Updated at 4:30pm PST for record $1 million amount.
Earlier this week, crowd-funding site Kickstarter set a new record when the Elevation iPhone Dock became the first project to close in on the $1 million dollar mark. But that milestone has officially been bested. In its first 24 hours, gaming studio Double Fine Adventure’s Kickstarter project has raised more than $1 million and it shows no signs of slowing down.
Double Fine’s Tim Schafer tweeted the above photo of the Double Fine team celebrating the $1 million mark.
As GamesBeat reported yesterday, Tim Schafer and Ron Gilbert are legendary game-makers from the golden age of PC gaming, having created classic LucasArts adventures such as Maniac Mansion, Secret of Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle, and Grim Fandando.
But in the era of Angry Birds, publishers weren’t willing to take a risk on a new project from the duo. As Schafer put it in the Kickstarter video, publishers would laugh in his face if he asked for the funds to do an old-school adventure game. But legions of fans are always asking for it, and offering to pay. So they turned to Kickstarter, hoping to raise $400,000 and offer fans a chance to watch the creative process, pitch in ideas, and even star as characters in the game.
Sketches of Double Fine’s new game
“There’s an unprecedented opportunity to show the public what game development of this caliber looks like from the inside,” Schafer said. “Not the sanitized commercials-posing-as-interviews that marketing teams only value for their ability to boost sales, but an honest, in-depth insight into a modern art form that will both entertain and educate gamers and non-gamers alike.”
The incredible response to the project is going to give Double Fine a lot more leeway in how it crafts the game. “Additional money means it can appear on more platforms, be translated into more languages, have more music and voice, and an original soundtrack for the documentary, and more!” the team wrote in an update after passing its goal by a wide margin.
HOW and to what extent pay packages should be structured is a touchy subject. Obermatt, a financial-research company, argues that remuneration should be based on company performance. Its boss, Hermann Stern, says the current system is flawed; he believes earnings growth and shareholder return should determine how much a CEO should be paid. Currently, of the largest companies in America (those in the S&P 100), CEO pay has no correlation with either performance or market capitalisation. By measuring performance against a peer group, Obermatt calculates the “excess pay” companies gave their bosses between 2008 and 2010. Occidental Petroleum, an energy firm, was by far the worst offender. Its boss, Ray Irani, who earned over $200m in 2008 alone, was one of the highest-paid executives in the period, and received almost eight times his “deserved pay”. After shareholder complaints, he took a pay cut and retired last year. Hewlett-Packard’s “overpaid” CEO, Mark Hurd, has since left the company, as has his successor; HP’s shareholders have also exercised their “say on pay” under new rules—though Obermatt’s pay-for-performance metric for the largest firms shows no correlation between performance and shareholders’ voting patterns.
Television is in trouble. Americans streamed 43.5 billion videos in December 2011, up 44% since December 2010, according to comScore’s 2012 US Digital Future In Focus report released today. The study also showed that 105.1 million Americans now watch videos online each day, up 43% from 73.7 million in 2010.
comScore says YouTube is largely driving this, and that average minutes per video view, average videos watched per user, and total ads streamed are way up as well. TV and film studios should take notice and consider how they can create companion content to engage this growing audience and promote their traditional offerings.
Note that these stats are from an independent measurement service, and other measurements and internal traffic stats from the companies discussed may vary.
Other key statistics on American video watching habits in December 2011 compared to December 2010 include:
The average video view length is up from 5 minutes to 5.8 minutes, showing an increasing willingness to watch longer form content
The average viewer watches 239 videos per month
Video advertising volume is rising faster than total videos streamed. The ratio of the number of video ads to total videos grew from 12.8 percent to 14.1 percent, with video ad volume up 20% to 7.1 billion ads served this year
YouTube and other Google sites account for 21.9 billion of the 43.5 billion video view in December –50.4% of the total market. VEVO ranked 2nd with 801 million (1.8%), Hulu was 3rd with 777 million (1.8%), and Netflix was 4th with 431 million (1%)
YouTube’s partner channel program has been a success, pushing more professionally developed content to viewers. In December, VEVO’s channel had 53.5 million viewers, Warner Music had 31.7 million viewers, and Machinima had 22.7 million viewers, indicating strong interest in Justin Bieber and watching people kill each other in Call of Duty
The American Booksellers Association (ABA) is the latest body to join the slew of retailers Stateside boycotting books from Amazon’s publishing division.
The ABA is the USA’s national, not-for-profit trade association which exists to protect and promote the interests of its members: independently owned bookstores of all sizes, with storefront locations across the country.
Barnes & Noble announced last week that it was taking the noble decision to ban Amazon’s books from its 700+ US stores, off the back of Amazon seeking exclusive deals with publishers and associated parties.
“Barnes & Noble has made a decision not to stock Amazon published titles in our store showrooms,” said Jaime Carey, Chief Merchandising Officer and Barnes and Noble. “Barnes & Noble Our decision is based on Amazon’s continued push for exclusivity with publishers, agents and the authors they represent. These exclusives have prohibited us from offering certain eBooks to our customers.
“Their actions have undermined the industry as a whole and have prevented millions of customers from having access to content,” he continued. “It’s clear to us that Amazon has proven they would not be a good publishing partner to Barnes & Noble as they continue to pull content off the market for their own self interest. We don’t get many requests for Amazon titles, but If customers wish to buy Amazon titles from us, we will make them available only online at bn.com.”
Whilst it was an interesting caveat to still offer Amazon titles online through its website, the message was clear nonetheless. Next to stick the boot in were Canadian booksellers Indigo and Books-a-Million,which held similar disdain for Amazon’s actions.
“In our view Amazon’s actions are not in the long-term interests of the reading public or the publishing and book retailing industry, globally,” said Indigo’s vice-president Janet Eger. “Indigo founder and c.e.o Heather Reisman has congratulated Barnes & Noble for taking a leadership stance on the matter, and offers kudos.”
Now, Publishers Weekly reports that the ABA-owned IndieCommerce, a for-profit company for independent booksellers, has removed all Amazon-published titles from its database. Matt Supko from IndieCommerce’s wrote to booksellers saying:
“While Amazon is seeking to distribute its print catalogue through conventional means, it seems that they are simultaneously pursing a strategy of locking in e-book exclusives which other retailers are not allowed to sell. IndieCommerce believes that this is wrong.”
To coincide with this, IndieCommerce has also initiated a new policy stating that “Only publishers’ titles that are made available to retailers for sale in all available formats will be included in the IndieCommerce inventory database.”
In May 2009 Amazon began its first foray in the publishing sphere launching AmazonEncore to “help readers discover exceptional books from emerging authors,” though it did announce that it would publish titles that have gone out-of-print.
Whilst the anti-Amazon sentiments are riding high, the real impact of these moves will be minimal, given the relative small scale of Amazon’s publishing division, and also given that the books are still for sale via one of the most popular retail avenues of all…Amazon.com.
Some of us can’t be bothered to check in, but still want to find interesting people nearby. The challenge for developers is how to do this in a way that is both useful and not creepy. Glancee, available for both iOS and Android, gets closer to solving these problems than most I’ve seen.
The app lets you sign in with Facebook, then it shows you people within 100 yards, or one, two, or ten miles who have things in common. In some ways this sounds similar another app I recently covered, Highlight — but there are key differences, that will make each app appeal to different sets of users.
Glancee works extra hard to match interests while minimizing the stalker feel. The main screen shows the Facebook profile photos of nearby people, but does not show a map of where they are, and it only summarizes the number of friends and interests in common. If you click through to the other person’s profile page, then you’ll see a list of Facebook friends in common as well as their interests versus yours.
The app compares your Likes in common with Wikipedia listings to identify similar categorical interests. Examples I’ve seen: If the other person likes The New Yorker, a line of text might say “You like The Econoimst.” If they like The Sopranos, it says “You like Mad men.” Sometimes these comparisons end up better than others, but overall the feature does succeed in showing you things loosely in common that might not have been obvious if you only compare Likes.
The app also goes very easy on notifications. During the past week I’ve been using Glancee, it’s sent maybe ten of them to me. I have to go to the app to see who’s nearby.
If you want to talk to anyone, a chat feature lets you message or voice call with them. A “News” tab on the home page shows you people with an especially large number of commonalities, as well as people who have visited your profile, or the activity of people you’ve communicated with. Also, the app goes very easy on your battery life.
In terms of future business models, Glancee’s ideas are along the lines of other location apps: targeting nearby ads, deals, etc. based on the users behavior.
Before I share my personal opinion about Glancee, I should point out that there are many other location apps that somehow use ambient location to try to create quality new connections. But very few are directly comparable to each other. Glancee cofounder Andrea Vaccari noted on my Highlight post that there’s also JoinMingle, Gatsby, Ban.jo, Shoutflow, Blendr, and Unsocial. And of course, there are many more location apps that have been around for years, like Loopt and Foursquare, not to mention Google Latitude or Facebook Places.
Briefly, here are the other things that some of these non-checkin apps are trying to do. JoinMingle is explicitly for professional networking, Gatsby provides a very opaque means of connecting in that it pairs you with specific people for one-hour-limited conversations, Ban.jo aggregates every other location service that it can, Blendr is dating-oriented, and Unsocial is designed around meeting people at conferences and other events. Shoutflow is the most similar that I’ve seen to Highlight and Glancee, but it’s not available in the US iTunes App Store so I haven’t personally used it. So, none of these apps appear to be that directly competitive to Glancee and Highlight (there’s lots more to say about each of these other apps, but they’re not what this article is about, sorry).
Glancee and Highlight are the ones that I’ve used that have provided social experiences that I have found to be meaningful. But, because I live in San Francisco and I’m a tech reporter, Highlight has been much more visceral for me. Being able to see exactly where other users are in relation to me makes a big difference considering that I’m in a city of hundreds of thousands of people sandwiched in a few square miles. So does the fact that it only shows people in a few blocks radius. And so does the fact that I get pinged by it whenever anyone is near. These are crucial subtle differences that totally reshape the user experience. Specifically, Highlight has been connecting me with long-lost friends and interesting new people in the tech world, who I’ve ended up having impromptu meetings with, and Glancee hasn’t.
But that’s just my tech-bubble perspective. Glancee is doing a lot of things right, and considering that a large portion of the US population does not live in dense urban areas, this could be the app for them. If you’re in a suburb or a spread-out small city or a rural area, the miles-radius range is more appropriate, and a neighborhood map is less relevant. Also, if you don’t like aggressive notifications and you like a long battery life, you’re going to like it more than Highlight.
But there’s always this caveat: Ambient location is not just something to build a company around, it is a feature that Facebook or Foursquare or any other big company doing location could also do very easily. I wouldn’t be surprised to see them test ambient out if any of these startups get serious traction. So readers, may each of you find the ambient location app that’s right for you.
Sketches of Double Fine’s new game
