“Wait, so what is that?” “This is Google Glass™. It represents the latest in augmented technology eyewear. It is designed to be unobtrusive and liberating, helping you connect your digital world to the physical one.” “Ok, so, give me an example.” “It tells you the time constantly.” “What else.” “It tells you the temperature if you ask it.” “Like my phone and my skin, what else?” “You know all of those times you take pictures for instagram?” “Yeah, like two or three times a week?” “Now you can do it with just 8 easy words in a voice command.” “So its like Siri on your face?” “Well, not exactly. It’s designed to fully integrate into your life.” “…Will it hurt more if I punch you in the left or right eye?”
Talk about starting early. Jordan Casey made his first game a couple of years ago, and he’s only 13. He isn’t old enough to formally incorporate his business, Casey Games, yet. But he has published multiple titles and is hard at work on his next big release, My Little World.
To all of you overachievers in the video game industry out there — Jordan has got you beat. By the time he’s your age, he’ll probably be running a gaming empire. He is already on the publicity circuit, giving talks at game events and at one of the prestigious TedX conferences. The baby-faced resident of Waterford, Ireland, gets help from his parents, who are the directors in his company and the ones who incorporated it.
Most other kids his age are playing games, but Jordan thinks that making them is more fun.
“I love when people enjoy playing my games,” he said. “I love when I see people playing the games and just enjoying the experience.”
I had dinner alongside Jordan at the Casual Connect Europe event in Hamburg, Germany, where he gave a talk on his business. He has a high voice and a thick Irish accent, but he was quite comfortable as the only kid at the dinner. He answered questions and politely listened to unsolicited advice about game development.
Jordan taught himself programming four years ago when he was nine. He read books, watched videos, and checked out online forums to learn. A couple of years ago, he did the same, so that he could figure out how to make games.
His first title was the Adobe Flash-based Alien Ball, but that was just practice. In February 2012, he made an iPhone version of the game, dubbed Alien Ball vs. Humans. It was his first commercially released offering, and it remains his most popular. It also got him a lot of attention because it went to the top of the Apple iTunes store in Ireland.
He followed that up with a seasonal version, Alien Ball vs Humans 2. He also created Greenboy Touch, a puzzle-adventure game about a boy lost in a forest. And he created Save the Day, in collaboration with the South American ad agency Fabrica, as the official game of National Children’s Day in Brazil.
In addition, Casey created Food World, an online multiplayer game for kids. He came up with that idea in early 2011, but he put it on hold. The title is currently in its pre-beta stage. And he is working on the aforementioned adventure-puzzle game, My Little World, about a tiny creature who lives in a backyard and is the only one of his kind. The creature wants to know what the big world is beyond the backyard, and he sets out on an adventure to make his way there.
“I have a good feeling about this one,” he said. “I’m putting a lot of time and effort into it to make it perfect.”
He hopes to finish that project by June.
Jordan even hired his first employee, a boy named Aidan Blackett, as his lead artist for Food World.
“I do most of the business stuff,” he said. “My parents come to conferences with me, and my mom checks my emails while I’m at school.”
Louise Casey, Jordan’s mother, said, “At the moment I suppose its fun, but we try to keep the balance with his age and the fact he’s still at school…. But generally once school work is done, we are happy for him to have fun … during the evenings and weekends to do his business thing.”
She added, “Jordan works hard in school and does after school study, so I feel he can have the time to work on his games and coding. As long as it does not affect his school work, I’m generally OK with it. We help him out with emails and events as much as we can, but he does most of the business stuff himself. He wanted to be a businessman from an early age, so this is all exciting for him. And he really enjoys it. He has attended some amazing events and met great people, so this in itself is life learning.”
He has spoken at the Cannes Lions Festival, TedX@NewDelhi, Gamecity 7, BETT 2013, the Smartphone and Tablet Games Summit, and the Casual Connect Europe event. That speaking circuit has made him famous, and publications have featured him such as Silicon Republic, Adobe’s blog, The Irish Examiner, and The Pioneer in India. And he has been on television on TV3 and RTÉ in Ireland. He got the business for Save the Day after a Brazilian representative of Fabrica saw his talk.
Jordan said he is staying in school.
But he said, “It can be difficult, considering I go to conferences regularly. After school I go to the study hall in school and take a two-hour study course, to catch up on homework, exams, etc. Then, when I get home, I can do some work or watch TV.”
And he is giving some of his proceeds to charity.
For the long-term, Jordan said, “As I’m still young and can’t really get an office, I want to stay small and indie. But, when I’m older I would like to get an office and expand. My goal is to create the most fun and high-quality games out there.”
Disclosure: The Casual Connect Europe organizers paid my way to Hamburg, where I moderated a panel. Our coverage remains objective.
it's SFW on the image front, on the words front maybe not.
It is a) amazing b) informative and c) hilarious
The porn industry never got such penetrating look as in a report today by blogger Jon Millward, who reviewed data from more than 10,000 profiles of porn stars in the Internet Adult Film Database. The result is the big data of porn, a set of facts that would surprise you and your perceptions about sex films on the Internet.
Millward wrote that the impression of a porn star as a “blonde with big boobs” is actually wrong. Based on his review of about 8.6 percent of the database’s profiles, the average porn star has a bra cup size of 34B. Double-D bra sizes were fourth, behind B, C, and D. The most common set of measurements for women was 34-24-34. And dark-haired porn stars outnumbered blondes by two to one.
The average male porn star is 5 feet 10 inches, while the average woman is 5 feet 5 inches — the same as the average American man and woman.The average female is 117 pounds, or 48 pounds under the U.S. average for women. The average male is 167.5 pounds, or 27 pounds less than the national average for men. The largest woman weighed 719 pounds, and the lightest was 74 pounds.
The analysis took Millward six months. From that come gems such as this: The top 10 most-prolific male porn stars have slept with 1,013 women each, or 45 a year for an average career length of 22.4 years. The top 10 women have slept with 148 men, or eight a year for an average of 17.7 years. Nina Hartley, who started in 1984, has made 938 porn films. Tom Byron has 2,549 film credits since 1982. About 10 to 30 percent of stars quit the business after making one film.
The database was started by Dutch fan Peter Van Aarle, who began keeping records in 1981 on the porn films he saw in his home town’s theater. He teamed up with others in 1999 to form the Internet Adult Film Database, which was visited in 2011 by 20 million people. The database keeps stats on names of performers, their heights and weights, their races, the sex acts they perform, and pretty much everything else.
Of the stars, 70.5 percent were white, 14 percent were black, 9.3 percent were Latin, 5.2 percent were Asian, and 1 percent were other. That’s pretty much a reflection of the U.S. population, broken down by race. The average age of a woman starting in the porn business is 22, and that has remained unchanged for decades. But men are getting younger, from 29 in the 1970s to age 24 now.
As for the location, 90 percent of American porn is produced in Los Angeles’ San Fernando Valley. California is the birth place of four times as many porn stars as they next state, Florida. The golden state is the birth place of a third of all female porn stars. The most common stage names: Nikki for women, and Lee as a last name for women; David for men, and Lee as a last name for men. But Lee is the 24th most-common last name in the U.S. After the U.S., Hungary and the Czech Republic have produced the most porn stars. There’s plenty of other data, but we’ll stop there and let you click on Millward’s link to check it out, or see the infographic below.
Everything is amazing and no one notices, comedian Louis CK told Conan O’Brien not too long ago. That’s what is cool about The Secret Door, a passageway to just about anywhere on the face of the earth.
On the one hand, it’s incredibly simple.
A web page embeds a Google maps street view URL. You click a door that says “Take me somewhere else.” And Google Maps Street View shows you another place on the planet.
On the other hand, it’s simply incredible.
A company — and thousands of volunteers – has built a repository of millions of images, updated frequently, of cities and streets, and mountains all over the world. Not to mention places like Australia’s Great Barrier Reef and Hawaii’s Hanauma Bay, plus portions of the Amazon rainforest. And with a click of a button you can see the south pole, or China’s Great Wall, or the Ginza district of Tokyo … or the surface of another planet.
Try it here:
How does it work?
“It basically works by using an i-frame, which gets dynamically populated with a full-screen Google Maps Street View URL,” Jordan Peck, one of the people behind the project told me via email. “The app loads one of 90 locations, randomizing the selection every time the user clicks ‘Take me somewhere else.’ The door design itself, as well as the on hover animations use CSS3.”
Granola doesn’t often enter the sphere of venture capital, but trends in investment and consumer goods are taking granola out of the bowl, and onto the cap table.
Online investment platform SecondMarket is partnering with CircleUp, a crowdfunding platform where accredited investors can make equity investments in up-and-coming consumer product businesses.
“For crowdfunding to work, it has to be done properly with expertise, curation, and due diligence,” said SecondMarket’s senior director of sales Bill Siegel in an interview. “CircleUp is vertically oriented in the consumer goods space and know how to find good deals. With this partnership, investors will have the opportunity to look at really unique niche brands, many in the artisanal food movement. The coolest part is investors can go to a store, eat and enjoy a product, and think its awesome. Now they can go online and bet the rest of the country will enjoy it too, and that the business will grow and become profitable.”
CircleUp combines the popularity surrounding small-production, high-quality products with the momentum of crowdfunding. VentureBeat reported in January that the platform helped five food-related businesses raised over $5 million by connecting them with investors. By getting featured on the site, these companies were able to the small companies the capital they needed to expand their production and distribution. Products included healthy fruit snacks, granola, all-natural butter alternative spreads, and kale chips.
SecondMarket is a registered broker-dealer that connects investors with investments. While investors may be interested in backing consumer goods companies, they probably don’t have expertise in this field. The partnership with CircleUp will make it easier for investors to find promising opportunities, because they are only presented with a selection of vetted, curated businesses.
“Right now, CircleUp is fielding inquiries from tons of consumer goods companies,” said Siegel. “They know where to source these deals, whereas most people have no background in this. Generalist crowdfunding platforms wouldn’t know how to originate these types of transactions that only comes with industry specialization. The second part is diligence to ensure the companies can execute and scale.”
This partnership is part of SecondMarket’s ‘investment education months’ initiative, which is designed to educate the members about “under the radar” asset classes. SecondMarket provides educational tools such as webinars and white papers, and if interested, the investors have access to investment opportunities within those classes. February is “early stage consumer goods month.” Other themes include health and education.
When asked if SecondMarket would continue to form partnerships like these, Siegel said it would only be with platforms or programs that are similarly dedicated to a specific vertical. The idea is to create specialized “stores” to shop for investments. Like shopping at a boutique rather than Walmart.
Back in November, SecondMarket announced a one-of-a-kind partnership with AngelList, a network and subscriber-base of angel investors, to let accredited investors fund startups for as little as $1000. These strategic partnerships support SecondMarket’s efforts to sustainably build out both side of its marketplace.
Owners of the device will be left with a paltry 23GB of usable space after the installation of system files and onboard apps, which together take up over 60 percent of the device’s 64GB.
While the situation is a bit better with the 128GB Surface Pro (which leaves users with 83GB of storage) the 64GB model’s numbers are actually worse than those of the 32 GB Surface, which only offers 16GB of useable storage.
Microsoft isn’t alone here, of course, as just about every device ships with less storage space than advertised. The problem is that the Surface Pro takes that trend to a more troubling extreme: $800 for 23GB of usable space is simply an awful deal for consumers.
To rectify the problem, Microsoft recommends that Surface Pro owners turn to things like USB storage, microSD cards, and SkyDrive. Those solutions, however, don’t address the all-too-clear reality: Microsoft is misleading customers by advertising one product and selling them something very different.
is it just me or is that a look of mild disgust on her face. she's got the curled lip thing goin
It may have been awkward and it may have been inappropriate and it was probably sexist, but Go Daddy’s Super Bowl ad featuring supermodel Bar Rafaeli and — yeah, let’s be straight-up — a fairly ugly geeky dude, totally worked.
Go Daddy posted more new customers and more new sales than any other campaign in the company’s long Super Bowl history, the company said today in a statement. According to Mashable, that translates to the company’s biggest sales day in history, with hosting sales jumping 45 percent, domain sales up 40 percent, and new mobile customers up 35 percent.
“Attracting new customers is what advertising is all about,” Go Daddy CEO Blake Irving said. “We wanted our Super Bowl commercials to generate new customers and overall sales, and that’s precisely what happened. We set all-time Super Bowl Sunday records for mobile sales, website builders, website hosting and new customers.”
Go Daddy’s sexy-meets-smart kiss-mercial prompted the most tweets of any Super Bowl ad, with almost 300,000, but also had the least positive sentiment. In other words, a lot of people hated it, or at least thought it was inappropriate. After all, if the dude was smart and Rafaeli was sexy, does that mean beautiful women can’t also be smart? Broadcaster CBS had rejected two earlier versions of the commercial, according to Irving, but Go Daddy wanted the controversy and craved even the negative attention.
“Inappropriate?” Irving said in a statement, referencing the negative perceptions. “Hearing that word, I absolutely knew we were in for a record Super Bowl ad campaign. And by the way, I think both of our ads were the funniest in the game, by far.”
Whether the ad was inappropriate or not, it clearly worked. Especially for the dude who got kissed.
Apparently Jesse Heiman, a character actor who played the smart side of Go Daddy in the commercial, thinks “this might be one of the best jobs I’ve ever had.” Well, duh. Heiman — who said that it took about 45 takes to get the commercial shot – is now landing appearances on the “Today Show” and other talk shows.
Which I guess shows once again there’s no such thing as negative publicity.
In case you haven’t seen it, but absolutely must, here’s the ad in question:
Liked the two comments: a) the one around the internet story arc b) Marc Andreessens
We have a two year rotation program at USV for most of our non partner positions. We hire incredibly talented people, suck them into everything we are doing for two years, and then ask them to leave. The USV alumni group is becoming quite a collection of talent.
For much of last year Christina debated what she was going to do at the end of her stint. We made it even harder on her because we flirted with extending her stay. But at the end of year, she packed up her desk and headed out.
And today she explains all of that and what she's been doing since on her blog. I particularly like this part:
Why did I want to do something different? In part, because I wanted something that felt more tangible. But mostly because the story of the internet continues to be the story of our time. I’m pretty sure that if you truly want to follow — or, better still, bend — that story’s arc, you should know how to write code.
I admire Christina's willingness to leave a cushy job and take up the difficult task of teaching herself to code and building something publicly. I am sure it will turn out to have been a brilliant career move in time.
Marc Andreessen says you either will be the person who tells the computer what to do or the person that the computer tells what to do. I see more and more young folks internalizing that dichotomy and deciding to "get technical." And that makes me very happy, and I am particularly happy about and proud of the choice that Christina made.
EVOL is a German street artist living and working in Berlin. He’s well known for transforming pillars, electrical boxes, garbage cans and signs into miniature apartment blocks. This particular piece was spotted somewhere in Farringdon, a historic area of London, England.
The other day, I got an email from my partner Jason with a photo of the Urban Airship Meeting Rules posted on the wall. They are so logical as to be rules that should apply to every meeting at every startup from now until forever.
0. Do we really need to meet?
1. Schedule a start, not an end to your meeting – its over when its over, even if that’s just 5 minutes.
2. Be on time!
3. No multi-tasking … no device usage unless necessary for meeting
4. If you’re not getting anything out of the meeting, leave
5. Meetings are not for information sharing – that should be done before the meeting via email and/or agenda
6. Who really needs to be at this meeting?
7. Agree to action items, if any, at the conclusion of the meeting
8. Don’t feel bad about calling people out on any of the above; it’s the right thing to do.
I particularly love 0, 1, and 4. I rarely walk out of a meeting when I’m not getting anything out of it. I’m going to start paying more attention to this one.
Kleiner Perkin’s Mary Meeker has issued her latest Internet trends, and it is a must read as usual. The big things I take away are the shocking speed of the fall of Wintel operating systems (Windows/Intel), displaced by iOS and Android, the amazing pace of iPad growth, and that 29% of American adults now own a tablet or an ereader. Look at these three charts, and then the full presentation below.
“I have a good feeling about this one,” he said. “I’m putting a lot of time and effort into it to make it perfect.”
