Ignite and Pecha Kucha

Pecha Kucha are and Ignite are two different public presentation formats focused on speeding things up. Presenters at both types of events have a limited number of slides they can show and each slide is limited to 15 or 20 seconds on screen before automatically advancing. It's challenging and can be very entertaining.

According to Wikipedia, the history of Pecha Kucha is as follows:
"It was originally devised by Astrid Klein and Mark Dytham of Klein-Dytham Architecture (KDa) in Tokyo in 2003 as a place for young designers to meet, network, and show their work in public. The format has spread virally to many cities across the world. The name derives from a Japanese term for the sound of conversation ("chit-chat")."

Indeed, PechaKucha.org lists 129 cities around the world where these events are happening.

A related event called Ignite has also begun to spread around the world. Popularized by the O'Reilly publishing group, Ignite is very similar to Pecha Kucha but uses 15 slides for 20 seconds each.

As the website for the wildly popular Ignite Portland event says: "If you had five minutes on stage what would you say? What if you only got 20 slides and they rotated automatically after 15 seconds? Around the world geeks have been putting together Ignite nights to show their answers."

These presentations can range from inspiring to funny. Below are two examples, "Why Deutschland Loves David Hasselhoff" by Mario Schulzke and the awe inspiring "Dare to Go Where You Fear" by Liz Kimmerly.

It Appears There is Hope

Is the internet going to absorb our brains into a private world of websites and online video (not to mention must-read blogs like this one)? Or is there still hope for public, shared communication - even in the real world? We think the examples above are reason to hope that even Powerpoint still has potential.

If you've participated in an event like this where you live, or if you have another favorite model for high-energy public communication - let us know.

Do Facebook Users Care About Commenting On Mini-Feeds?

Recently, Facebook changed its layout involving the commenting functionality on Mini-Feed items. Before, you had to click on the plus sign ("+") to add a comment, but now the word "comment" is written out. VentureBeat is reporting on this change and notes that it's probably to make the new commenting functionality more visible to users, since it appears that few are currently using this feature. But is it possible that the lack of use isn't because Facebook users didn't notice it, but because they just don't care?

On the new layout, the word "comment" does make it much more obvious what the new feature allows you to do, but even so, will Facebook users care to use this?

Maybe It's Just Not Useful?

For one thing, this functionality is built into the Mini-Feed (the feed on a user's profile page) as opposed to the News Feed (the stream of all your friends' updates), which means you only have the ability to add a comment if you're visiting a friend's profile directly - a place where you already have many options for commenting - like the Wall, for example.

Also, unlike FriendFeed, which this feature is obviously modeled after, comments don't cause the news item to bubble up to the top, so it's possible you could miss seeing the comments. This could especially be an issue if you log in and do a lot of activities - like adding applications, joining groups, and friending others - before glancing at your Mini-Feed. All your latest activities will still be at the top of your feed, while the commented-on item(s) will have fallen further down the page.

You aren't alerted about the new comments, either, like you are with application notifications, so there's even more of a chance that they can be missed.

Yet all that wouldn't matter so much if this meta-commenting was actually a feature users were clamoring for. But are they? Outside the early adopter set, commenting on updates and posted items in this manner may not really be an activity that many people care about.

Do Mainstream Facebook Users Get It?

When explaining the feature to a few mainstream Facebookers to see what they thought, the responses were just lukewarm. Obviously, this wasn't a scientific survey, but their reactions could possibly be indicative of the typical Facebook user mindset: Why comment on a feed item about a photo upload when you can just comment on the photo itself? Why leave your friend a comment they could miss when you can write on their wall...which they are notified about?

With these questions in mind, we wonder if it is possible that the commenting feature hasn't taken off yet not because it wasn't visible, but because most Facebook users don't really find the feature that useful? What do you think?

Bezos Invests in Social Gaming Network

Jeff Bezos clearly thinks there is a future in casual gaming. Just this May, he invested $3 million in Kongregate. Today, Bezos invested an undisclosed amount in the Social Gaming Network (SGN), which develops games like Jetman and WarBook for social platforms such as Bebo and Facebook.

This investment from Bezos comes just a few months after SGN raised a $15 million Series A round led by Greylock Partners and the Founders Fund.

With investments in Twitter, Whrrl, Kongregate, and Animoto, Bezos has been very active in funding start-ups lately.

SGN is monetizing its games mostly through advertising, but also through subscriptions and sales of virtual goods. The company's properties have about 1 million daily users, enough to make it attractive for large advertisers.

Overall, users have installed SGN games over 50 million times and handed out over 70 million gifts. It is, of course, questionable how many of these 50 million apps are still active, but with 1 million daily users, SGN is definitely one of the larger players in the casual gaming market.

Casual gaming is clearly turning into a major platform for advertisers. While both Kongregate and SGN are mostly focused on the web, the large range of casual games already available on the iPhone and other mobile devices shows that there is a very large market for them.

At the same time, though, it seems quite a few users are also very willing to actually pay for these games - as long as the prices are reasonable. As more and more investors are looking for companies that are not fully dependent on advertising for their revenue, the casual gaming market is probably going to see more investments like Bezos' in the near future.

gPhone? Just a Rumor - The Real Story Is The Android Developer Revolt

Of course, we all know that the event of the past week (or perhaps we should say the event of the year, given the news coverage), has been the launch of the iPhone 2.0. Yet even amidst the iPhone news frenzy - the lines at the stores, the activations, the failures, the apps! - there was another phone getting some press too - the Google Phone. The rumor was that Google was going to build its own phone after all. Yet while that rumor was catching the headlines, the real story was taking place within the developer community itself.

gPhone - It's Just A Rumor

A few blogs ran with the story that Google might be considering building the gPhone after all. The reason for this latest round of rumors? Hollywood Reporter's Dan Cox wrote an article summarizing a semi-formal press conference on Friday where Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergei Brin and CEO Eric Schmidt met to discuss the state of the technology community. In the article, Dan wrote: "The trio of Google execs also used the opportunity to talk about the inroads the company is making with its own branded mobile phone as a replacement for the iPhone." Add to that a claim that the Ammunition Group is designing it and you've got a full-on Gphone rumor.

Unfortunately, the rumor is most likely just that - a rumor. Silicon Alley Insider took a look at Reuter's reporter, Ken Li's, notebook from the event and made the determination that "the Google guys were talking about the fact that they're not producing their own branded phone, and that there isn't a 'Google phone.' And something got mixed up in the translation."

They also made the rather sensible statement that "if the Google guys had talked about a major change in their mobile strategy, you'd think the story might have appeared in other outlets."

We asked Google for comment and they actually pointed us to the same Silicon Alley Insider story, saying it was all just a misunderstanding by one of the reporters in the audience. They also noted that their hope for the Android platform will spur the development of thousands of different kinds of phones.

We wonder though, if these rumors point to the fact that there may be a demand, or at least a desire, to see Android loaded onto a Google-branded phone as opposed to it being just another mobile platform? Are people already looking for a solid iPhone competitor?

Android Developers Are Mad

Of course, before you can have a successful gPhone or mobile platform, you have to have a happy developer community and lately, those guys have been getting antsy.

Public developers recently started an online petition on Android's Google Group because they're frustrated with the lack of an updated SDK - the last one was provided in March 2008. The complaints are that the current SDK is buggy and that certain features don't work.

The Android Developers' Petition

The first post that begins the petition states:

In order not to lose many highly encouraged developers, I think its time to release some news about the development process of the SDK. Maybe let us know why we have to live with these long cycles...In my personal opinion it is not the right choice to keep developers in the dark. We, the developers, are the absolute base of success to the whole Android platform. The presentation with GoogleIO was a good first step but for me it was nto [sic] enough.

Other developers chimed in to express their dissatisfaction, too. One developer claims he's only going to wait until the end of July, then he's switching to iPhone or Windows Mobile. Another says the developer community is falling apart, calling them "Google roadkill." A third notes that by the time a new SDK ships, many of the developers will have already released software on the iPhone platform, noting that it's "a platform with 20+ million users versus ZERO user install base for Android.  It's not a hard decision to make after all.  Hopefully someone wakes up sooner than later."

Google's Android Engineers Are Frustrated, Too

Among the 37 responses, a Google Engineer Jean-Baptiste Queru spoke up. Although he makes it clear that he's not the official spokesperson for Android, he does try to address some of the issues while also expressing some frustrations from the engineering team's side of the fence, too. In fact, reading between the lines a bit, it sounds like some of the engineers aren't happy with the decisions being made, either.

His post reads, in part (see the full version here):

I'm going to get into trouble for this post...

There is some truth however in saying that we (the Google Android team) are very much focusing on playing our part in getting an Android device on the shelves as soon as we possibly can, and that focus comes at the expense of other tasks, like getting an SDK out.

There've [sic] been quite a few long threads recently in various groups(this thread, along with one in android-developers and one in android-internals) around the issue of communication from Google. I'm sure that many of the people who participated in those threads get the feeling that their comments fell on deaf ears, whereas in fact that's not true. Quite a few members of the Google Android team read those groups (and we also read a number of community web sites), and (quite a bit by definition) we are the ones who do care about the community. Many of us have played roles in various developer communities in the past, very often on both sides of the fence, and in more ways that one we understand the situation that the developer community is in right now and we share the pain. So, while those posts aren't falling on deaf ears, they're typically falling in the wide-open ears of people whose hands are tied and whose mouths are gagged, and the frustration that such posts create in the Android team might in fact be larger than the relief that gets created in the community.

I'm afraid that none of all that I just wrote brings any closure in terms of communication. That's all because it's not my role to communicate the "big picture" answers that people would like to hear. The Google Android people who read the groups hear you, we understand your pain, we communicate it back up to our management, we're not happy about the situation either, we'd love more openness too. And, just like anybody else, we don't like to read implications that we're lazy, or that we're liars, or that we don't care about you, or any of the other nasty things that have been written or implied about us, because none of that it true.

The full post is much longer and is followed up by a second post where Queru says that he's not about to say anything concrete about the ship date for the next SDK.

Wow. What on earth is going on over there with Android?