Recently we have seen a move towards games that combine more complex game design seen in traditional casual flash games with social networking provided by popular Facebook games. We just covered one of these games: Battle Punks from Gravity Bear. Another one like this is Restaurant Life by CrowdStar.

Restaurant Life has been steadily growing since [...]

Yesterday I spoke at the “Social Game Fest” hosted by the Silicon Valley IGDA. The topic of my talk was “Game Design that goes viral”  by using the casestudy of Farmville Zynga. Lots of great Q&A and discussion followed. Here are my slides from the event. What are your thoughts on this?

Social Fest 10 7 09 Deck [...]

I’ve been watching what myspace does with its strategy and customer focus for a while. This has gotten some interest and lots of confusion from various techies here in Silicon Valley. In one particular case I felt compelled to share my stats on Facebook the next day to confirm that I wasn’t making up my [...]

Orange Labs hosted a fantastic women in tech event last week featuring speakers like:

Rashmi Sinha – Co-founder and CEO of SlideShare

Heather Harde – CEO of Techcrunch

Silvia Console Battiana – Co-Founder and Member of Board of Directors of Auctionomics

Beatrice Tarka – Co-founder and CEO of Mobissimo

Sandy Jen – Co-founder and Engineering Chief of Meebo

Here are the [...]

I tweeted and posted a link about demographic changes on Facebook and got a lot of excited response. So I am reblogging here for my loyal blog readers. Here are some interesting changes in Facebook demographics based on snapshots of its social ad data on January 09 and July 09:

Fastest growing [...]

I’ve long been a fan of Siqi Chen. He is brilliant both for his razor sharp analytical focus as well as his bravery and commitment to sharing his company’s proprietary data in order to lift all boats in the social gaming space. He gave a wonderful presentation with David King at last week’s social gaming [...]

I generally work on utility apps and websites and this is reflected by the blogs you read here. However utility apps can learn a lot from social gaming because social games are some of the few spaces on social networks that have actually managed to effectively acquire, engage, retain, and monetize users. Because of this [...]

Image by patrickmccully via Flickr

I <3 San Francisco. And within San Francisco I really love the Mission. It has the best of ethnic food and shopping, Yoga and organic food, and beautiful houses with creative and interesting people. But I get few opportunities to meet these folks while their creative juices are [...]

Synopsis of Twitter, Yahoo, Google search show down; my ideas on how Twitter can use search to be a complete game changer on what we do on the internet and how!

I’m amazed at Facebook. I really am. I’m all for new features and innovations. Those who know me know I take stands for increased flexibility, more unconferences, proliferation of almost all new technologies, and not to mention throwing out suits. But I do believe that after a while a business just needs to grow up. [...]