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Seesmic and Graphic.ly impress the press with Windows Phone apps at MIX10Mar-19 by Alpa Agarwal
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Web developers and designers gathered in Las Vegas last week for the 3 day MIX10 Conference. The first day began with presentations and demonstrations of the Windows Phone 7 developer platform in keynote speeches by Joe Belfiore & Scott Guthrie of Microsoft.
 Microsoft BizSpark company Graphic.ly brought Marvel characters Spider-Man, Iron Man and others to life with its interactive digital comic book reader, using hardware-accelerated video and Silverlight’s Deep Zoom feature to pan and zoom across high resolution images. Graphic.ly also demo’d its online marketplace for comic books and social networking features for comic book fans to share their reading experiences.
 Seesmic introduced a plug-in architecture for its Twitter app and showed how it could be used to add Bing maps to geo-coded tweets. Developed with Silverlight 4, Seesmic’s app will run on Windows Phones as well as on Macs and Nokia devices. Seesmic also hosted a Seesmic Plug-in Developer Meet-up, sponsored by Microsoft BizSpark. One audience member had already built a plug-in and demo’d it at the Meet-up.
The second day focused on Internet Explorer 9, introduced in a keynote by Microsoft’s Dean Hachamovitch. Microsoft Researcher Bill Buxton gave a presentation on Natural User Interface design. Michael Comperda, Director of Technology for the BizSpark company Curse, presented Curse.com - the go-to site for massively multiplayer online games. The Curse.com development team was on hand to meet with game developers and its fans from The World of Warcraft and The Hammer of Resistance.
Julien Codorniou hosted the MIX session “Software Entrepreneurs: Go Big With BizSpark and WebSiteSpark” on Tuesday explaining the benefits of both programs for early stage startups.
Published: 3/19/2010 4:41 PM
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Curse.com: The Go-To Site for Massively Multiplayer Online GamesMar-17 by Dave Drach
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Curse is the largest independent Massively Multiplayer Online Game site in the world. It has over 7.5 million monthly unique visitors, over 1.6 million active Curse client users, and 250 million monthly page views, and is profitable, producing more than $3 million in revenue in 2009.
The company was founded by Hubert Thieblot in 2005. Thieblot’s goal for the company is “to provide gamers with an unmatched suite of tools designed to meet their every need. Curse is a centralized hub for everything MMO - a starting point that empowers gamers in a way no other service can.”
Curse captures – and holds - the Massively Multiplayer Online gaming community’s attention by offering wikis, databases, add-on downloads, blogging, forums, and guild web site hosting - the specialized web hosting service designed to support online gaming communities. The site also offers free PC and Mac Curse clients for managing game add-ons.
Popular games played by Curse gamers include World of Warcraft, Warhammer Online, Aion, Runes of magic and several others. The company also owns several game-specific sites, including DiabloFans.com and AionSource.com. The company has grown by predicting what titles will be hits and setting up hubs for their communities.
Curse offers its users a basic, free membership and a premium, ad-free subscription-based membership. Advertising within e-newsletters generates additional revenues for the company.
Curse has 32 employees and is headquartered in San Francisco CA and Huntsville AL.
Published: 3/17/2010 8:00 AM
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Graphic.ly brings Spider-Man to the Windows Phone 7Mar-15 by Dave Drach
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I’m sitting here with Kevin Mann, Chief Scientist and founder of Graphic.ly and Graham Morley, Lead Interface Designer. Graphic.ly took their social enabled comic reading platform and brought it to the Windows Phone 7 in Silverlight , with fantastic content such Marvel characters, Captain America, Iron Man, and Spider-Man. The Graphic.ly application let’s you shop for new content on their store spanning many different brands and varieties of comic novels, from mainstream comics to manga and edgier emerging comic artists. Graphic.ly also runs the comic book fan site iFanboy, giving them the most popular social platform for fan collaboration in the industry. The combination of great content, smooth, compelling navigation, direct social fan access and an ever growing comic store create a comic reading experience that is even better than paper comics.
We are watching Mike Swanson demo Graphic.ly and it really shows off the range of Windows Phone 7. I had chance to play with a Windows Phone 7 last night and yes, I was impressed. One of the constant challenges with rich media on a mobile phone is how do you get a large screen experience, onto a small device, that fits on your pocket. Using the Windows Phone 7 device you get a sense of how that is done. You can move smoothly, panning left to right, up and down, so that you feel like you are interacting with a much larger piece of content, viewing it in high resolution. This is called the “panoramic viewing experience”. And the interface is smooth, super smooth, with none of the lag and jitters that I have learned to hate on older Windows Mobile devices. Graphic.ly deployed Deep Zoom in Silverlight to allow you to pan, zoom, and truly experience the artwork in comics.
Here is the demo on YouTube.
Kevin Mann came up with the idea for Graphic.ly after being frustrated with finding the latest edition of his favorite comics. He founded the company back in January of 2009. Kevin applied and was accepted into the TechStars incubator in Boulder, CO. TechStars is one of the world’s leading startup incubators. Graphic.ly, known as Take Publishing while at TechStars, was selected as one of 10 companies, out of 600, for the summer of 2009. Kevin Mann and Thanavath Jaroenvanit joined TechStars for the summer. TechStars is a BizSpark Network Partner and enrolled Graphic.ly into BizSpark. This gave Graphic.ly a broad selection of Microsoft development tools, as well as a free subscription to Microsoft Azure for server side development. Soon after Graphic.ly completed TechStars they were able to close $1.2 M in venture funding led by DFJ-Mercury.
Micah Baldwin, a publishing and social application serial entrepreneur was one of the mentors for Graphic.ly at TechStars. Like most of the mentors at TechStars, Micah is not paid for his participation, and there is no defined “give” for Micah’s commitment of time and effort to the young startups at TechStars, but is part of a thriving startup mentoring ecosystem. This is a classic example of how Microsoft BizSpark Network Partners, like TechStars, are able to partner with Microsoft and provide all of the tools and technology to build the best solutions. Micah continued to engage with Graphic.ly and joined Graphic.ly as the CEO.
Graphic.ly is currently in private beta and will be launching their public beta shortly.
BTW – all development tools for development on Windows Phone 7 – are free for phone application development. Nice.
Published: 3/15/2010 2:14 PM
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Wild Pockets Game Jam 2010 - 3D Game Development for Everyone!Mar-14 by Alpa Agarwal
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It no longer requires a big budget to design, develop and distribute a commercial, online game. Wild Pockets, a spin off from Carnegie Mellon University’s Entertainment Technology Center, is democratizing game development and making it accessible to everyone. Its development platform provides an easy way for anyone to create, publish and monetize 3D games. It is free to use and simplifies all elements of game development, making it an ideal platform for independent developers, hobbyists, students, and game enthusiasts. “Our vision is that people will use the technology for things I have never dreamed of in the realm of games, education, training, visualization, architecture, art, design and much more,” says its founder and CEO, Shanna Tellerman. The company currently has over 5,000 registered game developers. Fifty game titles have been published to date and the company estimates hundreds more to be in development.
The Wild Pockets game building platform, like all finished Wild Pockets games, runs entirely online, in a web browser. The builder uses a renderer written in OpenGL, which works across all browsers, with Mac support coming soon, and provides hardware-rendered 3D content in the web browser. It also includes a built-in particle system, a graphical GUI editor, saved game support, and a performance-tracking analytics system. Wild Pockets games are written in the scripting language Lua and easily tested using a script mirroring system. Games can be displayed on any website that allows embedded content, similar to embedding a YouTube video, which allows for the viral distribution of any game. Art can be imported and exported using software plugins, and a global library of content, populated both by the Wild Pockets team and Wild Pockets users, makes it easy to get a game built quickly. The library includes models, animations, textures, sounds, and fonts, as well as collections of scene objects and their properties, game scripts, script modules, and sample code. In all, this development ecosystem now includes over 25,000 assets.
Wild Pockets also offers an integrated monetization system that makes it easy for developers to offer virtual goods and embed micro-transactions into their games. Monetization methods can be added to games easily with a single line of code. By invoking a simple Wild Pockets API call, a developer can charge money for content within a game, including new levels or new items, or for a game itself. Players can purchase Wild Pockets virtual currency coins and spend them on any game content in any Wild Pockets game, and Wild Pockets shares a small portion of the revenue with the developer. The company is in the process of developing a network of partner distribution sites that will make it easier for independent developers to showcase and market their work.
 Wild Pockets’ revenue is derived from a revenue share on commercial games that incorporate micro-transactions or advertising and the soon to launch developer marketplace. “We do not make money until the developer makes money and even then we take a small cut so that the independent developers can thrive,” says Tellerman.
The company has taken a grassroots marketing approach, hosting both on and offline events. One of its most successful events has been a series of Game Jams – free, two-day live events where small teams compete to create the best game in 24 hours. The second annual Bay Area Game Jam, sponsored by Microsoft, will be held May 15-16 at Microsoft’s Silicon Valley Campus, 1065 La Avenida, Mountain View, CA 94043.
Published: 3/14/2010 9:00 AM
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Making the World Happy with I Can Has Cheezburger?Mar-13 by Alpa Agarwal
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It began with a single LOLcat photo on I Can Has Cheezburger?, a site originally created by Eric Nakagawa and Kari Unebasami, and has grown to a network of over 40 humor blogs including such popular sites as I Has A Hotdog, FAIL Blog, GraphJam, There I Fixed It, Failbooking, Chatroulette Trolling, Must Have Cute and more. The sites are visited by as many as 15 million people every month.
Recognizing the popularity of the original site, Ben Huh, a former journalist, put up $10,000 of his own money to buy the ICanHasCheezburger.com site in 2007 and raised investor funding. Huh says the success of his company, the Seattle-based Cheezburger Network, has been the biggest surprise of his life.
The company has been profitable from the beginning. Advertising revenue is supplemented by online sales of merchandise and books such as FAIL Nation,Graph Out Loud, How to Take Over teh Wurld, I Can Has Cheezburger? and the forthcoming I Has a Hotdog: What Your Dog Is Really Thinking.
After buying the company, Huh focused on increasing traffic. It had been flat-lining, but it began to grow again when the company instituted a regular publishing schedule that guaranteed five new LOLcat pictures every day. For marketing, the company relied exclusively on its users. “To this day, we do not do any kind of advertising to draw in users,” says Huh. Cheezburger employs about 15 people on its content team, and most of them work full-time. “It's expensive, but we're also serious about quality,” Huh explains. “There's no substitute for humans.”
Huh attributes much of his company’s success to a few key principles. “Keep Your Lazy Attitude,” he advises. Cheezburger shuns complexity. As Huh says, “Human nature has a tendency to admire complexity but reward simplicity. The space shuttle is a wonderful thing but we would never buy it; we buy things that make our lives simpler.”
Cheezburger keeps things simple for both its users and its developers. Users are offered a simple LOL builder for submitting photos and videos – one page with space for just three captions. The company uses off-the-shelf products and outsources services whenever possible to free its developers to devote their energy to the company’s core technology. “We want to focus on what makes us different,” reasons Huh. “We can only do a few things well and those are the things we focus on. … We are a publisher not in the business of publishing. We are a publisher in the business of creating community.”
Huh’s overall goal for the company is “to make the world happy for 5-minutes a day.” What has he learned from his experience at ICanHasCheezburger? “When you’re entire business relies on a culture of generosity, the generosity of your community who share content, you become a believer in the inherent goodness of people.”
Published: 3/13/2010 9:00 AM
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Featured Network Partner
The featured BizSpark Network Partner is TechStars: a mentorship driven, seed-stage investment fund. Read more...
Featured Startup
The BizSpark startup of the day is Avetrium, based in Canada. You will find below an interview with Tim Smith, COO of Avetrium. All the best to them and congrats for being the startup of the day!
Read more...
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