and social, and that they will be free to play with revenue coming from virtual goods.  Hear his views in full on the video below.

Thanks to my friend Rob Majteles [...]

The problem with hit based models

This article from Slate captures the problems with the games industry brilliantly.  It describes how despite record sales of around $32bn last year all the leading games publishers are now losing money (including Activision-Blizzard, owners of World of Warcraft).  Then comes the (obvious) explanation:

So how can publishers lose money amid such incredible sales [...]

Experience in Asia suggests virtual goods is the biz model for social media

This post by Bill Gurley of Benchmark in the US gives a great comparative analyis of how social media sites are monetising in Asia and the US.

The headline is that the leading western socnets Myspace and Facebook are generating reasonable revenues (Bill estimates current run rate is $650m and $450m respectively), but that [...]

Strategy decay in the film industry

At the Library House Mediatech conference yesterday there was a presentation from a company called Slingshot Studios which could be described as a ‘Film2.0 business’.

They described how Hollywood has chased up film budgets to an average of $70m on production and a further $50m for distribution by focusing on the very limited strategy [...]

investment keeps flowing into virtual worlds

Copied from a VWM press release (from Blackberry so no link or formatting);

London, England – October 15, 2008 – Virtual Worlds Management, the leading virtual worlds trade media company, has announced findings from a comprehensive study of accountable transactions showing that venture capital and media firms have invested more than $148.5 million dollars [...]

Massive investment into social games and virtual worlds

Jussi Laakkonen of social gaming stealth startup Everyplay has a great post tracking investment in the social games and virtual worlds space.  The simple message – there is a whole heap of activity, with roughly $2-5m being invested per week, and some large individual deals, including Balderton‘s investment of $87m into Big Fish [...]

Facebook’s challenge

I was thinking this morning why it is that I don’t log into Facebook, and then as if we were somehow connected in the ether I saw this tweet from Calacanis:

just realized i haven’t logged into Facebook in a week or two. used to login 2-3x a day. hmmm… when did you login [...]