Mobitrends

Over the past few weeks, France has been in a mess regarding the policy to adopt regarding the support of start-ups. The tax privileges have been dismissed but may be on their way back (JEI), and many existing support mechanisms are being reviewed/discussed by the newly born CNN (Numeric National Counsil).That’s fine with me. But they’re not tackling one of the core subject in my opinion.

In France we have built a very scholar and elitist vision of what “Innovative” is. And it is utterly wrong. Unfortunately all the support mechanisms for start ups are built around that definition.
Innovative (n.m) = which is the outcome of ideally years of research, ideally by Ph.Ds and that may have a market application (or not)
Everyone will basically judge your project – and wether it’s innovative or not – according to this definition. For instance, Diveboard would not be innovative. Although we are creating a real-time view of the evolution of the marine species biotope by empowering scuba divers with mobile and pc tools, connecting their dive computers and crunching impressive amounts of data, it’s a social network so it’s not innovation. This is one of the reasons while I decided I won’t be spending even 1 second making a business plan or assembling a file to ask for grands and support : it would just be a waste of time.

This is the big difference between France and US and while France produces amazing tech startups that largely fails (of course and fortunately some succeed) : US focuses on market innovation. The objective is to disrupt a market, and a technology might be the tool that gives you an edge in that disruption. It’s by disrupting a market that you create opportunity, gain momentum and ultimately create a valuable business. That difference also profoundly changes the way research works in France v.s. US where in France we focus on writing papers and staying at a very theoretical level while the US researchers work around innovative use-cases and concrete real-life problems solving (MIT media lab is amazing on that regards).

As a conclusion I’d say that I don’t really expect behaviors to change, France is not really the kind of country where minds can switch to entrepreneurial and consumer oriented spirit that easily… but who knows!

Diveboard's logbook

I’ve been really silent lately, and it’s not that I’m slacking – far from that ! Actually I’ve ben busier than ever, maybe even busier than at the first days of Wavestorm.
Over the past few month I’ve been busy defining and building Diveboard.
Some of you know I’m a big fan of scuba diving. Jean-Charles, my associate a Wavestorm introduced me to it in 2005 and since then I got really hooked to it. As a computer geek, I love metrics and I’ve always been very frustrated not to be able to easily share my dive profiles and experiences with my friends online. I basically wanted something like a Runkeeper for scuba diving, but with some more features enabling dives to find new spots and dive into fellow divers’ experiences.
There was nothing like that to be found (or old web1.0 unappealing websites) – so we built one !

We opened Diveboard last week following the “launch early” adage and it’s already taking up pretty fast ! (we just passed 1000 fans on our Facebook page, the site has already far more traffic than this blog and we made up some pretty cool connections with the industry.

There are still a lot to do before we can actually launch the site (and by launching I mean communicate broadly) yet everyone is welcome to start using it – and we value your feedback !

I was lucky enough to attend this year’s #GDCEurope in Germany. GDC Europe is the little sister of the main conference that takes place yearly in San Francisco, but nevertheless since a big part of the most creative game studios is located in Old Europe, this conference had nothing to envy to its bigger sister.

A lot of my readers have no clue about games. They find it childish and consider them as a waste of time. I’m not going to argue their views here, yet if you look at it from afar, games are massive software projects involving very different skills from pixel artists to assembly language developers al aiming at creating emotions through a unique interactive experience.

And those projects are really massive, seeing how CTC (EVE Online) and Quantic Dream (Heavy Rain) are handling virtual teams and subcontractors while still ensuring a high level of quality and timely execution is really impressive. Quantic Dream for instance has designed highly detailed “subcontractor pack” with all the raws elements and the artwork for a scene for the 3D artists and level designers to build. In their case managing the subcontractors and preparing their work seems something like 30% of the company’s total energy (they are about 100).

One of the main theme this year was “casual is the new hardcore”. Even non-gamers have got addicted to casual Facebook games such as Farmville and spend countless hours on them. I have a few raw notes on this topic I wanted to share :

• Setting up a 2D casual game should be around 50keur (Unity 3D game is about 250k, Java over 1Meur)
• After launch games should be updated weekly/bi-weekly with new contents
• Marketing the game is 7 to 10 times the development cost
• Social games players are 43yo 55%female play multiple times a week
• Active users lifetime around 8months
• Managing microtransactions can be a pain – bigpoint has integrated with 200 payment systems
• The lifespan of a game is hard to evaluate – social games have trouble dying
• Conversion rate to paying players : 6 to 7%
• Virality accounts for 1/3 of the new user recruitments
• Virality works best when based on a social substrate – FaceBook, MySpace…
• The viral feed must be another way for the player to express their motives – get help tools resources…
• Having people “Like” a game will ensure more stickiness since the player wants to have some level of consistency
• Most popular viral feeds include
  * Sharing reward resource
  * Offering partnership apprenticeship < best retain value
  * Cries for help
• Achievements are a big part of the stickiness – one of the main player motivation is always to be “better” than his mates
• Achievements can point of exemplar values quantitative or qualitative of ur game
• Achievements must value both for main track and side quests
• Achievements help bring ppl in places they would have missed without it

As you can see most of these techniques actually can be applied to any piece of software. Recruitments of users, ensuring stickiness and loyalty are core objectives that one should always have in mind when building a piece of software. Seeing your software as a game and designing it as such brings a lot the the end user experience and can drastically change the dynamics of your community.
Understanding those mechanics has been one of the key assets for services such as Foursquare to actually emerge while so many other LBS in the past have failed (software using those techniques are known as Funware).

GigaOM is running today a story called Yahoo’s Big Plan for the Social Web in 2010: Aggregate It . Aggregating the Social Web is definitely something big for 2010, and obviously Yahoo is not going to be the only one trying this.

Obviously, we all are part of various social networks: some professional, some personals, some where we are active, some where we barely show up, all in the spirit of keeping in touch with our friends and following the real-time web. As such, the social networks websites are not the only place anymore where end-user are willing to check on their social activities. Better user experience, convergent activity view… all those themes open up opportunities for third parties such as software developers (Seesmic) or web portals (Yahoo) to stay in the game without the hassle of actually creating a social network.

Just like with the search, the user experience is a strong factor of adoption for a service thus opening opportunities to create value on top of those services.

Let’s face it, since Windows XP, everything consumer from Microsoft (apart from the XBOX) has been lame.

Windows Vista, Windows Mobile, MSN/Hotmail have been performing really badly and can be totally regarded as failures.

Yet it seems this time may be over.

For the first time in a long while, Microsoft is releasing exciting products one after another. Short development cycles, convergence and innovation has enabled them to release an excellent Windows 7, a challenging Bing, improved XBOX 360 experience and insights let us hope for the best with the upcoming Windows Mobile.

It seems that Microsoft managed to make massive changes in their R&D process to be able to regain that flexibility and ability to innovate aiming at shorter production cycles and more iterations, sounds like an interesting case I would love insights on.