gaming > tech stuff > and baseball

pondering how ones excitement and enthusiasm for work can trump the need for sleep...

beautiful sunrise...great dinner w/ rocking people last night...long weekend ahead...life is good!

buried from recent shows...loving his job...and squeezing in the book 'The Dragon and the Foreign Devils' (China 1100 BC to present) in 10 min stints

Starbucks, balcony, book, marina...a good start to the day

is one more meeting away from departing for home!

is sideways with fatigue w/ eyes that feel very gritty!

at gStar in Seoul - if you are here, my Seoul cell # is: +81 010 6884 0260

up all night catching up on email after an apocalyptic meltdown of technology

getting ready for gStar in Seoul, Korea

A bit of background regarding PCI compliance - as credit card use has become more widespread both offline and online, and as consumer concern about security has understandably grown, the credit card industries have made an effort to ensure that sensitive information is protected. To that end, in September 2006, the major credit card companies (American Express, Discover Financial Services, JCB, MasterCard Worldwide and Visa International) formed the PCI Security Standards Council (SSC) and established a set of rules for what they called PCI compliance. These rules have to be followed depending on the size of a business and the number of credit card transactions handled, and if done properly will help protect consumers’ data from theft. The Rules in a Nutshell There are six major categories within the standards established by the PCI SSC, which are as follows: –Build and maintain a secure network –Protect cardholder data –Maintain a vulnerability management program –Implement strong ...

A prospect came up with some interesting promotion code expiration uses the other day, so I figured I’d jot down how many ways you would want to be able to expire codes. Here’s the list as of this posting date: - Date (”expire on 12/31/2010″) - Number of Uses (”expire after 200 signups”) - Activity (”When an in game event happens, send an API call to expire the code”) - Combination of ways (”Expire a promotion code on 12/31/2010 OR when X people use it”) A general recap of what codes can do in addition to the above expiration stuff: - Change plan pricing - Change plan naming conventions - Mark a reseller or channel partner - Display multiple plans (not just a 1/1 ratio.. one promo yields multiple plan displays)

What products did we quickly grow to love and why? Southwest Airlines (online transparency and logic). They made their pricing transparent and easy to understand. If a round trip flight was $200, then the one way flight was…drum roll please…$100. That was the beginning of being transparent. Anyone could see and understand the pricing, and because it made sense it also built TRUST. As the online Guest became increasingly savvy they understood the necessity of charging more at different times of the day. So Southwest showed us the price ‘per flight / leg’ and we were able to satisfy all the questions swirling in our heads…what if I leave earlier or later…what is the price difference? With this transparent information, I could decide. What does this have to do with pricing streaming assets? Streaming video is usually offered in 24 hour increments. Why? I sleep some portion of my day, so why not offer it in 8 hour increments? I can enjoy it at work…at home and not feel like I am wasting...

Only 30% of Europeans pay with credit / debit cards! You can quickly do some online research and you’ll find that between 29-31% of EU citizens use credit / debit cards and instead prefer ‘localized payment methods. ‘ Localized payment methods drive international eCommerce! By enabling the online Guest to pay with their payment mechanism…online conversion is improved and site retention benefits. The Guest is less likely to commoditize your product due to their ability to pay how they want for what they want. Alternative or localized payments are common worldwide, and drive 10-30% improvement in incremental revenue from non-cannibalized sources. PAYMENT TYPES - GLOSSARY Credit Card - A card that allows a retail or business consumer to make purchases using a card and account where there is a predetermined borrowing arrangement up to a fixed monthly level. A plastic card bearing a number, the name of the cardholder, an expiration date and a Verification Code/Value. Used for purcha...

I always say to my friends that the minute I sound like I am making sense or know what I am saying, please hit the pause button cuz I’m not the sharpest guy you’ll meet. Having said that…let’s look at the trend in US gaming that seems to be trailing and copying Asia, EU and Eastern EU. Fully 80%+ of game publishers are exploring monetizing their games via in game currencies and commerce. A couple of quick definitions to help make sure we are singing the same song, including the monetization strategy; 1. subscription based games - monthly recurring subscriptions provide enhanced levels/attributes/game play in exchange for paying a monthly subscription. These have been common in the US and are not popular in Asia or EU (more on that later). Recently, US companies are combining free2play models as the lure to get gamers into subscription services. When we think of subscription models we invariably thing of World of Warcraft ( WOW) and the like. 2. Free2play - exactly as it sou...

I love this town in Italia! Go Lets a Modoletz! This was my final season in Italia and my friends from Castions della Mura Bagnaria Arsa are to be remembered with fondness always! If you look closely, you can see the baseball diamond...which was so beautiful that we hosted the European Championships for the kids...and a scout from the Tigers took pics as he'd never seen such beauty. Hand painted scoreboard...bubbling water so pure in a stone trough...the corn stalks in left just like Field of Dreams...and an infield so sweet you couldn't get a bad hop! In ITALIAN (translation follows) - how baseball came to Castions! Forse è stato davanti ad un buon bicchiere di birra, o forse è stato durante una di quelle lunghe discussioni, o forse chissà… ma è sicuramente stata la passione per uno sport coinvolgente, a spingere un gruppo di giovani a fondare una associazione sportiva, che si dedichi alla pratica ed alla diffusione del baseball e del softball nel comune di Bagnaria Arsa e non...

Social Gaming Summit: Monetization and Business Models for Social Games My laptop battery had already died, but the final panel at the Social Gaming Summit on monetizing social games was too good to not take some notes. David Perry, CCO, Acclaim, who's been putting together a hefty tome cataloging, if I remember right, as many possibilities for gaming as possible, noted that there are 22 ways to monetize a game. He didn't give a list, but there's certainly a range out there. For now, though, the most prominent for virtual worlds and social games seem to be subscription, advertising, and microtransaction, especially when packaged around a free-to-play experience. You just have to make it clear that eventually there needs to be money exchanged, explained Mattias Miksche, CEO, Stardoll "We've always said this is free and this is pay," said Miksche. "I think a lot of people are missing out by tring to build a big audience around entirely free content and then...

This guest post is written by Susan Wu, a Principal with Charles River Ventures, where she focuses on digital media, software, and infrastructure. Susan is coproducing the Virtual Goods Summit this Friday at Stanford University - most of the companies mentioned below will be presenting. People spend over $1.5 billion on virtual items every year. Pets, coins, avatars, and bling: these virtual objects are nothing more than a series of digital 1s and 0s stored on a remote database somewhere in the ether. What could possibly possess people to spend real, hard earned cash on ‘objects’ that have no tangible substance? The virtual worlds space has received tremendous press attention in the last year, fueled in no small part by Wild West stories of fortune and anarchy in worlds like Second Life and the plight of the Chinese gold farmer in World of Warcraft. But people aren’t paying attention to the bigger story. While people preoccupy themselves with mocking the absurdities of some of these vi...

My name is Steve Williams, and I am a MMO gamer and also a casual gamer. Give me an MMO, and I’ll play it. Give me a simple Flash game and I’ll play it. Wouldn’t it be fun if someone could mix the two flavors together and make a peanut butter cup of gameplay that would satisfy both MMO fun and casual fun? advertisement So let’s talk about what mini-games are doing in a self-respecting MMO like Stargate Worlds - let’s talk about putting the peanut butter into the chocolate and making something tasty. Since time immemorial, or at least the past few years, MMOs have focused upon two things: Killing stuff (and getting their loot) and making stuff for people to go kill stuff (and get their loot). As building games goes, that’s a pretty good spread of features, and it’s not too hard to make that work. Recently, however, the thought struck the minds of some developers out in the deserts of Arizona that a lot of fiction is built not around killing things (and getting their loot), but in solvi...