First iPhone app!

Today marks the first iPhone / iPod Touch application - AllYourBase - from Think Bulbs to go on sale. It's a simple app that gives you hours of fun in parties, at home, at work, at school, or even your geeky professor's group meeting! For those who are not familiar with All Your Base, the sensation started on the Internet around eight years ago, when a third-party robotic soundtrack came out for the horrible English translations of Sega's Zero Wing. Our app lets you play the funniest lines from the game in a number of ways - click-to-play, timed and movement-sensitive playback. It's a great way to surprise your friends with "Hahah!" or keep your kids from your precious iPhone / iPod Touch with a robotic "You have no chance to survive make your time!"

We also figured there will be people who feel that we have ruined the AYB legacy by introducing an alternative voice, which, unlikely the original voice, is not synthesized. It's almost like an innocent person telling you something hopeless like "You are on your way to destruction, HAHAHA". We understand that people will still want the original (synthesized) version, but even if it is reproduced, it will still be a violation of copyright of the original track. On the other hand, we spent a lot of time on different tools such as Audacity and various filtering techniques like ring filters, comb filters, simple distortions, etc. The recording we have is one of the best we could come up with. Unfortunately, we are well aware that it is far from perfect, and, without a real sound engineer on our team, we can only humbly learn from our users and reviewers about how to improve the voice. So, please keep the reviews and comments coming! We look forward to improving AllYourBase to make it a good escape from reality by injecting loads of laughter in virtually any place.

Startup2Starup, Amy Jo Kim

I attended the Startup2Startup dinner last night hosted by Dave Mcclure. This time we had Amy Jo Kim, founder of ShuffleBrain, talking about how social media and games intersect. Here are some keypoints:
1. Look at the reinforcement schedule and tap into customers' primal response. Essentially, think about when and how to engage them and get them back into the game
2. Engage in flow. Not too much and not too little so they just want to come back for more.
3. Collecting as a feature: Why collect? It gives users bragging right or a sense of completion. There are system points, social points, redeemable points. One can use leaderboards to make it more competitive
4. Levels: Level up is so important so that users don't get bored and play new things along the way.
5. Feedback: There are one-way feedbacks (twitter) and two-way feedbacks
6. Exchanges: be it gifts, comments, news articles etc
7. Customization: be it interfaces, content etc
8. Is the product accessbile, syndicated and recombinant?

Interesting observation: Amy mentioned couple Japanese games like brainage and cooking mama, but few people in the audience know about these games. Is it an opportunity?
Conclusion: Everything can be fun if you add in these features. Make things more game like.

Tap Tap Revenge for dummies

I've been playing Tap Tap Revenge since last Saturday, I've never played any DDR or Guitar Hero-like games seriously before. After just two days of playing I've been able to get near to world record scores for songs in easy mode consistently. Hard mode songs still stump me badly, though.

 

So I figured my simple techniques may be useful to people who are also new Tap Tap Revenge. It should let you breeze through easy mode and most songs in middle mode. (Click the video to see my tips in the video description)

 

Tencent

HYSTA's first event of the year featured CTO Jeff Xiong of Tencent QQ, the internet giant in China.

Here are some of his comments:

1. Significance of numbers in China are important; QQ uses numbers as ID instead of screen name or email
2. Luck plays a major part in its success
3. Tencent focuses more on entertainment due to its target audiences' young age.
4. Tencent has about 300 different product/ services
5. For QQ, Registered Users 8.56 億, Active Users 3.55 億
6. China's Internet Users will continue to increase and more and more people will use broadband; 3G service to go online
7. A story: A girl earns 500 dollars a month and she saves 50 dollars for QQ's avatar. She can buy brand names clothes for her avatar on QQ but not in real life; a different way to express emotions
8. Corporate culture is the focus on customers' demands
9. QQ mail has some innovative features that are better than Gmail's
10. Launching a product: 1) start with smaller customers base first then expands 2) Does customer engagement
11. China's products have been mainly following US's and Korea's trends.
12. The products' success and failure ultimately concern the team
13. Electronic business in China still has a lot of potential (like paypal)
14. 5000萬users online at the same time: How does the backend work?
15. Has around 100 patents; more companies are realizing the importance of IP (You get money if you register for a patent)
16. Tencent's R&D 6 core technology: Internet security, Storage Technology, Data Mining, Multimedia, Chinese processing, Distributed Internet
17. They have 50000 servers
18. Micro-transaction is still doing well, not too affected by the economy
19. QQ is opened up to share users with MSN, SKYPE given that their users like the service and are safe
20. Internet and Mobile still have a bright future in China