Category Archive

I’m heading off for the Austin Game Developers Conference this afternoon.  I’ll be there through Friday evening, if anyone wants to meet up.

I realized recently that I speak mostly in conclusions. That is to say, I am really bad at exposing my thought processes to other folks.  It’s one of the reasons why I blog so infrequently.  I only feel comfortable blogging fully formed thoughts - ones that have relatively well tested hypotheses.  But so much of relationship formation and bonding - the good stuff - happens in the in-between spaces.  I decided I need to actively work on exposing these thought processes.  

So I guess I’ll try posting more casually to my blog. I don’t have a lot of faith in this yet, but I suppose it’s the kind of thing that takes practice.  =)

I had a very enjoyable conversation yesterday with Byron Reeves.  Byron’s the Director of Stanford’s Language and Information Program.  In his spare time, he does a lot of consulting and startup work in the area of virtual worlds and virtual economies.  He told me about some fMRI work he’s done, studying people’s brains while they play World of Warcraft.  And the difference in people’s brain responses depending on whether you tell them the other characters they are interacting with are other people or NPCs (computer AI.) 

One of the companies he’s working with is Seriosity.   They are basically creating a platform to allow companies to create virtual economies by assigning currency values to different types of interaction and communication.  They are coming up with all sorts of very interesting, unique data about how virtual currencies drive behavior and group dynamics. 

Anyways, a few random thoughts have been percolating in my brain:

- What does it do to a [company's] culture if all interaction can be boiled down to some quantitative representation?

- Isn’t a company’s culture really just some expression of a collective utility function?

- And, has anyone done any studies measuring what type of correlation exists between the rate of change of a [group|country's] economic growth and the rate of change of its language? I guess I’m curious if various Chinese dialects are changing more quickly than languages in more static socioeconomic conditions.  I feel this must be true to some extent, but I wonder to what degree.

Yesterday, I got 3 searches for “pirate’s booty.”  Today, I got one search for the “galapagos turtle.”  And another for “making lots of money.” These I understand, because there’s actually content here that refers to these topics.

But some searches are really strange and unexplainable:

• “opening up front panel Wii”
• “club penguin hacking accounts”
• “posh spice new haircut”
• “urban snorkeling vacation”
• “gear military night vision”
• “how much a real baby monkey cost”
• “I NEED TO WRITE DOWN MY BUSINESS PLAN”

Who are you people?

Eesh.  I’m really playing catchup on this post.  My apologies.  If you want to be immersed in my life’s trivialities on a somewhat regular basis, you can follow my Twitter stream.  

For the 2 people that read my blog that don’t read Techcrunch (hi Mom, hi Grandma!), here’s a link to the Techcrunch article that I wrote awhile back on Virtual Goods: the Next Big Business Model. 

Also, the videos from the Virtual Goods Summit can be found here.   These are all worth watching, but if you have only 1 hr, I highly recommend that you watch the first one, Virtual Goods Success Stories.  Kira from Neopets, Paul from Habbo Hotel, David from Tencent, and Min from Nexon all disclose fascinating and very proprietary statistics about their businesses. 

I’m just getting back from a brief vacation.  I thought about going somewhere exotic, but I ended up being very, very lazy. I went to San Diego, hung out with old friends at ComicCon, and emptied my brain at the beach.  I read about a dozen books and watched Season 1 and 2 of Battlestar Galactica.  I know that sounds horribly dorky, but alas.  What can one do? 

Happy new year to you.  I just got back yesterday from a week long snowboarding vacation at Mammoth Mountain.  Mammoth is part of California’s Sierra Nevada mountain range.  It’s a pain to get to, but it has always been my favorite place to ride: it’s huge, has lots of varied terrain - including great tree runs, and has very well shaped jumps in the terrain park.  You come to love well built jumps if you’ve ever slammed your knees into your chin while landing on the flats after a big jump.

   
Look, I’m almost a Stormtrooper!

Actually, the big revelation for me this trip was Mono Lake.  I had never done the drive from north to south, so I had never had the chance to see the incredible beauty that is Mono Lake.  It’s a place I’d like to go back and explore when I’m not just driving by. 

This trip also reinvigorated my desire to get my pilot’s license.  It would be nice to not be so earthbound.   

So I’ve been watching this meme travel around the blogosphere, thanks to Jeff Pulver who started the whole thing.  Incidentally, Jeff has now become the recipient of some severe tongue lashing by several folks regarding his spurious marketing tactics in promoting this meme.  In any case, you’re supposed to list 5 things people don’t know about you and then tag 5 more people to see how far the meme travels. 

If not for this game, I would have never otherwise known that Dave McClure used to be a donut eating champion, Robert Scoble is a closet nose picker, Stephen O’Grady has a rubber band fetish, Jim Jagielski has never lived more than 25 miles away from where he grew up (!), and Sam Ruby has only ever dated one person in his life (!).   I also had a good laugh watching Loren Feldman’s response, which I found by following a thread to Jason Calacanis’ list. 

I love this game - I’m really fascinated by and enjoy learning about people.  I got tagged by Kevin Burton, so here’s my 5 things:

1. I am addicted to Pirate’s Booty.  I eat 5 bags of Pirate’s Booty a week.  I love all kinds of cheese puffs, but Pirate’s Booty is definitely the best.  I am also addicted to celebrity gossip sites like PerezHilton, PopSugar, and Dlisted, even though I know that by visiting these sites and consuming this information, I am contributing to the downfall of humanity. 
2. I once made a living as a jewelry designer.  I like manual labor a lot.  It’s like meditating, in a way.  Here are some photos of stuff I created:



3. My first official, paycheck paying job was as a waitress when I was 14.  The job paid $4 an hour.  It never paid any tips either, because it was in the dining room of a retirement home in Irvine, CA.  This job sucked.  I had to buy pink oxford shirts and khaki pants that I would have never worn otherwise.  However, I learned one important lesson: waiting on tables is hard, thankless work.  I don’t have a natural talent for it because I have a crappy memory.
4. When I was in my early 20s, I cofounded and wrote the business plan for a company that we took public a couple of years later at a $600 million+ valuation.  The company never reached its potential and innumerable mistakes were made along the way.  The most important thing I learned can be recited directly out of “The 10 Commandments of Entrepreneurship”: the first handful of hires will set the tone, culture, and values for the entire company, so make these choices carefully.  Are the people you’re surrounding yourself with people you would trust your life to in the trenches? If not, it’s better to err on the side of being conservative and grow more slowly.   The culture you build compounds exponentially in often unpredictable ways, so plant those seeds very carefully.  I hope to never make this mistake again.
5. I felt most alive when swimming off the shore of Kailua (in Oahu, Hawaii) this summer. 

The 5 people I tag are George Zachary, Bill Tai, Matt Asay, Jonas Luster - who has a gargantuan vault of fascinating stories, and Raph Koster - because I want to see this meme jump the tracks to the gaming universe.

Last night, I had the pleasure of hanging out in person with my guildmates from World of Warcraft. I’m a total noob - a mere level 30 Druid - so it was fun to be able to spend time with other folks from the We (K)no(w) guild and look over Joi’s shoulder as he showed me Molten Core.   I’m grateful that they included me, because I had nothing to add to the hardcore WoW conversation. Like a recovering addict, I feel conscious about tempering my WoW exposure, as I’ve lost spent years of my life on other games in the past (4 years to MUDs, 2 years to Quake/Quake2, 1.5 years to Asheron’s Call, 1 year to Planetside, .5 years to Kingdom of Loathing.  Not to mention all the time spent on Knights of the Old Republic.)  But as I listened to Michelle (Kazpah) & Don talk about gaming prices for Epics in the auction house, I couldn’t help but feel a twinge of longing… Hanging out with the guildies made me feel warm and fuzzy about being in such a great guild. 

 Eric Haller posted this photo of all of us gathered at Michelle’s house in Dolores Park.  We’re all -really- laughing because of some funny audio that came up on Joi’s laptop just as the photo was being taken.

Btw, yes, I’m working on blinging up my blog. I know it’s ugly.