Very interesting presentation. The bottom line – as soon as the work a person is performing surpasses rudimentary mechanical tasks, giving bigger rewards actually starts having a negative effect on work performance.

My TEDxLjubljana talk from last November is finally online and if you like languages and don’t mind spending a few minutes on it, you can watch it below (in Slovenian). I have already written about the topic in a previous blog post here.

Linguistics is a big hobby of mine so it’s always exciting for me when people let me talk about it for a whole 15 minutes .

The presentation touches upon the latest developments in mainstream language technology and how all of this matters to “minor” languages.

The video is also available on the TEDxLjubljana site.

And here are the slides in English again:

According to Jane McGonigal, reality is broken and game designers can fix it.

Jane points out four important characteristics of gamers that can make a difference when put to use in real life:

• blissful productivity
• urgent optimism
• tight social fabric
• epic meaning

Watch this amazing TED talk and don’t forget to check out Avantgame’s latest inspiring project, Evoke.

EVOKE trailer (a new online game) from Alchemy on Vimeo.

I am going to be in San Francisco from March 7th to March 15th for the Game Developers Conference 2010 and the Flash Gaming Summit.

Both conferences attract thousands of industry professionals (and a couple of hundred really amazing ones) and I am really looking forward to next week.

The list of sessions & tutorials looks great and it will be a challenge trying to go to all the interesting business, design and technical presentations all at once.

I will also be reconnecting with friends and looking for new opportunities – I look forward to making new acquaintances and discussing new ideas.

If you are in San Francisco next week and interested in discussing casual & social game development, design and marketing or potential projects, contact me.

See you next week!

I am giving a presentation on building casual and social games with Unity this Friday at the ITShowOff conference in Zagreb.

You can preview the slides below.

For people interested in Unity development, I am adding a few links to help you get started.

• Download Unity (free)
• Official Unity.com Tutorials
• Amir’s shader programming course
• Unity Forum

Motiviti is hiring!

If you have experience with Unity and/or Flash and are interested in landing a cool part-time game development job or just looking to publish your games, let me know! We are also interested in great web developers. Everyone is a potential full-time hire .

One thing to keep in mind when picking an audio version is the production quality – e.g. I have encountered a few versions of Dune books I simply could not finish due to a monotonous or uninformed narrator.

Here is my top 10 list of books that do have great audio versions (some even with multiple narrators and music), along with corresponding links on Audible.

1. Frank Herbert: Dune Classic Series (6 books)

This original series containing Dune, Dune Messiah, Children of Dune, God Emperor of Dune, Heretics of Dune and Chapterhouse Dune is perhaps one of the most profound and well written works of science fiction I have ever encountered.

Strong elements of philosophy and religion – combined with great writing. Where other writers tell the story, Frank Herbert shows it.

2. Dan Simmons: Hyperion Cantos (4 books)

Hyperion, The Fall of Hyperion, Endymion, The Rise of Endymion. As profound and memorable as Dune, the writing again near to perfect. Where Dune uses Near-Eastern inspired philosophy as a building block, Simmons pulls the reader/listener into a masterful transformation of the romanticist John Keats’ poetic legacy.

Very relevant references for present-day questions regarding the transformation and consumption of media as well as the interdependence of man and machine.

3. Orson Scott Card: Ender’s Game (4 books)

Ender’s Game, Speaker of the Dead, Xenocide, Ender’s Shadow

Very popular, contemporary, again emotionally very engaging and well written. For me, especially books 2 and 3 were very powerful.

4. Neal Stephenson: Cryptonomicon

View Cryptonomicon on Audible

Not really science fiction, but a must-listen for computer scientists. A great novel interweaving stories in WW2 and the present day, with emphasis on cryptology and wide-spread hacker appeal.

5. Neal Stephenson: Snow Crash

View Snow Crash on Audible

A great cyberpunk novel introducing the metaverse (inspired Second Life). Often surprising and funny, but also profound.

6. Arthur C. Clarke: Childhood’s End

View Childhood’s End on Audible

An early Clarke novel, perhaps foolishly aspiring in trying to introduce one too many paradigm shifts in a few hours, but nonetheless thought provoking and a must-listen.

7. Neal Stephenson: Diamond Age

View Diamond Age on Audible

A novel about a young lady’s illustrated primer – contains a lot of visionary technological ideas and loads of good Stephenson writing.

8. Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle: The Mote in God’s Eye

View the Mote on Audible

Where Niven is good at dangling the carrot, Pournelle adds some excellent plotting in this very classical sci-fi novel. Hard sci-fi.

9. Larry Niven: Ringworld (2 books)

Ringworld, Ringworld’s Children

As with Mote, Niven’s novels are a bit blunt and straight-forward when compared to more profound masterpieces such Dune and Hyperion (at least in my opinion). But he definitely makes up with story-telling and just pure hard sci-fi.

10. Neal Stephenson: Anathem

Anathem on Audible – the link does not seem to work in Europe at the moment

At number 10 just because I have not managed to get through it. The premise has drawn me since before its release, so I will perhaps have to revisit this list once I am through.

That’s it – my top 10 sci-fi list for 2010.

I have been a fan of classic science fiction far longer than I have been listening to audio books, so I knew most of these books before getting an audio version.

A lot of people I know told me that they are not able to draw equal enjoyment from an audio book, especially not with fiction.

For me, the experience is very equal and I will often switch from audio to text and back in the middle of a single book, based solely on convenience (e.g. if I am traveling, enjoying the sun on a beach or jogging).

What is your top 10 sci-fi list? Am I missing a must-read/listen?

The deadline to apply for Mini Seedcamp Zagreb is fast approaching. This is a great opportunity for startups.

• Seedcamp Zagreb application deadline: Midnight, 27th January

If you have an interesting startup, make sure you apply and get a chance to take advantage of everything Seedcamp has to offer, including:

• Get access to a world-class network of advisors to help you with every aspect of your business
• Be recognised as one of the 20 best start-ups in the region
• Open a direct route to seed and venture capital

Former Seedcamp finalists include great companies such as Zemanta from Slovenia, Brainient and UberVU from Romania, and Shoutem from Croatia.

I will be at the event (along with Tomaz and other experienced dudes) as a mentor doing my best to share past experience and give advice if needed.

I look forward to meeting everyone there!

For some reason , all of a sudden Wordpress installations start displaying a weird exception in options general

(when you click Settings):

Fatal error: Uncaught exception 'Exception' with message 'DateTimeZone::__construct() [datetimezone.--construct]: Unknown or bad timezone (Europe/Paris)' in [path/options.general]

If you are not that worried about time zones and just want to be able to post articles while this bug is driving you crazy, open wp-admin/options-general.php and change line 171 from:

if (function_exists('timezone_transitions_get')) {

into

if (false/*ignorant fix*/&& function_exists('timezone_transitions_get')) {

This works in Wordpress 2.9 – the fix for 2.8 is analogous but I’m afraid not exactly the same.

If someone has more time to investigate this issue, let’s discuss this in the comments.

Instead of the usual holiday greeting card, we decided to make a small 3-minute minigame to help you feel more christmassy

when going out and buying presents this week.

Here is a video:

The game is available for free on the Motiviti website, and you can play it online or download a full resolution desktop version.

And there is even an OSX widget to spice up your dashboard.

I had the privilege to give a talk at the second TEDxLjubljana, themed language & communication.

My talk touches upon the latest developments in mainstream language technology and how all of this matters to “minor” languages.

In 100 years, language economics indicates that up to 90% of currently spoken languages may go extinct. Some of them are beyond saving, so it is important that we have the tools to preserve as much unique knowledge contained in these languages as possible. For the rest, we are seeing significant improvements in technologies that are making their daily use more viable.

Special mention goes to Google Translator Toolkit, that – provided that it takes off – may mean an unprecedented increase in the quality of the parallel corpora that Google Translate uses to facilitate a real-time multilingual web.

Also speaking at the event were Primož Jakopin, Maja Vardjan, Jaka Železnikar, Daniela Candillari, Igor Bezget, Janko Božič, Vuk Čosić, Pavel Koltaj and Boštjan Napotnik.

Pictures from TEDxLjubljana

Thanks to the organizers for the great time we all had there and I hope to see the next one really soon!

(and don’t forget to post the videos from the event )

I have a couple of Google Wave invites left, so let me know if you need one.

Although it still has a long way to go before you will want to use it on a daily basis (for one thing, it is slow), Wave is probably going to be an important communication and collaboration tool for some obvious reasons:

1. The platform is easily extensible

You can write a useful gadget in a couple of hours (Google Wave gadgets guide).

2. The server architecture is open to federation

Just like e-mail (Google Wave Federation – Why it matters).

3. E-mail is an outdated communication tool

4. It’s Google

Google has a lot of steam to power this transition – slowly but surely

There have been a couple of significant developments recently concerning the iPhone.

The first was an official go-ahead from Apple for PhoneGap applications. This means that there is no doubt anymore that non-native HTML+CSS+Javascript interpreted on the phone with PhoneGap will not be frowned upon by the App Store review crew just because it’s Phonegap and not native.

I personally think that PhoneGap is an awesome tool (it lets you build apps for other platforms as well) and salute this decision. It allows companies like us to skip having everyone learn the (not too appealing) Objective C language and get great apps rolling much faster than usually – although we do still find ourselves hacking around the PG XCode project quite a lot at this stage.

The second news is concerning Flash. There has been much debate around the issue of the iPhone not supporting Flash applications in its browser, and this will likely stay so for a while.

However, Flash CS5 will let you build your existing application into a native iPhone binary without having to know any platform specifics at all.

Now this is big. The playing field for iPhone games just got leveled.

If the App Store has been flooded by games now, imagine what will happen once the booming Flash game bunch kicks in.

So far, what we’ve seen were mainly games made in Objective C and some made with Unity 3D or similar engines, and with the bar set that high, re-makes of the most mundane of classic game concepts were successful just because they were the first of their kind to make it to the platform.

But as the porting of Flash games to the phone becomes a matter of a few clicks, things will get different – being an Objective C guru is no longer a foot in the door and you are facing practically the same competition as  on the web.

So yeah – the (iPhone) world is now flat, but guess what – content is still King and having to make great games no matter who you’re up against is a good thing.

A win for the player and a win for creativity. Cheers!

Love is the most important metric

says @sebdeh of Playfish. And according to Zynga general manager Roy Sehgal, the number of players returning regularly (and not play time) is the metric that most closely correlates to a social game’s suitability for monetization.

Having monetizability in mind during the initial stages of game design helps, but the fact is that unless you have love, you have no business asking your players for money.

Ads may cover some costs, but only rarely to any significant extent.

But even when there is love, measuring just about everything and continuously redesigning and innovating the gameplay and monetization tactics from day one is what brought companies such as Zynga, Playdom, Playfish and others their immense success.

And this is only the beginning – social games are forecast to be a 1.5 billion dollar industry in 3 years, and even today, the number of unique monthly players on Facebook alone surpasses 55 million.

At my company Motiviti, we are keeping all of this in mind and we realize that in order to thrive in the casual/social games market, we need to put all of our efforts in creative innovation and sound execution. And as we prepare to launch our first games for the iPhone and the browser, we are humbly trying to learn from the best and the brightest in this young industry at Casual Connect in Seattle.

Follow me and the hash tag #casualconnect on Twitter if you want to discuss Unity 3D, Flash and social network game development.

In his latest book (Outliers), Malcolm Gladwell argues that if you want to really master something (e.g. playing guitar, programming, playing golf), there is a high probability that the number of hours you will need to invest into it will revolve around 10,000.

10,000 hours if you want to be an expert at something. This means 14 years if you are doing it 2 hours per day.

Looking back at Seth Godin’s insightful post entitled What would a professional do?, this makes me wonder:

How much can you really achieve by doing all the little tasks you’re (at most) average at yourself instead of leaving them to those who have devoted their 10k to them?

Once again the question of focus and extreme specialization. Sharing work and profits vs. keeping it all to yourself because you can just do it so much better and faster.

Based on the experiences of others and my own, I would say that the question you need to ask yourself is this:

Is the combination of your personal talents, traits and circumstances, confronted with all the tasks in front of you, so wonderfully special that you can do twice a better and cheaper job doing it all by yourself?

This is seldom the case, but surely not unheard of. And of course, your environment and circumstances might be preventing you from doing otherwise.

But consider this: if you can do it only twice as good as with a team of other 10k-ers, you will probably make a profit; however, the next time around you will not have made the important connections and experiences to even have this choice and you will most likely be doing it by yourself again.

And as you get older, and the cycle continues, you probably start losing your edge, along with your wonderfully special advantage – and you lose.

Bottom line:

Do the stuff that matters to you the most right now and stop thinking about what you feel might come in handy later.

Otherwise you end up just being an amateur at a lot of things. And – as Seth Godin put it -

Be an amateur on purpose, not because you have to.

There will always be enough time for your whims later on if you do it right. Right?

Focus FTW!

P.S.: I think we might be building up a little fascination with the number 10,000 here (see my earlier post, 10,000 Reasons To Focus).

Related articles by Zemanta

• Book Review: Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell (basilandspice.com)
• Gladwell’s Book Examines Outliers Success (somewhatfrank.com)
• 10000 Hours, Hits and Experts (steffanantonas.com)

A powerful video drawing parallels between the development of a human fetus from conception to birth and the entire course of our evolution, right up to a version of the proverbial nuclear demise.

Especially during times when things are not so dandy for a lot of people and resources are short, these images should inspire a drive towards constructive introspection.

Let’s make this machinery work FTW!

We have a gaming site where the node creation date is irrelevant to the user as they only see it once it is published by our moderators.

Surprisingly, there is no “published on” date in the original Drupal database, so the Views can only sort by the mysterious “created on” date.

As I didn’t want to hammer this problemmette away with the formidable Scheduler module, here’s a quick fix.

Get the Rules module and add this triggered rule:

• After updating existing content
• Conditions: updated content type fits, NEGATE “unchanged content is published”, “changed content is published”
• Custom PHP action:

$node->created = time();
return array(“node” => $node);

Seems to work just fine.

Now I can use the “posted on” date in Views to display the games in a logical manner. Too bad there is no way to do this retroactively.

Here’s my Rules screen shot:

And a related article: http://drupal.org/nyobserver.

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• Drupal Databases: The Next Generation
• Drupal 6? What about Drupal 7?

I wanted to share Steward Brand’s talk on The Long Now Foundation’s ambitious project to build a clock that will be able to hold accurate time every single day for the next 10,000 years.

Far from being a mere engineering gimmick, the project entails the design of a unique and memorable experience during the ascent to the mountain cradling the 10,000 year clock.

Needless to say, long-term thinking like this is extremely valuable and inspiring, especially in these times of alleged crisis.

Recession or no recession – this is a great time to be creative and to focus on what’s really important in the long run.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Neal Stephenson and the 10,000-Year Clock
• Stephenson’s Anathem was inspired by Clock of the Long Now
• Neal Stephenson – King of the Worlds

Best Obama picture ever (courtesy Boston.com)

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The days started early today at the Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin – Robert and I are currently at Dion Hinchcliffe’s workshop on Building Successful Web 2.0 Applications.

You can follow my tweets from the event on Twitter at www.twitter.com/tadej (hash tag #web20expo).

Some other tags from the event:

*update* #w2eb now seems to be the one to go with

*SESSION HASH TAGS**
Strategy & Business Models :: #w2eb_strat
Marketing & Community :: #w2eb_mktg
Design & User Experience :: #w2eb_ux
Development :: #w2eb_dev
Sponsored Sessions :: #w2eb_ss
Keynotes :: #w2eb_key

There is also an official back channel.

Our friends from Zemanta will have (at least) two presentations here (let me know if there are more):

• Andraz Tori: Beyond Who Else Bought What
• Marko Samastur: Easy Deployment of Site Extensions With Browser Plugins

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• Berlin – the tag debate…w2eb?

Translate Server Error

Despite a myriad of translation engines and web sites, human translation is still a very important job that requires a lot of experience and knowledge to be done properly.

It’s not just the language.

No-one in their right mind should tackle e.g. legal or technical translations if they’ve never worked in any of the fields (unless the job pays really, really well and it’s worth digging through books and Googling everything ).

Translation work is well paid (and rightly so) – and thus quite expensive for the client.

After all, you usually pay for 1-3 passes of proofreading after the translation, depending on the type of document you are delivering.

And if it’s marketing or other commercial text, the translator needs to know how to write copy, too.

I am sure that in Brussels, where everyone and their dog have a translator in their rolodex (as just about everything is translated into more than 20 of EU’s official languages), this is a pressing issue.

There is a huge demand for cost-cutting through Machine Translation and Crowdsourced Translation – it’s one of those markets where the right solution can make a lot of people rich instantly – but we are not quite there yet.

We are still in the era of machine-aided human translation.

This means that the areas where money can be made right now are:

• Translation corpuses (example: http://evrokorpus.gov.si/)
• Translation memory tools (example: Trados)
• Seamless integration of dictionaries, thesauri, …
• Various tools for translators (e.g. tools that hide HTML and other tags in web pages)

Natural language processing, machine translation and various semantic technologies are already having beneficial effects on productivity in writing, research and language learning (look at Lingro, Zemanta, Google Translate, Systran), but we are still years away from being able to deliver quality localizations without an experienced human translator.

Fun fact: this post would cost about 25-50 EUR to translate by a professional

Disclosure: I used to do freelance translation and nowadays still occasionally do business as an agent and proofreader