Disqus - Friends of alanodea

Re: Amazon Sets eBook World Alight with Kindle - Finally, Time For Read/Write Books!

Tadhg Kelly — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 11:48:54 -0000

I like the idea, but damn that thing is ugly.

I don't agree with this idea that e-book readers have to try and replicate the book experience in every way, much as iPods don't try and replicate the Walkman experience in every way. I read novels on my winmobile frequently, and the most comfortable type of reader is the one where you can flick-scroll the text (like you would with an iPhone) rather than pretend to turn pages.

The replication idea is, in my opinion, an attempt to convince the baby-boomers, but they simply do not want to be convinced no matter how hard they try. The younger generations and perfectly able to understand text-scrolling and finger-gestures, however, and ebook readers should be designed with them in mind.

Re: The great iPhone 3G iFail: A retrospective with videos

Tadhg Kelly — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 02:06:38 -0000

It's basically exactly the same story here in the UK, except swap AT+T with O2, the network that has exclusive rights. It's been an absolute shambles, to the point that the Apple stores just stopped selling them at all and advised everyone to come back tomorrow.

Re: Apple’s MobileMe Is Far Too Flawed To Be Reliable

Tadhg Kelly — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 07:00:25 -0000

The thing that fries me about it is the lack of interoperability.

For instance:

* It'll sync IE and Safari bookmarks, but not Firefox?

* It won't simply retrieve mail from other services like Gmail, and instead you have to mess around with POP settings and a me.com address

* It won't sync with existing web app calendars like Google Calendar.

What I really want from this service is invisibility. I want it to handle keeping my existing web apps and my existing desktop apps in sync with my phone. I don't want to move over to another web service when I already have a lot of services set up as I like them.

The biggest mistake that Apple have made with MobileMe is trying to push people toward their web apps rather than working with the existing apps (like gmail and gcal) which are far superior in every respect and work with many external services already.

As a pre-existing .mac subscriber, I am minded to not bother renewing my subscription once my existing contract expires unless Apple promise to sort out the interoperability issues properly.

Re: The Blogging Dream

Tadhg Kelly — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 11:27:51 -0000

My blogging dream, in a word, is fiction. Blogging may have taken the world by storm in the realms of fact, comment and insight but it is all non-fiction so far. For me that is only part of what writing has to offer. The other, arguably more significant part, is that of creative writing. I don't mean rot like fan fix etc. I mean quality art in word form dustributed through RSS.

Re: Why Isn’t there a Google Version of MobileMe for the iPhone?

Tadhg Kelly — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 19:11:42 -0000

And maybe the Google version would actually work as expected.
I love Apple but I do not love Mobileme.

Re: What Exactly are Social Games? - SocialTimes

Tadhg Kelly — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 04:56:51 -0000

Nice round-up (although I realise it's a few months old, but still).

I did a similar article recently for our company website. Simple Lifeforms (that's us) is a new social games startup based in the UK and we're very happy to be exploring this exciting space.

Here's our piece on it: http://www.simplelifeforms....

Re: New OnLive service could turn the video game world upside down

Tadhg Kelly — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 13:54:58 -0000

80 milliseconds is too long compared to the nanoseconds that it takes data to move around in an internal chip. It is literally thousands of times slower.

The problem with the OnLive idea is simply one of distance, not power. The limiting factor is neither processing power nor data size: It's transmission speed. Data can only travel across cables at somewhere a bit less than the speed of light and while that might seem instantaneous to you and I, it is not to a game handling millions of operations per second.

The further you are from the server, the worse it gets. And this isn't really factoring in the problems of latency. While OnLIve may have fashioned their data packets to be efficient, the fact is that most users are operating on contended connections, many of them are using packet-clogging software like uTorrent and Youtube, and so OnLive's traffic has to get in line just like everyone else's.

These means that while it'll look great in a test in a museum with a server a few miles away, playing a game of Counterstrike across half a continent via this system is likely impossible.

I don't think we'll ever see games as a service overcome these issues unless the internet itself is upgraded in some freaky way, and even then it's doutbful. Games today already have a ton of code in them for encoding and decoding network packet data for multiplayer games, and even then they have issues, corrections for latency, etc. Put the whole game in the cloud? Those issues grow 100 times worse, fancy compression or no.

Re: Switch to Seesmic Desktop…Now.

Tadhg Kelly — Mon, 25 May 2009 19:17:19 -0000

Or just use Nambu, which does all the same Twitter stuff, is OSX native, uses way less RAM and also monitors trending topics.

The one thing that still screws up all AIR apps is how much RAM they eat. I don't understand it, as Twitter is just posting tiny text updates to a simple desktop interface. Why on earth does this take up 400MB of RAM?

Re: MySpace wants to be “a gaming platform” – who are the top acquisition targets?

Tadhg Kelly — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 09:32:02 -0000

Why not buy Hi5?

Hi5 has been actively building itself as a games-oriented social network this year, has developed a series of technologies like virtual goods integration, has a userbase that could probably help boost Myspace's numbers by 40-60 million, etc.

Simply buying one of the successful developers won't be enough for Myspace. The issues are many, but chief among them is that most of the companies you've listed don't have a full package approach. They all rely on a myriad of billing providers. For Myspace to buy into the space they would need an acquisition target that not only has some games, but also has the infrastructure. I don't think any of the social game developers really have that in play yet as they are all so young.

Re: Is Facebook Like Google, or More Like Yahoo?

Tadhg Kelly — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 22:12:25 -0000

I get what you're saying, but I think you have it the wrong way around.

What won it for Google over Yahoo was the refining of the "search" experience to its simplest and most elegant form, but in Facebook vs Twitter it is Facebook that has the more elegant implementation of the "share" experience. Twitter may be everywhere but it's kind of a mess to use, requiring an understanding of @'s and RTs and so on. Facebook has none of that guff.

The difference between the two is that Twitter is totally public where Facebook is private. It would make some sense then for Facebook to have a public face, and lo and behold here comes Facebook Lite. Here comes a purchase of Friendfeed (which is exactly that). Here comes superb advertising technology for socially aware data. Here comes Facebook Connect.

I also don't think Facebook has as much of a problem with feature diversity. They have a few features that cross over a bit, but this is slowly getting sorted out (Groups will likely eventually become Pages). What it does have is a games ecosystem but that's essentially just left to run itself inside some strong rules to do with user policies. It's not quite like Yahoo with its masses of over-run information.

Re: The Future of Gaming: 5 Social Predictions

Tadhg Kelly — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 04:39:35 -0000

1. Yes
2. Maybe
3. Yes. And more respectable, more to the point.
4. Yes. Although they will mostly fail.
5. Yes. Not sure what that has to do with social games though.

Re: Penny Arcade! - From The Makers Of “Beam Kings” - Tadhg Kelly dot Com

Tadhg Kelly — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 06:10:09 -0000

Test comment

Re: Anticipating Apple Tablet, Amazon Bumps Kindle Royalty Cut

Tadhg Kelly — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 13:56:12 -0000

This may sound dumb, but won't Amazon just port the Kindle app to the iTablet, like they did with iPhone?

Re: The coming Facebook games price war (#socialgames)

Tadhg Kelly — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 10:10:38 -0000

Absolutely (on the mad dash front). I think we'll see a lot of experimentation/crisis management.

Re: Developers who blame the IGDA for doing nothing, blame themselves for doing nothing

Tadhg Kelly — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 05:43:35 -0000

This is a very common refrain from IGDA loyalists, the "get involved if you want change" argument.

The counter-argument is simply this: The IGDA is an impediment to effecting any useful change in the industry because it has managed to become a de facto voice of game developers while at the same time constitutionally framing itself in such a way that it cannot actually do anything for them.

This makes it nothing more than a club for would-be sages and white paper writers. It's not a representative organisation in reality. It's just a career gig. An academic study group. A haven for greybeards who like to pronounce wisdom, students who want to break into the industry and etc.

The one thing that all the active naysayers keep coming back to is this: Has the IGDA ever, in its long history, actually accomplished anything? Has it ever been at the forefront of actual change? And the answer is "not really"

To be fair, they have a point. It's all well and good saying that it's about getting involved, change from within etc, but the organisation at a functional level is not useful to developers. The IGDA is not a professional organisation and it doesn't agitate for anything. It's an open door clubhouse which takes any and all members it can find.

It fundamentally cannot represent developers meaningfully because it won't take on the mantle of a developer's union (in the mould of a writer's guild or other creative union).

And that's the real issue here: The feeling among naysayers is simply that changing the IGDA would not fundamentally be worth it because it is as byzantine and useful as the US Senate. Instead, they feel that it would be better to simply replace the IGDA with a leaner organisation that focuses on the actual concerns of real developers rather than everyone who pays a membership.

I for one think the IGDA's time is past and it's time for professionals to go and found their own leaner developer union whose only focus is their issues. And I don't think that's a minority opinion.

Re: Google Goes Social with Google Buzz

Tadhg Kelly — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 13:29:34 -0000

Either this is going to be awesome or feel like something Google should have done 3 years ago. There can be no in-between.

Re: HOW TO: Integrate Facebook, Twitter and Buzz into Your Gmail

Tadhg Kelly — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 20:41:22 -0000

The Twitter gadget is nice, but surely there are better Facebook gadgets? This one basically just places Facebook in a too-small window inside Gmail, attempting to inline it? I see no purpose in having inline solutions in GMail if all they actually are is a rendering of the site's home page too small so that the app maker can strip some ads alongside.

What works better for Facebook is simply having e-mail settings in FB turned on, and then a couple of semi-intelligent filters to pull all of the Facebook posts into some easy-to see groups. I have three filters for this purpose, FB (to grab all Facebook content) and then Events and FB Inbox as sub-divisions. It all works well with no muss.

Re: How To Bring Your Google Buzz Entries to Twitter

Tadhg Kelly — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 09:16:59 -0000

I've set it up, but so far my experience is that it's actually pretty flaky. Some shares worked, some didn't, some buzzes moved across to Twitter, others didn't. Etc. I'm not sure whether the problem is with Reader, PSHB or Buzz.

Re: How To Bring Your Google Buzz Entries to Twitter

Tadhg Kelly — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 10:22:11 -0000

Don't know. I unhooked it for a finish and used Twitterfeed instead and no Buzz pushing into Twitter. I think it's just not ready for the limelight yet.

Re: 20% of Facebook gamers spend money, an average of $35 per month

Tadhg Kelly — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 18:59:06 -0000

I can buy that 5% of users (20% of 27% is 5%) spend per month. But $35?? Not a hope. More like $3.50.

Re: Scale first, monetize second

Tadhg Kelly — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 12:16:28 -0000

That's all well and good, and I don't mean to sound dismissive.

However (especially outside the Valley) I have yet to encounter any investor who "blows past the revenue slide" as you say. They blow past all the others and only really give a damn about that slide.

And yet every blogger-investor has the opposite view. This leads me to think three things:

1. That the scale-attitude (Which, by the way, I agree with. Aside from a little customer discovery to verify that your market is real, startups are usually a growth game, not a revenue game) has not really gone anywhere outside the Valley. Out here in what passes for the real world (London in my case) there is ZERO interest in "that kind of talk", community-building is regarded as a nice-to-have, and ideas like Twitter and Facebook (and no doubt Google back in the day) fall into either the "madness" category or the "inevitable success" category.

2. Blogger-investors are unusual in the investor community, not just because they blog, but because they tend to be thought leaders - and a bit echo-chamber like to boot.

3. And the problem with thought-leading Valley investors seems to be that they don't really invest outside the Valley.

This presents a set of difficult challenges for non-Californian-based but Californian-minded companies like ourselves because we hear the message, and yet at the same time find it has very little purchase with those who would invest. And that creates all sorts of conflicts, as you can imagine.

(And also, because of a lack of available working visas, we can't move to San Francisco)

Anyway, bitching aside, the question has to be how to convince the investment communities around the world that their revenue-first headset is basically wrong seems to be the big challenge.

Re: Scale first, monetize second

Tadhg Kelly — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 15:07:11 -0000

Sure, sure, but you are a Bay area alumnus. As I said, I wasn't being dismissive at all, rather that your (in my opinion) right way of seeing the world and what matters for startup investment is very Valleyesque and doesn't tend to come from people who are not, or have not been, there. Here in the UK every single investor I've met is only interested in revenue revenue revenue, and this is why they tend to fund transitional companies rather than startups.

i was at a Lean Startups meeting last month in London where I met many other UK entrepreneurs, and they all have the same problem. Lean/customer development is quite popular over here because of its focus on money.

The over-riding message in the UK is that without prove-able revenue you won't get even modest funding (a couple of hundred thousand pounds, which is not a vast amount) because over here investors are terrified of risk, know very little about the technology industry and are all to able to remember the dotcom crash (like some kind of bogeyman tale to tell children).

Most of them are convinced that Twitter is simply a charity built on madness and that Facebook is a bad business, for example. They think of themselves as realists. It's a shame really because Britain has a lot of development talent, but on the whole significantly under-performs in the online sector. It is not the centre of innovation that it should be.

The kind of online businesses that get funded here seem to be things like insurance comparisons sites (like we don't have enough of those already) or second hand gold trading, or dating sites, or rubbish like that as a result. They're businesses that can answer that "cash in the till" instinct that investors over here have. And all of them, to a one, is a poor growth business reliant on TV advertising to try and make up the numbers.

Re: Monotony Is Expected

Tadhg Kelly — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 07:30:27 -0000

It is surprising, when you get right down to it, exactly how little original content or insight exists in the 'sphere relative to the number of contributors. I think it's inversely related to the speed of publishing.

When it becomes very easy to retweet other works, then it becomes easy to effectively rewrite the same opinions, and so on. This is why, just yesterday in fact, I dumped 75% of the people and feeds I was following in Reader and Buzz (and will probably go on a mass Twitter purge today). The fact is that most of those people are simply not adding anything interesting.

I think it's becoming apparent that social media's big flaw is that it tends to become an echo chamber of friends who all share the same opinions and keep saying them over and over. To punch through that echo chamber and introduce a new conversation gets increasingly difficult because a kind of social-debt gathers around all social groups, and I don't think semantic technologies are really going to challenge that.

The Next Web, for me, isn't about semantic nor social. It's about exposing the creative. The Artistic Web, if you like, is about bringing insight, ideas and entertainment to people who weren't looking for it, didn't find in their social sphere, but had an interest that they weren't aware of. It's very different to broadcast media (which doesn't discriminate) and a hard problem to solve, but clearly it's where the web needs to go next.

Re: Is Zynga Running Out of People to Acquire on the Facebook Platform?

Tadhg Kelly — Tue, 04 May 2010 19:48:29 -0000

Hi Charles,

You're confusing monthly active users with regular users here. Zynga's daily active users (i.e. regular users) is actually around 20-25% of their monthly numbers. De-duped, that means they have around 20-25 million players (going on those November numbers, which haven't really grown since then for most developers, Zynga included).

What happened (as I predicted in December in fact http://www.gamasutra.com/bl... is that the various social developers had become very reliant on short term attention spam tactics to acquire lots of users very quickly, and Facebook killed off that pipe. At the same time, the rate of growth of Facebook users has slowed down, resulting in more "veteran" users (who've been through at least one game and got bored of it and less "novices". This combination has effectively ended the cheap-and-cheerful phase of social game development and is creating a lot of interesting risky behaviours (such as cross-wall posting, which I'm pretty sure is against the terms of service, or abuse of the email facility). I expect there will be a further set of smackdowns handed around soon.

What it means in general is that the social app economy is having to move away, inch by inch from the fake-viral place that it has existed in for a while (a lot of app developers talk about Facebook as "viral" when what they actually meant was "free advertising channels"), and into the realm of true-viral (where users start sharing games in their feeds off their own volition because they are genuinely awesome). That requires a completely different kind of software company, one which none of the social developers can really lay claim to at the moment.

Re: Attention Social Gaming Startups: Show You Can Reach $1M rev/month Before Calling a VC

Tadhg Kelly — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 16:18:52 -0000

If I'm pulling down $1m a month, what exactly do I need a VC for?

Honestly, this really shows (if true and not taken out of context) how little some of the VC community understand the whole games space and how they're largely driven by fads rather than business sense.