Fishpool

I wrote last fall about the "sweet spot" in pricing and spending patterns for a microtransaction-based service and business model, where I posited that given flexible consumption, revenue could be maximized by ensuring the lowest possible minimum price point; one which is preferably closer to 1 cent than one 1 euro. Depending on the goods sold and amount of logistics overhead, the minimum profitable price may of course be much higher, and depending on the payment mechanisms available, the minimum price for which the consumers effort overhead exceeds the cost of the good may also be fairly significant. A chocolate bar may be sellable for 40 cents, while few durable goods can achieve a price point lower than a few euros. For virtual goods, the minimum pricing is mostly a question of efficient mechanism for transferring low amounts of money, because the minimum "size" of the good sold can be in theory reduced ad infinitum, and distribution costs are a non-issue.

Last week there was a Facebook Developer Garage day in San Francisco where a couple of interesting presentations were given. I wasn't there, but browsing through the material I found this slide about the distribution of order sizes among Amazon customers (slide 10 in the deck):

It's interesting to see the similarities on this chart to the behavior in virtual goods. In this data, the observed behavior follows the power law model in an ideal fashion at price points over $25, but the drop-off below that order size is remarkably fast. This is the result of primarily the goods sold and the logistical overheads implicit in that; it just doesn't make much sense for someone to order $5 worth of goods from Amazon given the shipping costs and delays incurred on top of the purchase.

For virtual goods, the drop-off point can be much lower, but still, a similar drop off does happen - again because below a certain price point and transactional overhead level, neither the consumer of the good nor its producer see value in the market. At prices above that, the transactional model does however exhibit the power law distribution. Again, by reducing the minimum marketable and profitable price point, there is a big potential customer base to be gained at the bottom end of the pricing scale. Most companies leave an amazing amount of revenue on the table by not addressing this issue.

Among the things announced this week in GDC were two developments in entirely different directions on a particular axis of games technology: first, the OnLive network of thin clients showing network-streamed video games rendered on a server cluster somewhere, and second, the Mozilla/Khronos Group initiative to develop an OpenGL-accelerated, JavaScript-programmed 3D canvas in a web browser. Both have one thing in common: make it possible to run 3D apps (games) on standard devices without prior installations. How they go about that goal is radically different. One of them will fail.

OnLive is not the first company to attempt their idea. It's a basic extension to the same theme that has been around since at least the inception of the X Window System and Sun NeWS in early 80s - graphical thin clients showing applications running somewhere in the network. Further, the idea was explored for 3D games in the late 90s by G-Cluster, which apparently is still around in Japan in some form or another. In my opinion, it's a misguided approach. Certainly there's value to server-side processing, even of graphics, but the final rendering just makes so much more sense to be done on the client even when all of the application logic is remote.

What kind of client? Well, anything that can run a high-performance VM for Java or JavaScript (ie, a modern browser), and has 3D acceleration functionalities built into the graphics pipeline. This includes basically every network-connected device from the cost of $200 upwards: all smart phones, all netbooks, all laptops, all games consoles, and so on. Some of those devices are still intentionally crippled by their manufacturers in terms of operating system support for the required features, and clearly the 3D Canvas development hasn't been finished yet. The hardware capabilities, however, are already deployed to hundreds of millions of consumers.

Ignoring that deployed base and trying to scale a server-side rendering solution to the same figures is just mad. And that's not even considering the framerate and responsiveness constraints that are inescapable simply because of the round-trip network latency of such a system: on a high-bandwidth wired network 10s of milliseconds (not everyone can be situated within a few kilometers of the server cluster), and on radio networks, 100s of ms. Developing high-framerate games under those circumstances is hard enough when you only need to deal within transmitting positional data and adjusting for lag and jitter in both ends - making the games playable when every action made by the player needs to go to the server and back before it shows up is practically speaking impossible.

(Update an hour later) I suppose I should acknowledge that clearly the OnLive approach does have certain benefits to it: no piracy, little hacking of the typical kinds, little opportunity to cheat, and no need for investing in PunkBuster-type technology in the game clients, since none of that is running locally. However, all that just simply will not matter when weighed against the enormous brunt of having to run all that rendering in the wrong end of the MMO network and ignoring the opportunities to disperse so much of the investment and energy requirements to the gamers.

I started working past the abstract of my upcoming MySQL Conf 2009 presentation on scaling business intelligence solutions for Habbo this week. Since I learned of an interesting new presentation tool, Prezi from Jussi Laakkonen, I decided to give it a shot with this presentation, since PowerPoint and other slideware tools have never really felt like a good medium to me.

Prezi is certainly fun to play with, and pretty useful for turning a rapid mindmap-style set of notes into a presentation that while perhaps basic, at least is stylistically "different". However, several limitations rapidly become apparent as well. Before reading any further though; go and take a look at their 4-minute demo video and perhaps even try the online demo for a minute or two. I don't want to taint your first impression with these criticisms...

First of all; for me presentation means a performance. A powerpoint deck sent over email is not a presentation; it's an extremely clumsy alternative to a well-written 3-page white paper. Having someone read aloud a bunch of bullet points or throw page after page of text on a wall is not a presentation either - that's the bane of modern corporate culture.

Someone communicating their thoughts verbally, preferably in person (though sometimes a video recording or a teleconference will have to make do) using a set of visual support material is a presentation. Oftentimes they are informative or interesting, sometimes thought-provoking. Once in a while memorable. That's what I'd like to learn to do, though I make no claims to having reached any of those levels yet. One has to have aspirational targets, though.

Now, my workflow for trying to get there goes roughly as follows:

Write down an outline of the ideas I want to communicate, either as a mindmap or as a plain-text document. I typically end up skipping mindmaps here, because I'm lazy and haven't found any mindmap tool yet to be as fast as just plain pounding on a keyboard.

Expand that outline to include all the data I want to show to support my arguments. This is the point where it would have paid off if I had started with a mindmap; but like I said, I'm lazy, sometimes to the point of optimizing time now to spend more time in the next 15 minutes. My rationalization for this is that since the world can change in 15 minutes (insert your own example), what's the point of doing anything too early? Buy that or not :)

Create rough visualizations of all of the data, because I hate having to read text or numbers while listening to someone speak, and I figure I shouldn't have to put others through what I hate doing. Pictures it is, then.

Make the first pass on the sequence in which to present all this stuff. Here's one of the first conceptual challenges I have with Prezi: I get the usefulness of mindmaps, and I love the contextual documentation a good mindmap can produce; but how can a mindmap, a naturally non-linear medium, be the optimal format for what ultimately is going to be a linear storyline to be spoken through by someone? I'm not about to be stopped by a slight conceptual conflict, though.

With slideware tools, this is usually the point where I move the text into a slides outline for the first time. What I've written by this point will be rewritten almost in its entirety by the time I'm through, but rather than organize clouds in a mindmap, I'm now starting to work on the order of ideas as collections of slides.

Once the rough shape of the presentation is in place, I start working on three things at once: the text of the presentation (which I tend to draft up as speech notes just to get a feel for the number of words required to describe the idea, even if I ultimately don't refer to them much), the text on the slides (which tends to be lots and lots of individual words or short sentences shown one by one, rather than lists of bullets), and the rest of the visual support material (eg, actual pictures, rather than the charts and visualizations).

At the end of this phase, I have what I might call a first presentable draft. What's left now is polish: make sure the fonts match, text is aligned, pictures look smooth, transitions work, and so on. While I work on the polish, I'm likely to run through the presentation speaking it through a few times, to time myself, make sure I remember the linear order (since until now I've been working on all parts of it at once), and so on. Because getting the timing right is enough work on its own, I tend to want to leave the visual polish up to a good template; I apply one now, and a jumble of text from random places gets converted to the same style, slide backgrounds are matched up (some have likely been copied from older decks and would not necessarily have the exact same style), and so on.

Now for the parts where Prezi could, but as of yet doesn't support me in this process:

1. It is impossible to rearrange text in a truly mindmap fashion. Either it's in the same text block and can at best be copy-pasted, or it's independent phrases that have to be manipulated one-by-one.
2. Because styles can not be applied at the END of the workflow, I have to constantly interrupt my thinking of the ideas by thinking of the polish.
3. Partially related to point 1, a keyboard pounder like myself is forced to grab the mouse to reposition, or end up writing a notepad-like text document into a Flash text field.
4. And related to all of the above; copying sections of material from one presentation to another is impossible, so either each presentation must be a from-scratch operation (which might be okay if the mindmapping worked really smoothly and I could at least collect a media library over time), or they have to be evolutionary changes as new versions. Having multiple presentations partially cover the same stuff (as in; short product overview at the beginning of a presentation) is very cumbersome. You might argue it's not a good presentation style to include significant amounts of boilerplate anyway, and I might agree with you, but then the from-scratch creation process just becomes that much more important.

(This being an entirely local subject, I'm making an exception from my normal practice and posting in Finnish)

Rautatieaseman kello näyttää peittyvän rakennustelineisiin estäen puolisen miljoonaa kellonajan vilkaisua päivässä. Ei pitäisi olla hirvittävän vaikeaa tai kallista asentaa telineisiin pieniä projektoreita jotka voisivat heijastaa suojakankaisiin kellonajan ja näin palvella kaupunkilaisia myös epäilemättä välttämättömän remonttiprojektin ajan.

Miljoonalta pääkaupunkilaiselta vaihdetaan matkakortit uusiin tänä vuonna, kun vanhasta tekniikasta luovutaan. Jostain syystä uuden kortin väritys on kuitenkin ainakin uutisoinnin mukaan projektin vaikein päätösasia. Hetkonen? Mistään pankista ei enää saa maksukorttia ensin päättämättä minkälaisella grafiikalla se tehtaalta käyttäjälleen kustomoidaan yksittäistoimituksen, mutta täysin etäohjelmoitavien, ennakolta vakioitujen korttien kanssa ei voida tarjota kuin yhtä graafista mallia? Onko se nyt oikeasti niin vaikeata tilata miljoonan samanlaisen kortin sijaan vaikka neljää eri väriä ja kuviota neljännesmiljoona kutakin ja antaa meidän maksajien valita minkälaista korttia haluamme busseissa ja ratikoissa esitellä?

Have you noticed how Google AdWords shows you directly targeted advertising on LinkedIn? Something that goes far beyond AdWord's normal capabilities of targeting. For example, I always see recruitment ads for a local Java consultancy house known for their agile process expertise, no matter what I'm doing on LinkedIn. It certainly doesn't have anything to do with the page the ads are on, nor is it related to search keywords. As a proof, take the case of searching for a farming expert in Nepal: I'm still seeing ads for that consultancy, Scrum process management tools, and SOA testing. If there's a connection to my activities, I'm at loss what it is.

However, I know exactly what they ARE targeting. My own profile, which mentions all those things, and more. LinkedIn and Google are not advertising to my stated intent (what I'm searching for), or the page content (as an AdSense customer might expect), but myself and what I've told the service about me.