Ok, so video game consoles won’t be replaced for at least 5-10 years, as Gerhard Florin, EA, said incompatible consoles made life harder for developers and consumers in a recent BBC article, but there are some killer games in development and early release that you can already play in your browser. Whether you’re a casual gamer who enjoys a 5 minute break during the day to play Bejeweled, or a hardcore clan gamer who lights his opponents up in first person shooter (fps) mayhem, you’re going to love the new generation of online gaming.
There are three game companies in particular that have beta games in various testing phases that you can sign up for right now, but spots are limited so you better move fast.
Good luck gaming!
1. Two Fish Inc, EDGERACERS
From the Quick Start Guide: Edgeracers - the community-based online racing experience! Edgeracers is all about having fun with friends old and new, growing your collection of highly-customizable cars, and competing with the community to become the best racer with the hottest set of wheels!
This is how parent company, Eximion, describes Kalydo as The brand new Kalydo technology allows gamers to play stunning 3D games in their browser. After installation of the Kalydo player people can play all Kalydo Powered games online. Players can continue playing, any time and anywhere in the world. Your game progress and achievements are automatically saved online (persistent webgaming).
3. Id Software Inc, QUAKE LIVE
Joystiq has a great write-up on Quake Live: As much as years of consuming have taught us to love purchasing goods and services, we have to admit that we still love free stuff just a skosh more. If you share in our gratis glee, you may be interested to hear that id, developer of web-based Quake III port Quake Live(formerly known as Quake Zero) is currently accepting sign-ups for the beta program.
I know this is late and that most of the other teams immediately posted their part of this general TechStars writeup in the Boulder County Business Report, but I’ll include the blurb about us anyway. Thanks to article author, Ryan Dionne.
Startups learn ropes from crew of seasoned advisers
By Ryan Dionne
July 18, 2008
BOULDER -The popularity of the TechStars LLC program, in its second year, has substantially increased.
The summer program offers 10 startup software or Web-related companies $5,000 per founder up to $15,000 and provides a space to work as well as a plethora of mentors to aid the businesses.
Last year 302 companies applied for the 10 positions. This year the number increased to 393, said David Cohen, executive director of the program. This year five women are involved in TechStars compared to none the first year.
“It feels like the companies are slightly more mature in their thinking,” Cohen said regarding this year’s crop.
Of last year’s companies, nine are still operating, seven of those received funding beyond the initial TechStars funding. One is profitable and didn’t accept funding. While one is operating but not profitable nor did it accept funding.
Now, nearly two months into the program, companies are taking advantage of the TechStars leadership and downtown Boulder work space to develop their vision as they approach the end of the program - Aug. 22.
BuyPlayWin
Combine online shopping with online gaming and a slice of gambling, and that’s what co-founders Aziz Grieser and Peter Zhang and their team at BuyPlayWin created.
Grieser and his team plan to develop relationships with online retailers like Amazon.com Inc. and sell the partner products through BuyPlayWin’s Web site, www.buyplaywin.com, when they launch a private beta version sometime after August.
But the fun factor comes from the chance to get the product for free by playing a host of games - including things like poker, Tetris and Pac-Man.
Whoever wins - whether it’s high score, biggest earnings or more - receives a refund for the MP3 player. The shoppers who lose merely have to pay for the product.
At first, the company plans to offer movie tickets to keep the site simple and garner support. From there, Grieser said the possibilities are endless.
BuyPlayWin is an exciting and venture-backed startup, located one street away from the Pearl street shopping area of downtown Boulder, and we have two exciting openings for a thrilling summer internship. Note, both internships are flexible and can be full-time or part-time.
1. “Devvy” General Web Developer - Gamer/Coder: These are our flexible guidelines for this position:
Experience with web related technologies including HTML, PHP/JSP, JavaScript, CSS, and MySQL DB systems.
Game hosting and playing experience a plus (LAN and Web game parties).
Quick learner, ability to learn new technologies and deliver on a fast-paced schedule.
Ability to work in a cooperative and team environment, as well as, the ability to work independently.
2. “Bizzy” General Business & Marketing: These are our flexible guidelines for this position:
Experience with sales, marketing research, professional writing and correspondence.
Internet technology research
Scheduling and contact management (must be professional and comfortable speaking on behalf of key people)
Project management assistance
Produce and continuously improve the quality and value of our online experience through data-driven analysis, optimization, and experimentation.
Quick learner and deliver on a fast-paced schedule.
Ability to work in a cooperative and team environment, as well as, the ability to work independently.
Additional Desired Qualifications: statistics (significance testing, linear regression, etc.), experimental design, excel (high level of proficiency), attention to detail, ability to multi-task, familiarity with the web and online communities
Creative, but without wasting time.
Common sense and good judgment.
Future potential for the right candidate.
Pluses: HTML / website production, familiarity with business calculations like NPV, viral growth models, statistal analysis (regressions), powerpoint and the ability to communicate data-rich ideas to a data-hungry audience.
These are our inflexible guidelines for both positions:
Never, ever, says, “this is not in my job description”, but instead says, “I am part of the team. Anything could be in my job description”.
We believe that BuyPlayWin is a fresh and unique customer experience, joining several industries together for the first time. This is the second of a 3 part series of posts that give our perspective on each industry.
E-commerce
Web 2.0 Advertising
Gaming.
Lately, we’ve heard a recurring message from social network websites and some of their investors:
Show me the money dammit!
It’s clear that there’s going to be some sort of collapse to the social bubble; not everyone can survive, at least among the big guys. There are simply too many competitors for web advertising dollars. Ok, the pie is growing and will continue to grow, but new social website growth is vastly outperforming new advertiser budget growth, which is the direct result of new technologies becoming freely available to anyone. We simply can’t think of new social websites as being medium to big companies anymore, but instead, we have to include every new blog that is created, each day, small business or individual. Look at what Michael Arrington, (TechCrunch), has to say about Yahoo’s current predicament. Microsoft takeover deals, Google safety lines, angry shareholders, and ever-thinning ranks of Yahoo executives have the blogosphere speculating whether Yahoo will survive, or fall (some have already decided one way or the other). Remember, every popularly read blog entry about Yahoo, (like this one will be one day), takes another potential advertiser dollar away from Yahoo.
So, is social advertising to blame for Yahoo’s predicament? We don’t think so.
Again, we’ll reference Michael Arrington and TechCrunch. TechCrunch earns $240,000 from advertisements per month for the 1.25 million users that read the techno-blog each month. Think of some of the very popular folk’s blogs you follow, and the amount of money that person is making from everyone reading their thoughts. Need help? For quick estimates, take Michael’s $240,000 monthly revenue, divide by 1.25 million users per month, and you get a little over $0.19 cents per reader. That’s a higher number than most blog writers will be able to achieve, but it’ll give you a rough estimate of any blog’s revenue potential if you track the monthly unique views with Compete.com (not arguing over which count statistic is most accurate here). Let’s look at one popular blogger, Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures. Fred has two blogs: http://fredwilson.vc/and http://avc.blogs.com/a_vc/ We’ll just focus on the first, since we can’t get accurate stats for the second. Compete.com, http://fredwilson.vc/
Monthly People Count: 15,391 and growing by 12% each month.
Our math: 15,391 X $0.19 = $2,955.07 per month
Remember, this site is much less popular than his other blog, which actually has advertisements. Can you see that Fred is easily paying his monthly bills, including rent, just by writing a blog?
So, why is Yahoo hurting so badly? We think it’s a result of being stretched to thin with no clear focus.
Yahoo has so many different businesses they’ve acquired over too short a time. Why? When you think of Yahoo, what phrase comes to mind? Don’t feel bad, we don’t know either. People have been saying that Yahoo is confused about what they are for years. The simple fact is that Yahoo is competing closely with many small battles, involving hundreds of competitors in some cases. This has the impact of diluting their overall advertisement worth in the eyes of advertisers, who now have more precisely targeted options.
At the Snap Summit in San Francisco, everyone was using the “social graph” to target ads, which is more like traditional targeted advertising. Facebook and other social networks constantly fret over how to make money for themselves and for their partner businesses. You can see the type of thinking occurring in these closed and open discussions in this Inside Facebook article, titled “Show Me The Monetization: Turning Apps Into Dollars.” In an attempt to diversify their revenue from just social network advertising dollars to include actual e-commerce, Facebook recently announced Radical Buy, offering a 15% fixed commissions to product resellers on Facebook, who opt to sell out their friends. Think of it as an online Amway. Community is where online has always been at, there’s nothing really new there.
Some of our team can remember the first BBS systems, and it was all about finding people you were interested in chatting with (at 300 characters a second). Then, later CompuServe and AOL were all about finding groups of people, too. UseNet, which some of us got into heavily in the early 90’s was also the same way: find a group that has people with the same interests. There are millions of community sites now, using stuff like phpbb or phpforum set up with from just a few to thousands of users. What kind of makes MySpace & Facebook more interesting these days is that like CompuServe or AOL, you could find lots of groups in one place. Of course, CompuServe isn’t around anymore, and AOL is barely.
The main lesson to learn from Yahoo is the same lesson to learn from any other social network focused business: do something unique, stay focused on it, and do it best.
We believe that BuyPlayWin is a fresh and unique customer experience, joining several industries together for the first time. This is the first of a 3 part series of posts that give our perspective on each industry.
E-commerce
Web 2.0 Advertising
Gaming.
(Post Updates At The Bottom In Italics)
Just now breaking news: “William Ackerman, the billionaire hedge fund manager who is a major stakeholder in Borders Group Inc., said Wednesday the bookseller should consider approaching online retailer Amazon.com Inc. about a possible acquisition.”
Ackerman owns a 30% stake in Borders, so he does want the stock to go up in anticipation of a merger. However, he is proposing to open new “Apple-like” renovated and chic boutique Amazon stores to replace all of the old Borders brick and mortars, producing his cliche, “bricks ‘n clicks”.
If you find yourself scratching your head, here’s a quick recap:
This is not a joke. We just got a confirming email from Amazon, and I’ve pasted it below:
The following are key excerpts from the afore-linked articles above:
After a lengthy hiatus from its solitary existence as an online bookseller, it’s back as an independent entity, and it’s come with a major facelift clearly meant to increase interest in its brand. A visit to the site today will show users a storefront with rich visuals. The site’s centerpiece is a browser window that users can interact with to view highlighted book, music, and movie titles. Border’s has dubbed this feature “The Magic Shelf.”
Borders’ Web site announcement came as the company said it was shuttering nearly half of its Waldenbooks stores.
Before 2001, Borders had its own Internet business, but it wasn’t profitable, Roman said. That led to the arrangement with Amazon, which operated Borders’ Web site, took orders and delivered books.
Amazon obtained all the sales and gave an undisclosed cut to Borders, Roman said. Amazon also runs the Web sites for Target and Bebe and fills the orders.
The loss of Borders could cost Amazon $80 million to $160 million in annual revenue, according to an estimate by Scott Devitt, an analyst with St. Louis-based Stifel, Nicolaus & Co. Amazon and Borders wouldn’t confirm or deny those figures.
Devitt said the loss isn’t material to Amazon, which had revenue of $10.7 billion last year and $190 million in profits.
Devitt said the loss of Borders could result in a 2 percent decline in profits for Amazon.
Perspective:
Borders has struggled for a long time to get its book business booming online. They’ve received a lot of criticism for their past performance, and this continuing tragedy. We’re not sure, but most deals like this go bad when one party realizes they’d be more profitable on their own. Why are they just realizing this now? One answer:
Amazon’s EC2 Cloud Infrastructure
This was the reason that Borders bedded with Amazon in the first place: to leverage Amazon’s superior technology infrastructure. The difference? Today, it’s being basically given away to millions of startups through Amazon Web Services. Borders has been giving their business away to Amazon for a very long time, accepting a small cut for their own business. Now, they see the folly of their ways, but it’s probably too late.
Borders plans to outsource server costs to Amazon through EC2 Cloud Computing, like so many other dot com’s, but the paperback book margins are slimmer now. A lot slimmer. Technically, the data ain’t really goin’ nowhere. We tend to think, same server, must be same sys admin’s.
Kindle has started taking off. Digital books are going to take over reader’s preference as the device becomes more popular and cheaper. Yes, just like your first iPod that you bought after prices came down.
This will be an interesting corporate soap opera for all of us. Stay tuned!
Post Update 1: Borders US partners with Alibris
Significance: This is serious competition folks. This partnership is a move to differentiate Borders online book selling from Amazon online book selling, in a way other than the eventual price war. The split between Amazon and Borders will hurt both companies over the long haul, but the cost of your books will come down.
Significance: We think that Borders and Alibris it’s not going to hurt Amazon at all, as far as we can see. Like they said, maybe 2% of Amazon’s total revenue. It’s going to be tough for Borders.
If you check the Alexa rankings, it does look like they’ve had a big spike lately, but maybe just nothing was happening on borders.com before. The click n bricks thing is a cliche, but it could be a powerful one. We’ve used it a couple times: the ability to check and see if a book was in stock at the store before driving over. If not, we ordered from Amazon. If they can make that work, it could really be something.
However, that won’t work if they try to be a boutique. It’ll only work if they operate like they do now and have a deep inventory. It’s hard to find a real bookstore with a deep inventory these days, and borders is better than B&N.
Compare the rankings: B&N is way ahead of Borders now, and they’re both way behind Amazon. Borders has a steep hill to climb just to catch up with B&N. The difference in number of stores could be significant.
