LSQHA Blog Reviews

It's no longer a secret that China's online gaming industry is booming, and growth is set to continue with companies such as Shanda Games , Netease and The9 leading the way. In 2009, China's online gaming industry earned nearly $4 billion, growing 39.5% from 2008 . Each day, millions of high school students trying to forget the pressures of college entrance exams and young adults discontent with their jobs flock to Internet cafes to play online role-playing games. They're part of China's 384 million netizens , and they sit in front of rows of computers in dimly lighted smoke-filled rooms for upwards of eight hours at a time, living in virtual worlds to escape the pressures of contemporary Chinese life. Sponsor Guest author Joel Backaler writes The China Observer , an award-winning blog focused on Chinese technology trends and consumer culture. His writing has appeared in and he has been quoted by the Wall Street Journal China Journal, BusinessWeek, and Seeking Alpha. Joel is a Mandarin-speaking former Fulbright Fellow who has worked and lived in Taipei, Beijing and Singapore with Frontier Strategy Group. Follow Joel on Twitter . But beyond the Internet cafés, social games have emerged as a convenient alternative for students and workers alike to gain a sense of release and revitalize themselves before tackling the next assignment of the day in their everyday lives. They take breaks to tend to their garden on 5 Minutes' Happy Farm (Kaixin Nongchang) farming game, or steal their friend's car parking space on Kaixin001 's Qiang Chewei. RenRenWang (formerly Xiaonei), Kaixin001 and Tencent's QQ Xiaoyou are leading SNS portals, and are the go-to sites to access China's most popular gaming applications. The widespread popularity of social games is not solely limited to white collar workers in their 20s - social gaming appeals to China's youth, their middle-aged parents, and even elderly retirees looking to share a common hobby with relatives spread throughout the country. The social gaming landscape is developing at an extremely rapid pace, with competition growing increasingly fierce by the day. What Makes a 'Winning' Social Game in China? The most popular social games in China are simple to play and appeal to a broad audience. These winning games take place in easily recognizable environments such as kitchens, gardens and parking lots, and only require a few clicks of a mouse to have a shared social gaming experience with your friends. Happy Farm is the most popular Chinese social game to date. Created by Shanghai-based social game developer 5 Minutes, the game is quite similar to Zynga's FarmVille. Players own a virtual farm where they plant fruits and vegetables. They purchase supplies like seeds, pesticide and fertilizer at a virtual market. While part of the game is about growing and protecting your own harvest, the real fun is sneaking into your friends' farms to steal their vegetables. The game is easy to learn, taps into traditional Chinese farming culture and is extremely addictive - appealing to the young, the old and everyone in between. Which Social Game Developers in China You Should Know About? 5 Minutes (五分钟) , CEO: Shaofei Gao 5 Minutes was founded in 2006 by three college students. In November 2008 it released Happy Farm (below) and achieved immediate success, partnering with leading SNS portals, and receiving a one-time multi-million Chinese RMB payment from Tencent for full rights to the game on its QQZone platform. At the end of 2009, 5 Minutes received $3.5 million in venture capital funding from Draper Fisher Jurvetson . Rekoo (热酷) , CEO: Yong Liu Founded in 2008, Rekoo is one of China's leading social gaming developers with several domestic partners: RenRenWang, 51.com, Alibaba, Baidu and Sohu . Rekoo also has strategic overseas partnerships with Facebook, MIXI, Myspace and Cyworld. Rekoo's most successful games are Sunshine Ranch and Animal Paradise. IsMole (奇矩互动) , CEO: Edwin Chen Founded in 2008, IsMole started off as a market-leading game developer for social networks, but quickly lost its competitive edge to others like 5 Minutes and Rekoo. IsMole's is best known for its Xingfu Chufang (below) cooking social game that has been released in five different languages across seven countries on thirteen different SNS platforms. Kingnet Games (恺英网络) , CEO: Yue Wang Founded in 2008, Kingnet first released Tower of Babel in April 2009, and within three months had over 500,000 users. In July 2009 Kingnet received venture capital investment from KPCB China. In October 2009, Kingnet had over 2 million users on Facebook. Challenges Facing Social Game Developers Social game development in China has entered a period of tremendous growth, but it has yet to fully mature. Companies compete fiercely with varying levels of experience and capital to create the next winning game. Two major challenges have arisen as a result of this environment. 1. Lack of Innovation: There is an overall lack of diversity in gaming context. Copying is rampant amongst competitors - once a social game is proven successful, competitors begin producing their own versions. For example, there are numerous games that take place in farms such as 5 Minutes' Happy Farm: Rekoo's Sunshine Ranch, Kaixin001's Kaixin Huayuan, and Zhiming Xingtong's Happy Farmer. 2. Lack of Continuous Improvement: There is a tendency for developers to stop investing in the game after it is on the SNS platform. In some cases this is due to lack of sufficient capital, while others stop because they're trying to make multiple games to obtain a quick return on investment. This lack of continuous improvement creates short game lifecycles, as user experience ultimately suffers, and a short period of success finally leads to replacement by the next popular game. To win in this environment over the long-term, it is unavoidable that operational costs will continue to rise, as developers must continuously improve the quality and uniqueness of their games to fend off domestic competition and maintain their market share. This Is Only The Beginning Despite these challenges, there is tremendous growth potential in social gaming in China. The first years of growth in China's social game development have served as a foundation. The next few years will see a convergence between social games and 3G mobile gaming. The social game user base that is predominantly comprised of students and young white-collar workers will continue to grow with even more older players joining the crowd. While Chinese companies will continue to face a competitive market at home, the best companies will develop unique winning strategies domestically and localize them to win success overseas. In a recent interview, 5 Minute's CEO Shaofei Gao was quoted as saying : "China's netizens are becoming more mature, they are gradually becoming more accustomed to paying for gaming, and social gaming market opportunities will definitely continue to increase in the future." Discuss

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China's Social Gaming Landscape: What's Coming Next

The effort to bring Facebook into the enterprise continues with more services using Outlook as a gateway to extend a contact network and use as a foundations for a CRM environment. SenderOK is one of the latest effiorts to give more context to email by showing a picture of the sender in an email message. Too bad it only works on Windows XP or Vista. Ugh. Sponsor But let's take a look at the service as we are seeing more services that use email as a foundation for a social CRM environment. SenderOK compares itself to Microsoft's Outlook Soclal Connector and Xobni , an email plug-in that provides a search and profile element for Outlook. But we hear a lot of criticism that Xobni is a memory hog and slows down computers. As one reader said about Xobni in our last post concerning Outlook plug-ins : "Interesting article, although I have my doubts about Xobni which I used for several months but had to uninstall as it had gotten to the point where it was nearly impossible to use (too slow). Harmony sounds promising; sharing documents in place of merely sending them as attachments (hence overloading the network) is becoming critical if one wants to keep only one copy and not scatter several around." To be fair, Xobni is the leader in this space compared to other services. They have a loyal following. It makes sense that companies like SenderOK would go after this sector of the market. SenderOK features include a smart mapping capability to give a view of the person's unread email across multiple accounts. It will also prioritize the email. Our interest stems from the SenderOK "business card" feature. Email includes an image of the person and their profile information in the header of the message. In Outlook Social Connector, the image of the sender blocks out the message. In Xobni, the image and contact information appears in a widget. We expect these services to proliferate as more startups turn their attention to Outlook as a way to build a user base. Xobni has proven that this approach works. Further, Google Apps now integrates with third party applications. Services such as Zoho CRM and Intuit are leveraging GMail integration to offer hybrid applications. Perhaps 2010 will be the year email is viewed more as a foundation than a nuisance to be eliminated. Discuss

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SenderOK: Email as a Facebook Connector and Social CRM Catalyst

What if we took the leading sensor-based products currently being developed or already on the market, put them all under one roof, and added a typical American family? Would they just be the techiest family on the block, or would it have a significant impact on their lives? Here are six ways this Internet of Things family can see their lives change. They exercise more, save energy and water, budget better, know where their kids are at any moment, and they'll always have the right lighting for activities in the house. Sponsor Bank Account-based Motivation We

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6 Ways to Better Living: Inside an Internet of Things Home

During today's SXSW keynote , social media research Danah Boyd , who works for Microsoft Research New England and is a fellow at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, talked about online privacy. Specifically, she focused on how users can navigate issues around online privacy and how developers can help them to do so. Sponsor Boyd, who has researched how mainstream users use social media for the last couple of years, argued that developers have to focus on questions about privacy and publicity as they use and develop these new applications and experiences. According to Boyd, privacy is not dead and users care about it - both online and offline - and often react quite violently when their expectations of privacy are broken. Google Buzz: Privacy Fail Looking at the example of Google Buzz , which she called a "privacy fail," Boyd argued that Google didn't do anything technically wrong when it release Buzz. Instead, Google made a number of non-technical mistakes that interrupted a set of social expectations its users had. Google's mistakes: Building a public system in an environment that most people consider to be private (their email service). A lot of users actually believed that once they started using Buzz, Google would expose all of their private emails to the world. Google assumed that users would simply opt out if they didn't want to participate. A lot of Google users, however, thought that they would cancel their Gmail accounts if the opted out of Buzz. Technologists assume that the optimal solution is the best and forget about social rituals. Boyd noted that users expect to be able to choose their friends, for example, a social ritual that Google interrupted when it automatically populated its users Buzz accounts with people they tended to send a lot of emails to. To explain these issues, Boyd distinguished between articulated networks (address books, Facebook, Twitter), behavioral networks (based on common behavior, location, etc.) and personal networks. According to Boyd, people don't necessarily want to bring all of this info together (which Buzz did). Instead, they want to be able to separate different groups. It's also important to remember that private and public are also not always clear binary opposites. While technology often makes it looks like this, in real life, things tend to get a lot messier. If you are out in a café, for example, you are in a public space, but you expect a certain community to be there - while you don't expect others to be there - and you still expect a certain degree of privacy while you are talking to your friends. Facebook's Privacy Fail Users generally don't handle change well, which can have serious privacy implications. When Facebook asked its users to reevaluate their privacy settings a few months ago, the default choice was "everyone." People encountered the Facebook popup with a notification about these changes, however, clicked through without reading it and suddenly all of their data was public. According to Facebook, only about 33% of users made changes. As Boyd noted in her talk, most Facebook users simply didn't understand the privacy settings. Public by Default, Private by Effort By default, most conversations on social media services are now public, while making them private takes a conscious effort. By and large, teenagers, according to Boyd, are more conscious about what they can gain by being public, while adults worry more about what they could lose. That, however, can lead to shortsighted decisions and have serious consequences - something developers need to think about as they create their social media applications and especially aggregators. The Public-By-Default Environment is Not the Great Democratizer Just because something is publicly accessible, for example, doesn't mean that people want it to be publicized. The launch of Facebook's news stream, fore example, caught users by surprise as it broke the social contract on Facebook. While the data in the news stream had always been available, aggregating it violated the privacy expectations of most users. Developers, according to Boyd, have to ask themselves how the people whose content they are remixing and aggregating would feel if all of this data was suddenly available in one place. What Can Developers Do? There is no magical formula: privacy exists in social contexts and these contexts are complex and change constantly. For technologists, this is what makes it so hard to deal with these problems. Developers, said Boyd, have to learn to navigate these complexities and interact with their users. Developers also have to consider that privacy slip-ups can have real-world consequences for users. Developers have to ask themselves how they would feel if this information they aggregate would be disclosed. Just because you can see somebody, doesn't mean they want to be seen. Wanting privacy is not about having something to hide, but about control and creating space to open up. Discuss

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Privacy Is Not Dead: Danah Boyd Talks About Privacy at SXSW

Get rid of that guilt of taking all of those plastic and paper bags whenever you go to the store. Instead, try a green bag. Though the canvas ones that all of the major stores offer can look a bit gaudy, there are plenty of sources where you can get a bag that is fashionable, while fitting your own personal style. Custom green bags are in if they fit the style you show every day.

If you enjoy a variety of colors, there are sources on the internet that can make a bag for you at an affordable price. These green bags are reusable and made of many similar materials to other green bags on the market. Regardless of the material, you can feel a lot better using these bags since they can be reused each and every time to head out to the store.

Custom green bags are a way to make a fashion statement as well as a statement that you care for the environment. Each reusable bag that you buy reduces thousands of bags that you could have used in the future. This is a great way to reduce your carbon footprint on the earth without any big hassle. Many bags are extremely affordable, especially if you buy them in bulk off of a specialty site.