I recently attended a conference on social and mobile games (yeah, I know) and they talked a bit about cloning of games. Again. A few high-profile examples of cloning have brought this back into the spotlight. So, let's take a look at the business realities of cloning and how it affect small game companies.

I say "again" because I wrote about cloning a bit over a year ago. Since then, it's just continued to become a bigger issue in the game industry.

Theme One: Do not, under any circumstances, start a startup.

This is, of course, tongue in cheek. But more than half the speakers said, in one form or another, do not start a startup. The summary went something like:

Don’t start a company just for the sake of starting a company. Don’t start a company because it’s cool. Don’t start one because you think it’s going to turn out like it does in the fictional movies, because it won’t - death is the default for startups. Don’t start a company because you want to be like the founders you see at startup school, or want to be the “next [fill in the blank].”

Dating, oh dating. You are such a strange phenomenon, so amazing & simultaneously horrifying. Who knows where the night will begin or where it could all lead? But here’s the kicker — dinner & a movie is totally played out. You’re interesting, they’re interesting — surely that’s not the best you can come up with! So here, for your romantic pleasure, are a list of 50 unusual, interesting, fun ideas to try!

I think the game development community has done a pretty good job of sharing resources and ideas and tips and tricks on effective brainstorming.  However, it’s one thing to tease out of your brain all the fantastic and creative ideas you could ever ask for; getting the same thing out of a group of people in meeting-form is a slightly different animal.

Have you ever been in a brainstorming meeting where people sort of sit around and spit out ideas, but by the end of it, no one is sure if anything was really accomplished, and you have the uneasy sensation of having just poured a bunch of creativity into a black hole?  I hate that feeling!  Brainstorming meetings should not yield that feeling, they should produce a bunch of really awesome and useful ideas for the problem at hand, and everyone should leave feeling like they have accomplished a great feat, and made strides in whatever the project is.

Wo kommen die meisten Produktinnovationen her? Angesichts des täglichen Nachrichtenstroms zu neuen Gadgets liegt die Vermutung nahe, die Quelle in der Industrie zu verorten. Weit gefehlt: Nach einer Studie von MIT-Forscher scheinen Verbraucher nicht nur viel innovativer zu sein als bislang angenommen, sondern auch mehr Innovationen anzuschieben als die Industrie. Technology Review fragte von Eric von Hippel, der an der Sloan School of Management am MIT lehrt, warum dies bisher von den Ökonomen übersehen wurde und wie sich Marktforschung und Unternehmen ändern müssen.

“Flickr isnt doing it for me anymore and it hurts to say that out loud.” - bijan

Bijan’s post struck a chord, which is really hard for me to talk about too. I’ve been a paid user of Flickr for many years. Flickr was the first web2 company I fell in love with. It made it easy for average people to share photos publicly and privately, and it built a community that encouraged people to push themselves to take better photos. It was the first prism with which I looked at how a community website could subtly use game mechanics to drive behavior without building “a game.”

But at this point it feels overly clunky in too many ways. I’m curious what folks feel like is missing in their Flickr experience, but for me the next Flickr would have one huge difference and a few smaller ones.

My talk at Lift seemed to go down quite well but I remember leaving the stage thinking of all the things I'd meant to say; my own fault for trying to cram an hour of stuff into 20 minutes. So I thought I'd try and elaborate on some of it here. This post is what I meant to say while standing in front of this picture of one of Roo and Leila's tapes.

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