justin's links

I drank too much Akvavit, one shot for each song in the songbook (8, I think?). I didn’t really pace that out properly. At Artur & Simon & company Crayfish party with singing and Skål! Shot and edited on iPhone4.

I spend a lot of time playing with a glowing networked touchscreen in my hand. Every few weeks I blink my eyes and marvel at the access to tools and information we have through today’s portable mobile internet devices. Hallelujah!

These days I’m using an iPhone most. I use this device to feed my brain - to look stuff up and index what I find. Howard recently asked for some iPhone recommendations; here’s some App software that make my phone seem like a Tricorder (according to Wikipedia: “The standard tricorder is a general-purpose device used primarily to scout unfamiliar areas, make detailed examination of living things, and record and review technical data.”)

I use Instapaper, a free service for tagging articles you want to read later, a combination of an App and a simple web profile. So, if you see something in your web browser that looks like a good read, you can save it for later using a web browser bookmark that says “read later.” Then I open Instapaper on my iPhone when I’m waiting for a bus or lying in bed - instant curated reading.

To feed my Instapaper I’ll open up Arts & Letters Daily and mark a bunch of long articles. Or I’ll search Twitter for recently mentioned articles in The Atlantic Monthly. In addition Kevin Kelly just posted a list of the Best Magazine Articles Ever - good stuff to stuff in my article bin to read on the road.

Twitter has a great iPhone client, and it uses this system as well: if someone links to an article from Twitter, you can send that article to “read later” in Instapaper. Instapaper allows you to cultivate an information garden planted from the storm of seeds flying all around us.

Books. you can get a number of free books to read in the book reading Apps for the iPhone. Cory Doctorow’s novels are all free for download in iPhone-ready ePub format. Texts like the Rubiyaat, Siddhartha are available for free download with Apple’s iBooks app. My friend Ben says he prefers to use Kindle instead of iBooks because you can read Kindle books on more devices. Many great written works of the world have been digitized through the hard work of people like The Gutenberg Project - Stanza, another reader app will give you access to a number of free Ebook archives.

The Maps program has street view. If you’re on wifi, you can quickly scroll through streetview maps of the world. It’s pretty amazing to see all the spots you can glimpse around the world.

Free Wikipanion Wikipedia browser, and Wiki Hunt ($1.99) an information pathways game asks you to connect from one Wikipedia article to another in a limited number of steps. Yelp indexes local commerce and attractions. NYTimes app provides reams of news and good reading - still free. Mint gives a powerful financial dashboard if you trust it with your personal credentials. CraigsList apps like Craigsphone (free) will let you post to your localCraig’s List and browse as well.

WhatTheFont lets you take a picture of any text and learn the font used to write it. It feels like decoding the environment. Shazam will listen to song fragments and attempt to identify them; it doesn’t know obscure / non-commercial music, and only 5 free IDs per month.

With these portable media devices, you can have a batch of lectures at the ready, to listen and learn when you have a moment. Here are two of my favorite public affairs lecture serieses, available as free podcasts using Apple’s iTunes:

• RSA Audio Lectures from the UK
• Commonwealth Club of California

These days I work in the mobile entertainment business, producing free-to-play games with ngmoco; it’s fascinating to see how we can learn and adapt ourselves to take advantage of these heady powerful pocket mind amplifiers. Another exciting set of mobile Apps out there: media recording and publishing tools; maybe I’ll write about that some other time.

I have taken a job as a Producer for the iPhone games company ngmoco! I start Monday, March 1, working at their offices in San Francisco, near the baseball stadium in SOMA.

My last job was running GameLayers, building social games in Firefox and Facebook. We didn't manage to sustain our studio with successful games - I'll be sharing some of what I learned during a March 11 session at the upcoming Game Developers Conference: "Fate of a Small Social Game Studio."

Fortunately, the people at ngmoco should be great collaborators and teachers. The company was founded by veteran executives from the console/computer game industry with a passion for innovative mobile gaming, the type afforded by devices like the iPhone. Right now ngmoco is one of the top iPhone game companies, known for experimenting with new business models and device-native game experiences.

Between 2000 and 2004 I wrote frequently about the potential for mobile games. For example:

3 January 2003 - Multiplayer - the Only Mobile Game

Single-player games are a waste of devices built for human communication (from TheFeature.com)

16 June 2004 - Mobile Entertainment: The Power of Play

Mobile entertainment serves a critical social function -- it will teach us how to be connected citizens (from TheFeature.com)

I took a few years off from the mobile game industry to go to graduate school, and to run a social games startup. Now I look forward to helping ngmoco make a connected social future of fun!

I’m looking for something new to work on. I’m meeting with smart people and promising companies to find the right opportunity.

As I started this process, I was still caught up in my startup. Most of the time GameLayers was five people. We shared a lot of responsibilities, and as CEO my roles included investor relations, team cheerleading, public relations, evangelism, new product development, strategy, product management. Also taking out the trash and booking plane tickets, arguing with the landlord. So, for a formal, larger corporation, what roles was I ready for?

My ready answer was “I get excited about things and I share my enthusiasm.” Between writing, speaking, or building a game out of the entire internet, most all of my professional work comes from sharing what I believed. Most of my profesional beliefs can be summed up in two sentences:

• the internet will become better as a wider range of people participate in it
• games and play can facilitate social interactions, teaching us to be better 21st century humans

So now I wonder, what can I do to facilitate the further evolution of these beliefs? GameLayers did not turn out to be a sustained long-term business. So I would like to learn how sustainable businesses are made - ideally businesses that work to increase the range of participants in online sharing and entertainment. Any idea that I have, or any idea I want to support, I would like to be able to support the idea as well as the people who contribute to the idea and need to feed their families.

Howard Rheingold has been diagnosed with cancer. He's probably the person I know who is most in touch with his mortality. Merci and I asked him to officiate our wedding because he has a good sense of the divine nature of everyday things.

So it's both sad and inspiring to see him wrestle with new pain and priorities. Sad because he's beginning an uncertain future within his body. Inspiring because its Howard and his irrepressible spirit is already filling the channels with what he's learning about himself and beyond.

I helped him set up @rheingoldsbutt on Twitter and Howard's Butt on Tumbler. He's using online community tools to update people on his progress. What else would you expect from the guy who set up the social media classroom?

In high school one year, I helped run my school’s Martin Luther King Day celebration. I studied up on Satyagraha and gave a speech about the lessons of nonviolent resistance to injustice, and converting your enemies to productive common cause. Immersing myself in those ideas was ennobling for me - I had seen some anger and violence in my life and I was happy to find great scholars and social change agents who embraced a way of peace.

What does Martin Luther King mean in 2009? Community service is a good start:

I got my first pair of glasses in first grade. I got lenses that darkened in sunlight. I remember running out of school and back into school to show my schoolfriends the magic lenses.

My uncle has been scanning family photos and sharing them with us. Today I found this photo of me in the pile, I think this is from my early glasses-wearing days, probably 1981 or so :-)

It's 2010! We've been living with the internet for over a decade now. There's so many ways to present oneself - forms we can fill out on social networks, or tiny status boxes for us to write a short sentence on our moment by moment affairs.

I started a personal web site here jeez like sixteen years ago. It seems dated to have a weblog! And write long things, expecting people to pay attention to them.

So I went looking for inspiration - people who have compelling personal web sites in 2010. I found Matt Haughey still maintains a nice, active personal site. He introduces himself in a friendly way, provides updates from his various streams, and the site is not too crazy or cluttered. Not too bad considering his archives go back ten years now!

I just installed Movable Type 5, because it will output hard files each time I write a blog entry. Hard files fit better with years of online publishing slag in my archives. Now I've got to figure out how to style this site, maybe using a slideshow in Japanese, maybe just using some elbow grease and HTML tables!!

So this is to thank Matt Haughey for some inspiration. He's going through a medical excitement recently, so it's great that he continues to share himself graciously with the web.

UPDATE 8 January: Besides his personal site, Matt has done some innovative web business work. He started a topic-focused weblog, PVR Blog, about Tivo-type technology, and he shared some lessons on fortuito.us. Fortuitous is good reading for independent web business work; now dated for 2007; fortunately his topics and advice are evergreen. And, he's the founder of MetaFilter a sustainable, content-rich online community. Good stuff, online!

2009: Love and business with my partner Merci Victoria Grace at our game studio GameLayers. Most every day taking the train with our small dog Pixley Wigglebottom to our office 76 2nd Street, San Francisco, CA, 94105, in the Financial District of San Francisco.

Every day we worked on games. Our goals changed from grow fast and raise money to hunker down and earn revenues. We launched three products during 2009: a rebranding of our Firefox toolbar game and two games on Facebook. To stay alive, we tried paycuts, layoffs, and insufficient attempts to make money fast online.

GameLayers was profoundly engaging employment. I am grateful to my teammates, investors, advisors and customers for their patience as they showed me how to be a better leader. I was fortunate to work with so many smart people who wanted to make a game out of the web.

By the end of 2009 it was clear that GameLayers wasn’t earning enough revenue to keep employees. After exploring investment and acquisition options, we elected to leave our game The Nethernet up and running as Merci and I begin 2010 looking for new employment.

Midway through 2009, we moved into a larger apartment in the Mission District/Noe Valley, San Francisco with our brother Justus. Good times, great eats! We hosted a number of family gatherings at our apartment, a few lit by the wide smile of our new niece Francesca.

We saw the four seasons, the five elements and the corpses of large seals as we ran with Pixley on the beach at Fort Funston, just south of the city. Merci, Justus and I swam in a cold Pacific Ocean there during the fall. Merci and I drove north of the city to eat oysters and enjoy the coastline in Sonoma and Sea Ranch, California.

By December 2009 we were no longer being paid by GameLayers. We cashed in frequent flyer miles for a belated honeymoon to Thailand. We intended to travel the country seeking adventure. Instead we ended up spending two weeks on a small tropical island reading, sunning, swimming, diving, eating, sleeping and being massaged on the beach. We pleasured ourselves like love tycoons at a beautifully reduced rate, creating a fond sense of our compatibility beyond our time working together. Hurrah!

During our honeymoon, I had a chance to read, mostly speculative fiction: Orphans of Chaos series, Mistborn, Collected Works of Lord Dunsany, I Martha Adams, Sarsen Place, Blind Assassin, Pillars of the Earth, Mordant’s Need Series, Tom Clancy’s Net Force. At home, during 2009, I completed Dead Space, Gears of War 2, Fable II, Far Cry 2, Lego Batman, Red Faction: Guerrilla, Fallout 3, Shadow Complex, Batman: Arkham Asylum, Beatles Rock Band, Borderlands, Dragon Age, and Modern Warfare 2 on the Xbox 360, and GTA Chinatown on the Nintendo DS.

2010: I am catching up on games, poking at projects, exploring opportunities - figuring out what I need to learn next. And I’m dusting off http://links.net/ as a means to experiment with the web. Enjoying my fantastic friends and family and wonderful wife. Exciting times!

(Year in (p)review - thanks to Randy for the prompt, including last year 2008/2009).

I work for a company called GameLayers, and this week we released a new game Dictator Wars - playable on Facebook.

I wrote up a bit about the path GameLayers took to get to Dictator Wars on the USC IMD site.

I was able to contribute a lot of writing to Dictator Wars - it was fun to exercise my fingers again. I hope you like it!