Wizards of Kid at Toy Fair 2011

ShadyLogic will be presenting the Wizards of Kid (The Alchemy of transforming Kid´s Movies, TV and Toys into Online Worlds at Engage at the Toy Fair 2011. It has been a busy year, and we have had a lot of fun helping Activision design and develop a web world that is integral to the Skylanders [...]

A Checklist for Kids Virtual Worlds

In February I  was honored to be part of a Panel on Virtual World development at Engage 2010 at the NY Toy Fair. In “The Tactical Perspective:  A Best Practices Checklist” we discussed the process of migrating brands online, including a typical product development roadmap and timeline.  At a high level we covered the different phases of [...]

Should Designers Script?

At last years LOGIN conference Peter asked me to do a debate.  Knowing that I was bit outspoken in my views on technology and game design he pitted me against Isaac Barry of Gamehouse.  Our topic… “Should game designers be allowed to write code in a  scripting language”. Watch the video if you want to [...]

Future of Web3D

I had the good fortune to present on the Future of Web3D as part of a panel at the Web3D symposium at SIGGRAPH 2008.  This is the segment on Youtube. It was a great panel put together by Rita Turkowski of Intel and featured Remi Arnaud, Johannes Berh, Mimi Harris, Doug Twilleager, Christian Renaud, Vladimir Vukicevic and [...]

Farewell to China and my friend Robert

On June 25th Dr. Robert Lai (Mr. Lai Chi Tau) Chief Scientist of China’s Cyber Recreational District (CRD) passed away in his sleep at the age of 50. I met Robert at the Virtual Worlds Conference and Expo (VWCE) and in November I had the privilege to be invited by Robert to speak at the [...]

What is Community?

Jeremiah Owyang posted a question about how we define “Online Communities”. In referencing Jake Mckee’s post on the subject he wonders is Twitter a community? Before we answer that question we have to define what a “Community” is? As has been pointed out by Robin Hamman, “Community” “has dozens if not hundreds of distinct definitions”. [...]

Moore’s Law vs. Dunbars Number

Moore’s Law wins. In a recent twitter conversation Jeremiah Owyang asked the question, ” Did we break Dunbar’s Number of 150 members per social network? Or are tools more efficient?” The reality is that we have been pushing Dunbar’s number since we first invented the little black book. By offloading much of the social context [...]

Who is the Long Tail?

We have been making a lot of noise about the long tail for a while now in our little world of Web 2.0 and it struck me this morning while reading a post by Gordon Haff that we don’t really talk about where it comes from. The long tail has many forms, some obvious ones [...]

Is Disney good for Club Penguin?

On GigaOM Carleen blogged that she thought that Club Penguin sold out to Disney and it might ruin Club Penguin. I think she came close on a couple points, but missed the bigger picture. Disney is by its nature a big lumbering beast that is mired in bureaucracy. Having worked there a while I found [...]

Penguins + Disney = Duh!

If you have been curiously watching the news around Club Penguin you may have wondered aloud, is this really worth $500-$700 million? The answer is it depends on who you are. Certainly on its face the projected revenues by themselves don’t seam to make sense, especially as was mentioned on TechCrunch that penguins (like anything [...]