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Monday 4 January 2010

Happy 2010 - it's review time

By Osma on Monday 4 January 2010, 20:05

I was happily snowboarding and skiing (the latter for the first time in two decades) last week, so here comes the year-end review a week late. Last year, I harped on Facebook's closed nature, and over the the year they've tried to open more of the users' data over to the Internet. Still, there are no decent APIs for a user to pull out everything they've posted to Facebook to have their own copy, though. That doesn't seem to stop them from dominating the Internet for the time being, though, so good for them.

I'm trying to think of what would have surprised me over the year, but given I failed to make many accurate predictions myself, things just seemed to happen in pretty natural direction. Oracle's Sun acquisition over in April was a bit of a surprise at the time, but since then, I've grown to appreciate how it might make sense for Oracle. However, what still baffles me is that EC is going along with Monty's campaign of blocking the completion of that acquisition. Look, guys - the entire world does not need to agree on a commercial transaction in order for one to go through! MySQL is not the important thing here overall, Java is.

We managed to complete a few of major transitions for Habbo, most notably replacing the Shockwave client which was getting a bit long in the tooth with an all-new Flash-based Habbo Hotel and integrating Habbo with Facebook and other social networks. I didn't write about either of those launches here at the time, but these are pretty huge things for us because they make approaching Habbo much easier for a new user, and enable us to create all kinds of interesting features that would not have made sense previously.

So, what do I expect from 2010? Well, did the mobile Internet already happen? If not, at least it has a fighting chance this year. I'm having a hard time identifying any people close to me who're not using some Internet services on their phone by now, and some seem to be doing that almost exclusively on a phone. That must mean the rest of the world is close on their heels. As for more predictions, others have taken care of them by now.

One promise I can make is to try to do my part in making the Internet more fun and more social. At least now that even newspapers are beginning to think that asking their readers for money is not just a utopia, we can focus on the apps themselves, not whether they're ad-supportable.

Have a great year MMX!

Sunday 8 November 2009

Nice going for Bobba Bar -

By Osma on Sunday 8 November 2009, 11:02

What a fun end of the week! Bobba Bar, our virtual world app for mobiles just launched this Thursday on iPhone having been available (in a slightly different form) for Nokia S60 devices for a few months. Four days later it's (at least in Finland where I'm looking at it) the top social networking app (ahead of Facebook, Skype and others) and the 3rd highest ranked free app in general. Great launch performance! Get yours from Bobba.com, or if you don't have a compatible phone, check out the Facebook group for Bobba Bar. Oh, and post here or in Facebook where you see Bobba in your local App Store listings!

Sunday 1 November 2009

Habbo, soon ten years old, still the leader

By Osma on Sunday 1 November 2009, 13:59

According to Nic Mitham at KZero, Habbo was the fastest growing virtual world for another quarter. Thanks, Nic! One thing though:

Although it’s the Grand-Daddy of the sector, Habbo continues to show dominance in the virtual worlds sector from a user acquisition perspective

Grand-daddy? Sheesh, Habbo hasn't even got to its pre-teen years, let alone have kids! Lets talk about that another ten years later :) Seriously though, Mobiles Disco, which preceded Habbo by a few months is now ten years old. I'm thinking we should relaunch the Disco..

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Wednesday 27 May 2009

What we're looking for in a data integration tool

By Osma on Wednesday 27 May 2009, 20:05

As our data warehousing process grows and the workflows get more complex, we've revisited the question of what tools to use in this process. Out of curiosity, I had a look at basing such a process on Hadoop/Hive for scalability reasons, but the lack of mature tools and the sacrifices on efficiency that would entail meant we're better off using something else as long as a distributed processing platform is the only thing that can get the job done. I'm also curious about the transition to continuous integration, a model I noticed showing up a couple of years ago and now getting some air under its wings as CEP, IBM's Infosphere Streams, and other similar approaches. Still, I think I'll continue to rely on something else for a while and see how things shake out. Continuous integration clearly is the future, but there are many ways to get there.

So, we had a look at what's going on in the Open Source data integration field. It seems the leaders in that field are Pentaho with Kettle/Pentaho Data Integration, and Talend with Open Studio and Talend Integration Suite. Both seem pretty even in terms of features. Both companies are a bit difficult to approach as a potential customer, so I figured I should also try what would come up from the OSS approach of just posting my thoughts on the Interweb ;)

Besides the technical pilot implementations we've made to compare basic workflow of the various tools, below is a sample of the kind of questions we're considering when evaluating the suitability of the tools.

Product roadmap, release schedule and size of the development team

  • How often and of what scope of changes should we expect and prepare ourselves for platform upgrades?
  • Past track record on keeping to a regular updates schedule

Data lineage and dependency, Impact analysis

  • How to find out which tables are being used to for deriving DWH dimensions and facts?

Logging, auditing, monitoring on row and job level

  • How to monitor and archive workflows on a row level (amount of rows being inserted/updated/deleted)?
  • How to maintain, access and query a job execution history (start time/end time/return code)?

Version control

  • How to track and restore changes in jobs?

Multi-user environment

  • How can several developers work together?

Change Data Capture

  • How to assist incremental loads?

Data profiling

  • How can data source be examined?

Job recovery

  • How to recover from possible failures in jobs (such as lost database connection)?

Deploy jobs

  • How to move jobs from one repository to another (development to testing to production)?

3 comments

Tuesday 25 November 2008

New reward models for Habbo

By Osma on Tuesday 25 November 2008, 10:38

As I hinted at last Thursday, and as was noted by Sulka yesterday, we are introducing a second currency to Habbo. We've had Coins (or credits) since the beginning of the service as the purchasable in-game currency, and the business model of Sulake is primarily based on sales of this currency to end users via a variety of mechanisms and sales channels from premium SMS billing (our original method) to credit cards, PayPal transactions and prepaid voucher cards purchasable from kiosks and stores like R-Kioski and 7-Eleven around the world.

Since yesterday, starting from our pilot site Habbo UK onwards, there's now a second currency as well, called Habbo Pixels. This one can't be bought -- you have to play Habbo to get it. There's a whole new set of cool things you can do with this currency, that can't be done using Coins. Naturally, the process doesn't end here, and we'll be introducing plenty more features tied to Pixels, Coins or both over the following months as part of our routine monthly releases.

Because of this tight connection to our primary business model, and because trading is such a big feature of the gameplay in Habbo, the implications of this change are pretty substantial. And so was the process by which we arrived at making this change - starting from (at least on my part) utter confusion of why anyone would want to complicate their economic model by introducing this big new variables. Once we got that part (thanks to everyone who patiently explained why it makes sense), implementing this still took its own sweet time, as did all of the pre-analysis on why it wouldn't immediately collapse our end-user sales and drive the company out of business -- that it would be fun for users was less of a worry.

I've been for a while convinced this will be huge for Habbo. It's way too early to tell whether that will truly be so, but the first indications sure look promising. Our UK service had a new peak simultaneous users record on the day of the launch of Pixels (20% increase -- if you care, you can follow those figures on the front page of each Habbo site), and the community feedback is overwhelmingly positive, despite its normal bias towards resisting change. We'll be following this closely, and follow-up articles are sure to appear in many places.

3 comments

Friday 27 June 2008

100 million and other metrics

By Osma on Friday 27 June 2008, 17:32

News hit the Internet this week that our favorite social play phenomenon, Habbo has reached a milestone of 100 million registered characters. Several places in the blogosphere have also pointed out the weaknesses of that figure, such as the fact that yes, most of those characters are "alts", abandoned accounts, or otherwise not very meaningful. I'd be the last person to argue against that particular point.

Still, it's a figure that has some comparison basis. MySpace didn't have 100 million registrations when News Corp acquired it, reaching that milestone a year later, and MySpace regs are arguably just as likely to be abandoned as virtual world avatars.

Overall though, we don't really put much weight to that metric compared to many others. The 20 million new registrations made in the last six months is pretty nice, but nicer still is 1.5 million logins per day and over a million hours per day spent in Habbo by users. Those are hard to discredit, never mind whether you think that free-to-play is less sticky than subscribed games or not. I tend to give more attention to that than to the 9.4 million unique monthly visitors, because ubiquitous as the UB/UV measurement style is, it, too is horribly inaccurate due to all kinds of errors from cookie washing to shared computers.

If you're interested in hearing about how we measure Habbo and decide what to do based on what we learn from those measurements, you might want to consider attending Leipzig GCDC this August, where I'll give an updated and more in-depth version of the talk the slides of which are in my earlier posting.

Thursday 3 April 2008

Nokia loses share among global youth, music on mobiles doubles popularity

By Osma on Thursday 3 April 2008, 20:24

We just released the results of our second global Habbo youth survey. For this 2007 edition, over 58,000 people contacted via the Habbo sites in 31 countries answered a survey the results of which have been painstakingly analyzed for weeks, nay, months by our in house analytics team.

Among the findings is tha majority of teens are now using their phones as mp3 players, that being almost twice as popular at 71 percent of the surveyed. Sure sign of convergence there. Sony Ericsson has enjoyed a rise in popularity thanks to this trend, and while Nokia is still the global leader in the teen segment as well as overall, it has lost some ground among teens.

This and a lot more, 250 pages worth of brilliant insight, can be found in the book we released in Virtual Worlds Conference today. We're selling this for €475 a piece, a real bargain for the content, because we figured it'll be more useful widely distributed rather than if sold at the typical market research prices. Check out the links above for more info.

Monday 16 July 2007

Ping

By Osma on Monday 16 July 2007, 20:14

It's again been a while since my previous post. First, it was a feeling that there was nothing worthwhile to write about, at least without having to spend hours thinking about it first. Then I had a biking accident and fractured my left wrist, leaving me rather handicapped as far as computers are concerned. Thanks to Helsinki's Rakennusvirasto for that - it would be nice if the few bike lanes weren't mined with road construction asphalt gravel.

I even entertained the idea of switching to a Mac in order to get decent speech recognition software, given that my laptop blew a gasket (well, busted its fan, at least) the day before. No, that won't happen though - an experiment with one proved that Macs are still, despite their aesthetic appeal, really excellent at infuriating me with their UI. I'm sure that's all fault of my own idiosyncrasies, so no comments of that, please.

A few other things of note have happened. We're closing the end of the latest Habbo update rollout, with this version bringing various usability improvements all around, from password retrieval and friend invites, to a more scalable web store interface. In Finland we're already pilot testing the next version, which has more noticeable new features: tagging and related search functionality and music player on the home pages to mention two. However, since I'm such a metrics-driven incremental improvement freak, to me the most significant events are the rollout of Google Analytics measuring (it's such a nice tool, even if with our traffic it becomes a bit sluggish), and how we're (once again) speeding up our update cycle to twice its previous velocity. I think this is now the third time we do it, and likely the trend will continue at least until we've reached a daily upgrade frequency.

Speaking of Analytics, the updated "social networking" version of the Habbo UK front page showed interesting changes in behavior, with some key metrics producing double-digit improvement. Something must be done about those ads, though... Comments on that vs the other Habbo sites' front pages welcome.

Finally, the corporate Sulake site was also updated last week. I may join the group posting notes in its blog as well, but that will happen after the holidays. Fractured wrist or not, I am looking forward to a few weeks offline. Too bad this forces our vacation plans to a more passive mode - but I suppose that will finally let me catch up on a lot of reading.

Wednesday 27 June 2007

Good luck, MySQL!

By Osma on Wednesday 27 June 2007, 13:13

BusinessWeek reports MySQL continuing with their IPO preparations. As a long-time user (about ten years now), and almost as long-time customer (in many companies, obviously currently and most significantly Sulake and Habbo), I wish you guys the best of luck on that road. Don't lose your sight of the ballgame while doing that -- we need you to continue to do better with the product itself while the distractions of investor communications will be great.

I'm sure we can all name a few nuisances in every software product we use, and I certainly have a few of those of the MySQL database, but what I really admire the guys for is their approach to innovating in the sales and customer relationships, or in the business of software. It's so much easier to deal with an Open Source project and vendor than with proprietary, old world software vendors, that I'm always willing to overlook a few problems in the product itself. It's not like the proprietary products aren't without their share of problems, either -- and ultimately, what counts is how much you have to suffer while trying to work around that. I get to add a new note on both sides of the coin to that experience nearly every day, and it's not common for proprietary vendors to win that game.

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