Fishpool - Comments

Dusting off the looking glass - Osma

Osma — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 14:51:13 +0200

Entrepreneurship is a social activity, and like all social activities, it follows a skewed powerlaw model - a very, very small fraction is high quality, and doesn't resemble the average at all. That's where the phrase "with quantity comes quality" comes from. The more you have it, the more likely it is that there are 1-2 diamonds in the mix, and since they're good they will sort out from the chaff. Which should go to explain why I'm optimistic by just seeing quantity increase.

Dusting off the looking glass - Markus

Markus — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 17:07:25 +0200

Osma, refreshing to read your thoughts for the New Year. Couldn't agree more on your selected sources of optimism: entrepreneurship, citizen democracy and advancement of technology..I just hope that the recent rise in quantity in these domains will also translate into corresponding rises in quality..i.e. I would not only welcome more entrepreneurship -but also better in kind - for us all to enjoy...

Driverless cars, and a complete rethink of in-city traffic management - Jon Martin

Jon Martin — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 23:22:18 +0200

I've had many of the same thought. It also strikes me as short-sighted to be building large rail infrastructure projects not set to mature until the mid-20s, when even with high speed trains, the comfort and convenience of a personal carrier from door to door at low cost will be likely. The UK is doing such a thing.

Driverless cars, and a complete rethink of in-city traffic management - Toni

Toni — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 21:57:15 +0200

Brad Templeton, who might be bit biased, wrote a provocative article how ecologically bad is current public transportation compared to small electric vehicles. http://www.templetons.com/brad/robo...

Zynga's ARPU doubling? Not quite - Osma

Osma — Wed, 06 Jul 2011 20:17:35 +0300

Eric, thanks for the note. Yes, if game design considerations were ignored, then making all virtual goods consumable instead of durable would "fix" the trailing revenue figures. While Zynga's received more than their fair share of critique regarding their games, I would not be ready to claim they've completely sacrificed game design to arbitrary GAAP rules to the point where they're intentionally throwing away durable goods for revenue recognition purposes.

Nor is the deferring of revenue an entirely bad thing, either; on one hand, Zynga have chosen to publish the bookings figures as well, and on the other, the deferred sales provide not-inconsiderable stability and predictability to the official revenue figures, which would probably be quite appreciated by Wall Street, as well as some reaction time for Zynga themselves -- if bookings start to decline, they'll still have a couple of months for corrective measures before revenue is hit badly.

However, my post is intended to point out that when calculating comparable KPIs (such as monetization rate), one should be careful to pick compatible base metrics. In this case, those metrics are even readily available.

Zynga's ARPU doubling? Not quite - EVCinNYC

EVCinNYC — Wed, 06 Jul 2011 18:26:39 +0300

No question the bookings and deferral distorts revenue recognition and thus what these figures reflect - I probably inelegantly mentioned this in my post. In general, I think this requires a breakdown of how you think each game is monetizing and the percentage of traffic each game makes at any point in time.

For example, FrontierVille is almost solely consumables - I'd bet a good 80% of that revenue is consumables that are being used and thus shown within 30 days. FarmVille is probably 60% durables, with revenues being recognized over six to eight months (I think most games have 3-6 month lifespans).

If you look at Zynga games, the most recent releases are focused on energy or consumable purchases, which would allow them to reflect the revenues more quickly. This is coming at the expense of FarmVille whose users have declined over time. So my hunch is that the majority of the revenue improvement is from being able to recognize revenues faster in faster over the last year.

And now that they've done that, you are seeing the ARPU flatten out, or actually decline in the last quarter. The gains from revenue recognition have mostly been made at this point, and the harder road to optimization lies ahead.

Passwords are a broken system - Heini Malmi

Heini Malmi — Mon, 21 Feb 2011 17:57:57 +0200

Hei,

Blogisi on valittu Cisionin helmikuun blogilistaukseen sekä yhdeksi CisionPoint-verkkopalveluun lisättävistä blogeista.

En löytänyt sähköpostiosoitetta blogistasi mutta jos meilaat minulle osoitteeseen heini.malmi@cision.com niin lähetän lisätietoja listauksesta.

Lisätietoja Cisionista yrityksenä sekä palveluistamme ja tuotteistamme löydät kotisivuiltamme: http://fi.cision.com/.

Yst. terv.
Heini Malmi

A last look at 2010... and what's in sight? - Kriss

Kriss — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 21:07:23 +0200

I still think native client is going to be a game changer...

So don't discount native apps it might just mean a change in what a native app is.

Probably a few years before anyone notices though. :)

Notes on Samsung Galaxy Tab - @piplzchoice

@piplzchoice — Sun, 28 Nov 2010 18:30:41 +0200

During the first month after introduction, Galaxy shipped over 600K units and started to challenge iPad for customer advocacy. Check out this preliminary Market Intelligence report that shows Customer satisfaction of Galaxy users is 5% higher than iPad 64GB users http://blog.amplifiedanalytics.com/...

First thoughts about Balancion - Osma

Osma — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 15:59:01 +0200

Lähetin pari päivää sitten melko kiukkuista asiakaspalautetta OP:lle Balancionin kieltämisestä, ja tänään tuli hieman erilainen viesti takaisin: lyhennettynä "OP ei voi taata palvelun turvallisuutta, käyttö on asiakkaan omalla vastuulla". Tähän voisi sanoa "no shit, Sherlock" - mutta ainakaan he eivät varsinaisesti KIELLÄ käyttöä.

First thoughts about Balancion - Osma

Osma — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 15:14:43 +0200

So, just before the weekend OP decided they want to ban Balancion referring to security concerns. To hell with them - sure it's insecure to log in to a bank using a custom browser designed to take over the web session as soon as I'm authenticated, and I'd much rather not do that. However, that's not an option unless banks offer a decent read-only API and OAuth-style authentication for a client such as Balancion's to grab the transaction information without resorting to screen scraping.

So, OP, don't talk the talk unless you're prepared to walk the walk. I'm waiting.

First thoughts about Balancion - Jussi Muurikainen

Jussi Muurikainen — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 17:26:22 +0200

Hi Osma,

Very thorough pre-analysis about Balancion.

I´m glad to inform that Your suggested "next steps" are pretty much what we are planning with Idean almost as we speak ;)

Regards,

Jussi

Jussi Muurikainen
founder & CEO
Balancion Ltd.

PS. for those who want to know more in English:

http://www.finnfacts.com/english/ne...

http://www.arcticstartup.com/2009/0...

The balance of great products and rapid evolution - Sampo Karjalainen

Sampo Karjalainen — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 20:36:46 +0200

Good challenge. Some thoughts from my fluish mind:

Great design is about visualizing concrete solutions that truly serve people's goals, needs and wants.

People use products to get 'a job' done. The job can be built of...
* concrete end goals like "I want to build and share a photo slide show"
* experience goals like "I want my photos to look really good"
* or higher level life goals like: "I want to be respected by other photographers."

In one product, the individual features, UIs or layouts are all there to build a flow that gets that job done. A job done – and you are ready to pay for it in one form or another, and probably recommend to your friends, too.

The challenge with granularity and design is that to satisfy those goals, you need to see the product, the users and the context as a whole. Putting up a photo upload functionality for the user is a start. But to get your slide show up on your friend's computer, and get praise from him, may require a sequence of seamlessly integrated features of uploading, scaling, ordering, previewing, sharing, commenting, etc. Before the chain is complete, all we have is some random meaningless features (for this particular job).

Once you have the flow designed, it's quite easy to design the individual features one by one and take them further incrementally and iteratively. But to serve a new need requires a holistic view of the whole design.

Some scaling observations on Infobright - david!lutz

david!lutz — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 00:57:10 +0200

Osma,

Nice observation, test and summary. Thanks!

David Lutz
Director, Technical Sales Consulting
Infobright

[ping] MySQL - could we please move on already? - uberVU - social comments

uberVU - social comments — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 22:37:37 +0200

Social comments and analytics for this post

This post was mentioned on Twitter by osma: MySQL - could we please move on already? http://bit.ly/X73mx...

MySQL - could we please move on already? - Kennu

Kennu — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 15:23:02 +0200

Better to just jump over to NoSQL already... Then we can forget all that MySQL stuff ;-)

[ping] Habbo, soon ten years old, still the leader - Habbo Herald

Habbo Herald — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 11:03:31 +0200

Habbo still #1

Habbo proves it is still the best when the results for new user registrations for the 3rd quarter of 2009 show up and tell us how popular Habbo really is. ......

Habbo, soon ten years old, still the leader - jamcs

jamcs — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 17:51:23 +0200

Please re-launch it to the iPhone/iPod touch for a limited time as well as other phones<3

Creating your very own Habbo site - Lab-Rat

Lab-Rat — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 16:20:54 +0200

Nice, for a second there I thought this was gonna reference Retros and was like o.O, Might try this :)

Habbo, soon ten years old, still the leader - Ryan1806

Ryan1806 — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 14:40:57 +0200

Relaunch the disco!