Arhiva completă: engleză

We all have blind spots. Things that we think we know and we actually don’t, moments when we just miss some opportunities.

As an entrepreneur, you are really prone to blind spots. You need to move fast, juggle a lot of balls, you have an attention span of a pup. So what should you do about it?

Well, get a co-founder and use him/her. Send them the emails for investors that you are working on, the blog posts you are writing or the interviews you are answering to. Ask them for help when you get stuck, even if they have completely different skills. A fresh pair of eyes is always great.

We do this at MavenHut. And it works. So get a co-founder :) Or more.

Photo from Forbes.ro, by Mihai Barbu/Photoliu

Gravitarium is not, actually, a game: it’s a design challenge and a challenge to your sanity. I feel like a crazy person trying to put order into chaos.

So, how do you play it? You start with chaos. A lot of things, small things, wandering around the screen. And once you touch the screen, the little creatures (I know, I know, but you really feel they are alive) come to your touch. And if you add another finger to the screen, the start moving around from touch to touch. You can use up to 4 fingers (didn’t really make anything with 5, though you might be able to).

Now, start moving your fingers across the screen and you will create stunning graphics, stunning moving pictures. I remembered I once saw a documentary on the luminous little beings in the see and it’s the same feeling you have when you see people swimming through them (I don’t know the English name of the damn sea fireflies :D

Well, I downloaded the game without expecting to much from it, but since it’s made by a Romanian guy and it was recommended by my girlfriend I thought (read had to!!!) give it a try! And 30 minutes later I was still trying it :)

The game will set you back about $2, but it’s fun and it’s worth trying. I don’t know if it’s available for Android, I played it on iOS.

Later update: more details on the game here. Even better, there’s a video below showing the gameplay :)

Airbnb is a site I used more than once. And even better than the services they provide is their entrepreneurial story.

They started in 2007-2008, they’ve been through Y Combinator, they got refused by close to 100 investors that didn’t understand their value proposition and they grew a company whose valuation is more than $1 billion.

Looking around, I’ve found 2 videos of their founder, Joe Gebbia: one in 2008, when he was just starting AirBednBreakfast.com (the initial name) and one in 2011, when he was already growing fast.

Got the videos from here. There’s also an interesting story behind the first one there to read.

Today was a full day. Both at work and in terms of events. Radu Georgescu [romanian], the first official advisor MavenHut has, just announced he sold Avangate, the biggest company he sold. The price is not public, but I bet it was good for Radu :)

I’m thrilled to announce we have just closed a very strategic transaction with Francisco Partners. With this transaction, Francisco is acquiring Avangate and investing additional capital to further accelerate our already impressive growth. Francisco Partners is one of the most respected private equity firms in the world with over $7 Billion under management and we are extremely pleased to find an investment partner who shares our vision of Customer Centric Commerce. Even more importantly, the capital investment will help us further scale up our operations, deliver expanded platform capabilities, and better serve and support you, our customers.

More information on it here.

The other thing that happened today (not as big, obviously) was that How To Web published a short interview with me, as a prequel to the talk I will be having (along with my co-founder, Cristi) at the event this year.

1. What are the main skills it takes to build an engaging game for social media nowadays?
Looking back to the last two years, the most important skill we had was understanding the metrics and acting on the lessons from them. Of course, understanding what metrics to follow and what to A/B test is another skill you should have (or, at least, cultivate).

The team at TechHub Bucharest is hosting a new gaming meetup on Thursday, October 10th: Developing games – The indie way. As I am really interested in gaming (duh!) and I have an unnatural attraction for indie gaming, the guys thought I would be the one to moderate the panel.

The panel consists of:

Robert Muresan, Owner and Founder of Exosyphen studios, Dragos Inoan, Creative Director at Dream Builder Studios (Strikewing) and Dan Dimitrescu, Game designer and co-founder at Killhouse Games (you can read more about them here, where you can also register).

It’s an interesting mix, with PC games sold through Steam and mobile games distributed through a publisher.

I have two things to say to you, the reader:

1. If you are in Bucharest and you are interested in gaming, you should be at TechHub on Thursday evening. Again, you should register here.

2. Questions! Are you interested in something in particular? Do you want to ask them something? Fire away in the comments. Otherwise, don’t complain if I ask dumb questions, ok? :)

This is the first day since I started daily on the blog when, honestly, I had no desire to write. I am kinda tired, a combination of waking earlier than I’m used to and a lot of work at the office, so all I wanted to do was lie down and sleep.

Anyway, this didn’t happen and I have to thank the frame of mind set by the 30 days challenges I set myself every month. I’ve written a little bit more about it a month ago.

After 30 days of writing daily (which is proving to be 2 month now), the second 30 days challenge was to not drink any kind of Cola drink because they keep me up at night. Well, I am glad to be able to say that I’ve done it :)

It’s been 30 days since I’ve drank my last glass of Coca Cola Zero. And, man, was it hard. Especially in the first 2 weeks. But now I am ok with it and look forward for my next challenge.

The thing is I’ve started my third challenge while the other one was still running: I’ve decided that every morning shower would be a cold one. The advantages behind it can be found here or here, but I am also ahead of the trend, since the people at the Bucharest town hall announced that we might not get hot water during the night (communism more?). The most important gain for me is that I am not cold in the mornings anymore (I am actually quite alright).

I have one more challenge running right now, but that is still in its first 2 weeks, so I will talk about it a little bit later.

Still, I have to say that for me, the concept of 30 days challenge works. And it’s great.

Photo from Shutterstock

If you’ve been through Romania recently you’ve probably seen the “We hire!” signs by King (especially in Vama Veche, nice move!). The studio in Bucharest has been in a hiring spree in the last year or so and I assume it’s not really easy to find good people. And it’s not related to King as a company (they are one of the gaming company I really admire), but I think it’s related to the availability of talent in Romania.

While there are some great gaming companies in Romania, I really don’t think there’s enough workforce in the country right now with the right skills, at the right level to be hired in the gaming companies. Anybody that wants to create a team that’s bigger than 10 people has to train juniors at some point to get all the skills it needs (I might be wrong, but this is my feeling as someone deeply involved with the industry for the last year and a half).

And I remember meeting someone at the Hamburg Casual Connect earlier this year that was the Dean of the Gaming studies at a university in Hamburg. I mean, they have a curricular, you can actually choose gaming as a career and use the 4 years of college to get prepared for that.

I wonder, what should be done to do something similar in Romania? I have no idea right now, frankly, but I was thinking about it as I saw that a dental company in Romania (Dentestet) decided to create a school of dental technicians just because they need the skills in their company (link here in Romanian, and translation in English).

MavenHut is still a small company, but we might actually try to do this in the years to follow: create our own courses just to train new possible hires (you see the plans for MavenHut, right? :D ).

On the other hand, why wouldn’t art universities had a course of gaming art? Or the tech universities have a course of gaming programming? Or, even more surprising, economics universities should have gaming project management courses (and every studio head in Romania cringes right now).

I am not proposing something (at least not yet), as it’s something I was thinking about and I wish I knew what your opinion on the subject is.

Later edit: apparently, “the Ion Mincu Architecture University in Bucharest has a course on Level Design for several years now”, so it can be done (thanks, Claudiu, for the tip)

Later later edit: a good thing with this post was that I found more on the subject, like the class on Game Design at the Ion Mincu Architecture University.

P.S.: in the meanwhile, later tonight (Thursday, October 10th) you can attend a great panel on indie game at TechHub (how to create them, how to promote them, what results can you expect aso). Maybe these meetups are the seeds we need to get to the Gaming University of Romania. I would love to attend some classes there :D

Photo from Shutterstock

Yesterday I moderated a panel called “Making Games: The Indie Way“. The panel was really interesting and you should watch it here (unfortunately the sound is not the best, being quite low from time to time).

I want to talk about something else. Both members of this panel and members of the Social Gaming panel I moderated some time ago mentioned at some point that they were lucky at some point in their developing games life. And not only once, but several times.

This gives you the impression that developing successful games is a lot of luck, most of the time. Actually, a good friend said that she got the impression building games sounds more like magic than a proper industry.

I just want to tell you that I don’t think luck is that important, though. It doesn’t matter what you do, I just think that luck is just the result of your work, of your efforts and of the opportunities you create for yourself. We were “lucky” to get into Startup Bootcamp, but that is luck only if you take out of the equation all the years before when we build different businesses and games.

Thomas Jefferson said “I am a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it.” I totally agree with it.

Photo from Shutterstock

I am changing the Sunday Video to Saturday Video. The reasoning behind it is that it gives me more of the weekend to play more games, so I can write about them on Sunday.

One of the videos in this post is about beauty, about the impact beauty has on young girls, all told by a women that was a model at some point in her life. I found the story entertaining and the ideas behind it genuine.

Another TEDx story I’ve seen is the one of a pickpocket. It’s fun to watch and be careful, this can happen to you (wait for the final minutes to be blown away). I’ve gone back to watch specific sections of the video several times (maybe more than I’ve done this with any other video).

Finally, the last video I’ve seen is about the food we eat. Jamie Olivier has a passionate presentation about food (what else) and obesity. While I am not really interested in the subject, he is entertaining to watch and, by the end of the presentation, you feel you should be interested. It actually had an impact on me, since I decided that I need to lose the weight I gained after 6 months of traveling, eating bad food and eating at weird hours.

I hope you enjoy the newly Saturday Video (ex-Sunday Video) :D

Last week, searching for adventure (quest) games on the iPad, I’ve found Gemini Rue. I enjoy SF games more than fantasy, so it sounded great (especially since I am a big fan of Beneath a Steel Sky:

“A sci-fi noir adventure in the tradition of “Blade Runner” and “Beneath a Steel Sky.”

Azriel Odin, ex-assassin, arrives on the rain-drenched planet of Barracus. When things go horribly wrong, he can only seek help from the very criminals he used to work for.

Meanwhile, across the galaxy, a man called Delta-Six wakes up in a hospital with no memory. Without knowing where to turn or who to trust, he vows to escape before he loses his identity completely.

As fate brings these two closer together, we discover a world where life is cheap, identities are bought and sold, and a quest for redemption can change the fate of a whole galaxy.”

I have downloaded the game last week, played for about an hour, it’s pretty simple for the moment (the puzzles aren’t the most difficult), but I had no time to continue (still, it’s there, on the iPad, waiting for a better moment). The game is an 8bit graphic game, but the graphics is not even at the same level of Broken Sword, so don’t expect too much out of it. The story, though, seems intriguing and interesting, so it should compensate :)

So, if you are a fan of point and click adventures with cyberpunk subject, Gemini Rue might be exactly what you need. The game is $4.99, though, not free, so think about it before dropping the price of a coffee on it :P

The game is also available on steam, for PC, a little bit more expensive (€7,99).

You can see a video review below (not mine):