Was curious how the Super Soaker worked, and came across this great summary from How Stuff Works:
http://entertainment.howstuffworks.com/water-blaster3.htm http://entertainment.howstuffworks.com/water-blaster4.htm
5,340 karma · joined September 26, 2009
http://entertainment.howstuffworks.com/water-blaster3.htm http://entertainment.howstuffworks.com/water-blaster4.htm
The NSA gives you nothing in return, other than the blanket reassurance that you are safer. You have no choice but to submit to NSA surveillance, other than limiting your online footprint.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/08/us/politics/default-threat...
Totally agree with others that you're building up the next ESPN.
<< Android’s growth has far more important implications than just bragging rights. Developers tend to make apps for iOS before coming up with a version for Android. If Android continues to show up on more devices, the order could flip. As of 2013’s second quarter, Apple’s App Store generated 2.3 times more revenue than Google’s app store, Google Play, according to App Annie, an analytics firm. But Google Play had 10 percent more downloads overall. It’s one thing to cede a portion of the market because it’s racing toward the lowest possible price, but what if that market becomes the center of gravity for the entire industry? >>
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When it comes to content, I think we should be encouraging companies to find ways to fund high quality content. That's what the NYT has done with their metered pay wall, and it feels like this is something that should be encouraged. Otherwise they will become yet another newspaper that is sold off or shut down...
Blog here: http://kyrobeshay.com
<< All-or-nothing funding is a core part of Kickstarter and it has a number of advantages: It's less risk for everyone. If you need $5,000, it's tough having $1,000 and a bunch of people expecting you to complete a $5,000 project.
It motivates. If people want to see a project come to life, they're going to spread the word.
It works. Of the projects that have reached 20% of their funding goal, 82% were successfully funded. Of the projects that have reached 60% of their funding goal, 98% were successfully funded. Projects either make their goal or find little support. There's little in-between. >> http://www.kickstarter.com/help/faq/kickstarter%20basics
Meanwhile, Indiegogo is more agnostic about the projects they work with. Because their projects aren't all creative, you can set up your projects to either use "all or nothing" funding (aka Fixed Funding) or more "Flexible Funding":
<< If your campaign is set up as Flexible Funding, you will be able to keep the funds you raise, even if you don't meet your goal. If your campaign is set up as Fixed Funding, all contributions will be returned to your funders if you do not meet your goal. Flexible Funding campaigns that meet their goal are only charged 4% as our platform fee, whereas campaigns that do not meet their goal are charged 9%. >> http://www.indiegogo.com/indiegogo-faq
Indiegogo does offer refunds to backers of Fixed Funding projects that don't fully fund... but they don't offer refunds to members of Flexible Funding projects. In fact, they charge 9% to those people... possibly to offset the margin loss they incur for refunds of Fixed Funding projects that don't fully fund.
In any case, there are two ways to program pledges from backers, given these specs:
1) You can charge the backer's credit card right away and then refund if the campaign doesn't fully fund. 2) Or you can auth the card right away and then only charge the credit card if the projects fully fund.
Kickstarter does the latter: their backend (powered by Amazon Payments) authorizes a backer's credit card when someone pledges... but then doesn't charge the card right away. Instead, Kickstarter waits until the project successfully funds before charging the card. If the project doesn't fully fund, then the credit card of the pledger is never charged.
Not a lot of payment processors will support such a model. Amazon Payments is one of the few... although they actually stopped onboarding new crowdfunding sites last year: http://www.wired.com/business/2012/08/crowdfunding-gets-stic...
So in short, it's less of a legal complexity (as far as I can tell) and more of an issue around:
1) Margin risk around refunds of projects that don't fully fund. 2) Making sure the customer experience of pledgers is a good one.
But did want to mention that ESPN is 80% owned by The Walt Disney Company (which also owns ABC)... and 20% owned by Hearst.
Here's the history of ESPN's ownership, from Wikipedia: "In 1984, ABC made a deal with Getty Oil to acquire ESPN. ABC retained an 80% share, and sold 20% to Nabisco. The Nabisco shares were later sold to Hearst Corporation, which still holds a 20% stake today. In 1986, ABC was purchased for $3.5 billion by Capital Cities Communications. In 1996, The Walt Disney Company purchased Capital Cities/ABC for $19 billion and picked up the 80% stake in ESPN at that time." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_ESPN
I've met with Hearst a few times, and their executives love to mention their 20% stake in ESPN!
1. Cheap licensing terms for DRM: http://www.quora.com/When-does-Netflix-use-WideVine-DRM-inst...
2. Strong support for CDNs, enabling lower-cost streaming: http://www.quora.com/Why-does-Netflix-use-Silverlight
As I understand it, the best way to lower the crawl rate is to log into Google Webmaster Tools and manually lower your crawl rate. The crawl rate delays expire every 90 days, so I set a calendar reminder to renew the crawl delay every 3 months. https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/48620?hl=en
The book also didn't dig nearly as much into the detail around the creation of the games. In Masters of Doom, you felt like you were watching Carmack and Romero invent Doom. In Jacked, the game creation process was talked about in much more general (and less personal) terms. That's absolutely typical for a journalist, but Masters of Doom set such a high bar for gaming journalism that I ended up a bit disappointed.
Overall Jacked was a worthwhile read, but I didn't find it to be in same class as Masters of Doom.
source: http://www.internetmarketingninjas.com/blog/social-media/log...
He also mentioned that, "Bounce rate dropped while time-on-site and page views increased. It's as if having an authoritative photo in the search results raised users' trust in my site and expectations of authority."
Matt acknowledged the issue with this content (cloaked with CSS) and apologized the next month: http://ma.tt/2005/04/a-response/
Here's a quote on that topic from Isabelle Olsson, lead industrial designer for Google Glass:
"One day, I went to work — I live in SF and I have to commute to Mountain View and there are these shuttles — I went to the shuttle stop and I saw a line of not 10 people but 15 people standing in a row like this," she puts her head down and mimics someone poking at a smartphone. "I don’t want to do that, you know? I don’t want to be that person. That’s when it dawned on me that, OK, we have to make this work. It’s bold. It’s crazy. But we think that we can do something cool with it."
It's a lot of fun and it feels great to contribute to a noble project. Plus it's surprisingly addictive: http://www.snapshotserengeti.org/
The myth of the eight-hour sleep
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/12/18/my-website-design...
Most hosts will quickly take down the website, giving you a cost-effective way to stop the issue. However I'd strongly encourage you to pursue a more friendly approach first, to give them a chance to do the right thing. (The site owner may not be the one who actually stole the design.)
They can occur together too...
That gave me a thought around branding. The name ("Adrift") and the tagline ("A puzzle game in worlds of whimsy") both feel whimsical and fun - which is great for a game. But I wonder if focusing the branding around "brain training" might help expand your target market.
Most games are fun time-wasters, and tend to appeal to people who want to have fun and/or kill time. This game has a considerably wider appeal: it can help people exercise their brains, especially older people who want to keep their minds active. This is why a lot of people do Sudoku and crossword puzzles: http://healthland.time.com/2012/01/24/use-it-or-lose-it-keep...
I had a brain injury a decade or so ago, and the doctors told me to do certain puzzles to keep my brain active. It gave my brain a workout, and I was reminded of that feeling when I played your game.
One way to expand the target market might be to eventually do an expansion set called "Adrift: Brain Island" or something? You could target PR to the demos that brain workouts could appeal to.
Good luck!!
One thought: I'd consider making the first few levels much easier. This article on Yoyodyne's trivia games is along those lines:
"As Yoyodyne got busier, we had less and less time to write each game's questions. Finally, one day, we launched a game that had very little effort put into the questions - a rush job, as I recall. The questions were factually correct, but there was no witty writing, no twist, and the questions were really easy to answer.
When the game ran, we were surprised to see that the response rate, instead of hovering around 30%, actually exceeded 60%. We had put less work into crafting the experience, and there were more players who wanted to participate. ... [u]sers wanted two things from their e-mail game experience:
1. POSITIVE REINFORCEMENT: Users wanted to be told that they got the answer right, and that they were winning.
2. NO INVESTMENT: Users did not want to pay for that positive reinforcement in any way. They didn't want to think, work, get up from their chair, or otherwise make any effort to get the reward."