Whyos

We’ve been busy lately at superfluid, so I thought I’d post to update folks on the state of things at our b2b site, superfluid.biz, and encourage those who haven’t yet posted offerings to get something started. We’ve been steadily adding users, so you’re likely to find some new offerings of interest to you, and as a registered user, you can borrow a few Quids to purchase products or services before your own time gets used in the system.

In addition, we’ve just completed construction of quids.org, a non-commercial implementation of the superfluid technology. With a focus on volunteer projects, it has a simpler process, and a cost-free model that requires only a $1 donation to the Electronic Frontier Foundation.  -superfluid.biz is also free for the time being (at least a year for beta users), but will eventually have an annual subscription fee.  As quids.org is all about collaborating on services, it doesn’t allow commercial transactions, or those involving physical goods, so we don’t collect W9 information and membership is available to international participants. We envision it being used for social good/software/games/art and any number of other areas we haven’t yet conceived.

Upcoming for quids.org is a facebook application, allowing you to pull together your volunteer projects from that site as well, and a mess of other stuff that we won’t spoil by mentioning now.

If you have any questions or suggestions, please do let me know. We continue to develop superfluid.biz and quids.org with a lot of feedback from the community, and are pretty responsive to needs, whether that’s in the form of functionality or rounding up offerings of specific interest to current members.

In something of a fluke, I’ve had a few conversations with different sorts of people over the past couple of weeks about the best ways to see a vision for a game or software project through to completion.  It may be self serving, but I think that superfluid could be the best option for many of these. A superfluid-based execution will allow almost anyone with their own marketable skill (whatever that skill is) to put together a team and execute from development through marketing and distribution, and to maintain full ownership of their baby. Read More »

…in fully functional (google-style) beta at www.superfluid.biz; when we have the chance to breathe, I’ll post further. For now, suffice it to say that we’re launched, and developing several specific community focii, including game development and marketing that may useful to readers here.

btw: If you’re a business (game developer, designer, marketing folks, etc.) that’d like to participate in superfluid, for a limited time you can submit for the beta here.

-Nathan

Bijan Sabet followed up a tweet pondering the future of libraries with a post including the feedback he had received. Some of the responses were interesting visions, while  some simply crowed the death of the printed word as the end of libraries. A fair amount of what I’ve been called upon to do since 2001 is evaluation of how physical retail can continue to have value in a world of digital distribution. -I dealt with this specifically as VP of Business at Electronics Boutique, and since then in a consulting role for various initiatives. Amusingly, the redundancy of libraries and of video game retail stores ends up being sort of the same issue at this point in history: Read More »

Since folks continue to ask questions about OnLive, I thought I’d follow up a bit on my earlier post, and include the information I gathered from discussions with OnLive at their GDC booth.

I liked the guys I spoke with, and they seemed open and forthright about the product, giving me the feeling that OpenLive isn’t bunk so much as the product of good technical people creating something moderately useful. But that product has, for strategic purposes, been positioned by their marketing and biz dev folks as something it truly is not; competitive with existing products or in any significant way market changing. Read More »

It seems to be getting an awful lot of press today that Toys R Us, Best Buy and Amazon are all buying-in used games for re-sale, and hence endangering GameStop’s revenue from this element, but:

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As AdWeek points out, these days it’s hard to justify a relationship with a conventional ad agency based upon its understanding of media and how to drive a successful campaign. And some of the worst efforts these days come from agencies trying to go “creatively outside the box,” without understanding that the box itself no longer exists, while some agency folks simply miss the entire point. Read More »

It has been the case since the mid ’90s that periodically folks who may have had some degree of expertise and insight in the previous iteration of internet business model and technology will cast a jaundiced eye at current trends and dismiss them out of hand in a way that demonstrates singularly well their complete disassociation from the current industry. I would suggest that Sean Carton did just this in a recent ClickZ article in which he evaluates Twitter based upon website traffic. Read More »