In at the Deep End…

Okay, its gone quiet for a while. No posts - whats going on?

Well - a lot is going on underneath the surface and some will have to wait till it all agreements get signed and in place.

The new company is called Esperient Corporation and we are going through all the fun of a pre-funded startup getting licenses, resources and plans fleshed out and in place.

I’ll start posting more on Esperient, what we are doing, investor processes and lessons learned in the coming weeks.

Right now lets just say, great team, great product and huge opportunity.

 more info to follow soon

 cheers.

One of my oldest friends is an aerospace engineer (yup he is an actual rocket scientist). He is also an adventurer (though he wouldn’t say that) and has spent the last two years living on his motorbike while he rode across Canada, through North America and around South America (Columbia, Bolivia, Peru, Chile etc) . From  North Alaska to the sourthern tip of Chile… You can find picturers of his adventure here:  http://ktmdave.smugmug.com/

Unfortunately not at agdc this year since juggling getting new gig off the ground (yup more info to follow) and finishing consulting gigs, but Gamasutra has  some great write ups:

 Sulka Haro’s keynote speech on Habbo Hotel. This was probably the one presentation i thought was a must see since Habbo hotel combines  multi-user web, gaming and online community development for a niche market (primarily early teenagers) seamlessly.

Cheyenne Mountain Entertainment,  Heatwave Interactive; Conduit Labs, and Areae. Great coverage of panel discussion from several heads of  potentially important game/ web3d/online world  startups discussing starting up on their own, financing, hiring and company sizes etc. must read.

Micro-transactions and business models. GoPets’ Eric Bethke, Areae’s Raph Koster, EA Mythic’s Marc Jacobs and Sony Online Entertainment Austin head John Blakely  in a panel to discuss What are the biggest online gaming opportunities?  Covers microtransactions, user generated content, and Xbox live arcade. worth a read if business models and user needs/industry drivers are of interest.
 

wow - my brothers got a cool blog and great pictures

http://www.3pointd.com/ - great blog on multi-user virtual worlds. lot of focus on second life and similar developments.

http://www.blitzcode.net/3d_1.shtml - some nice programming examples and interesting projects here

Since leaving Right Hemisphere (RH)  i’ve been looking at different options including a start-up. I was also determined to spend some time this summer getting up to speed on what has been happening outside of the world I’ve focused on for the last three years. Its been great catching up with friends and family and taking stock and thinking about what next. Its been fun playing with various social networks, api’s and new toys like Adobe Integrated Runtime and Terrainformatica’s Sciter. 

I’ll post more on the above in while but for the last few weeks I’ve been reading a lot on Venture Capital and refreshing brain cells on profit and loss and cash flow accounting, tech roadmaps, competitive landscapes  and the usual stuff.    While I’ve been working for a well funded start-up for the last 3 years thats enjoyed backing from Sequioa and Sutter Hill my knowledge of the processes and activities involved have largely been on the periphery.

As a product manager in a funded startup - you tend to focus on customer needs, competition, market requirements, product requirements, engineering team needs, product completion and marketing outs - data sheets, outbound presentations, case studies, customer value statements etc. As a senior product manager - you also spend time working on things like platform roadmaps and getting buy in for new directions, developing product management processes and live in alphabet soup of MRD, PRD,Specs, Alpha, Beta, RCx  etc

When i started reading up on vc funding and processes there were a lot of great books and some VC’s, angels, CEO’s and execs I know were helpful and gave great advice.   much of the advice offered is also encapsulated in the postings from these three blogs:

• Tim Oren  (VC) 
• Marc Andreessen (Mozaic, Netscape, Loudcloud/Opsware and Ning) 
•  Guy Kawasaki’s  (VC)

You can read them in  any order but i’d suggest reading  Tim’s Venture Capital categorised posts first;  Then check out Marc’s truth about venture capitalists posts. and finally if after reading both - your head hasnt exploded, then read and think hard on  Guy’s art of the start related posts - especially those related to pitches .

All  are articulate, well written and give different insights to the process and things you should consider. They are also all great examples of different styles of  blogs and outbound communications.

On the sense of presence  discussions for next generation web experiences…

1. are they really ‘next generation’ web experiences? lets settle on  potentially attractive possibilities for now..

2. In admist the early 90’s  ‘next big thing’ Virtual Reality  hype wave, there was a lot of pure clap trap written.  In amongst the articles describing interactive 3D as electronic LSD and scolarly articles referencing science fiction works such as Gibson’s Neuromancer or Stephenson’s Snowcrash as if science fact,  there were also some real gems.  

One of which was written by David Zeltzer now Senior Lead Scientist at General Dynamics Advanced Information  Systems and then a professor at MIT Media lab. His  paper entitled  ’Conceptual Model of the Sense of Presence in Virtual Environments’ sought to define a base classification framework for ‘presence’.   There are number of usability and user experience studies which extended this early work and provide measurement metrics and solid methodologies including work by Kulwinder Kaur amongst others.

I’ve got a hunch that its getting close to a time - when dusting some of these off, and mapping them onto current game studies and viewing them through our collective cyncical lens of product development and web 2.0 business model hype  will be very worthwhile…

 It will be interesting to see if/when these models get pulled into the mix as means to begin qualifying mixed 2D/3D interactive experiences start being fully mainstream.

Reality.org - if you don’t know it check it out.  Susan Wu is a VC at Charles River Ventures and scary smart.  Reality.org is her blog and its worth a read. In recent posts she makes a number of  interesting points on where the next generation of web apps are heading and the cross polination between gaming, web 2.0,  online virtual worlds and  economics of virtual worlds.

Its interesting to contrast her view that the next generation  of web apps (web 3.0 for want of a better term? ) will be about deeply rich user experience - versus the more widely held view that  ai/semantic web view is the next stage of web evolution.    I think she is likely to be right - if for no other reason than a great user experience and sense of place is essential to many real world and online services and its technically easier to get to.

 While folksonomy developments such as Metaweb’s * freebase - will provide significant momentum to the semantic web developments - engineering great  mixed media user experiences is more attainable in the short term.

[* I’ll write more on Freebase as i get to play with its API’s in the coming weeks]

Ok  I’m clearly biased since I have a vested interest in visual design, interactive 3D and great user experiences -the reasoning here is pretty clear.  When you simply look at the number of barriers to next generation user experience based web models (beyond simple ajax driven experiences) that are defined around the user experience integrating multiple media forms  (2D, 3D, video etc) and sense of place (social network with defined sense of community and ‘neighbourhood’) there are fewer hard problems to resolve. 

Adoption of  a functional semantic web will happen - there is a lot of promise - but we can get to a new generation of  interfaces and user experience oriented business models quicker.. Adobe Integrated Runtime and Microsoft’s Silverfish are early examples of large bits of infrastructure that will enable this  and there will be more…

Since i work in 3D graphics, grew up playing with text adventures and MUDs and adore books, I also like Susan’s reminder that the old text based networked Multi-User Dungeon  (MUD) games offered a high degree of immersiveness and social interaction -and they didn’t need graphics.  Several million kids who have just finished or are currently reading the Harry Potter saga will heavily subscribe to this. 

 Its going to be interesting seeing how these things evolve and which tech gets the headlines and hype awards first in the coming 18 months.

there are are a couple of posts that say originally posted ….  the original site got mis-administrated . I’ve just added those posts that I wanted to keep.

Orginally published: June 17th, 2007

Its my elder brother Stephen’s 40th birthday today. As I write this he should have landed in Ibiza with his wife for a well deserved holiday. Have a great one guys - and young-un, have a great  birthday!!