The Funware Blog @ rmbr

Wendy Bounds, award-winning author and columnist for the WSJ has been playing around with rmbr a bit - and she likes it. Take a look at her excellent article for Independent Street. And, if you haven’t been actively reading the IS column, and you have an interest in emergent business, you really should give it a whirl! It’s awesome.  Her perspective is very much grounded in reality, and it’s great to read about so many interesting new startups.

Happy New Year to all - here’s to an awesome 2008!

We put out a new release on Friday with some cool new stuff!

rmbr now has a new feature that you’ve been clamoring for: GRAB. It lets you add a friend to a given conversation (or to your network) with a single click, directly from a photo. You simply click on “Grab Someone”, enter their email address or name, and they’ll receive a notification that they’ve gotta see the pic and discussion in progress.

And, as an FYI, we’ve got some exciting new “writers” at rmbr. A couple of photo columnists have started gossiping and curating funny photo collections right on rmbr. You probably received a friend invite or two from Gossip Whore or LOL About. Give ‘em a shot - you might enjoy what they have to say!

Ok, so let me start off by saying that Macrovision (MVSN) has been very very good to me. They purchased my former company, Trymedia, in 2005 for a pile of cash. The check cleared. So far so good. I also lucked out in that I didn’t have to work a lockup after Trymedia’s sale - which means, in short, that even though I was instrumental in selling my former lover to MVSN, I never had the experience of punching in (or out) there. So everything I’m going to say about MVSN now is from the perspective of a (somewhat) outsider.

Yesterday, Richard Bullwinkle (who, incidentally, went to the same school as me and has an awesome name!) posted the most inane piece of corporate shill-swill I’ve seen on CNet since…well…Tuesday. In a pointless diatribe, he extolled the virtues of a consumer-centric perspective in digital media (check!), the need for open standards (check!) and told everyone that he likes the Beatles (check?). The central thesis of his “blog” “post” was that Apple (whom he exhorts from the perspective of a fanboy) needs to open up its systems to ensure interoperability. This would, eventually, lead to greater consumer satisfaction, he says.

His core point is well taken, if banal. We all know that an open, interoperable system that can ensure a consistent (and high-quality) user experience is the holy grail of designers everywhere. Anything less is usually the result of “strategic” thinking (see: NBC vs Apple) or strategic “thinking” (see: Windows Vista, PlaysForSure, etc). What Rocky conveniently forgets is that prior to Apple’s arrival on the music scene, everything *was* open and standards based. There were tons of great choices, most of which could play all the available digital music in the world. That’s because it was the open source community and teenagers that were responsible for the format choice (the MP3) - not the brilliant technical minds at Universal, Sony or Microsoft.  Those “creators” (or destroyers, depending on your perspective) depended on interoperability to win the status game they were playing. In the original Napsterian universe, you were either a god-like figure who’d ripped all his music in 1998 (the giver), or the music explorer, smoking dope and spending hours “playing” Napster to find long-forgotten songs (the receiver). In fact, many people played Napster as a social game - with multiple users in a single physical room enjoying the process of discovering and playing long-forgotten songs. A game of nostalgia, or memory, if you will.
Now the experience of discovering, sharing and exploring music is a lot less fun. To my eye, it seems like a rote shopping (or design) experience. We now do it in private, like it’s somehow dirty or onanistic. But it wasn’t only the free part of Napster and KaZaa that made it fun, it was the basic interaction. We were discovering something. Together. It was a new frontier, and we were cool in our exploration of it: You bring the broadband, I’ll bring the beer. Napster was the original in-room multiplayer Web game. Nowadays, online music is about 1-click shopping (c) and “browse the catalogue”. They’re filling options, maybe. Delicious? Never.

Maybe MusicNation or startups like ConduitLabs have an idea of how to resolve this fundamental disconnect. Perhaps their vision of the connected future spells “Funware” with musical notes instead of letters. They are, after all, run by people I admire and are known to be planning great things. I just don’t know how exactly things will pan out. But one thing I can tell you: the vanguard of this movement won’t be Apple, Microsoft, Google or Macrovision. And it isn’t because of open standards or consumer friendliness that people will rally around the next generation solution for music.

It will be because it’s fun.

With great excitement (a few extraneous emails - sorry!) and a lot of sweat on the part of our team, we’re super excited to announce the latest release of rmbr. It goes a long way toward reinforcing our vision that photos are a catalyst for memories, and that you can engage in a deep and meaningful (if generally amusing) interaction with your friends around them.

To that end, here’s what we’ve added and improved:

• The Mix now works to automatically find all of your friends’ best memories
• How you discover and add new friends
• View all the most recent updates with our quick view
• The speed of the site is vastly improved
• We’ve given you some invitations if you’re already a user

And we’ll be adding even more great stuff before the end of the year, so stay tuned. Come and play!

I’m not usually one to react to posts generally designed just to be incendiary, but today’s editorial from Michael Arrington on the subject of “The Twice Shy Entrepreneur” definitely hit home. His basic point: He and VCs (like Saar Gur, whom we adore) think that 1999 bubble entrepreneurs are at a disadvantage in this cycle because they’re we’re not being daring enough.

While I can’t comment on the thousands of pitches Saar’s had to sit through, I can only say that he’s a nice guy and that I’m one of those people TechCrunch is talking about. After helping to launch Trymedia in October of 1999, I stuck with the venture through the ups (impossible valuations, hiring 5 “biz dev” people in 4 weeks, signing an equity-inclusive lease for office space) and the downs (letting everyone go, working without pay, listening to inane ‘advice’ from armchair CEOs). We finally sold Trymedia in 2005 to Macrovision, and I can safely say that the overall experience was formative. Anything you do for 6 years will color your perspective on the world, and I’ve become increasingly aware of how Trymedia has affected mine.

Although the ultimate outcome for the company was great, lately I’ve been describing myself as a “depression-era” CEO. This means that I want rmbr to be viable, cash-flow positive, and to build on its strengths. I want to create something that really connects with users and that generates (a ton of) value for all our stakeholders. I also want to change the world. Chris and I agree wholeheartedly on these points. Now, I’m not sure if this means that rmbr is somehow under-reaching, or if we lack the vision and chutzpah necessary to create a billion dollar business, but I can tell you one thing.

I don’t care.

The lesson I’ve learned first hand is that while there are few YouTubes, and even fewer Googles, there are many BigFish Games. These are companies led by visionary leaders, focused on satisfying consumers and obsessed with financial performance - namely, profits. And while I am a huge believer in the value of purely financial investors (those that invest for their specific financial returns in the short/medium term), like VCs, it doesn’t mean that we desire to create a company that solely serves those needs.

One of the biggest lessons I learned at Trymedia was about alignment. If all parties to a deal are aligned, magic can happen. People punch above their weight, they set aside their differences and they share suffering. But when people become misaligned - because of vastly different shareholdings, divergent career paths, or through fundamentally opposed worldviews, very few organizations can stay healthy and functional. Fractures begin to show, people become partisans, and an “everyone for themselves” mentality quickly pervades.

Perhaps the difference between the old guard and the new can be simply summarized as experience. And while it might seem to some that our Bubble 1.0 experience makes us meeker, perhaps its simply that we know enough this time around, to make sure everyone is aligned correctly. Our vision:

• We want to hire teams that believe in the product as much as the stock options.
• We intend to build products that serve real consumers rather than just the valley.
• And we insist on working with investors that care about companies and products as much as we do.

If this makes me/us old, so be it. Our intention is to rewrite the way that people interact with photos using games - and to pioneer the Funware category by driving broader adoption in the market. The time for our ideas is now - bubble or no.

Maybe thirty (three) is the new twenty (four) after all.

PaidContent.org is reporting that Activision and Vivendi have agreed to merge and create a company worth 18.9 Billion that will, reportedly, have the highest margins in the games industry.

WoW. That (World of Warcraft) is precisely what this is all about. In fact, this merger is proof-positive of what I’ve been saying for the past year: the core videogame business is lame. And by lame, I mean “on its way to pasture”. In fact, I’m not the only person that agrees. The WSJ reports that Activision’s CEO, Robert Kotick even said that the success of WoW made them want to get into online games, but they couldn’t figure out how. The emphasis is, obviously, mine.

Geez, guys. So, you couldn’t figure out what everyone in Asia (and most of Facebook’s users) already knew: that the future of games is about pervasive experiences that play across platforms and market segments? That if my mom and I can’t both find something interesting the “platform”, that it’s not much of one after all. So, in order to get a piece of that pie, you combine two of the largest and (already) top-heavy game companies into one entity. Why aren’t you buying Three Rings, or Nexon or another company with “new” mojo, instead of one that is, frankly, resting on its laurels and that has only one (albeit huge) hit on its hands?

The truth is that even WoW, with its millions of players, is a niche product. And while it’s a successful niche, you can’t build a $19Bn business on it. What you need are smart, directional moves in the direction of broad game experiences: casual and Funware both. You need to do things like hire the powerful and amazingly talented Kathy Vrabeck to run your casual game division - as EA did, and make a real commitment to the future of gaming.

The upshot here I suppose is that this merger will only hasten the demise of the core gaming sector. With one less competitor, AAA game development costs approaching $10M, and a continued lack of creativity/brain drain in the biz, it’s only a matter of time before even the least cynical 17 year old XBOX360 owner decides that they’ve had enough and start playing indie games.

So congratulations to everyone who made out well in the deal, and all my friends who stand to profit. I’m really looking forward to this next round of competition in the core game space, because it’s going to be brutal and prove an important point about large, creative organizations: they rarely never maintain their edge.

About 2 months ago I was introduced to Sramana Mitra, a friend of John Welch’s and the publisher of an influential blog on business strategy (primarily focused on the web). Sramana asked me to write a series of articles for her audience all about the games industry.

Now, that’s a pretty big topic to bite off, but I did give it “the good old college try” and wrote a 6-part series for the site. You can read the first installment and follow the appropriate links to catch the rest of the series.

I hope you enjoy. Pay special attention to the discussion of the casual games sector. While it’s my favorite part of the business, my opinions on the topic are a smidge controversial - and I’ll be interested in reading your comments on Sramana’s site.