Bruce Lee, Be Like Water.

Ira Glass, Put in volumes of work

How does EG generate revenue? Are sponsorships mostly limited to gaming/hardware companies, or are you getting sponsors with broader appeal as well?
Mainly sponsorships, but not entirely. EG as a company has several wings to it, with the team being only one of them. Our fans are mainly interested in the team and its players, but to EG’s sponsors, EG is not only a team but an all-in-one marketing agency solution for the gaming demographic. We provide access to pro players, but we also run our own gaming tournaments, run our own broadcast streams, produce tons of interesting content, and do a bunch of other boring corporate stuff as well . Historically, our sponsors have mostly been endemic, but we’ve had a couple of general consumer brands in the past, and we’re hoping to bring on a few mainstream accounts for 2011

Evil Geniuses, EG for short, is one of the most popular teams in the eSports world. In this interview with PC world, Alex Garfield CEO of EG  talks about the team, players and generating revenue.

Most companies that focus on individual brands or teams are marketing companies. If you have marketable people you keep it for the sake of marketing and not necessarily for the value they provide as an individual competitor. This is what happened with Anna Kournikova and it’s why it happens with a lot of players like EG.Idra. They are supremely marketable even though not necessarily in the highest caliber of players. But it’s always a good idea to get insights into the eSports world.

He was kidding. And was high. Or both.

Either way, one of the things I get very itchy about is flaky net connections. I love being wired to the net. It doesn’t matter what I end up doing, I need to stay wired. That bandwidth juice has to be pumped in. If not, I go crazy. So it was amusing that yesterday when my net died (when I had very important work mind you), I switched to the iPhone to check up on news sites and reads and I found this good read by Nick Bilton on Unplugging for 30 minutes a day.

There’s a lot of boohoo science behind it, but this particular part was interesting.

Like everyone else, I really can’t imagine life without that little computer in my pocket,” he added. “However, there is an importance to being able to put it aside and let those daydreams naturally perform the cognitive functions your brain needs.”

That cognitive function he talks about is the natural process of forgetting and remembering. If you experience a sunset, chances are unlikely you’ll forget it. Just like the birth of your kid or the day you get married or have your first kiss. Those needn’t be captured but need to be lived through. So I thought this is a good thing to do.

30 minutes daily, I’m going off line completely. This means manually unplugging my internet. What will I do in the next 30 minutes I don’t know, I’ll probably end up reading a book or painting or design or learning the guitar. It doesn’t matter, it’s time away for one self.

I suggest you try it too with any other addiction. It doesn’t have to be the internet reading thingy that I’m getting off. Just get off daily on what you seem to consume so much that it overtakes your life.

Because life is in living. Not only on posting/sharing.

One that is also found in India and all it’s publications too. Forget the fact we have no good tech news reporter or reporting done in India, no one takes the time to think and write good shit.

Print circulation is dying and pageviews are all that matter in keeping advertisers happy. This means, whether writers like it or not, there’s an underlying drive for both sensationalism and more — more — more.

Read the stories that are published in the tech blogosphere tomorrow. Are most published because the writer put in a lot of work or original thought? No, most are published because more — more — more content leads to more — more — more pageviews.

Most are stories written with little or no research done. They’re written as quickly as possible. The faster the better. Most are just rehashing information that spread by some other means. But that’s great, it means stories can be written without any burden beyond the writer having to read a little bit and type words fast. Many are written without the writer even having to think.

There will be 25 stories about Google TV or something else tomorrow which will all say basically the same thing. Maybe one or two of those stories will have actual insight or information. Maybe none will. If any do, it’s the exception, not the rule.

He ends up with

You cannot be an authority on 20 different topics. You just can’t. But people are trying to convey that they are. And there’s often a perception that they are. And this horribly broken system works from the perspective of the pageview machine.

That being said one of the best sites for content is TechMeme. It’s like the meta search result engine for Tech news. I refer to it on a daily basis. I am yet to see good news reporting in India. Do you have any good sites you’d recommend?

 

His income comes from prize money, sponsorship and from lessons. Tyler didn’t want to state specifics about how much lessons with him cost, but said professional coaching services can run to over $100 an hour.

“If you’re aim is just to make money, then coaching is great,” Tyler said. “But you will never get better and you will never win [tournaments] if all you do is teach.”

He also said some his clients aren’t who you might expect. Some of them are 40-something business guys who just want to beat their friends or their kids.

 

• Interesting Links will be purely related with a short commentary on what I think.
• Quotes are just quotes.
• Opinion Pieces are things I’d like to have a longer than summary idea on. Things I have observed.

The Topics I am mostly interested in are

1.eSports/Gaming

I love Electronic sports. I think the dream to take it to the Olympic games and bring the competition to large number of people is something I will ALWAYS be interested in. Right now there are a few games that are doing great on the circuit, I am not quite sure how many of them will last  but you’ll be sure to be flooded with fantastic information on eSports and the movement. This includes all competitive games like Starcraft 2, Street Fighter and stuff. I work in Social Gaming, so good stuff coming there as well.

2. Technology

I am a technophile. I love using technology and I get very excited about developments. If it weren’t for gaming I’d probably be a technology writer full time. I am currently an iPhone user and I don’t plan to change. I will definitely observe everything in tech and present that. But there are better writers and more important faster news breakers so you’ll get a curated list.

3. India

Country I live in. Country I love in. If there’s one place that has tons of diversity, it’s this country. There are so many interesting things happening here you HAVE to be in the know.

Reach me

I thank you for following me so far and I’m sad if these things don’t fit into your interest.  I’d like to hear from you about what you think about this blog and what do you think I’m doing right.

You can reach me on

Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/kageman

Facebook : http://www.facebook.com/karthickgopal

Email : karthickgopal[at]gmail[dot]com

Instagram is a fantastic service. It lets you take a photo, add some filters and share it. That’s it. This is exactly the sort of thing Steve Jobs would have approved of. Do one thing but do it the best.  I have been using their services for quite some time. What I used to do was take photos apply the filters and then share it on facebook. I have an album up there.  But over time, I realised that the awesomeness is in seeing what people have, liking and sharing it. I have a few friends on it too and they take some great stuff.

Here’s a story Gizmodo does with Instagram and there are some interesting points I noted.

Instagram’s Vision

It wants to become the indispensable visual strorytelling medium. It wants to be an entertainment platform, where people can come and consume. And getting there means getting on every platform, in every country. You have to ask yourself how you allow people to communicate what’s in their lives,” says Systrom. “I don’t like the idea of Instagram as a photo sharing service, and I don’t think it is,” says Systrom, “it’s very much a communication tool, it’s a visual communications tool.”

On Scaling

We learned really quickly, especially with celebrity users, about the design and what would break,” explains Krieger, who leads development as the company’s CTO. “We didn’t really design with 50,000 likes in mind, but now suddenly this Bieber photo has 50,000 likes. That is a totally different UI issue. Or all the sudden he has hundreds of comments, and you can’t display them all at once or the app just scrolls on endlessly.”

It was because of Bieber and other popular users—including ones who have made a name for themselves on Instagram, like photographer Cole Rise—that it started comment threading and made the meta-information below a photo collapsable.

On Twitter’s bad architecture

Twitter’s architecture was fine for content management—like a blogging platform—but not so great for a true real-time communications system with an exponentially growing user base. Messaging systems have specific needs—reliable queuing, concurrency, robust caching—that it just didn’t have. The Twitter team tried to write those features themselves and attach them to the existing framework, but every addition created even more stability issues. One of the biggest issues was the simple growth of the size of people’s networks. Rails, around which Twitter was built, was designed to simplify complex database relationships by making many queries. But the number of queries needed to support the complicated social relationships people build on Twitter were overwhelming its servers.

 On focus and not taking it to Android just yet.

To be at 15 million users on one platform is not something any other social mobile company can say. There are a lot of others that are in that size range but are multi-platform. We saw an opportunity to be really good at one thing, and it turns out that helped us. It wasn’t because we felt like Android wasn’t an opportunity we wanted to go after. It wasn’t about the quality of the phone—there are plenty of awesome Android phones; we have a bunch in the office that have beautiful displays and beautiful cameras. It’s more that we were three people trying to keep the site up. We’re now eight people, with ten people worldwide.”

“The only thing that will make other platforms happen is natural growth of the team. I think we didn’t expect how quickly we’d grow a year ago when we were like ‘oh let’s work on Android next.’ Everything became a priority, and because everything became a priority we had to focus on what was most important which was to keep the site going and make users really happy. A person is a person is a person no matter what phone you own. I’m excited to be on Android someday. Are you kidding me? Our growth is going to double.”

How do I view pictures from Instagram?

Here’s how you can view someone’s photos (you can’t view it if you don’t have the iPhone and the instagram guys don’t have a flickr like thing). Open up the url: http://web.stagram.com/n/kageman/ . Replace “kageman” with whatever the name of the user is, like my friend Angad’s stream is here.

Get an iPhone. Get Instagram. Change your life one visual at a time.

Artist gets $ 200 million 

David Choe, the artist that painted murals will now get $ 200 million for his effort to beautify the Facebook walls. Cleverly he chose stock options over dollars after completing his painting.

Sarah Lacy on Zuckberberg’s plan

Zuckerberg didn’t just wait. He obsessively learned what being a CEO was about. He surrounded himself by people who had strengths he didn’t and absorbed from them like a sponge. Unlike nearly every other Internet wunderkind who came before him, he didn’t hire the grown-up to run the company. He became the grown-up to run the company.

There are a lot of reasons Larry Page envies Mark Zuckerberg these days. But the pre-IPO Page would most definitely envy his ability to hold onto the reins, experience and age be damned.

How Facebook makes it money – Mashable.

Revenue from Zynga games contribute 12% of Facebook’s bottom line. Facebook said it made $3.71 billion last year, so almost $500 million of that came from Zynga, which includes both users buying virtual goods and services within the games via Facebook Payments as well as “direct advertising” that Zynga bought. Facebook also pointed out that Zynga’s worth even more to Facebook than the numbers say, since the users playing games mean more pages get served to those users, and in turn more ads.

If you ever wondered if an advertiser can reach the entirety of Facebook’s audience, the answer is it can. Apparently Paramount did so with its advertising purchase to promote Transformers: Dark of the Moon last summer. Facebook said the studio was able to reach 65 million users in a single day.

Stephen: As one of the few guys who have been able to make the jump to full-time, what’s your advice to those who want to do it one day?

Shawn: There isn’t any one path to becoming a full-time blogger. The two things that seem to have worked for me are consistency and diversity.

The first, consistency, is in regard to showing up every day to write for the site. I ran the site as a hobby for nearly 4 years before taking it full time, and during those years I built a reputation of consistently showing up.

And that is where the second thing comes in to play: diversity. This isn’t so much about blogging as it is about common business sense. Writing your own site as your full-time job means you are also a small business owner. And so diversifying your income streams is important.

And, though I didn’t mention it earlier, there is a third issue you need to settle. It’s passion; or drive. Being a full-time blogger is difficult and tiring. There are more and more folks who, thanks to the wonders of the Internet, have been able to step into the world of self-publishing. But just because it’s possible doesn’t mean it’s right for you. I would advise anyone considering this occupation to deeply ponder if it’s something they are willing to pour themselves into. It is exciting and rewarding, but at times it is also very lonely (as all writing often is).

The good news is that there is no better time to go for it than now. The Internet favors the indie writers and self publishers. The tools and the opportunities have never been more available. All it takes is the determination to work your butt off and the willingness to take big scary risks.

 

Good artists copy, Great artists Steal.

No more is it truer than in the Tech industry. Especially the ones with rapidly changing landscapes. Social Gaming is one of them.

(Disclaimer:- I work with one of these gaming companies. Views expressed here are my own and have nothing to do with the company).

We have seen it time and again. Coke then Pepsi. You had the iPhone, then the poor imitation of Android. But in gaming it’s a different scenario. You have an idea and then some people who move with it. The product in social gaming is differentiated not by idea, but by playability, accessibility and scale.

This is what Zynga exemplifies. While it’s debatable whether Zynga comes across with a clean slate or not, you can’t argue with the success of their underlying games and strategy. I think it’s a good guerilla tactic to follow. Look for improving execution not on owning the idea.

In Mark Pincus’ letter to his employees,

Google didn’t create the first search engine. Apple didn’t create the first mp3 player or tablet. And, Facebook didn’t create the first social network. But these companies have evolved products and categories in revolutionary ways. They are all internet treasures because they all have specific and broad missions to change the world.

We don’t need to be first to market. We need to be the best in market. There are genres that we’re going to enter because we know our players are interested in them and because we want and need to be where players are. We evolve genres by making games free, social, accessible and highest quality.

As I’ve said, our strategy since the beginning has been to develop the best game – most fun and most social – for every category of play. We are rarely first since most categories in games go back decades, but we aim to be the best.