gamerDNA.com | The Blog

For many of you who are already members, we have a fancy new registration process that you will probably never see. Here is what it looks like:

(ooo ahhhh)

Also, because the registration is no longer modal, you can link people to it! If you find yourself in a conversation and someone says “Hey what is this gamerdna thing?” you can say “Go register and check it out at http://www.gamerdna.com/register”

It doesn’t get easier than that!

We are also working on registration improvements for the guild hosting creation as well so look for those soon.

I spent the last couple of days at OnHollywood, a conference for digital media and entertainment companies.  While there, I sat on a panel moderated by Kara Swisher (Wall Street Journal writer and co-producer of All Things Digital) where we discussed the intersection between social media and entertainment.  I’ll post a copy of the video once it is available.

I also gave demos of the new version of gamerDNA.com … Here’s the official announcement we made at the conference:

HOLLYWOOD, CA AND CAMBRIDGE, MA, June 12, 2008 – At OnHollywood, GamerDNA Inc. launched GamerDNA.com, a new crossroads for gamers, games and the websites they hang out on.  GamerDNA is a platform for gamers to join forces with friends, preserve their experiences and share the stories of what they’ve discovered in games.  The site builds upon the technologies developed for the popular 360voice and GuildCafe websites.

“As we developed GamerDNA.com, we discovered that we could be so much more than yet another destination website for gamers,” explained Jon Radoff, CEO of GamerDNA Inc.  “When we realized that we could become every player’s portable gaming identity—complete with a history of gameplay, experiences and preferences—it changed everything about our roadmap.  It isn’t just about our own properties.  We want to make every game and every gaming website more personal and rewarding.”

The company benefits from an initial registered member community of about 250,000 derived from the 360voice and GuildCafe websites.  In addition, the company has already secured exclusive distribution agreements with other Web publishers to deliver GamerDNA-enabled content and applications to over two million users per month.

“OnHollywood is showcasing the companies that are creating new opportunities in entertainment technologies including games, video and music ,” said Tony Perkins, CEO of AlwaysOn, the event host for the OnHollywood conference.  “GamerDNA is an innovative business that combines disruptive technology with a unique distribution model.”

The GamerDNA platform (which includes Web-services that allow games and websites to incorporate gaming histories, preferences and identity into their user experiences) is currently in closed development with a limited number of partners.  However, anyone may now take part in the community that’s being created by visiting: http://www.gamerdna.com

About GamerDNA Inc.

GamerDNA is building a community for the millions of people around the world who are passionate about the immersive, engaging experiences that can be found through games. Based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, GamerDNA is funded by Flybridge Capital Partners and led by a team of online media and computer games veterans from Eprise, New York Times Digital and Electronic Arts Mythic. More information is available at: http://www.gamerdna.com

I just wanted to chime in and let everyone know that we are aware of a few issues following the cut over to the new GamerDNA.com site.

1. Guild event scheduling is hurting
   We have a known bug that is making the scheduling of guild events not function correctly. Something is causing the dates to change after submitting them. We are working to track down the issue. It turned into a bigger snare than we had thought it would be, but we are getting there.
2. Browser support
   Unfortunately, our support for Internet Explorer 6.0 is degrading as we move forward. This is mainly because all of us use Firefox 2, and IE 7 for development… and we double check in Safari. So outside of those three browsers, We are a small team and we simply don’t have the resources to test all pages and functionality in every browser. We will be continuing to work to improve support in some areas and making the site more friendly to as many browsers as possible, but using the latest version of your browser will always help!
3. Profile page appearing too wide
   Speaking of browsers, in Firefox 3 RC, Safari, and Opera 9.x the profile page, member home, and game pages are stretching beyond the screen width. This is due to the picture strip at the top of those pages not behaving the rules of layout! We are aware and working on a fix.
4. Performance
   We have seen complaints about site performance and will be continuing to tweak servers and pages to get things running smoothly. From our side things seem to be running fairly well with a few moments of weirdness. We are looking into the weirdness.
5. Login issues
   A few people have reported that they are getting logged out of the site at random times… or that they are unable to log in. We are investigating this as well, but it is hard to recreate so the going is slow.
6. Search Engine
   Our site search engine is still turned off as we look at higher performing alternatives. The one we were using throughout our closed beta up and died when we went live with it. But we will raise it from the dead as soon as possible.

We understand some of you are upset with the bugs and we are doing everything we can to get them understood, fixed and deployed. We are doing another build today to get a few fixes in and will continue to do builds and hot fixes all week as we track things down.

That is it for now! A special thanks to everyone sending in positive feedback too… we dig that… keeps us smiling over here when the flood of bugs becomes unbearable! Everyone at gamerDNA is a gamer… and just wants to build a fun service and community that we ourselves find compelling. With all of your help submitting bugs and being patient, we will get there!

Any comments can be sent through the Feedback & Support form.

Jon Radoff (CEO, captain of this crazy ship) will be in Los Angeles June 10th demoing our new site (right before our open beta!) at the OnHollywood conference. If you are going to be there, check it out:

Socializing Online Entertainment Demo Competition
More online entertainment sites are socializing their content, this debate uncovers what is working and what is not. You be the judge on which one works the best.

Kara Swisher, Co-Producer, D: All Things Digital
Drew Curtis, Founder & CEO, Fark
Jon Radoff, CEO, GamerDNA
Rooly Eliezerov, President & Co-Founder, Gigya
Abdul Khan, Co-Founder, I Beat You

Read more about the event.

Some pretty heavy hitters in there! Time to go crank on more code!

It was only a matter of time (being that I come from 360voice) that we would start importing Xbox Live activity into your gaming profile. We also changed around the automatic entries a bit… and will continue to evolve them. Here is one of mine:

It has many of the same elements that we explained before, but a few little tweaks…

1. We are now calling out the primary changing metric in HUGE text for all to see… for Xbox it is gamer score, for XFire it is time.
2. Underneath that we are doing the roll-up of stats so it is easy to see what contributes to that over all metric.
3. The auto-narrative comes from the gamerDNA bot for all content…so that it is clear where it is coming from.
4. The gamerDNA bot talks addresses you directly in the entry. That way we can ask questions and you can feel compelled to respond.
5. The embellishment that you can add to any entry appears underneath, properly called out and referencing the above comment.
6. If you are logged in and you view your profile, there is a call-to-action to add an embellishment to your item. This link launches the DNA panel.

A few things you will see in the short term:

1. We will be separating out your manual stories and the automatic generated activity. On your profile it will be easy to see which is which and flip back and forth. This will prevent the activity from taking over fun manual stories that you put in your profile.
2. We are still playing with the terminology of the actual content… experiences is morphing into “stories” and “activity” to properly explain what they are. You will see this reflected in other areas of the beta site as well.

Keep the feed back coming!

No, really: http://www.360voice.com/tag/RantingTweety

I could easily use the editing features to explain that I set up the blog more than a week before I actually purchased an Xbox. But I’m way too entertained by the despair of my console.

In other news… boy howdy, I SUCK at console controllers. At one point, my better half attempted to explain how to properly use the controller. This is somewhat like trying to teach my beagle how to build model rockets by speaking to her in Cambodian. Anyway, it hit me that I was getting a taste of how my mate feels when I try to explain MMO mechanics.

We at GamerDNA are all about building bridges between consoles and PCs, and I will get started with my bridge building just as soon as I learn to use my thumbs for something besides hitting the space bar.

In the states, we are celebrating Memorial Day today… so if you were looking forward to our weekly build, packed with new features and functionality, you will have to wait until tomorrow! Tuesday is our Monday this week.

If you are looking for a good post about Memorial Day, I think our own Director of Community, Sanya made a great post on her personal blog. Go check it out:

There are a lot of people in the military who play MMOs. Life in the service for most people consists of being on a base very far from home, but not far from industrialization. I know many people for whom a new post is just a new place to plug in a computer. All that changes is the time zone.

Read more

I am sending out an official welcome to everyone watching this blog. We are going to ramp up creating some content here, shifting from a strict “company” blog to one that carries more information about our product development, our company development, our passions, and our excitement.

As you may or may not know, we have been doing a ton of work behind the scenes to redesign the site from Guildcafe.com to GamerDNA.com. This involves not only a new design, but significant new features that focus on making the site personal, effortless, and instantly rewarding. If you want to see some of the work, you can access the open beta by:

1. Register for GuildCafe.com
2. Once you confirm your registration, click the Beta button in the top navigation.
3. This will load up the open beta of GamerDNA.com.
4. Explore!

Make sure you check out the GamerDNA Panel which gives you access to all of the items that make up who you are as a gamer. This can include the games you play, the characters you have from various MMOs…. upload screen shots too so we can put a face with the name!

Also make sure you fill out your AKAs for Xbox Live, XFire, and other gaming services as we are building out auto-capture technologies that will capture your gaming history without you having to do anything! How is that for effortless?

GamerDNA is a new company. We are just getting started. We have a great team, a great existing community from GuildCafe.com, and it will be fun evolving this into something truly unique and exciting. Follow along at home by watching this blog!

I took a break from GuildCafe for a couple hours on Thursday morning–I was invited to give a lecture at WPI on entrepreneurship. For my talk, I decided to put together a list of ten things to speak about. You can watch me on video or view the PowerPoint deck containing my list of ten things to think about when starting a company.

The most “controversial” point I listed was “Avoid the unhappy and unlucky,” based in part on one of the more enlightened elements of the recent book The 48 Laws of Power, by Robert Greene. I think it’s true that good companies are built by passionate optimists who love what they’re doing. Such people are naturally happy, and the “luck” they’ve experienced is just a manifestation of their hard work.

I think WPI is doing a great job of educating students on some of the more exciting areas of computer science, and their Interactive Media and Game Design department is producing some great students. If at least one person walked away from my talk feeling inspired to get involved with a startup, then I feel like it was worth it.

We just moved into our new offices in Central Square in Cambridge. This is a great place to pull the team together; the area is electic, urban and hip. Public transporation couldn’t be better: we’re right at the midpoint between Harvard and MIT, and the T-stop is right outside our front door. A bunch of other videogame-related companies are in the area: the space we moved into was just vacated by a videogame studio called Demiurge (who moved down the street to a larger building). Next door to us is Harmonix, the company responsible for Guitar Hero and Rock Band. And above us there’s Motus, a company that creates motion-based controller technology. Our main goal with the space is to support a vibe that’s conducive to teamwork, energy, creativity and fun.

A lot of people talk about “agile development,” which for 90% of companies translates to a rapid build-and-deploy process.  Toward the end of last year, we concluded that our LAMP environment wasn’t going to cut it for that—and made the move to Ruby on Rails (which we’re now affectionately calling our LAMeR stack).  And yes, Ruby on Rails is a hell of a lot of more agile than PHP, and we’re quite happy with how rapid our development process is becoming.  But it isn’t enough.  Agility alone won’t allow you to dominate.

It also takes discipline, and when I think of a fanciful character who combines both agility and discipline, I think of one thing…

Ninjas.

Ninjas are agile, but they’re also disciplined.  If the first pillar of modern development is agility, they add three more categories of expertise: learning, knowledge and confidence.

In computer gaming, a “ninja” is a pejorative term for a quick-to-act player who steals an item out-from-under the group they’re with.  For gaming this is a Bad Thing, but for development organizations—this is good.  There’s a wealth of Open Source code, and most problems have already been solved.  Sure, every ninja has their secret move—and every great development organization has some special mojo they use to dominate the competition… But people have already mastered and made available the things you’ll need to know.  That’s where the learning comes in.  A good ninja needs to look outwards, know how to search, know how to be a good student of others.  If you’ve read the Cathedral and the Bazaar, that means accessing the bazaar of readily-made components—because today that bazaar is hella big.  Maybe it should even be renamed the Dojo.

Knowledge is about knowing both your enemies as well as your friends (your customers).  It means being data-driven.  It’s making metrics, analysis and a deep understanding of your users a central part of the product development process.  It’s using things like A-B testing to help you know what works best, about partnering with users up front to have them guide you to better decisions and then developing the measurement systems that tell you whether you’re enhancing the stuff that people really care about.

Confidence is about integrating QA into the process.  Most people will tell you that test-driven development is an important element of Rails (or agile development in general). Yet with most RoR shops that I’ve seen, QA and testing are still more of the old-school, reactive method.  Great QA includes unit-testing and mechanized, functional testing as part of the up-front process.  The advantage isn’t just better quality.  This gives you the confidence you need to deploy ideas and changes rapidly without the level of worry this would normally entail.

Lastly, and this isn’t a pillar of ninja development—but rather a fact.  Anyone who has watched a ninja movie knows that a small team of inspired, highly trained ninjas will defeat a near-infinite number of clumsy ninjas who might wear the right costume but don’t truly pursue the righteous path.

(GuildCafe is hiring.  We’re looking for bright, energetic people who love games and want to be part of the development organization I’ve described above.  If you aspire to some of the same ideals—and whether you’re a Master or a dedicated student—we’d love for you to talk to us about becoming part of the future of social networks, gaming and ninja development.  Drop us a line at: jobs AT guildcafe DOT com.)