San Mateo based Gemini Mobile has a virtual world for phones called S! town which is apparently running in Japan, coming to the US soon. They just received 20 million in funding from Goldman Sachs. It’s not clear to me if this is an interface to Second Life, or a competitive virtual world. How many do you need I wonder?
Nick Wilson of ClickInfluence has put together a master RSS feed of blogs about social media, i’m honored that he included me in this list, as the collection is a stellar list of bloggers. Interestingly Nick used Yahoo Pipes to pull all these blogs together in a single feed. Here’s a direct link to the RSS Feed for Social Media Strategy
Suw Charman
David Armano
Daniel Riveong
Kathy Sierra
Valeria Maltoni
Ben McConnell & Jackie Huba
Charlene Li & Josh Bernoff
Karl Long
Rohit Bhargava
John Boyle
Jennifer Jones
Jake McKee
Greg Sterling
Anastasia Goodstein
Steve Rubel
Lisa Whelan
Here are the criteria that Nick used to select these blog:
Over the last couple of months i’ve started to become convinced that the concept of games is going to evolve over the next decade blending more and more the real world and virtual. As Kevin Slavin from Area/Code, a company that makes “big games” says (i’m paraphrasing) “Games are going to get bigger and the computers will be in in the games as opposed to the other way round”.
I think there are three key trends that will drive this concept of Big Games way beyond it’s current niche role:
Current Trends:
Future trend:
Update: Great article in technology review about mobile augmented reality
Mobile converged devices
Believe it or not that billboard in the photograph is a a barcode or semacode that you can take a photo of with your camera phone and if your have a fairly advanced device, lets say for arguments sake a Nokia Nseries, a web browser will automatically open and take you to a specific web page. This is just one example of technology out there currently that is being used in “big games” or ARG’s (alternate reality games). In 2006 there were 80 million of those converged devices sold (up 42% over the previous year), 2007 the projection is around 250 million converged devices (according to IDC and Nokia).
Mobile Evernet
We all know how persistent connections changed our relationship to our computers, information can be streamed in, we can use the network as an extension to our computer. It enabled things like World Of Warcraft, secondlife, youtube, and in many ways the rise of web2.0 and social media. Now imagine a persistent network connection on your phone, when you’re out in the real world, location aware, possibly even with GPS built into it. Games are dependent upon various gameplay mechanics which always include feedback, if you have a persistent connection on your mobile device feedback is possible constantly. I know this is a very general statement, but this will be the first step in augmented reality, feedback that is contextual to where you are, what your doing, and when your doing.
Co-creation
The greatest success stories in technology and on the web over the last few years have been co-created, customers, users, citizens, people have been building, commenting, contributing and creating the next web. When more and more people are mobile with creative tools in their hands, they are going to be the co-creators, co-collaborators of the big games. Multiplayer gaming is one thing, but when you have a portion of a city or country playing a game, and the value of that game is derived from the people playing it the results will be extraordinary.
Wouldn’t life be more fun if aspects of it became part of an ongoing game that you played as part of living your life? Surely that’s where games and play began, small microcosms that modeled real world so we could learn how to participate in it.
I was recently asked to join a panel at Ad-Tech in San Francisco on April 24th. The panel is hosted by Rohit Bhargava VP for Interactive Marketing at Ogilvy Public Relations and the topic of the panel is “Trench Warfare: Using Blogs, Vlogs and Podcasts to Have a Brand Personality”. Despite my headline I’m absolutely humbled by all of the speakers i’ll be on a panel with, just look at this stellar line up:
Here’s a description of the session:
Also if you want a 25% discount for ad-Tech SF register here using the code ATSFA2, do it before March 19th and you get the early bird discount as well.
How to create online awesomeness from the founders of Threadless.
I’m in another GDC keynote by Robert Tercek who is the Founding Chairman of the Game Developer Conference’s mobile game summit. His keynote, “the first decade in mobile games 1997 to 2007″ is really interesting stuff, but even more interesting is he has created a social network on Ning.com for people interested in designing and creating mobile games. I found this very serendipitous having just discovered Ning.com a couple of days ago from the good folks at Adaptive Path.
Beyond voice, probably the simplest and most ubiquitous technology on the mobile phone is text (SMS), North America has been a bit of a laggard adopting this technology but in the last year or so has really started to use text. I think the voting on American Idol might have been one part of the tipping point for texting in the US. I’ve certainly seen a rise in the amount of people using text, but being in San Francisco my experience may not be mainstream. Here’s some interesting text interfaces:
Any other uncommon uses for SMS messaging you know of? leave a comment or email me.
I’m currently at GDC (Game Developer Conference) and have just listened to Trip Hawkins, CEO of Digital Chocolate a mobile game development company, and considering he founded EA (Electronic Arts) he’s probably worth listening to. His keynote speech was titled “Making Mobile Phones the Ultimate Game Platform”. Couple of points worth highlighting are:
(As an aside, the next session from Shuffle Brain who i’ve written about before, started their session with this statement: Game mechanics + Social Media = the future of networked entertainment - check out their blog)
As I was sitting in the audience and Trip started talking about Social Media and Web2.0 I had a couple of colleagues in the audience giving me some knowing glances and nudges, as it’s pretty well known where I think things are going. In fact even my friend Paul who writes Myphonerocks.com tagged me in his more comprehensive write up of Trip’s keynote.
I actually think it’s a very natural progression for mobile games to move toward social games, much more natural if you think about it than the move of console games toward social games. For me, Halo 2 on the xbox was more of a social game than it was a video game, I owned it for 2+ years and played for hundreds of hours, and most of it was against other people, it was a conduit through which I connected with people that I knew. Game consoles were game devices first, and social tool second, the mobile phone is a social device first and a game device second.
One of the best recent example of a mobile social game is Avapeeps from Digital Chocolate, that is essentially a dating game. An Avapeep is a charicter which you create, resides on your mobile phone, and can be sent on dates with other peoples Avapeeps, how the date goes depends upon certain traits or instructions that you can give your Avapeep - should you give flowers, move in for a kiss etc. Beyond even the gameplay which is inherently social, they have also got several social features as a way for you to share your Avapeep creation by embedding it on your myspace page or blog, here’s my avapeep:
Social can mean so many things here it’s really mind boggling, whether it’s sharing a game, playing against other people, playing with other people, playing within a community, co-creative games, building social equity. World Of Warcraft is a social game, the Wii is a social game, my xbox badge is an aspect of a social game, playing brain age with my Mum and a friend of hers was a social game experience. Surely games have always been a way that people connected, learned, and built social connections.
In the end the rise of social media has been the rise of people making meaning in their lives through creating and connecting rather than just consuming. That can mean a lot for games, when games move away from being time wasters to actually helping create meaning and giving people creative outlets. One of the points that Trip makes here is that the money spent by the public on “time filling media” is going pale in comparison to the money spent on social media or (my words) “meaning making media”.
Ning.com is a site that enables users to create their own social networks on any topic they want useing a log of social media tools like photo sharing, video sharing, blogs etc. There are an amazing array of features avalable and all customizable through a nice ajaxy interface. Basically if you want to create your own version of myspace or facebook for your own college you can, think of it like yahoo groups 2.0. Check out the Battlestar Galactica group on Ning
To get a good overview of Ning you should check out this scoble show video of the CEO walking you through how you create the site.
Potentially Ning could provide the platform for users to create much more meaningful social “niche-works” which could erode the power of some of the monolithic networks like myspace, facebook etc. With all the companies running to put their pages up on myspace, wouldn’t they be better off cultivating their own social network around their brands?
Remember Vortals?
Tip of the hat to my pals at Adaptive Path who were involved in helping think through and design the tools for people to build their own social networks, good job guys.
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