The question raised by Blogeek is : “can video-games help (save) football clubs?”. However in my opinion, it is more intringuing to see an example of how data-mining processes as well as virtual reproduction of a parcel of reality influences back this very reality. It is a facinating story about how simulation may act back on the processes they are simulating. In a near future, we may have access to a broad range of procedural information and skills via technologies, broadly spreading the phenomenon initiated by early flight and driving simulators.
:ratio | user experience architects
Dear readers,
I’m happy and proud to announce that the Website of our new User Experience Agency is now up and running. Please check us at: http://8ratio.ch. Here is a short description of the agency:
user experience agency based in Lausanne Switzerland
:ratio is a freshly created user experience and usability consulting agency, striving to design user-friendly and intuitive interfaces and make the Web a better place to experience and enjoy.
We are three passionate user experience architects based in Lausanne Switzerland. We put our passion and creativity at the disposal of companies desiring to improve the usability and user experience of their websites, extranets, intranets, as well as mobile, Web and desktop applications.
Please email us or call us on +41 78 759 58 17 for an estimate or to know more about us, we will get back to you within the next 24h.
Wii-like interaction for flash-based games
The evolution of Web2.0 in 2009
The end of the year is usually the opportunity to see back what happened in order to inform what would happen next year. This interesting post gathers thoughts of 8 web2.0 gurus about the evolution of web2.0 in 2009. I gather here some of the thoughts I found interesting:
Chris Brogan from New Marketing Labs anticipates a stronger push towards the portability of identities and friends and a better bridging between different networks.Similarly, Charlene Li points out the importance of opening social networks to fully profit from profile exchanges and existing social relationships. Companies should start to think about how to leverage an existing community such as on Myspace, Facebook or LinkedIn.
Mary Hodder points out the importance for users to own their data back and have a better control on what’s happening. Compagnies like Facebook that tries to control every aspect of users life would be forced to focus more on certain aspect and abandon others.
For Tara Hunt, it is time to cease experimenting and begin to solidify the core principles. She argue that the challenge among marketers must shift from “how you control and spread the message” to “how you interact and empower those customers.
Susan Mernit’s concerns are more about the accessibility to mainstream audiences. She expect the social networks to become more widespred in order to allow everybody to experience what bloggers and gamers begin to experience 5 years ago.
Finally, Nate Ritter argue for the ermergence of location based services as an integrative part of the new mobile social network era. Furthermore, Ritter points out the importance of aggregation tools, helping people to cope with the multiplicity and abondance of messages with their limited consumption capabilities. Ritter and Richard Yoo points out the importance of the financial situation to frame the future of the Web2.0. They argue that decisive financial decision will be made serving as “natural selection” process to strenghen some of the existing models and eliminate weakers (I am interpreting here). Yoo also points out that the accent would be put on the real needs of the users.
Why do I blog this? All these considerations and prospective thoughts give me a feeling that we are reaching the asymptotic point of social media trends and the web2.0 buzz. The underlying important message is probably that the financial crisis will accelerate the slowing (pardon the oxymoron) process and the frenetic bulimia that leads to the emergence of a plethora of new entities. Time has come to leverage existing entities in order to permit to the more adaptive and well-established ones to survive and the weaker and less useful to disappear. It is probably time to go from quantity to quality.
Another important question is how the social media will spread to the mainstream. A lot of people discovered social networking through facebook in 2008. I think 2008 has been the “tipping point” of the wide-social networks and the geometrical ascension will probably continue during 2009. Furthermore, the transition from computers to smartphones will be another phenomenon we should observe across 2009. So far, I stood scheptical about the iPhone revolution with respect to social networking. However, it is tempting to say that Smartphones will give access to social-networks, to people that are not so computer friendly. To conclude, I would argue with some of the above authors that the important aspect is the real needs of the users. It is time to have a serious look to how the web2.0 is used by the mainstream users instead of taking as point of referenc, the early adopters or tech-saavies.
Video-games help real football
via blogeek:
The english football club Everton signed a contract with Sports Interactive to access the football players statistics of over 20′000 fooball clubs. The rationale is that it may reduce the cost of filtering and detecting potential futur talents.
More interesting is that Marco Amelia recently declared that he was able to stop Ronaldinho’s penalty thanks to the realistic moves of the brasilian star reproduced in a video game and studied by Amelia on his gaming console.
Starting startups in bad economy time?
in a piece, Paul Graham talk about creating startups during recession times and bad economy perspective. Hereafter I gather some of the main ideas:
The economy is obviously bad and common-sense may suggest that it is a bad idea to start new businesses such as start-ups. Graham claims that it is neither a bad nor a good time to adventure the creation of a technology start-up. The state of economy doesn’t matter.
The success of the startups are based mainly on the quality of the founders. Economy is just minor. What is important is the Who and the how, not the when. Technology progress are independent from the economy shape. A good idea should be exploited “ic et nunc”. Waiting is missing the train. However one of the issues in ignoring the economy condition is that investers are more reluctant to invest, even though its common sense to by when times are bad and sell when it’s good. But founders have to adapt. previously you would have to convince that your startup was viral, next you would have to convince that your “startup is recession-proof”. To make it recession-proof, its like anytime before: run it as cheaply as possible in order to be difficult to kill because you ran out of money.
An advantage of bad time is that it lowers the competition; everyone else is cowering. Founders are ultimately like investors. They should invest in their own business when time is bad to make profit when it gets better. However its difficult to say that the advantages such as lack of competition can outweigh disadvantages such as cowering investors. Nevertheless remember that what matters are people.
Why do I blog this? I’m in the very last sprint of my Ph.D work and the idea of going independant is of course appealing. However I did not yet seriously thought about opening a startup. Probably because despite what Graham says, it’s not only the people that matters, but the ideas as well. However even though it could appear as a commonsense, it’s quite thought-provoking. I would say that I’m kind of despointed by the final conclusion. As the author say it himself: “The truth is more boring: the state of the economy doesn’t matter”. Except perhaps for finding a job.
New Life, New Blog
Hi there,
for the rare readers that are following this blog, I would like to say that I will not continue posting here anymore. Indeed I am about finish my Ph.D. and enter a new life. New life means new occupations and new trends, which means new blog. For those who are interested to follow my peregrinations and digressions, you can access the brand new blog through the following link:
See you there.
Myspace confuses Switzerland and Sweden
I’m not really used to go to the myspace site very often but I went there recently and was suprised to see that they somehow constraint you to access a localized version of the social-networking site. So the main page offers for swiss residents the choice between the three main languages: “German”, “French” and “Italian”. However when clicking on of those links, it is supprising to see that the link redirect the user to the swedish version of MySpace.
The confusion between Switzerland and Sweden is not new and occurs often for north-americans but it is a utterly messed-up blooper for a big company as myspace.com and the danger of badly controlled over-localization It also reminds me the bad design choice of PayPal that provides only german language for the Switzerland based accounts, ignoring by the way half of the population of Switzerland as potential users, letting them annoyed, frustrated and desappointed.
Dashboard-design: the common mistakes
I’m doing some counceling and consulting for a french campagny designing a fully online project-management and collaboration tool and one of the challenge is to reorganize the summary of the project in an overview allowing to have a quick look at the state of the project and allow users to plannify in consequence. Hence, I dove back in Stephen Few’s book “Information dashboard design”
It is worth gathering back here Few’s 13 common mistakes in dashboard design, as dos and don’ts heuristics:
- Exceeding the boundaries of a single screen
- Supplying inadequate context for the data
- Displaying excessive detail or precision
- choosing a deficient measure
- Choosing inappropriate display media
- Introducing meaningless variety
- Using poorly designed display media
- Encoding quantitative data inaccurately
- Arranging the data poorly
- Highlighting important data ineffectively or not at all
- Cluttering the display with useless decoration
- Misusing or overusing color
- Designing an unattractive visual display
Massive or Casual? the evolution of video-game consumption
Recently, besides the “Sterlingian-inspired” elucubrations about the future of the European politics and the potential role the ambitious french president will play in, the now traditional “parallel-monologue” sessions with F. Kaplan are mainly turning around the entertainment industry. It made me think about the evolution of the video-game industry these past 5 years. I came to the conclusion that the subtle change in the industry and video-game consumption can be characterized by a polarization of the game consumption in terms of pace and duration. On one hand, there are the massively online games with their loads of hardcore gamers and the never ending game experience. The model here is to create addiction in order to justify monthly billing of subscription to sets of online services. World of Warcraft, Age of Conan and the highly anticipated and recently released Warhammer online, fall in this category of games that place their bet on long lasting session of game consumption behaviors.
On the other hand, there is this emerging tendency assembled under the umbrella reference of “casual-games” where the pace of the consumption has shifted to the other extreme, emerging and evolving in a close relation to the way the new generation consume all sort of media, as well as the new model imposed by the social-networking services.
Melissa J. Perenson from PC-Word, puts it as follows:
“Five years ago we didn’t have Facebook, MySpace, YouTube. [Kids'] consumption of entertainment has changed–their tolerance is shorter and shorter and shorter. Their whole world is a screen,” Olin says. “Game makers are trying to reflect the world around them, and as such, they’re creating online play patterns that fit the short rhythm of today’s world.”
For example, not everyone is willing or able to commit 25 minutes to scale a virtual hill and reach another. So some game developers set up shorter tasks, or set a sequence of smaller actions that lead to the hill. “That reflects the immediacy of the real world.
She extends the reasoning by saying that this model of casual games is changing the shape of the gaming industry, especially the console games that are more and more designed in a “parceled” way, allowing in the mean time casual gamers and regular gamers to experience the game according to their own rhythm. I strongly believe that this scalability is the Key to adapt to the broadest range of consumers and fully exploit the wealthy trend the gaming industry is experiencing these days: “cherishing the geek as well as the casu”
Swype a new way to input text on touch-screens.
This new technology called Swype is nothing more than amazing. it allows a new paradigm of text-input for touch screens. Best is having a look on this video from Cnet recorded at the Techcrunch50.
