December 31, 2006

Wii is fun

 I spent Christmas over at my relatives in Toronto, Canada.  It was a lot of fun.  The best parts were playing around with the Nintendo Wii.

Although I'm a known game addict, Wii is like liquid crack 100x.  I played the games that come with the system, tennis, golf, bowling, boxing.  My favorites were tennis and boxing.  Tennis was very intuitive.  you swing the racket at the time when the ball on the screen reaches your players.  the speed, angle, and position of the racket in relation to your body changes the ball's trajectory, and determines if your player will take a dive for it.  2v2 is definitely the most fun, and I look forward to wii tennis tournaments.

Boxing was a whole other animal.  Learning the moves is everything, and the learning curve is pretty steep.  There is no gaming manual for boxing moves, so it's more of a self discovery of what works and what doesn't.  There's jabs, hooks, uppercuts, blocking the face and body, leaning back, moving from side to side.  

There is just so much added functionality to the possible gameplays.  It more than makes up for the simplistic graphics.  Imagine if you and three other friends are fighting, punching, slicing up enemies in some epic quest of good vs evil.  Or if you could be a squad of assassins against another squad that play head to head online.  Wii is definitely a step in the right direction.

December 30, 2006

book list 2007

So many books, so little time.  In 2007 I plan to read 1 book every 2 weeks.  This will be done by basically reading though most of a book on Sundays.  I feel like my mind hasn't expanded enough since I got out of college.  Itching for a new venture.
I move to Providence, RI in February to do technology analysis, but it feels like it can't come soon enough.

cheap chinese food

Why is it that Chinese food is cheap?  Even at authentic, classy Chinese restaurants I expect to pay much less than other types of restaurants.  Am I the only one that notices this phenomenon?  Of course there is the el cheapo $4-5 lunch special, consisting of many Americanized fast food Chinese meals such as  Kung Pao Chicken, Sesame Chicken, Beef w/ Brocolli, all coming with a generous proportion of fried rice and soft drink.

It's certainly not because it's asian.  Both Korean and Japanese share an image of eloquence.  Every time I go to a sushi place I end up spending at least $25 / person.  At dim sum, if I spend more than $15 / person then either I'm with a bunch of marathon eaters or I feel like I've been p0wned.  

It's not the ingredients.  Many Asian dishes use the same meats and prepare the meals in similar ways.

It might have something to do with some Chinese mentality.  People from China seem to always sell themselves short.  I see that in my parents, and some of my friends that are PRC (they came from the People's Republic of China).  I understand that life in China sucked horribly.  That people would have 2 eggs per month, and that would be their total protein intake.  This is why some PRC's would gladly be fed well and work 60 hrs / wk in the States rather than starve in China.  And to make more than that is to indulge in frivolous wants.

I guess cultural and environmental events can have life long consequences.

December 29, 2006

trust and permission marketing

In direct marketing, sometimes we give away freebies.  This gives prospects a chance to identify themselves, and give us their contact information.  These marketing pieces give us a chance to show our prospects who we really are, and demonstrate how useful we can be.  But it's not just how helpful we are, it's also how much trust we can establish.

While there are dedicated snoopers out there that research everything thoroughly, it's certainly not a quick and easy thing to determine if you can trust someone or trust a website.  The traditional means to build trust include a plethora of testimonials, your picture, business address and real phone number, and an iron clad guarantee.  But how about for the casual seller or buyer?  

It'd be interesting if there was a portable reputation/trust packet you could carry with you where ever you went on the web.  Two interesting services I noticed are Opinity and Rapleaf.
Opinity feels like building a myspace profile geared towards building "trustability."  You can insert personal info, friends testimonials, awards, education, etc. and take your identity to where ever you do business.

Rapleaf is more lightweight, has an open api for easier site integration.  You can tie in online and offline transactions, but there is no transaction specific feedback.  You can measure different aspects of the person's rapleaf profile, like difficulty of obtaining the e-mail address, number of positive and negative feedbacks.  

All the value is in the network.  When your reputation system is the one to use, revenue opportunities will present themselves.  The biggest problems are fraud detection (false negatives and false positives) and making big business development deals.

December 28, 2006

community building

In web 2.0, everyone touts that community is key.  Looking at Digg, I couldn't agree more.  It started as an interesting idea and now enjoys a bolstering community behind it.  While there are technologies that make websites technically superior to Digg, what many of these sites lack is community.  What I'm wondering though is that even though there are thousands of Digg clones out there, how did Reddit make it to the top?

Communities all start by having content that helps the individual.  Keeping the content fresh helps visitors come back for more.  As your community grows, add social networking/community aspects to make content more useful and interactions meaningful.  In Digg's case, as link submissions increased, the most interesting news became more valuable.  Other social features added include:
-commenting
-adding friends
-feeds to friends and users
-recognition for accomplishments by users
-community enforced policing

an interesting proposal I noticed was to buy parked domains that have a lot of traffic, add useful content, then add social stuff ( grab.com and deals.com and wikihow.com)

another play off this idea is to buy the traffic generators for myspace/youtube and direct it to the next myspace (that you created)