Yesterday someone asked me the ubiquitous “what’s working in mobile social games?” question and I thought it was worth pointing out that a lot of the most popular games today outside of the physics genre (by reach and revenue) are social mobile versions of known popular board and parlor games adapted for asynchronous play on […]
Read More “Classic Parlor and Board Games Continue to Inspire Social Mobile Game Devs”
In all of the announcements about Apple’s iOS5, the one that caught my attention was the continued progress that Apple has been making with GameCenter. They now claim over 67 million registered players for the Game Center service and it continues to expand to include a wider range of game types. I’ve been thinking about […]
Read More “Does Android Need Its Own Version of Game Center?”
I received a free Samsung Chromebook after attending Google I/O this year and I’ve been trying to use it as my primary weekend computer for the past few weeks. I have a handful of observations about my experience. I’ll sum my thoughts up in a simple sentence: The Samsung Chromebook is not a reasonable substitute […]
Disclosure: Through my work at SoftTech VC we have a small position in Groupon, I have friends involved with LivingSocial, and friends at foursquare (and I am an active user). This post is based on my views alone and doesn’t include anything other than idle speculation or reasoning on my part. Like a lot of […]
Read More “Real-Time Deals Need Daily Use Applications – foursquare and real-time offers”
There is a strong case to be made for why Amazon will become a force in the wold of freemium games. Amazon has the three key ingredients – a database of customers who have credit cards, a hardware strategy that will promote customer adoption, and skills as a merchandiser.
In my dual roles as a Venture Partner at SoftTech VC and Co-Founder of Bionic Panda Games, I’ve met with a bunch of companies and teams who are focusing on trying to solve the problem of mobile application discovery. Simply put, the problem (as articulated by people trying to solve it) is that there are […]
Read More “Mobile App Discovery Is a Developer Problem, Not a Consumer Problem”
I’ve been chatting with a lot of people who are working on mobile games with a strong location component. Almost all of them are trying to do some mashup of a game plus check-in data to do something interesting. At its core, the concept sounds intriguing. To date, I don’t think anyone has really cracked […]
Read More “Location Based Games are Hard and Check-Ins Aren’t the Answer”
Every day I seem to love my iPad more and more. I read a few reviews of people declaring that they could easily go iPad-only during their workday and not a miss a beat. I was a bit skeptical of that claim, so I decided that I would try to go iPad-only during my workday […]
Read More “The iPad as a Laptop Replacement – My 1 Week Experiment”
I’m now on my second Android phone and I have to say that Android has come a long way. When I first got my Nexus One, it wasn’t an iPhone killer by any means (some of my early thoughts on the Nexus One can be found here). In reading a few posts, this one by […]
Read More “The HTC Incredible Has Shown Me that Android is Now “Good Enough” to Compete”
I have had my Google Nexus One for about a day. And I’m getting ready to box it up and send it back to them. It’s not because I don’t like the device – it’s kind of wonky in terms of UI, especially if you’re an iPhone user, but it’s still a very good device […]
Read More “Buying a Google Nexus One Unlocked is a Terrible Experience – Fixing It is Easy”
