Business

Excellent interview: Guy Kawasaki tells Robert Scobel why Twitter is more important than his cell phone, rants about bailing out banks and the auto industry, differentiates the good and bad kind of asshole bosses, talks about making the competition crazy and remembers what it was like working at Apple back in the day. Oh yeah, there’s his new book Reality Check too…

The Pew Internet Project released a data memo this morning on Adults and Video Games. Among their main findings:

More than half - 53% - of all American adults play video games of some kind, whether on a computer, on a gaming console, on a cell phone or other handheld device, on a portable gaming device, or online.

Age is the biggest demographic factor in game play by adults. Younger adults are significantly more likely than any other game group to play games, and as age increases game play decreases. Independent of all other factors, younger adults are still more likely to play games.

Among older adults 65+ who play video games, nearly a third play games everyday, a significantly larger percentage than all younger players, of whom about 20% play everyday.

Age is also a factor in determining an individual’s preferred game-playing device. Gaming consoles are the most popular for young adults: 75% of 18-29 year old gamers play on consoles, compared with 68% who use computers, the second most popular device for this age group.

Out of all the gaming devices, computers are the most popular among the total adult gaming population, with 73% of adult gamers using computers to play games, compared with 53% console users, 35% who using cell phones, and 25% using portable gaming devices.

The full text of the  memo is available as a PDF file here:
http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_Adult_gaming_memo.pdf

I received an email this morning from a friend who paraphrased Monty Python’s Blue Parrot sketch to describe the financial meltdown:

This financial system is no more! It has ceased to be! ‘It’s expired and gone to meet its maker! ‘It’s a stiff! Bereft of life, it rests in peace! If you hadn’t nailed ‘it to the tax payer’s perch it’d be pushing up the daisies! ‘Its metabolic processes are now ‘istory! ‘It’s off the twig! It’s kicked the bucket, it’s shuffled off its mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin’ choir indivisible!! THIS IS AN EX-FINANCIAL SYSTEM!!

It may be an ex-financial system for now but as with all cycles — natural or man-made — I’m confident of a turn-around. Soon I hope, at some point for sure. In that spirit let me turn the paraphrase around and back to the original. Enjoy, happy turkey (or tofurkey) to all and long live the parrot!

Was the meltdown of the financial system predicted by events in the online virtual world Second Life more than a year ago?

Alan Greenspan, former head of the Federal Reserve, admitted last month that lending institutions could not always be trusted to regulate themselves. Really? Then maybe the 2007 collapse of Second Life’s virtual bank Ginko Financial can be instructive. In a post for MSNBC.com Jeremy Hsu writes,

Virtual economies in games such as Second Life and EVE Online may seem trivial, but they actually can provide real-life lessons on the patterns of free markets and unfettered capitalism. Researchers and self-described virtual economists have observed how virtual entrepreneurs establish themselves and compete, as well as how a lack of self-regulation can lead to dramatic banking failures, scams and even corporate espionage.

“I don’t view ‘Second Life’ as a game,” said Robert Bloomfield, an accounting researcher at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. “I view it as a market space.”

Should we have seen it coming? Reuters reported on 2L’s unregulated banking in 2006 and Wired magazine reported a run on the virtual banks of Second Life was possible months before it happened. And a panel discussion a year ago about the virtual financial crisis and “take over” of Geko Financial in Second Life seems to be particularly prescient. In that incident, Lindon Labs effectively shut down Second Life’s unregulated in-world banking system with predictable consequences:

The end came when panicked investors began withdrawing their virtual money, known as Linden dollars in the game and exchangeable for U.S. dollars at a rate of roughly 250 Linden dollars to one U.S. dollar. Ginko did not have enough reserves to pay up. When the bank finally announced it was finished, an equivalent of $750,000 in real-world U.S. dollars went up in smoke. The collapse not only wiped out time spent earning Linden dollars in the game, but also hit the wallets of players who had legally paid U.S. dollars to buy Linden dollars. 

“The ‘Second Life’ financial markets have pretty much been unregulated,” Bloomfield told LiveScience. “There are accusations that people are doing everything from questionable behavior to outright fraud.” (Jeremy Hsu’s report for MSNBC continues here.)

Questionable behavior and outright fraud? I’m not an economist by a long shot but those words do ring true about now. And though virtual worlds are, well, virtual, by providing a portal to human behavior they can deliver real value in unexpected ways… if we pay attention.

R. L. Burnside’s (1926—2005) timeless blues boogie “It’s Bad You Know” was the perfect setup for the adventures of Tony Soprano and his capos. Week by week we knew they were going to be so bad that it would be good, that Burnside would keep setting it up and that Tony seldom failed to deliver.

This morning when I received this reassuring (sic) email from CitiBank all I could think of was Burnside’s song and wish for those good, bad old days:

Good news! Citibank is participating in the FDIC’s Temporary Liquidity Guarantee Program. Through December 31, 2009 2008, all of your non-interest and interest bearing checking deposit account balances are fully guaranteed by the FDIC for the entire amount in your account.

So the fact that Citibank is in a temporary liquidity program through the end of December is the good news? Let’s see, that gives me about five weeks to find a solvent financial institution before we have to round up the posse and march on Citibank’s vault.

If that’s good, it’s bad you know. At least we can still enjoy the music:

Is it safer “on the edge” in economically turbulent times like these?

In his recent blog post Innovate or Wither - Personal Strategy for Times of Change, my colleague Lee Wilson asserts that in times of rapid change and market disruption, “…the cutting edge is the safest place to be.”

Although he was talking specifically about educational publishing and technology, I think the underlying truth can be applied widely. Lee writes,

If there is rapid change the inclination of most people is to circle the wagons around the familiar. But, when the market is moving, breaking camp and moving forward is actually a lower risk approach. If you are taking risks in your job and trying to invent the future you are actually in a safer position than those who cling to the status quo.

Several weeks back I posted a video clip from the Dow Jones’ Media & Money conference where several media and marketing executives argued that now is a great time to start a new business. It may sound counter-intuitive but this was echoed by venture fund partner I know who feels the risk profile of digital media services and content compares more favorably to brand-name investments than it has in years.

Everyone running for cover means there is more opportunity on the edge these days. And while your 401K may have dwindled to a dot-401 remember it’s all a matter of your perception and confidence, and those are things you can control.

Mark William Hansen, who leads product development at Lego, talks about their transition from a toy company to developers and publishers of an immersive 3D virtual world set to launch in early 2009.

For more on Lego Universe read the Reuters story Virtual World is Lego’s Latest Brick Trick and visit the Lego corporate site. For an historical perspective, view Mark William Hansen’s 2006 presentation on Lego Universe. For more videos from the 2008 and 2007 Dust or Magic Institutes visit http://dustormagic.blip.tv.

Since I started using Hulu and more recently learned about the open-source video aggregation software Miro and the video sharing plugin Kaltura, it seemed to me that Tivo’s days were numbered. Evidently I’m not the only one.

In her Halloween post on the Wired Blog Network, Meghan Keane observes “the future of the company which defined the DVR is likely to depend on dumping the magic box altogether,” and reports that Daniel Taylor, an analyst at Yankee Group, says that the “TV-Killer” may find itself facing irrelevance long before television networks have to face up to the problem:

DVR and video on demand are struggling for relevance today. The challenge that Tivo faces — the challenge that any device-based service faces — is how they’re going to address user behavior. For every one person who plans ahead to tape shows they’ll miss, there are nine other that want to go online now that they’ve missed it.

The key words “…the challenge that any device-based service faces” is spot-on. Old media and proprietary technologies are dying, while web media and open-source is ascendent. Adapt, as Tivo is trying to by transforming itself into a web video offering, or become irrelevant. Shift happens.

WordPress — the open-source content management system that runs this site and millions of others around the world — is almost infinitely extensible, which was the intention of the development team from the beginning.

One of the core philosophies of WordPress is to keep the core code as light and fast as possible but to provide a rich framework for the huge community to expand what WordPress can do, limited only by their imagination. Plugins can extend WordPress to do almost anything you can imagine…

But there are more than 3,000 WordPress plugins to choose from so if you’re new to this, where do you start? After building several dozen WordPress sites, from simple one-page blogs to complex web-zines, we’re finding these 10 plugins among the most useful:

Akismet	Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not and lets you review the spam it catches under your blog’s “Comments” admin screen.
All-in-one SEO Pack	Automatically optimizes your page titles for search engines (SEO). Generates META tags automatically andavoids the typical duplicate content found on WordPress blogs.You can override any title and set any META description and any META keywords you want, and can fine-tune everything to your hearts content.
Contact Form 7	Contact Form 7 can manage multiple contact forms, plus you can customize the form and the mail contents flexibly with simple markup. The form supports Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Google XML Sitemaps	This plugin will create a Google sitemaps compliant XML-Sitemap of your WordPress blog. It supports all of the WordPress generated pages as well as custom ones. Everytime you edit or create a post, your sitemap is updated and all major search engines that support the sitemap protocol, like ASK.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO, are notified about the update.
Lock-out	This plugin will allow you to put your website into Lock Out mode to prevent access while you preform upgrades or maintenance. Includes the ability to upload a pre-made html file for use as a placeholder page while in lock out mode or build your own online. The login page is still accessible and will allow only the user role you set to view the site normally while in lock out mode.
Reveal ID’s	With WordPress 2.5 and later the IDs on all admin pages have been removed, probably due to the fact that the common user don’t need them. However, for advanced WordPress Users/ developers those IDs are quite useful. This plugin makes them easy to find.
Stat Press	We love Google Analytics but their reports lag 24 hours and sometimes you want to see what’s happening right now. For that you need Stat Press. This real-time plugin is dedicated to the management of statistics about. It collects information about visitors, spiders, search keywords, feeds, browsers etc. and reports them as they happen. Think your site is slow because traffic is spiking? Here’s how to find out.
WP Polls	What do your visitors think? Ask them with WP-Polls which is extremely customizable via templates and css styles and there are tons of options for you to choose to ensure that WP-Polls runs the way you wanted. It now supports multiple selection of answers.
WP Super Cache	This plugin generates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog. After a html file is generated your webserver will serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts.
WP Automatic Upgrade	WordPress Automatic Upgrade allows a user to automatically upgrade their installation to the latest one provided by wordpress.org in 5 steps that include complete site and database backups, deactivation and re-activation of plug-ins.

Don’t see what you need? Search the Plugins Directory or learn to write one yourself.

At the Dow Jones Media & Money conference last week, a panel of executives representing digital media developers, investors and advertisers debated whether it’s possible to start or grow an advertising-supported web service at a time when even huge corporations are challenged to survive. With the market down yet again today, some of their answers were refreshingly optimistic: