Odd Ramblings from a Superfly Gaming 3.0 Start-Up

Berlin, April 3rd, 2009 – Red Herring announced that Muzui was named a WINNER of the Red Herring 100 Europe, an award given to the top 100 private technology companies based in the EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) region each year.

Read the rest of this entry »

Only one out of ten mobile games titles becomes profitable, due to the high development costs and the greedy publishers and operators. Consequently, not even the best mobile games make a profit.

Read the rest of this entry »

A couple of weeks ago, one of our most anticipated indie games emerged to the surface after a year in silence. The name of the game is Fez and it’s Kokoromi, a small Montreal-based team working their magic. To celebrate the news, I pulled out an old “just-for-the-thrills-pseudo-3D-Fez-tribute” starring Andy’s favorite character The Shadow. All you can do in this tech prototype is press ‘SPACE’ to rotate the world. The trick behind the demo, is that it doesn’t really render complex 3D shapes. All it does is scale the width of each tile and shade it. The effect works great for a low-strength machine (say a mobile device) but it’s in no way either voxel-based nor trixel-based.

Here’s my take:

Click inside the flash window, and use SPACE to rotate

For a while now, the three brothers, have discussed Twitter and its succes quite vividly. We all like Twitter and we use it ourselves to publish thoughts and links. So as users we see the obvious benefits of the service. But, and there is always a but, we also see some problems in regards to Twitter as a business.

Twitter vs. Status Updates

Plainly speaking Twitter is a social network stripped of all social features, except for the status updates. This is probably also one of the key ingredients in its succes. So, why is Tweets any different from FaceBook status updates? Well, I have given this alot of thought and the obvious reason that came to mind, was that Twitter is a service for professionals while FaceBook is a community for friends, as they demonstrate time and time again. Being an avid twitter user myself I have noticed that almost every single update I see, is from a professional who uses Twitter to gain awareness, make money or brand themselves. So, a Linkedin comparison would probably be more appropriate than a FaceBook. Instead of friends you have followers. Is Linkedin really about more then profiling yourself and your network? Twitter ads the value of blogmentality, which Linkedin have blatantly overlooked as statusupdates there are as rare as revenue in web 2.0 startups (I’ll get back to that).

Read the rest of this entry »

Everybody’s talking about search engine optimization (SEO) as a key ingredient in the marketing mix, during the financial crisis. If SEO was important before the crisis, it’s even more critical, when advertising revenues are decreasing and marketing budgets are reduced. But what happens when everybody seeks this Holy Grail?

Read the rest of this entry »

“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”
Leonardo da Vinci

We’re Web 2.0 fanatics/geeks - we admire the simple innovations. Yesterday, David stumbled upon a site called 25lines.com that promulgates simplicity. The idea is this: Create whatever you want in 25 lines of code. Just code. No library assets, nothing loaded in. Just code. This requires a resourceful and innovative mindset. Just see what this guy came up with (Alvaro Videla ported it to JavaScript, perhaps someone can port this to J2ME?). He won the contest in December. Kudos to Marius from Muzui! This would be a great project for job interviews - make them create whatever they want in 25 lines of code. Often, this will show how disciplined and creative, the person is.

Read the rest of this entry »

We LOVE Japan! The culture is booming with interesting stuff online and offline. We get inspired by Takashi Murakami’s contemporary art. Our day is incomplete without a sushi snack. And we think Shichinin no samurai is the coolest film titel in the world. Naturally, Muzui in itself is hugely inspired by Japan: It’s short for muzu’kashii meaning beautiful and difficult, according to the japanese slang dictionary. We also pay attention to what happens on the tech scene. And it’s inspiring!

Read the rest of this entry »

Seth Godin, marketing guru, entrepreneur extraordinaire, action figure and perhaps a bit overhyped, has come up with seven pieces of advice in the financial crisis. For the people, who don’t know Godin, he came up with permission marketing where the audience opt in to your marketing ploys. He holds that since TV ‘died’ the audience has to choose to follow you - you can’t demand attention. Secondly, the consumers have the power, so you have to show respect. Finally, he asserts that the only way to catch the consumers’ attention is by having a remarkable message.

Read the rest of this entry »

We’re disciples of Wordpress. It’s the epitome of the Web 2.0 culture that we love: Simple, user-friendly, search engine optimised, and open-source. Even big blogs that can afford to develop their own platform opt to use Wordpress. Michael Arrington even proclaimed Wordpress as one of the things he couldn’t live without in 2009. Because it’s open, you can use it for literally everything by searching for a Wordpress plugin plus the function you need. Due to its open nature, there are vast amounts of plugins out there, which make it hard to figure out which are necessary. There are a few that we always use because they serve functions that are always usefull and cool. So here’s our Top 5 Wordpress Plugins (drumroll):

Read the rest of this entry »