Family Learning Center

Posts Tagged ‘Time And Money’

Facebook on Track for $1 Billion Revenue This Year

According to figures released today by the singularly focused blog Inside Facebook, the ubiquitous social network made upwards of $700 million in 2009 and is expected to reach a phenomenal $1 billion in revenues in 2010.

Year over year, Facebook’s revenues have typically doubled, from $150 million in 2007 to around $300 million in 2008 and so on.

The breakdown of revenue streams is fascinating, showing the extent to which well-targeted ads based on massive amounts of user data still drives how we monetize the Web.

These data also show how much some have underestimated the market for virtual goods and the real-world value of virtual currency – as much as $10 million in 2009 alone, still in beta and just for one social network.

Sponsor

Last year, brand advertising and performance advertising are estimated to have netted $225 million and $350 million for the company, respectively. Microsoft ads alone brought in $50 million.

All this cash flow makes the $10 million Facebook earned from its still-in-beta Facebook Credits system seem puny. We wonder how much this figure will increase when Credits are rolled out for all users and all applications.

A common rumor about Credits is that this virtual currency will become the mandatory, de facto method of purchasing virtual goods – from Gifts to in-game accessories – on Facebook. If that were to happen, Facebook (which takes a 30 percent cut of all Credits revenue) stands to make a great deal more than $10 million as it takes on the role of virtual currency exchange.

Facebook has stated it will not comment on these figures or speculation about future revenues. However, it is completely clear that this company has found a way to make the Web dramatically profitable. They’ve done so by honing their revenue streams, getting creative with brands, tweaking their UX to maximize time and money spend on the site and targeting ads based on user data. And these revenues will only continue to grow as Facebook edges out competing networks for users’ attention and brands’ ad spend.

Discuss

Read the whole story…

feature: Lockdown: creating a secure domain policy in Windows

The recent Google hack has brought security to the top of every IT admin’s mind, if it wasn’t there already. But securing a network is a huge investment of time and money, to the point that many best practcices are out-of-reach for many small and medium businesses. Nonetheless, there is hope. Windows shops can get a good, cheap head-start on security by simply ensuring that their domain security policy is solid. In this article, Ars shows you how to create a group policy that will secure Active Directory (AD) according to current best practices, while keeping it open enough to ensure that operational headaches remain at a minimum.

Note: For reference, all policy settings discussed in this article can be found under Computer Configuration > Windows Settings > Security Settings in the Group Policy Editor (gpedit.msc)

Read the whole story…

Week in gaming: New Super Mario Bros. and DJ Hero death

This week has been filled with games that are worth your time and money. Classically trained gamers will enjoy the newly multiplayer-enhanced New Super Mario Bros. Wii, while Left 4 Dead 2 is a great entry into the co-operative gaming space, and the God of War Collection is a great look back at games that feel current and fresh.

We also talk with the CEO of Square Enix about bridging the gaps between the East and West, and give up some thoughts about why DJ Hero didn’t find a large audience in the United States. Welcome to the week in gaming.

Read the whole story…

Ohai launches massively multiplayer online vampire game on Facebook

Game startup Ohai is launching a new vampire-themed online world on Facebook as part of an attempt to snare more time and money from social network fans.

Social games have exploded on Facebook this year. But the games have been casual, holding the interest of users for just minutes a day. Ohai wants to take social games to the next generation by launching a massively multiplayer online (MMO) game that will have synchronous play, meaning live games with constant movement and action.

Susan Wu, co-founder and chief executive of San Francisco-based Ohai, said in an interview that she hopes that by launching City of Eternals on its own web site and on Facebook, the company will attract players who would never otherwise play an MMO. She also said that Ohai intends to make its games addictive enough to generate a lot more revenue each month than typical social games, which generate sales of a few dollars a month.

It’s an interesting gamble, since Facebook games are dominated by Zynga and Playfish, whose games have tens of millions of players. But it only makes sense that there should be more to Facebook games than farming carrots (Zynga’s hit FarmVille title) or running restaurants (Playfish’s Restaurant City).

“There is a huge market left untapped for MMOs that can be played by everyone,” Wu said in an interview. “It’s the next leap in social gaming. To date, MMOs have been pretty inaccessible.”

Ohai’s game is accessible in part because it runs on Flash and doesn’t have complex 3-D graphics like many hardcore MMOs that require expensive computers. The two-dimensional vampire game is synchronous, meaning players can move about simultaneously in a live world rather than take one turn at a time.

It runs at a fast speed in a small browser window on a Facebook page. That’s no small achievement, since the game has to handle as much as 5,000 web-based transactions per 100 players.

The game is set in New Valencia, a modern-day vampire city in the Pacific Northwest and it has a complex story with more than 20 different missions. Users can create their own vampire characters, customizing the look and clothing to their own tastes. The players can fight supernatural creatures in combat zones and level up, earning goods along the way. You start the game with an apartment that you can decorate. You can grow things to buy or sell, adopt a trade, and join one of four vampire houses, or clans. You can enlist your friends as minions in a vampire army. A lot of these features are standard in social role-playing games. But there’s a lot more room to explore in City of Eternals, which has a sizable map with a growing list of locations to visit.

The game is free to play. But if they want a better experiences, players can pay for virtual goods for anywhere from 2 cents to $20. Users can earn or purchase Ohai coins, which can be used to make the goods purchases.

The game is social because of the integration with Facebook. It is integrated with Facebook Connect and Twitter. In the middle of the game, you can use a mouse to hover over a vampire character, and it will show the user’s Facebook name and picture. You can then send them a Facebook friend request. Normally, in MMOs, there’s no easy way to find out the identity of another player, except through direct communication. You can do that via text chat in City of Eternals as well, but there is no voice chat at the moment.

Ohai has a real opportunity here for a few reasons. Vampire games were once the most popular app on Facebook. One of them was created by Blake Commagere, who joined Ohai as a co-founder but has since left. Now, vampire games are nowhere to be found on Facebook’s top 15 leading apps, according to AppData. So Ohai’s game has a chance to pull in desperate vampire fans. Its timing is also good given the popularity of vampire shows like True Blood, Underworld, and Twilight, Wu said. In that sense, City of Eternals can tap into the growing popular interest in the romance, action and dark humor of vampires.

There are also no popular synchronous MMO games on Facebook. Asynchronous role-playing mafia games, where players take turns one at a time, are popular. It may very well be that social gamers don’t really want to play synchronous games, which in some ways are more demanding of the user’s attention.

But that’s a test for Ohai. Synchronous MMOs aimed at hardcore gamers are wildly popular on stand-alone web sites. World of Warcraft has 12 million paying subscribers for its fantasy role-playing game, but there is no equivalent of it on Facebook, largely because typical PC-based MMOs are built by teams with scores of people working for years. Gaming on Facebook is just a couple of years old.

Wu, whose resume includes being a professional Quake 2 gamer and former partner at Charles River Ventures, started the company in the fall of 2008 and recruited a top team of game veterans. As co-founders she enlisted Commagere, Scott Hartsman of Sony Online, and Don Neufeld of Sony Online Entertainment. Both Commagere and Hartsman have left. Wu said that was a “natural evolution” of a startup.

With just three engineers on a team of 12, the company managed to build its first MMO in just nine months. Neufeld, who has worked on 15 MMOs in his career, said the team built a game platform that can be deployed quickly. Ohai plans to go into production on its second game next month and take much less time to finish the game. The plan is to create games that operate as efficiently as web services.

Ohai built the game in Adobe Flash 3D and created bite-sized entertainment that players can play in short bursts of time. There are 10,000 alpha users now who play an average of 65 minutes a day and log in as many as 10 times daily. So the average game sessions are short, in contrast to most hardcore MMOs like EverQuest. Players can enter the game at a variety of points, depending on what they want to do. They don’t have to waste time traveling from one part of the game world to another.

Ohai raised $6 million in January from August Capital and Rustic Canyon Ventures. Wu believes that Facebook games last a short time and don’t generate much more than a couple of bucks a month per user, whereas quality MMOs like World of Warcraft can generate a lot more money.

“Our goal is to take over the MMO universe,” Wu said.

[Pictured: Ohai's Franky Aguilar, Susan Wu, Don Neufeld, and Chris Olson]

Read the whole story…

Tibco Offers Real-Time Service For Optimizing BPM Software

Tibco is offering a real-time service called iProcess Spotfire that allows business users to manipulate data and produce reports from their business process management (BPM) software.

Tibco’s do-it-yourself (DIY) service represents one of the promises of the real-time enterprise. The task of updating and fine tuning BPM software usually requires the help of IT personnel. It’s reminiscent of how the web has made the most complex tasks fairly doable by people with little expertise. Tasks that once required experts now can be performed by people with few technical skills.

Sponsor

The Tibco service is designed for all levels of business users. Professionals can use it to understand the operation aspects of the process performance. Executives can use it to get a broad look at the business.

iProcess Spotfire features:

Personalized process reporting and analytics: Gone are the static dashboards. Custom templates display reports that are tailored to specific users.

Better Context: Tibco provides the ability to extract process performance data generated by the BPM and combine it with business information from other applications. This provides the business manager with a broader context than if the data from the BPM environment was all that could be accessed.

Self-service: Instead of relying on IT to create custom reports, iProcess Spotfire enables business users to customize their own work and analyze the metrics themselves. By empowering the business users directly, companies can save time and money, while simultaneously ensuring that changes in the business process performance can be identified and acted upon by the most appropriate people, in the most efficient manner.

Due in large part to the faltering economy, BPM software is proving to be one of the hottest growing sectors in the enterprise IT market. According to Gartner, the BPM market will increase 5% over the next year. Companies that make the investment now in BPM will see better growth when the economy rebounds.

The Tibco offering optimizes BPM software even more by making it a DIY product. Efficiencies are maximized and business managers get to make better customizations that in the long run could have a real effect on the bottom line.

Disclosure: Tibco is a sponsor of the ReadWrite Real-Time Web Summit to be held October 15 at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Ca.

Discuss

Read the whole story…

Federal courts now offer hearings online as MP3 files

US federal courts are in the midst of a fascinating pilot program that could eventually bring MP3 digital audio recordings of court proceedings in a Montana federal building to an investigative journalist working in Boca Raton.

The courts already run the PACER system, which offers Public Access to Court Electronic Records. Theses are generally PDF copies of all documents (except those under seal) filed in federal courts across the country. As a tool, it’s an amazing time and money saver for lawyers, journalists, and the public, despite the 8¢ per page charge for most documents which has proved controversial.

Read the whole story…