Raul Aliaga Diaz

I am changing the update of these links to a monthly edition from now, it seems better that way. You can check my feeds or shared items on google reader, twitter, delicious, etc. See you next month with more links .

Game Development

• Study: 90% Of U.S. ‘Tweens’ Playing Games Online, Industry Missing Opportunity [Gamasutra]. In the case you didn’t notice it.
• NCsoft sued for making Lineage II too darned addicting [Massively].
• Game Maker released for Mac [Edge].

Social Media

• From Mashable: 10 Tips For Aspiring Community Managers, 7 Services to Find and Reserve Your Name Across the Web and 5 Huge Trends in Social Media Right Now.

Marketing

• From Mashable too: 5 Key Benefits of Monitoring Your Client’s Brand on Social Media, Top 5 Mobile Advertising Trends To Watch.

Entrepreneurship

• Avoiding Momentum [Seth Godin's blog]. Your fears of feeling overwhelmed are probably groundless.
• 8 things I wish I knew before starting a business [VentureBeat]. You can learn some of these just by planning a party.
• Chop-Shop Workers and Bootstrappers: Chile Really Wants You [TechCrunch]. Curious.

Misc

• Fred Brooks is about to publish a new book.
• Sound enabled sorting algorithms.
• The trapped Chilean miners are alive!!! :’)

When I was a child I thought my life was an adventure video game. That the life I had was in a budding state before becoming the main character of a great and epic adventure, in which I would travel the world, meet lots of curious characters, learn awesome skills and challenge big enemies, fighting heroic battles.

The time passed and it wasn’t like that. I grew up and almost without notice I entered into something that can be called “a young man’s life”. In parallel, I kept playing, maybe innocently hoping to scape from reality, nourishing my hobby, sharing with friends and creating complicity links with new people as we shared some common game experiences.

However, something stayed with me: the skills and learning transference. If still not direct and widely researched, the skills that one acquires playing video games can be transferred to everyday life, having great impact on several dimensions of it.

For example, in RPG games there always exist a system of advancement and progression for character skills, such as “espers”, “materia” or similar, which induce to learn to manage an adequate equilibrium among different skills. With such a focus, one can transfer that management to capitalize activities that were once a hobby -like organizing role playing meetings or keeping a blog about my favorite band- into “team management skills and communications”.

Another memorable experience was my intuitive approach to scientific method. My first game that I played from end to end was Sonic The Hedgehog 2. When I realized that you can transform Sonic in Super Sonic I wondered “Can Tails become SUPER TAILS?”. The answer is, unfortunately, no.

Don't bother, it's not gonna work ¬¬

I refused to believe that all the emeralds and Tails had no relation at all. So I separated all the game instances: the emeralds, where I was getting them, finishing the game with them, etc. to find out if there were anything further between the emeralds and Tails. The answer: No relations at all. However, something stayed with me: I asked questions, formulated hypotheses, delimited the way to approach them, I played (experimented) and answered my questions, asked new ones, and so on.

One more example was the glorious summer of 1998 when I played Mario Kart 64 with almost military discipline. Four friends, four controls, a whole summer. Once all the basic skills, items, shortcuts and related stuff was learned, the game turned into a “psychological war”.

To win the races, the game was requiring from me to enter my friends minds and to anticipate what they were also anticipating from me. This is also commonly seen on RTS games, FPS, fighting games, and any multiplayer game, where we can extract great lessons on empathy.

Adult life is increasingly flooded with complexities that overwhelm us and worry us incessantly, demanding answers in situations that we never faced before. Those of us who “wasted our childhood playing video games” tackled at bounded scope many of these situations and had grown in time an intuition to face them, sometimes performing even better than those who have never played video games.

Is there any skill of yours you consider is inspired from a video game?

Game Development

• Spending on Experiences Instead of Possessions Results in More Satisfaction [Lifehacker]. I’m putting this one here because, well, game developers are creating experiences since a long time ago.
• Interview: ACE Team Spams Us With Python-Inspired Rock of Ages [Gamasutra]. Fellow Chilean game developers, check them out .
• Game Design Essentials: 20 Real-World Games [Gamasutra Feature Article]. Many “non video” games from which to draw useful game design lessons.

Social Media

• 3 Reasons Why CEOs Hate Social Media [Socialnomics]. Something to be aware of in case you need to perform a tough negotiation.
• From Mashable: How News Consumption is Shifting to the Personalized Social News Stream and Why Games Are the Killer App for Social Networks. Both may seem like old news to some people, but it’s worth to pay attention to these trends anyway, and to get insights in how to communicate them.
• An inspiring presentation: “What the F**k is Social Media NOW?”. My personal best takeaway from it: Listen to your audience, engage with them on a real and respectful fashion, have fun together.

Marketing

• Marketing 101, lessons learned on the battlefield [Score Studios' blog]. This can be on the game development section, since they develop iPhone games, but these are useful for other iPhones apps as well.
• 15 Design Tips to Learn From Apple [Design Shack]. Great insight into the details and design decisions that support the integrated experience Apple thrives to deliver.

Entrepreneurship

• Why Startup Founders Should Stop Reading Business Books [Software by Rob]. Basically, because those books were made to sell, not to give you the final checklist to achieve success.
• When NOT to Invest in Your Freelance Career [Freelance Switch]. Money won’t buy you the time it takes to do your own homework.
• 95 Strategies for Work/Life Balance When You Work From Home [Carol Roth's blog]. Pick whatever suits you and move on .
• Five Whys [Lessons Learned]. Simple and useful method to learn from mistakes at every level.
• How I Document my Business Model Hypotheses [Ash Maurya's blog]. Nice charts and simple ways to provide grounds for business hypotheses.

Misc

• Think Python: How to Think Like a Computer Scientist. A free introductory programming book.
• Learn more about the social circle google knows about you.
• The Illustrated guide to a Ph.D.
• 15 Great Geeky Web Comic Strips.

Game Development

• Gamers beat algorithms at finding protein structures [Ars technica].
• Glitch Continues To Iron Out The Glitches, Beta Due Soon [TechCrunch]. I’m waiting for this.

Social Media

• From Mashable: How to perform successful social media monitoring, twitter mapping tools and some lessons to learn from Google Wave’s end. My personal take on Google Wave: Scalability issues. Finally, 5 tips for aspiring music bloggers -and actually for any blogger.
• A complete guide to Tumblr [SmashingMagazine], some reasons to quit Foursquare and Gowalla [Cavendo.com] and several resources for community managers [Clases de Periodismo](in Spanish, many links in English though).
• Twitter’s Number 1 Rule: Make your own rules [Tweet Smarter].

Marketing

• Several links on virality: it’s not just magic, from For Entrepreneurs, Success Online, 20bits and My Guest List.

Entrepreneurship

• Are you building a R&D lab or a business? [Mark Maunder's blog]. Good distinction to have in mind, specially for tech driven people.
• How to get good ideas for startups [Penelope Trunks's blog] and Tips for Creative Success from Pixar [Presentation Zen].
• Why We Need To Abolish Software Patents [TechCrunch].
• How to win money using copyleft [Manzana Mecánica, in Spanish]. Many links are in English.
• Six Steps for producing a web site [Six Revisions] and taking A/B Testings to the next level [Performable].

Misc

• Let’s stop the use of the word “obviously” and let’s think twice about what everybody knows [Lifehacker].
• A great presentation about HTML5, done in HTML5.
• The 30 Best iPhone Apps So Far This Year [TechCrunch].
• How the earth would look like if it stood still? [ESRI]. However, it seems that it doesn’t consider Earth’s Magnetic Field [Wikipedia].

Here we go!

Game Development

• On the business side, we have two news to watch: GameStop buys Kongregate [Gamasutra], and Zynga goes to Japan [Worlds in Motion].
• A conversation about Social Game Design principles that started on twitter it’s now on Brenda Brathwaite’s blog.
• Two more blog posts about Starcraft on board game format [Sirlin's Blog] and the importance of research on postmodern design [Gamasutra blog article].
• Two Gamasutra feature articles about Motion based controls and Tension & Release. Always good to learn and think about new stuff.

Social Media

• From Mashable we can learn that social media can make us more productive, why we need social media monitoring, how to grow sustainable communities and how to send audio tweets.
• From Techcrunch, we have an article about how game mechanics have changed social media (again).

Marketing

• iMedia Connection is a site for great marketing resources, and many of the articles they publish can be applied far beyond marketing, such as this one about “6 principles for success in your career” and “what it takes to discover your social media star” (or “what this social media guy we’re paying is supposed to be doing”).

Entrepreneurship

• Tim Ferris’ blog is running a great article on how to differentiate yourself and harness a super star effect.
• Gabriel Weinberg’s blog on “Wannabe entrepreneurs, symptoms and cures“.

Misc

• This week we have an inspiring article from the Algorithmic Game Theory blog about incentives on “human aided” systems for computation (such as Amazon’s Mechanical Turk)

See you next week! (or sooner, I hope )

It’s been a busy week:

Game Development

• Study: Virtual Goods Significantly Help Brand Awareness, Increase Purchase Intent [Worlds In Motion]. Branding by gameplay.
• Carcassonne on iPhone: $5 for a wonderful package [Ars Technica]. You need to at least know what this game is about. Also, it’s always useful to remember that Myst it’s available on the iPhone too.
• REJECTED! The MagicSteve story [Score Studios blog]. A truly funny story about an iPhone app that randomly quoted Steve.
• Analysis: Is The Game Industry A Happy Place? [Gamasutra]. Great article by @leighalexander, great discussion on the comments. Also check the discussion the article provoked on Slashdot.
• Evaluating Game Mechanics For Depth [Gamasutra Feature Article]. It’s been a while for a simple, useful and clearly written feature article on Gamasutra about game design. This one is worthy!
• Some thoughts about casual game design [Gamasutra Blog Article]. Same thing as above, but on the blogs section.

Social Media

• Beyond Social: Read/Write in The Era of Internet of Things [Read/Write Web]. It’s time to see what the possibilities for next waves are about. This article is somewhat related to this shorter one.
• Foursquare Google Maps Mashup [A VC]. I love mashups.
• Seis aspectos sobre Social Media que deben tener en cuenta los profesionales web [Pulso Social, Spanish]. It describes six aspects Social Media professionals should be aware about: Knowledge, Tools, Strategy, Conversation, Research and Metrics, providing resources for each one.
• Top 20 Sites to Improve Your Twitter Experience [Mashable]. That’s it. Very good ones.

Marketing

• 20 ejemplos de Marketing Guerrilla [Diego Mattei's Blog, Spanish]. Guerrilla Marketing examples, it doesn’t need to be English, you can check them anyway.
• Coke Happines Machine [Mashable]. Just brilliant. Check the video if you want to be amazed, read the article to learn how to work the magic .

Entrepreneurship

• Startups: Welcome to the lost decade [Venture Beat]. Some reflections about the current decade and entrepreneurship.
• Data-driven Startups [David Cancel's Blog]. Insightful and useful slides.
• Will Zynga Become the Google of Games? [NY Times].

Misc

• R in a nutshell [Slashdot]. Nice book review about a really useful and nice tool.
• Doit.Im: User Friendly Task Management Tool. Yet another one, always useful to check if anyone works .
• Course about using Circos [Circos website]. A circular network visualization tool I was planning to write about, but this one seems better .

See you next week!

This is my first post on a series I hope to write on a weekly basis: Last week’s interesting links. Meaning “what I’ve found interesting last week” .

Game Development

• Social Games Classification [Gamasutra blog post]: (A)Synchronicity and (A)Symmetry.
• Image Metrics Acquires Character-FX [Gamasutra]: You should always keep an eye on this company. Seriously.
• The real cost of marketing your game with Social Media [Gamasutra feature article]: An excellent article to extract a clear and focused strategy to develop a social media campaign beyond gaming.
• Free-to-play business model starting to generate a “geiser of money” for iPhone game makers[VentureBeat]: Remember when everyone thought microtransactions were destined to failed?

Social Media

• 5 Social Media Trends to watch right now [Mashable]: Location, Group Buying, Mobile Ads, Mobile Payments and Having a Social Media Policy.
• 10 Tips for Building Brand Communities [Open Forum]: Great tips for community management for brands.
• Foursquare’s Next Game: Choose Your Own Adventure? [Mashable]: Foursquare expanding it’s game-inspired features to grow even more.

Marketing

• MTV to develop Social Games based on Shows and characters [Mashable]: It’s not particularly “news”, but it would probably set a bar for media franchise development on the forefront of current trends: Social Media and Video games.
• 12 Clever Social Media-Friendly Business Cards [Mashable].
• Beyond Personal Brand to Character [Communication Overtones]: Too much focus on brand can hurt the image you’re proyecting if what inspired your personal branding efforts, your values, fade away.

Entrepreneurship

• Entrepreneur: You’re No Steve Jobs, so look before you leap [Techcrunch]: The title is self explanatory. Don’t believe that just because you behave like him you’ll end up having your own Apple.
• Founder personalities and the “first-class man” theory of management [Eric Cries' Lessons Learned]: An interesting article about some myths and research about the personalities of entrepreneurs.
• How to know if you are ready for entrepreneurship [About.com]: Health, focus, will, caring people around you, business network good and activated and years of savings.
• Freelancer Pricing, Business Terms and Effective Project Management [About.com]: Fees, negotiation and first meeting tips.

Misc

• 11 Essential Online Resources for Consultants [Mashable]: I was actually planning to write about something like this, the tool set for the freelance consultant , this one is pretty good though.
• Turning a To-Do List Into a Game [NYTimes]: I’d definitely play this.
• Clients from hell posts on Scope creep and Generation Shift.
• A couple of papers from an old classmate, always inspiring to read such things : Symmetric Submodular Function Minimization Under Hereditary Family Constraints and Matroid Secretary Problem in the Random Assignment Model.

See you next week!

These are some notes I took at a visit to the “First Tuesday” event of July 6th 2010.

The angel networks that attended were:

• Southern Angels: related to Universidad Adolfo Ibañez, their website is under construction, please don’t think is this one.
• Angeles de Chile: related to Universidad de Chile’s Economics School.
• Angeles del Sur: They’re at Concepción, be careful about the video that starts to play automatically on their website.
• Chilean Global Angels: They’re the network most likely related to technology as far as I know, because the other ones invest on biotechnology, agriculture and similar.
• Angeles Dictuc: They’re the angels network from Universidad Católica.

My highlights from the talks:

• Understanding entrepreneurship in a context of social change, based on the book “Reframing Organizational Culture.”
• Angel investors are looking for, basically, someone who answers: “Who are you? and what us, the world and you gain with your idea, in that order and how much?”.
• All of them invest in the range of 20.000 to 500.000 USD depending on the project, considering positive to have been through Corfo’s “line 1″ and “line 2″ to have seasoned entrepreneurs, and they all charge a fee of the raised capital when it materializes, except for Chilean Global Angels who charge about 200 USD in some point in the middle of the process.
• Never say that your business it’s good because your “cash flows are good”. Never use bad estimations or wrong flows. Never be confused about who’s the client or what the innovating component of your business is. Never stay local, get some ambition to take your project worldwide.
• Each one of these networks have a process of several stages in which the entrepreneur receives feedback all the time, whether the business receives approvals or not. Approximate time to get funding is six to nine to twelve months. The expected return is 3x in 5 years, average.

The critical factor, according to each angels representative:

• Chilean Global Angels: Investment factor (what does the investor wins).
• Ángeles de Chile: A common vision between investors and entrepreneurs regarding shares and direction for the company to grow in the future.
• Ángeles del Sur: Good market research.
• Ángeles Dictuc: Good compromise, team balance and reasonable expectations.
• Southern Angels: Good team, good idea and well presented.

Finally, some advice and good practices for entrepreneurs according to Chilean Global Angels:

There are some common flaws from the entrepreneurs that the networks or the very angel investors can help to resolve, however they must be aware about:

• Little market research: Some entrepreneurs think they don’t have the skills to perform the research. However, there are several ways to do it and it’s important that they are aware about it in front of the angel investors.
• Not being prepared for high growth: Entrepreneurs must be very clear about how to manage unexpected events, where the company cash may be insufficient to cover the high volumes of inventory of the needs for more infrastructure for transactions beyond expected.
• Accounting and administrative tasks: Three key tasks to be carried out by entrepreneurs are: invoice management, collect money that is “on the streets”, and deliver their solutions on time and minimize the existing inventory.
• Sales focus: Sell, sell and sell to any client while there is value generated. This strategy also strengthen the market position and close the open door to competitors.
• Advertisement it’s NOT the only marketing tool: The marketing carried out by the entrepreneurs can also include activities to keep clients happy, loyal and raise the average value of each sale.
• Ask for help when necessary: This last point is critical for an entrepreneur, it implies that having formally a good group of advisors such as accountants, attorneys and business people with experience is key. But be careful, one can count with this kind of support informally. Always consult your friends, fellows and other parties that can give you some support.

Hope this may be useful for other entrepreneurs!

Hello, this is my first post on the blog within my website that I just finished to customize. For now, just feel free to check it out and wait for some awesome posts to come in a rss feed to this blog near you!