Mark's World » vancouver

DemoCamp Vancouver

Mark Lise — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 16:13:51 +0000

What’s best way to follow up DemoCampVictoria01? Go to DemoCampVancouver06 – Gaming edition. I saw a lot of familiar faces from the last time I was over; Boris, Brendon, Greg, and Roland just to name a few.

Parveen Kaler talked about iPhone game development, specifically the medium and what it means. He mentioned that the iPhone audience is fundamentally different, you can’t just port a game from one platform to it. ie: They are playing games in transit – on the bus to work/school, so developing a 50 hour game probably isn’t a wise choice.

Dustin Sacks from Sillysoft games had a great demo of his product, Lux Delux. It’s a turn-based strategy much like Risk. Being a former Risk player, I found it to be pretty interesting His company cares a lot about the users community and it’s quite apparent they have a solid base of customers. They even contribute back to the company freely with things such as AI (Artificial Intelligence) and other downloadable apps. He had a lot of solid ideas and content when doing his demo, so I hope to find the time to post in detail about this later.

One of the main points to come out of DemoCampVancouver06 “gaming edition” was that the future of games seems to be “free to play”. This basically means that anybody can grab the game without paying any fees – (via download or some other distribution channel). This begs the question, how do they make their money if the product value is essentially $0.00? The answer is selling premium services as value-add. For example: Say by default every time you die you lose your items. What if you had the option to add “For $2, keep my items when I get killed” – that I agree would be a great way to monetize the game .

This was a great DemoCamp to be at – I’m on the search to find similar stories in Victoria.

Community Platforms & Community Harmonization

Mark Lise — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 16:23:20 +0000

This morning I read a post from David Crow on “Community Platforms“. It got me thinking about our local community, that being Victoria and Vancouver. I have always been a supporter of community platforms and open source, but I’d like to see that go further into the real world. Vancouver has quite a buzz w.r.t. technology and so does Victoria, however here in Victoria you have to go searching for it to find it.

There are lots of user groups here in Vic, but there are little silos here and there and there’s no cohesion or merging of the groups happening. This is where I think DemoCampVictoria can help change. Lets see what happens when we try to bring some of those people together to create new relationships, learn about what others are doing and maybe help contribute to the direction of technology development in Victoria.

Now you’re probably wondering at this point why I mentioned Vancouver as a “local” town. It’s only a 30km trip North of Victoria (that can come with a wide selection of hot and cold entrees), and there are so many human-links between the two cities. Why not try to feed these connections? If you think of it as a platform, it only makes sense if you’re living in Victoria to add the “Vancouver plugin” your ecosystem.

OpenWeb Vancouver

Mark Lise — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 18:24:38 +0000

Geeks Unite! As the title says on their page… I will be attending OpenWebVancouver this year. This event I’m especially looking forward to as it brings together web technology, culture, design, and the open source discussion all in one neat little place. If you want to learn about where the web is going today from some of the top leaders in the space, come to Openweb Vancouver! Talks include those from the Mozilla foundation, Google, Sun Microsystems, and Facebook.

The event is put on by the Vancouver PHP user’s association, a non-profit organization that advances php development and other open source initiatives. Sign up and register today to learn about or simply promote the use of open source technology! Hope to see you all there!