Techcrunch50, the Sundance Film Festival of Startups?

Filed under: Company, Technology— Guy @12:50 am September 26, 2008

We recently presented Mytopia’s RUGS™ platform at the Techcrunch50 conference in San Francisco. During a 3 day period, 52 promising startups pitched their vision to an audience of nearly 2000, including a star-studded crowd of technology visionaries, high profile corporate executives and billionaires.

I could write 20 posts on all the interesting ideas I saw, but in the interest of time I’ll share a few thoughts about my favorites. They all revolve around one of the most fascinating and under-developed areas of the Internet - mass collaboration.

DotSpots - This company is bringing the wisdom of the crowd to any block of text on the web. The concept is like Wikipedia, but seamlessly woven into the fabric of any webpage. You can read a story about a political candidate and contribute ideas or criticism to specific parts of the article. The team behind DotSpots looks very impressive.

Bojam – Another Wikipedia concept, but applied to music. The idea is to let musicians record together and collaborate on songs. There are a few companies doing similar things already, but it seems like Bojam has a bigger vision. With Bojam, music teachers can give lessons to students around the world, famous musicians can contribute pieces of a track for a price and users can build on top of popular songs together by recording and modifying covers. There is an interesting business model around the way music royalties are collected, especially with cover tracks and if Bojam can clearly articulate the fine legal print to end users, this could be a disruptive company.

Atmosphir – Obviously games are close to my heart, so I paid special attention to Atmosphir. They’ve built a platform to allow ‘regular people’ to create games. While user-generated games have been around  for a long time, the Atmosphir demo was truly exciting. The main concern is that all the games designed on a platform like this will basically be the same: run, jump, collect,  and hit. Creating dynamic and more sophisticated forms of game play is extremely challenging. As a platform architect, the art is in finding balance between power and flexibility. IMHO, one of the key elements to creating a successful platform of this type is building in more robust collaboration tools. You have to enable teams to work together on different regions or aspects of a game and provide sophisticated tools to administer the process. For example, creating levels of access control to work on different parts or regions of the game and a simple mechanism for checking-in and out changes to avoid branching the product.

There were two more areas where Techcrunch50 truly excelled. First of all, the panel of experts and judges were top-notch. You can see the full list here, but some of my favorites were Marissa Mayer from Google, Sean Parker, Yossi Vardi, Evan Williams and Marc Benioff. For us geeks, watching the parade of ‘Techlebrities’ march into the panels felt like standing behind the velvet rope at the Oscars. The lengthy interviews with Mark Cuban and Peter Thiel were worthy of primetime television. According to Peter, one way to gauge a startup’s potential for success is by looking at the CEO’s salary. We should DEFINETELY introduce him to Mytopia.

Finally, what really set this conference apart was the Live Stream. I had over 100 friends, family and colleagues watch our presentation from around the world via live stream. By opening up the conference to everyone, Techcrunch50 democratized a show that would otherwise have benefited only a lucky few.

A special thanks to Mike, Eric, Jason and the rest of the TC50 team for their unbelievable support! We would highly recommend the conference again to our fellow entrepreneurs, though watch out for that Tim O’Reilly if you get him as a judge :)

 

Mytopia selected as Techcrunch 50 Finalist

Filed under: Company, Technology— Guy @3:25 pm September 9, 2008

We’re proud to announce that Mytopia has been selected as a Techcrunch 50 Finalist. The Techcrunch 50 event has been described as the ‘Sundance Film Festival’ of software conferences and after only one day at the show I can indeed confirm it is an impressive experience. This place is filled with so many wonderful ideas, interesting companies and superstar panelists that it’s hard to take it all in at first. We have some big announcements coming up, so be sure to stay tuned!

Mytopia at CTIA

Filed under: Company— Galia @11:24 pm August 23, 2008

Mytopia is honored to be exhibiting with Microsoft at CTIA Wireless, coming up at the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco, September 10-12. If you’re at the show, come by and say hello, or get a proper whooping on Mytopia’s Texas Hold’em table. We’ll also be at the Microsoft Media Event at Varnish Fine Arts Gallery, September 10th from 5:15 - 7:00pm. Drinks and snacks on uncle Windows.

The Universal Language of Games

Filed under: Company, Games—Tags: — Galia @8:25 pm July 11, 2008

So Guy kicked off our blog with a little childhood nostalgia and since I was there (for most of it, anyways) I figured I’d follow suit. Actually, I’ve been thinking a lot about games all my life, and not just the digital variety. People have been playing games since we could throw stones in a cave, and many of the “classic” titles you’ll find in Mytopia can be traced back across generations, continents and civilizations.

Games are all around us. The most recent massive multiplayer I engaged in, also known as college, revolved mainly around skill level and achievements in the rigorous game of beer pong. A girlfriend of mine just returned from a beach vacation and shared photos of guests from around the world standing in for pieces on a human size chessboard. Studying in Italy, I learned more about the culture watching battles of Bocce Ball than I ever did in the classroom. On a recent stroll through Chinatown in San Francisco, I sat down next to a group of old men huddled ferociously around a Mahjong board. I don’t speak a word of Chinese, but I knew exactly what was happening, both in the game and around it.

Mytopia’s vision statement, Helping the World Play Together, is not just a marketing cliché (neither is this blog post…touché). In a world divided, its difficult to find common ground anymore. Multicultural discussions seem to gravitate towards topics of friction: politics, economics, war, McDonald’s. But everybody plays games. Often, the same games. Sure, you’ll find variations here and there, but give an 80-year-old Russian lady and a 25-year-old Brooklyn hipster a deck of cards, and they’ll know exactly what to do. You’ll be hard pressed to get anything but good old-fashioned fun. It may not be world peace, but if we can bring people from all walks of life together, to enjoy a common and timeless experience and forget, even for a moment, that the modern world isn’t exactly Utopia, we feel pretty good about that.

Saluting the Greats

Filed under: Company, Games— Guy @8:46 pm July 6, 2008

I was 11 years old when my father came home with our first modem, a 2400 baud U.S. Robotics. I still remember that shrieking sound it made when connecting to a remote service. A few days later, I discovered The Sierra Network (TSN), later known as the Imagination Network (INN).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imagination_network

 There was no Web, no email, no instant messaging, yet there was this one place where literally thousands of people were playing games together in real-time. The graphics were amazing and the ability to create an avatar, chat with people and play games with others from around the country was, at the time, unheard of. After running up more than $200 in charges within the first few weeks, the modem was quickly confiscated, but the impression it left was permanent.

It’s been more than 15 years since then and obviously a lot has changed. The Web is now an inseperable part of our lives and is becoming more personalized than ever. But in the process, it has also created large islands (like Facebook, MySpace, etc.), where people, applications and content are isolated from each other. However, this fragmantation will not last much longer. In fact, I believe it will be gaming companies who build bridges between these islands as they have the most to gain by enabling people to interact in real time across different networks. And this is why Mytopia was started — to help the world play together.

At launch, Mytopia is the first company to enable real-time interaction between the four of the major social networks: Facebook, MySpace, Hi5 and Bebo. These communities represent a diverse audience of users from around the world and for the first time, everyone on these networks can communicate and play together in realtime. Additionally, through Mytopia.com, we are enabling players who don’t use social networks (still the majority of Internet users) to seamlessly interact with social networkers. This means I can play Sudoku online with my mom, from the comfort of my Facebook account, even though she doesn’t have or want a profile there. Just jump into Mytopia’s Town Hall to check out who’s online and where they’re playing from, and you’ll find a “Web 2.0” melting pot.

Few people remember TSN today, but it was without a doubt, a watershed moment in digital entertainment. Every modern gaming community, from Pogo to World of Warcraft, owes them a debt of gratitude. Although Mytopia will soon have many different appearances, most created by its own members, we hope this first look will pay homage to the community that made us fall in love with online gaming.