It's been a really hectic few weeks for me, for a reason that will be unveiled soon - hence the big slow down in blogging. I'm at the Facebook Developer Garage London tonight (which I help organise). I usually try to take notes and write them up into a blog post later, however because I'm so pressed for time at the moment I'm writing this 'live' at the garage.
A bit different this time, as we've got
Laura Kidd along to video the presentations, which will be up and on YouTube within a couple of days, so I'll embed them here when they're live.
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Karl Bunyan from Exponetic is talking at the moment on apps to watch, looking at how the company behind Friends for Sale has just got huge investment, and how Slide's been expanding Funwall.
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We're now listening to Jon Mitchell from Spotify, a new music (desktop) app from the people behind Skype. It's a free, legal, on demand music streaming service that's ad-funded (both audio and online).
They're determinedly not a social network, but have many social features to share playlists, recommend music, etc, and have very sophisticated ad targeting. They do some similar stuff to last.fm (e.g. a radio player that recommends music) - but you can listen to full tracks indefinitely, compared to Last.fm's 3 times. They also have the ability to purchase songs through them (via retailers at the moment), although they say this isn't a focus at the moment, as they're more about exploration than ownership.
They're showing a demo of the app on Mac. It's similar to iTunes, a good idea considering the huge number of users of iTunes familiar with the layout, and it seems pretty slick. It has a playlist feature so you can put together favourite artists and songs etc. They asked someone to shout out a band and straight away got to Devo and started playing, which is pretty impressive - it showed all of their albums and artwork and he dragged an album into a playlist.
The main speakers are Andrew Mills and Daniel Denning from Sports Anorak, an application project from Andrew and Dan alongside ITN. They create unique Facebook applications for different football teams. They have about 700,000 installs, and support eight leagues. They have 1293 discussion topics just on Arsenal Supporters, and are getting 3-5m page-views per month (2-5% Daily Active Users). They've recently branched out into Bebo (currently have 80k users there).
Andrew and Dan started the app themselves and then went to ITN once it had some traction to get together to distribute content from ITN to the app (a number of different sports shows). They spoke to Facebook directly to get video feed approval, which means that if one of their users share any of the videos, their friends can play it directly from the feed - a huge viral benefit.
They had some issues with user racism, and have had to stamp down on this pretty hard - creating an automatic mechanism to delete racist posts and block those users, as well as a moderation scheme - they track down users who are really active in the forums, and give them admin control to delete and block, which they've found to be an amazingly effective strategy (as well as a great way to reward heavy users).
They had some copyright issues with club logos and fixture details but have managed to overcome these - for example, instead of logos they now use 'club shirts'.
It's coming up to the end of the season now, so they're looking to improve and expand the app, by moving into other social networks like Friendster and MySpace, possibly expanding the sports they cover, and building mobile apps.
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Next up is Kristian Segerstrale from Playfish, a social games company. He's speaking on how to create successful HTML businesses, and lessons learnt from the games industry. Kristian is a multiple games entrepreneur - co-founder and MD Europe of NASDAQ listed mobile games company Glu Mobile, and has been behind over 50 games (multiple platforms), including over 10 top-ten titles. He set up Playfish with $3m seed finance, and they're getting over 5m game plays (CORRECTION: 1.5m - still very impressive) a day through their gaming applications. Their main game so far is "Who has the biggest Brain", and they've just released "Word Challenge".
Kristian's five learnings:
1. Think like a CFO (with picture of Darth Vader in the background)
- develop a financially led operating model
- manage risk in hits business
- clear product strategy (e.g. some low risk cash cows, high risk experiments). Choose them by forecasted contribution, not just what would be fun.
- enterprise value
- choose a clear financing model (work for hire or venture capital)
- look for operating leverage
2. Create great product
- only create the No. 1's or 2's in any category - the rest don't matter and don't make satisfactory ROI
- attract the most talented team
- specialise in types of games
- love your product and polish, polish, polish
- names, trademarks, logos, characters, sequels - get it right from the start
3. Kill Product
- learn to stop projects when it no longer goes in the right direction, even if you love it
- This avoids resource drain, and bad products
- implement 'green light' time periods on projects, get big formal reviews after a certain time
- ensure that a kill is not seen as a failure, and no-one has loss of face (otherwise developers etc will be against the kill)
4. Build Platform
- develop and document tools, tech and processes to constantly improve efficiency
- better leverage over time
- easier to scale development
- enterprise value
- automate and document everything that can be
5. Budgets Increase
- be ready to compete with the kind of product that you expect to be possible within 1- 3 years
- production values always increase over time
- early investors into new platforms reap the largest rewards (allow to learn, build market share and products)
- build/recruit right skill set for 1-3 year horizon
- focus on continuous learning
Interestingly, he thinks that the Facebook app platform is around the same level at the moment as old MUDS - a far cry from World of Warcraft. He expects production values of Facebook app games to increase hugely, so that we have console-equivalent games on social nets.
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Just watched a great talk on Ideomag, a really impressive 'personalised daily music magazine'. It gets over 6000 articles a month from over 500 content partners, as well as pulling in feeds for artists from Flickr, YouTube etc. They take your profile info and friends profile info to create recommendations and then look at your behaviour, artists you look at and say you like etc, and personalise all the content they feed to you.
Unfortunately I was having an in-depth discussion with the person next to me during the presentation so couldn't get all the info down - have to wait for the video.
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We're just finishing up looking at what's new on the platform, will be over soon but loads of great conversations waiting to happen in the pub after (the best bit!).
Thanks to Toby and the rest of the committee, as well as all the speakers, and of course Laura for being our 'Video Girl'!
