Natasha Friis Saxberg, partner at webcom discusses current trends that she has been observing in the Social Media space.

In this insightful video interview at CoMinds - a coworking space located in Copenhagen, Denmark, Saxberg tells us why she thinks that that influence and success in the social media world will soon be measured qualitative rather than the quantitative side.

In other words, success will be measured not solely based on how many followers you have, but by how much value the various individuals in the group are bring and adding to each other.

It is not important how many followers I have, it is more important that the followers I have bring value to me, and I bring value to them.

Saxberg also thinks that the focus will be more towards measuring the individual, how much do we actually help each other and participate in discussions. Later on in the video, Saxberg talks about how GeoLoco apps like Gowalla and Foursquare are a big hit in the US, while it is still very new in the Netherlands and how they can benefit from observing what is going on here in the US.

Written by blogdoctor

I am the editor-in-chief at oObly a tech blog based in San Francisco, California.

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Cross-posted from faberNovel’s blog:

Amazon.com’s Kindle paves the way for companies facing disruption.

The company followed a two steps rationale:

1. Understand what your business is about: Amazon.com’s business is not to sell books. Its business is to give access to a cultural object called “book”. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ vision for Kindle is “every book ever in print in any language; all available in less than 60 seconds.” Fathoming your true role in the value chain will help you replicate it in a new paradigm.
2. Put your cash cow at risk: Kindle was definitely a very surprising move: how can Amazon — which begun in 1995 as a book retailer — shackle its own foundation with the Kindle? The Seattle company has a long history of being a first-mover: with the Kindle it once again proved that it’s better to be disrupted with your own product than with someone else’s.

Here are some other key points:

• You will be alone: if you ever thought that disruption is easily adopted (as the iPad example might show), you will be proved wrong. Disruptive projects require a vision to stand criticisms. You cannot even make all your customers happy: some will never read digital books.
• Nail down what’s really important: admittedly, the first version of Kindle was ugly. E-reading was nothing new: yet Amazon.com understood that convenience was what customers were looking for, and Jeff Bezos explained that they designed the Kindle as a book: when you read, the book disappear to let you dive in the author’s world. Convenience meant the ability to wirelessly download books from anywhere, thanks to a CDMA modem. When it launched in 2007, the Kindle was sold out in five and a half hour! So much for the attractiveness…

Inspiration:

• On Money Making, 10 Lessons in Innovation from Amazon’s Kindle

Airspace is a coworking space located in the heart of Wellington, New Zealand. Started in 2009, this coworking space is full of young, vibrant coworkers with lots of ideas and enthusiasm. Airspace is also one of the most environment friendly coworking space that I have ever seen!

They have designed the space in such a way that it gets plenty of natural light that in turn helps reduces dependency on artificial electricity powered lighting. The natural sunlight also helps keep the place warmer in winter, as opposed to a space that has limited natural sunlight. On top of that, there are big green plants everywhere around inside the coworking space that play a big role in absorbing all the Co2 that the computers emit!

The internal layout of this coworking space should serve as an inspiration and role model for other peeps who are in the process of creating coworking spaces in their cities and towns.

Check out the Airspace intro video below that also gives you an inside look at how AirSpace has built their green coworking space. I wanna say this almost looks like the Coworking Space of the Future!

Written by blogdoctor

I am the editor-in-chief at oObly a tech blog based in San Francisco, California.

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Cross-posted from faberNovel’s blog:

A great article by Paul Stamatiou lays out a “design crash course” for startups. Here are some of the most interesting advices:

• Subtle is key: don’t overuse visual effects. Apply them just enough “to make it perceivable”.
• Get inspired: create your own repository of screenshots showing great design or UI elements, use ColourLovers, UI-Patterns
• Read The Non-Designer’s Design Book or the free Designing for the Web

The article also provides a checklist for startup in a hurry; so that you can focus on frequently overlooked areas:

• Marketing copy
• Icons
• Textures
• Alignment
• White space
• Colors: do not have more than 2 dominant colors
• Page organization: all the links that won’t drive user conversion should be in footer
• Links: give feedback (LoVe HAte: link, visited, hover, active)
• Call-to-action on your homepage
• Use A/B Testing thanks to Optimizely
• “Finally, you don’t have to fill up all of your available space!”

Sources:

• Paul Stamatiou, Crash Course: Design for Startups

Wondering about interesting trends in and patterns emerging from the coworking world? At the 1st ever Coworking Unconference in Austin, Texas over 100 coworking space owners, catalysts, members and enthusiasts gathered to share their experiences and observations this March.

In this video from the “Future of Coworking” panel, moderated by Alex Hillman of IndyHall, several coworking space owners and industry thinkers share the major emerging patterns that they have been observing across the industry and within their own individual spaces in their local area.

Written by blogdoctor

I am the editor-in-chief at oObly a tech blog based in San Francisco, California.

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Cross-posted from faberNovel’s blog:

You might have heard the words “casual gaming” and “gamification” a lot these days. Thanks to mobile devices and social networks, games are reaching new customers. Publishers target these “casual gamers” with simpler gameplay, no required continuous commitment (you can play in short bursts) and new business models (low pay-per-downloads price or free-to-play). EA’s Peter Moore describes his company’s vision about this new, disruptive era (see Part I.).

Given this new landscape, it is no wonder why other applications now includes gaming dynamics: Part II. explains John Ferrara’s Elements of Player Experience, which provides inspiring insights for implementing gamification into your applications.

I. Game industry: “the times are changing”

EA Sports’ Peter Moore said at MI6 game marketing conference that the game industry is facing disruption. This creative destruction resembles the changes the music industry underwent with the rise of Napster and the digitization.

• Game companies have to experiment other business models, including free-to-play, virtual goods, subscription, advertising and pay-per-download. Digital game now adds up to 45 % of the total industry revenues (31 % in 2008). This will help games take off for segments and countries that can’t afford $60 games (EA expects the number of players to multiply from 250 m to 3 bn over time).
• “The ability to coalesce your development around one console is gone” Customers plays game on mobile devices, tablets, computer, console, browsers and social networks (it represented $1 bn in 2010).
• Digitization hits the industry. At the end, consumers will choose: only the most convenient business model will win.
• “Every game now has to be socially engaging.”

EA’s facts & figures:

• #1 in mobile games
• #2 in social games on Facebook
• #1 in casual webgames
• A $3.74 bn game business
• Direct relationships with more than 230 m players
• 3.5 m players on its Facebook version of FIFA

II. The Elements of Player Experience

John Ferrara proposes a simplified model to successfully design engaging and enjoyable games.

Although it has intentionally been written for game designers, it will provide great inspiration for those looking to instill some game dynamics in their software (gamification).

1. Motivation which comprises two main elements:
   • Short term motivation or up-front “interestingness”: for Pac-Man, it’s the race to clear the board
   • Long term motivation or systems of rewards: being the first in the leaderboard
2. Meaningful choices: “games work best when there’s a partial ambiguity between which actions will result in better or worse outcome”.
   • Long term: chess relies heavily on long-term strategy
   • Short term: tactics in sport games or first-person shooter
3. Balance: is the game appropriately challenging? Only iterative prototyping and testing will solve your problems, given games’ complexity and dynamic nature.
4. Usability: it includes all the UX concerns, plus some usability considerations that are specific to games: players should have a sensible experience and a sense of control. For instance, they should understand why they lost and attribute it to a cause.
5. Aesthetics, which can have a profound impact, as shown by Red Dead Redemption.
   • Long term: narratives
   • Short term: images, sounds, haptics (including force feedback), etc.

Sources:

• GamesBeat, EA Sports chief says game makers face disruption, transformation, and digitization
• UXMagazine, The Elements of Player Experience

Josh Ochs of will be holding his next “Social Media Bootcamp” at the newly opened NextSpace LA coworking located in downtown Culver City in April 30th (saturday)

Ochs is part of the Media Leaders group and  has hosted several such bootcamps successfully in the past. In this video below, Josh gives us more info about the Bootcamp.

According to Ochs, here is what you will, and won’t get from the Bootcamp

What will you get?

About 3 hours of real life social media success stories. Josh promises that the very same day that you complete the bootcamp, you should be able to put your learning to work on facebook, twitter, websites, blogs and other social media platforms.

What won’t you get?

Agency speaking, throwing words like “Strategy” and other buzzwords.

Written by blogdoctor

I am the editor-in-chief at oObly a tech blog based in San Francisco, California.

Follow me on Twitter

Cross-posted from faberNovel’s blog:

Despite the fact that native applications yield far superior engagement, they represent a burden for companies. Businesses have to learn building mobile apps for each platform, not mentioning different version. It takes time and resources to learn the logics of all these mobile platforms; and hold off from focusing on the core offer.

It goes unchallenged that HTML5 needs to close the gap with native application capabilities:

• Access to low-level peripherals (bluetooth, camera and graphics)
• Offline capabilities, background execution
• Business model: except ads, user experience can be very cumbersome for subscriptions, virtual goods or micropayments.

In my opinion though, HTML5′s main drawbacks is that it still lacks a vertically integrated approach.

iOS’s success undoubtedly stems from Apple’s integrated approach: the Cupertino firm provided its own tools to let developers build but also monetize great applications. On the web, developers have to constantly make decisions regarding the tools and technologies they use, most importantly regarding the JavaScript libraries they use.

Even though integration may sound antinomic to the web’s open spirit, such a solution would greatly improve the web apps’ quality by having developers focus on their core functionalities. This is the strategy that both Google (notably with Chrome and the discontinued Gears) and Adobe (with its plugin and creative suite) has been following. What is more, integration would only appear on the developers’ side.

As Sencha‘s Michael Mullany asks, “when was the last killer Windows native app developed?” “Native has always had a performance advantage on the desktop but it hasn’t mattered because of the other benefits of being on the web.” The question is not “will HTML5 replace mobile apps?” but “when will HTML5 replace native apps?”

Sources:

• VentureBeat, How HTML5 will kill the native app

Tuesday, May 10th: 6:30-8:30pm

Join pariSoma and TechCentralSF as we host “60 second spots” mixer. Listen to elevator pitches, network with the startup community, and have some drinks. We’re currently looking for startups to pitch at the event – so contact us asap to secure your chance to pitch!

PapayaMobile is the leading Android mobile social gaming community with over 10M users and a large developer community originating from Europe, the US and Asia.

- Chief Developer Evangelist (VP level position)
The Chief Developer Evangelist’s primary mission is to drive excitement and to secure adoption for Papaya’s products, through evangelism and community engagement.  The position will be part technical some development experience required.  8-10 years relevant experience required.  Undergraduate degree from top university required.

- Director of Developer relations
Responsible for creating and managing partnerships with large mobile game developers and publishers.  Also responsible for overseeing the developer relations team.  6 to 8 years of Developer relations and account management experience required. Undergraduate degree from top university required at the minimum.

- Developer Relations Associate
Responsible for partnerships with independent developers.  An entry level position for someone who is smart and passionate about games.  Undergraduate degree from a top university required at the minimum.

PapayaMobile’s products include; a social SDK with the biggest feature-set in class enabling the rapid integration of features like Avatars, in-app purchase, Leader boards and Achievements; a Social Game Engine for quickly developing Facebook-like games and; an Offer SDK which allows developers to monetize in-app purchases through an Offer Wall like Super Rewards with more than 2,000 offers.

Our killer team includes investors, advisers and employees from company’s including Google, Nvidia, AMD and co-founders from Mforma and Sina. The Company has been profitable for two years and received $4M of investment from Silicon Valley based DCM in 2010, who have invested in companies including Rockyou, About.com, Playfirst and Sling Media.

Please contact Cindy Yang at Cindyyang@papayamobile.com for more information!