Category: Tech news

[Editor’s note: James Altucher is an investor, programmer, author, and several-times entrepreneur. He is Managing Director of Formula Capital and has written ten books. If you want to get him something for Christmas, here is his Christmas list. His latest books are I Was Blind But Now I See and 40 Alternatives to College. You can follow him on Twitter @jaltucher.]

Ugh, I can’t write anything today. It’s the end of the year. Tomorrow is Christmas. You’d think I would have something to say.

Merry Christmas.

Oh wait, you can’t even say that anymore. I’m Jewish! I have to say something like Happy Holidays. I don’t even know what Hannukah is. Does any Jewish person know what Hannukah is? We made up some battle that has no historical basis so we could have a holiday around December 25, itself a holiday where the history was somehow manipulated to be on December 25. For all we know, 5,000 years ago some Ethiopian warlord had a birthday on December 25 and ever since then we’ve been trying to line up our calendars to match his.

Ok. Happy Holidays.

Oh, I know what I will talk about. It’s fascinating. I just got my results from 23andMe.com, a company started by Sergey Brin’s wife, Anne Wojcicki, to do genetic testing.

Do you know the site?

Here’s what I had to do. They shipped this vial to me and I had to spit into it until it was half full. You ever try spitting for five minutes? For some reason my wife, Claudia, watched me the entire time. There’s something sexually unpleasant about it.

Then I had to put the vial in a carefully sealed box. I live in New York State, which apparently is the one state in this great republic we live in where it is illegal to do any sort of genetic testing, so I am not allowed to mail the vial from this state. What’s up with that Andrew Cuomo? Do you have something to hide?

So I had to give the box to a friend of mine, Brian, who lives in New Jersey. “I don’t want to give it to him,” I told Claudia the week before. “Why not?” she asked. “He’ll just put it in his mailbox.” “He’s going to forget about it,” I said, “and then he’s going to feel pressure to do it and then will feel bad and I don’t want anyone to feel bad.”

Brian came over and Claudia gave him the box. He said to me, “Are you just doing this in order to get a blog post out of it?”

“No way,” I said, “this information is too personal. I would never blog about it.”

“Why is it sealed wrong?” he said. There were two flaps that were supposed to be tucked under but they were sticking out. The box now looked like this weird paper airplane. Claudia made her usual joke, “James went to get a PhD in computer science and now he can’t seal a box.”

Brian, to his credit, just nodded his head and said, “Got it.” And took the box. A few weeks later he wrote me and said, “Dude, I’m sorry I haven’t sent it yet. I’m putting it in the mail today.”

This morning, Christmas Eve Day, I woke up with an email from 23andMe saying the results were in. I could now know everything about my genetics. What sort of shit my mom and dad left me in their twisted DNA.

A few months ago I met with a friend of mine who had his genes tested. I asked him what the number one thing he learned was. He said, “I learned that my father is my real biological father.” I was surprised that this was news to him. “Apparently a lot of people cheated on each other,” he said, “and these genetic results are showing people the truth.”

Well, I look a little like my dad so no worries there. And my mom had polio so she wasn’t getting around much (sorry Mom).

But I did learn that my father’s ancestry is either Bedouin or an Ashkenazi Jew. Or both. I almost like thinking of myself as Bedouin. Like Omar Sharif in Lawrence of Arabia. Either way, my ancestors are either from North Africa or the Middle East.

My mother’s ancestry surprised me. She is all northern Europe. Hmmm. Most people with her “haplogroup” are Scandinavian. I wonder if this means I should get blue contact lenses. I wonder if she knows she’s Scandinavian instead of Jewish. I wonder if she also knows that according to 23andMe, SUSAN SARANDON IS A DISTANT RELATIVE through her side of the family! Good thing I never married Susan.

I’m looking at this in realtime as I write this. They give me three warnings before they let me see the Alzheimer’s information. Okay, okay, I get it. Most people are wimps and are afraid to find out.

Oh no. Apparently between the ages of 50 and 79 I have a 14.2 out of 100 chance of being diagnosed with Alzheimer’s as opposed to a normal 7.2 out of 100. One of my parents was kind enough to give me an APOE 4 gene (the other gave me an APOE 3 gene), which is associated with twice the risk of getting Alzheimer’s. Goddamn them! I knew one of them was a loser but I just don’t know which one.

I  have another 35 years to go before I’m 79 so hopefully one of you techcrunch geniuses will be able to figure out a cure before then. Do it for me, if anything. And I think I can handle the odds of 86 out of 100 that I won’t be diagnosed. Good for me. In the community section on 23andMe there are now support groups for people with the APOE4 gene. Like they need a 12-step program for having bad genes.

Moving on.

Parkinson’s. Again with the warnings. Okay, here we go: I’m at the upper end of average. Average is 1 percent to 2 percent of people get it. I’m at 1.9 percent. Okay, good. I’ll exercise a lot to get that extra dopamine kicking in.

The disease I’m most likely to get based on my genetics is Type II Diabetes. I have a 38 out of 100 chance of getting it when the average is about 25 out of 100. But there are environmental factors that include obesity, so I don’t think I will get it. That’s about it. Oh, I have an increased risk of glaucoma. Which once again proves my dad is my dad. He had it, his mother had it, her mother had it. And so on. We’re all good there.

So the worst that can happen to me is that I go blind, lose my memory, lose my ability to manufacture dopamine, and have a heart attack and/or stroke (thanks to the imminent diabetes). The best that can happen to me is that maybe I can call myself a Bedouin. Or a North African. I like that.

Good news for my two daughters: I don’t carry any mutations for breast cancer (Ashkenazi Jews are apparently at higher risk of this). Nor am I a carrier for “Zellweger Syndrome Spectrum” which must be some predisposition to like all movies with Renee Zellweger. No wonder I didn’t like Bridget Jones Diary despite so many others of Bedouin or Ashkenazi Jew descent loving the movie.

Uh oh. Bad news. I have three times the risk of becoming a heroin addict. Which is too bad because I was thinking if I was ever in great pain for something then morphine or heroin would be my drug of choice. Hmmm. Have to file that one away. Can I at least take Percocet? It doesn’t say.

Here’s where they are completely wrong. Apparently I’ve inhererited an ability to “effectively learn from errors.” Hahaha. “People with the GG genotype learned to avoid choices associated with negative feedback relatively easily.” It’s taken me a long time to learn. I don’t know how effective I was when I was trying to pull myself off the floor. 

Oh, this is cool! 2.5 percent of my genome comes from Neanderthals. At last! I knew I wasn’t human. Oh wait. Unfortunately 2.5 percent is average. We killed them and raped them back in the day and all of us are basically 2.5 percent Neanderthal.

My kids will probably be surprised to find I have no risk of Tourette’s Syndrome. A lot of times when I randomly think of something embarassing that happened to me in the past, even from 30 years ago, I’ll shout out “No!” by accident. They’ve had to explain to their friends that, “Daddy does this sometimes,” and Claudia has gotten used to it. But apparently this is all me, and not from my genes.

Two other things that could affect my life. It turns out I am not likely to be a very good sprinter. I have no working copies of the ACTN3 genotype found in many world-class sprinters. So if a mugger is chasing me my best bet is to just give him all my money and not try to outrun him. I kind of suspected this one already.

Finally, I am genetically disposed to have a higher sensitivity to detecting the smell of asparagus in my urine after eating asparagus. This is true. Thank you 23andMe and God Bless You All.

[See also, “The 100 Rules for Being an Entrepreneur” and PLEASE follow me on Twitter at @jaltucher] 

London-based mobile taxi network Hailo is set to close a $30 million round of funding as it sets its sights on the U.S. market, reports AllThingsD. The Series B funding round is likely being led by Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures. Earlier this year, Hailo raised a $17 million round of series A financing led by Accel Partners.

According to AllThingsD’s sources, the new round values Hailo at about $140 million, a discount from Uber which was valued at more than twice that amount when it closed $32 million in Series B funding one year ago.

Hailo launched in London in 2011 and landed stateside in mid-October, when it officially opened for business in Boston, its first U.S. city. In London, Hailo matched passengers and licensed taxi drivers (unlike Uber, which uses private black cars), and in Boston it continued that model, working with city officials before service started there. In Toronto, where Hailo also started operating in the fall, the company sought out a cab company license. Hailo hopes this will help it avoid the regulatory problems that Uber has run into in NYC, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco and other major U.S. cities.

Hailo’s latest funding will help it prepare to do battle with Uber in Manhattan, where New Yorkers will be able to hail cab with smartphones starting on February 15 thanks to a year-long pilot program adopted by the Taxi and Limousine Commission.

Hailo has been emailed for comment and we’ll update if we get a response.

If you’re looking for something that closely matches the Jambox in portability and sound, but costs substantially less, this $100 boombox can’t be beat.

We navigate the flood of Jambox wannabes, testing a bunch of Bluetooth portable boomboxes. Here are eleven contenders for the wireless speaker crown.

Editor’s note: Ross Rubin is principal analyst at Reticle Research and blogs at Techspressive. Each column will look at crowdfunded products that have either met or missed their funding goals. Follow him on Twitter @rossrubin.

‘Tis the season when our thoughts often turn to the wee ones in our lives, and that has certainly been on the minds of some crowdfunding project owners and backers.

Backed: ATOMS Express Toys. Clearly aimed at the little (or not so little) maker in the house, the ATOMS line consists of three kinds of components: Blue bricks sense things; red bricks connect things; and green bricks do things. Yes, you can see the faint outlines of the developer mindset already. The bricks are all linked together with standard audio cables. Taking a cue from the construction masters at LEGO, ATOMS has packaged its bricks into different sets, one for building monsters, another for activating things via a “magic wand,” and a third for iOS control using a Bluetooth brick. One gets the feeling, though, that the young ones’ favorite component will wind up being the exploding brick. Just a hunch.

ATOMS isn’t the first kid-friendly DIY e-bricks set out there. Littlebits uses magnets to link together components, but ATOMS seems to offer more functionality without any more complexity. With about 10 days left to go in the campaign, ATOMS has cleared its $100,000 goal by more than a third. The sets run from about $50 to $80 with the lot going for an early-adopter price of $190 with retail expected at $250 next June.

Backed: Sqord. The first IndieGoGo project to be profiled on Backed or Whacked, Sqord combines children’s activities with one of crowdfunding’s favorite product categories: wristwear. Essentially, a 3D accelerator-based activity monitor for kids, the product is durable and cheap. Sqord’s video shows off whacking the product with a hammer, something you wouldn’t want to do to a Nike FuelBand or an original Striiv monitor. Unlike those products, the Sqord has no display and can relay its latest results up to the cloud by tapping the monitor against a base station using NFC.

Reward levels include two Sqord monitors and the base station for $50, which the company expects to deliver in May. With about two weeks left to go in the campaign, Sqord has raised less than $20,000 of its $85,000 goal. But because they’ve used IndieGoGo’s option for a flexible funding campaign, it gets to keep all contributions.

Backed: iBuKu Pets. At first glance, the iBuKu Pets look a bit like a number of other rubbery protective shells for smartphones and tablets like the Speck iGuy for iPad (with perhaps a bit more cushion). Those taking a second glance will discover that co-creator Royce Channey has gone beyond that, integrating cable storage and a backup battery into the iBuKu; the latter is a particularly handy feature if it is to encase iPhone hand-me-downs. And those taking a third look will find that the team has even designed an iBuKu Pets app that features a quartet of characters, including the Furby-faced Alvie.

One thing’s for sure: The gang over at Arbor Cube runs a tight ship. The campaign, which ended on December 15th, met its $25,000 goal with only $585 to spare and actually shipped the $35 appcessory to backers three days later, hinting that this was one of those campaigns where the fundraising was more of a formality than a necessity.

Backed: Genetipetz The mooraffe, zebugraphant and snurtlegator sound like the work of a collaboration between Dr. Seuss and Dr. Moreau. Actually, they are under the supervision of the animated Dr. Genetipetz. Charlotte, N.C.-based Jackson and Cavan Meade are the entrepreneurial young stars of the enthusiastic pitch video for Genetipetz, animal body part “plushups” that have a tenuous tie to genetics. The early bird-creatures who got a jump on the toys grabbed the first batch of 35 at $50, but this was another campaign that raced to the wire like a zepheetah, just poking past its $20,000 funding goal. The toys are slated to be delivered in February, which should get them out the door in time to avoid scrutiny from the People for the Ethical Treatment of Stuffed Animals.

Whacked: Maze-O “Pretty much everyone loves mazes,” asserts Dan Friedman, half of the Lakeville, Minn., spousal pair behind Maze-O. Maze-O is a set of 2.5-inch squares that easily fit together to allow kids to create mazes wide enough to accommodate a Matchbox car or Hexbug. Maze-O was inspired by the length of time it took for Master Friedman to create mazes using tools such as wood blocks combined with the resulting fragility of such mazes. Most parents would probably outsource the work to China, but not Dan, who spares us the special effects in noting, “We knew there had to be a better way and — light bulb — Maze-O was born.”

A starter 36-piece set of Google/Windows/eBay-themed red, yellow, blue and green Maze-O pieces was made available for $30. Alas, the Friedmans will need to rely on their 3D printer for printing such pieces for a bit longer. While just over 100 backers were willing to enter Kickstarter’s labyrinthine funding process, the 30-day campaign lost its way in seeking the cheese of its $50,000 funding goal.

Editor’s note: Charles Gabriel is vice president of sales for the AOL On Network. Follow him on Twitter @cgabriel10.

For anyone who’s attended a conference on online media or advertising, or read any of the industry trades over the last six months, the phrase “native advertising” is all but inescapable. Originally coined by Fred Wilson, it’s been evangelized into 2012’s biggest buzzword. Its advocates point to Facebook’s Sponsored Stories and Twitter’s Promoted Tweets as well as experiments from the likes of Forbes and The Atlantic as evidence of the category’s growing prominence. More recently, however, skepticism in the media and backlash from consumers has started to cast doubts about the native model.

In the video realm, the stakes for getting this right are particularly high. In contrast with display, video’s production costs, and high barrier to engagement – particularly with click-to-play units – make the native promise a particularly attractive one. As more and more brands pump big budgets into branded content and entertainment, they’re seeking placements that better fit their overall objectives (authentic engagement that transcends the traditional advertiser-consumer relationship) and deliver ROI on their campaign dollars.

So what needs to happen for native video ads to become a reality, rather than simply a Silicon Valley gimmick or a dressed-up advertorial? How can the medium overcome issues of scale and consumer mistrust? Here are four things that need to happen in order to move native advertising from the latest shiny object to a sustainable, long-term solution for video advertisers.

1. Upward Trend In Quality Content

A recent MediaBrix study found that many consumers find sponsored content on sites like Facebook and Twitter misleading, and that it can actually harm their perception of a brand. The study, unfortunately, did not delve into the specifics of the content itself – whether it was well-targeted, high-quality, and clearly identified as coming from an advertiser. My hunch is that these respondents would have replied differently if asked about native ads featuring content they found relevant, useful, or entertaining.

The bottom line is that user trust is essential for generating the engagement that the native ad model is founded upon. A sure-fire way to lose this is by allowing blatant advertorials or shoddy content into the mix. In order for native advertising to be viable, brands have to focus on maintaining a high standard for their content. In addition to high production value and utility for the user, videos shouldn’t be overloaded with logos or other branding. And if the video is a product review or other how-to content, experts should be just that – experts – and not thinly veiled pitchmen.

2. Shift To CPV Model

While the CPM (cost per impression) model works for pre-rolls that play every time a page loads or a player is selected, it’s an ineffective economy for click-to-play native ads. The CPV (cost per view) metric makes the native model work by ensuring that advertisers pay only for videos that are consumed by users who choose to watch them, and by offering publishers an incentive to run native ads that often change the architecture of their pages. Pricing can vary based on the type of guarantee (e.g. video start, percentage of video completed, etc.), but with a CPV model advertisers are much more likely to get what they pay for.

3. Entrance Of Big Players On The Publishing Side

One of the biggest problems with the current native video offerings is that they rely on middlemen who have to create custom integrations with publishers. As more companies like AOL, Yahoo and MSN that have a first point of distribution (properties they own and program) enter the scene, advertisers will be able to easily run native campaigns at scale across multiple sites.

4. Programmatic Buying For Native Formats

Like it or not, programmatic buying is reshaping online advertising as we know it, and by some estimates will account for as much as 90 percent of all ad buying in the future. While there are very few examples of native formats being bought this way currently, Facebook could help pave the way in the future by making their Sponsored Stories available via the Facebook Exchange (today only standard display ads are sold on the exchange). Native video placements, which would strip out some of the inefficiency and issues of scale, lend themselves well to this approach.

The intensity of the discussion around native ads shows no signs of slowing down, with more arguments for and against them cropping up every day. Whatever your stance on native, it’s hard to deny that the goal at its very core (make online ads better, less intrusive, and more engaging for the user) is a worthwhile one. As advertisers start to experiment beyond the pre-roll, creating new and beautiful video content, they will start to demand placements that do those ads justice. For this reason alone, it’s essential that the industry work together to make them a reality.

AOL is the parent company of TechCrunch.

A number of amazing startups have been popping up of late to employ modern technology in the hopes of improving healthcare and education. This is important not only because these are two industries that touch each and every one of us, but because they are both equally consumed by legacy infrastructure and archaic standards. Yet, while startups continue to enter the space — something we should continue to celebrate — many are still shying away from some of the most challenging technical problems that stand to make a bigger impact than yet another sexy consumer mobile app.

Granted, this shouldn’t be surprising, given that both industries suffer from some seriously intractable problems, mostly courtesy of long-entrenched legacy infrastructure. Modernizing the infrastructures themselves, along with the way health companies integrate and exchange data is a difficult task — but it’s also an important one.

Eligible, a San Francisco-based startup and member of Y Combinator’s most recent batch, has decided to bite the bullet and meet this challenge head on. Big data stands to have a transformative effect on healthcare (and education and really every industry), but the key is putting that data in a language that is smart, universal and dynamic.

To do that, Eligible set out to build a modern, standardized set of protocols to make healthcare data and information more accessible, particularly healthcare eligibility. A member of the same Y Combinator class as Clever, Eligible is applying the same philosophy to healthcare data. In other words, just as as Clever (and LearnSprout) have created a modern set of REST APIs to unlock student data from the lumbering, closed datasets of Student Information Systems, Eligible is doing the same for healthcare eligibility.

The goal is to pull down the barriers that restrict the interoperability of disparate (yet critical) data sets, making them easier to manage and integrate. Of course, “healthcare eligibility” is a side of the healthcare infrastructure that the average person doesn’t see much of, and thus it may seem a bit boring or obscure (because it is), but it’s also an essential part of the process of receiving and managing care and is part of making the whole thing tick.

For example: Every time you go to the doctor’s office, seek treatment or go in for surgery, hospitals and doctors query insurance companies to see what kind of coverage you have and what treatments you’re eligible for under your current health plan(s). Traditionally, these requests are made manually, with the whole process taking place over the phone, by email, or maybe even by way of horse and carriage.

Naturally, with the aid of technology, the eligibility and information request process can be automated. And when one considers that there are about two trillion eligibility queries made by hospitals and doctors every year (a single procedure might involve five queries) — one starts to understand the amount of time, money and bandwidth that can be saved by automating those mechanics. In fact, it’s now understood to be such a critical need, that the Obama Administration (under its new healthcare policy) has mandated that insurers must begin automating their response to these queries.

Of course, automating and streamlining data exchange in the world of legacy Healthcare IT is easier said than done. Eligible co-founders Katelyn Gleason and Patrice Krakow have embraced the old technologies endemic to Healthcare IT (and the translation burden that comes with it) in order to solve what they believe is a very real (and monumental) problem both for developers and insurers. And, well, really everyone involved in the process (doctors, hospitals, administrators, developers, insurance companies, and, of course, patients).

Those two trillion queries that are made annually happen across a number of disparate data standards, including those for labs and testing, for insurance info, doctor visit info, pharmaceutical info and so on. That information is critical, but tends to be locked in its own individual silo, and there’s not much intercommunication. Aggregating that info becomes exponentially more complicated when you add the fact that there are a huge number of insurance companies providing coverage under an even huger (yep, I said it) array of plans.

To make it easier on healthcare providers, insurers and everyone in between, Eligible aggregates data from the various insurance providers, normalizing coverage data and patient info from each silo in a stack of REST APIs.

For developers, this means spending a lot less time parsing and for both developers and providers, integration with Eligible’s APIs means being able to confirm active insurance coverage and demographics like billing zip codes, gender and employer, as well as being able to get access to plan details, including diagnostic lab coverage, health spending accounts co-payments, and so on. It also makes life easier on hospitals (and developers) by allowing them to electronically request pre-authorization codes for admissions, home health care and surgeries, streamlining the entire care chain, from signing in at the front desk of the hospital to check out.

In the same way Stripe offers developer-friendly technology to simplify the complex and obscure process of integrating payment processing into apps and websites, Eligible wants to build the first modern API that allows developers to easily exchange health data — and make money while doing it. Developers can integrate Eligible to increase both traction and revenue through these eligibility queries, patient information queries, etc.

In fact, Gleason tells us that Eligible is already processing 8,000 eligibility transactions per day and, at five cents per transaction, the startup is already producing revenue. The company is already working with more than 100 different providers and healthcare companies and 60 percent of hospitals, and the co-founder says this number is growing fast.

With Obamacare mandating the realtime automation of healthcare eligibility requests and healthcare organizations and startups looking for an easier and more accurate way to access this information for their own apps, Eligible has a real opportunity at turning this early growth into a long-term hockey stick.

Eligible has done the tough leg-work and written the code so that developers and healthcare companies don’t have to, and that alone is money in the bank.

The startup has raised $500K in seed capital to date from Y Combinator, Start Fund and a number of other angel investors, including SV Angel’s David Lee, Esther Dyson, Anvil Capital’s Michael Liou, Accenture Managing Director Anand Swaminathan and Andreessen Horowitz.

After graduating from Y Combinator with the foundation of its healthcare information exchange platform in place, the team joined Rock Health’s accelerator this winter, where the team is currently plugging away.

For more on Eligible, check them out at home here.

Editor’s note: Tadhg Kelly is a game designer with 20 years experience. He is the creator of leading game design blog What Games Are, and consults for many companies on game design and development. You can follow him on Twitter here.

In the wake of a terrible event like a mass shooting or terrorist attack, it’s inevitable that the question of video game violence is raised. Whether it’s a reporter showing how Microsoft Flight Simulator could be used to pilot a virtual jet into the World Trade Center, or a psychiatrist worrying about games and the inability of some people to distinguish between reality and fantasy, games get a lot of grief.

At times like these our medium is often portrayed as little more than drug-addiction meets murder-simulator, and we game makers apologise endlessly. We invoke the notion of catharsis, or the physical benefits of games. Hand-eye coordination, we say. Or reasoning skills. We might also point to a variety of studies that show there is little correlation between what we do as gamers and how we behave in the real world. We might find ourselves saying that actually most games are cute and cuddly, and not violent at all.

But we are not really being true to ourselves by adopting these apologist positions. In a sense all games are inherently violent. It’s kind of essential to understanding how and why they work (or don’t). And not only is this okay, it’s a good thing.

Functional Violence

There is a difference between functional violence and the appearance of violence. Functional violence is a part of the frame of a game, in the pushing of levers and destroying of tokens, the stealing of resources and so on. Because fun is so wrapped up in mastery over dynamic systems, the player is inevitably cast into the position of agent-of-change, and that always involves some kind of real or abstract action.

Functionally speaking, chess is violent. You actively deploy units to seek out and destroy an opponent, and the only way to win is to be more skillful at wiping out the weak units in his line to get access to his King. In the average chess game the winner has usually obliterated 90 percent of the opponent’s forces in so doing, and lost 75 percent of their own.

Poker is also functionally violent. Through betting and card rules, the game is a systematised way of stealing from and bankrupting other players. Tetris is functionally violent. You slot bricks into place in order to destroy them. FarmVille is functionally violent, involving as it does the clearing, planting, resurfacing and therefore destroying of land. Mario is violent, with all that jumping on the heads of enemies. Pac-Man is violent, as you run away from, and then chase unto death, ghosts. Sim City is violent. Portal is violent. Even Journey, with its activation of ribbons and platforms, is violent.

Functional violence is just another way of saying that the player causes change in the game environment, and that usually involves destruction, theft, alteration, beating, hitting, shooting or some other activity that – at some level – is violent. Whether we mean realistically represented destruction, or the more abstract kind (playing Scrabble letters in such a way as to close off opportunities for other players), in games we both create and destroy, build and clear, make and obliterate. All games are fundamentally about death.

Appearances Deceive

For non-players (or reporters who want a cheap headline) game violence is not about function. It’s about what they see, like viewers watching the game like a television show over the shoulder of the player. It disturbs many a well-meaning parent or doctor or politician, and they assume that – because the game is drenched in blood, and the player is so into the experience – it must have some effect. This is why several countries have bans or age ratings on things like the appearance of blood in games.

Yet anyone who actually plays games will tell you that these concerns are overblown. They will (usually rightly) say that the concerned person likely doesn’t play games, and that their worrying is little more than the fear of the corrupting influence of the novel in the 19th century, the comic book in the early 20th or the “video nasty” of the 1980s.

They will readily admit that they engage in immaturity like ass-hatting, taunting each other or giggling with glee at a particularly well-executed headshot in Quake 3, but this is no different from most sports. In fact it’s better: No video game has ever caused a riot, unlike some sports, and in terms of overall violence the video game’s rise happened during a time when violent crime rates  throughout the western world had largely fallen, with no clear explanation as to why. Has Call of Duty saved lives? Who knows, but it’s interesting how the two correlate.

Yet the fear and ignorance over game violence remains because of the belief that immersion deeply affects impressionable young minds. Immersion has two aspects. The first is projection. Controlling a game is like driving a car in that both rely on the brain’s ability to extend its perceptions beyond the physical existence of the body. When you get behind the wheel you project into the car, perceiving and acting in terms of the world of roads. Projection opens the mind to the sensation of numina (that the game world is larger than that which is directly observable) and that in turn is how games become thaumatic (emotional, believable experiences).

The second component of immersion is transference – what comes back out of the game and into the real world. A simple example of transference can be observed when playing a racing game. Players unconsciously tilt and swing their joypads while steering, although this has no effect in-game, because a part of their mind is so “there” that it reflects backward. The same effect is observable in players playing horror games. They might squint or physically move to the left or right of the screen, in a sense trying to edge their way along a spooky corridor or similar.

Transference is often more than just physical mimicry. In a more advanced sense it’s the physiological effects of playing games (raised heartbeats and so on), and also emotions and ideas. After I played the hell out of the original Doom, I went through a phase of seeing some of its characters in my dreams. Similarly, many players who get deeply into certain games sometimes find themselves wondering what reality would look like overlaid with the game.

The fear is that transference is a symptom of something subtler. If I do something in a game, the worry goes, is that not fundamentally worse than watching it? If I kill a prostitute in Grand Theft Auto and then take her money with no consequences, doesn’t that interaction transfer into my perceptions of the real world? Don’t I start to objectify, to become inhuman or sadistic? Don’t we need to control what players do to avoid such associations? No.

What the Brain Sees

For the purposes of game design I often find it useful to consider the player as a being with four mini-brains, (each able to think, perceive, feel and remember) and a moderator that governs which of them is in charge at any one time.

The first is the lizard brain, the instinctive brain that holds all your basic urges and phobias, and its job is to keep you alive and to procreate. It activates fight-or-flight when it perceives trouble, gets jealous when it sees a challenge to a mate or leadership authority, is protective when offspring are threatened and is terrified of being stared at (because that usually implies being hunted – this is why people are afraid of public speaking).

The second brain is the machine. The machine comes into play in two distinct areas: reflexes and skills. When you see an object flying at your face, you instantly react: you duck, dodge or raise a hand to block. This happens unconsciously, and sometimes even against what you intended to do. The machine can also be trained through practise to react more skillfully and precisely (wax on, wax off) to specific tasks, eventually reaching a state of control. When players feel a sense of flow it is often because their machine is so trained that they do not have to consciously think about game controls any more.

The third is the art brain. Also called the Master or the Erasmian brain by Dr Iain McGilchrist. This is the side of you that perceives the world in wide lens and sees everything as a set of webs of meaning, interplay, social interaction and narrative. It is the part of you that believes and communicates through feelings rather than information. In games it is the art brain that senses numina, interprets experiences as resonant (or not) and so engages with the fantasy of the game more than its frame.

The fourth (and often the most important for good game design) is the play brain. McGilchrist calls this the Machiavellian, or the Emissary. It perceives the world in narrow focus and its understanding is literal and reductive. The play brain looks for patterns and abstract solutions, disregards information that it cannot evaluate functionally, groups objects into clumps of understanding and is fascinated by rendering the complex into the master-able. Mechanics, logistics, procedural thinking and so on are what the play brain does, but also language. For better or worse we tend to express ourselves on its terms (which is why it can be particularly hard to convey that art brain experience).

Finally the fifth component is a kind of switchboard. Located in the corpus callosum, this area of the brain seems to inhibit the others. At any one time a piece of information might enter the brain that applies to all of the above, and the switchboard prevents all of them reacting at once. This leads to the sensation of having conflicted or complex feelings, and it is largely a matter of personality as to which dominates. Some people live more in their art brain than their play brain, and vice versa. Some are more inclined to give into their root fears and desires (lizard) than others. And over the course of a lifetime, this ordering can change.

In the context of a game, the play brain is often in the driving seat, in conjunction with the machine. The other brains are not dumb, but it’s the play brain’s feelings of boredom or joy that will tend to win out. Even with a great story or a scary theme, if a game is not much fun to play then players will often drift away from it. And this is why violence is actually not that big a deal in games.

The play brain does not care about blood and guts and gore. It cares about overcoming problems and winning. To the observer, the act of sneaking up on an enemy in Assassin’s Creed and slitting their throat is horrific, but to the play brain it is no different to avoiding ghosts in Pac-Man to get the power pellet. Each is just a test of skill and strategy, and the visceral pay-off tends to fade. Games are not like movies in this respect: Violence is not contextual, and its significance is just signalling a change in the game environment.

The first time you defeat a minotaur in God of War through the special move of pressing X repeatedly to drive a sword into its throat, it’s pretty bloody and spectacular. The tenth time you do it, it just signifies a win. As you see the same violent effects again and again, their power quickly diminishes.

Play Is Not Life

As players we may get immersed in a game world, even wrapped up in its fiction, but we never lose our sense of self. Play is a mock activity, an illusion, and we are able to distinguish between reality and fantasy. We are also able to perceive that the object-nature of the game reduces the impact of individual occurrences within it, leading to a fascination with the mechanism more than the fiction. We play largely to master the mechanism, and then discard it.

These days we know more about the psychology of play and games, about how they are good for you — expand your learning and skills. Meanwhile endless studies fail to find any link between gaming and supposed negative effects. Moreover, games are an important form of culture. Millions of people around the world find friends through games, share cultural experiences within games, generate their own culture around games and express themselves through games. They feel more positive about their lives because of games, and also grow smarter and better as people through playing games.

Even in their most apparently violent forms, or at their most cute’n’cuddly, players always cause change, destroy and create. Through games they do so in a way that is safer than driving a car, shooting a real rifle or any one of a myriad of real-life activities. So all games might be violent, but games are not life. Not only should we accept this, we should realise that it is overwhelmingly a positive aspect of modern existence and get over this hangup that just because we’re doing terrible things in virtual worlds it somehow makes us terrible people.

Facebook Poke messages self-destruct after a few seconds, but is Facebook saving these potentially embarrassing photos and videos? No. It’s deleting them. Pokes are encrypted, and Facebook deletes the encryption keys two days after they’re read so they’re unreadable. Key backups are destroyed within 90 days, making a poke completely inaccessible. So send those silly, racy messages with confidence.

Normally, Facebook stores everything you share until you delete your account. This lets it mine your photos for location data, track what sites you share links to, and collect other information that can help it improve the site or better target its ads.

But ephemeral messages are different. They’re meant to be individual moments of time that aren’t saved. This makes them feel urgent and informal. That feeling can be ruined if you think those messages are being saved. There’s already a level of paranoia about Facebook and privacy.

Yesterday when Facebook launched its ephemeral messaging app Poke for iOS, I heard some people say they would stick with independent competitor Snapchat because they worried ”Mark Zuckerberg is going to see my Pokes.”

Snapchat, the app that inspired (or some say was cloned to create) Poke, set a precedent for ephemeral messaging privacy by stating in its terms that: “When you send or receive messages using the Snapchat services, we temporarily process and store your images and videos in order to provide our services… we attempt to delete image data as soon as possible after the message is transmitted.”

That gives users the peace of mind that they can Snapchat anything they want as long as they don’t offend the recipient.

As soon as Poke launched, I was curious about how Facebook would handle this especially private data and asked for its policy. Poke’s “Privacy and Legal” button sends people to Facebook’s standard terms of service, so it’s understandable that people would think it was saving their Pokes. Facebook isn’t, though, and this morning the company gave me the full explanation of how Poke data is protected:

All Poke messages are stored in encrypted form and retained for two days after the last recipient views the poke — a process that helps facilitate abuse reporting. After that period, a Poke’s encryption key is deleted. However, it may still be possible to recover that key from logs or backups. After a fixed time period, this key becomes inaccessible, rendering the content completely unreadable (unless it was copied for abuse reporting.) Today, that fixed period can be up to 90 days, but we are working to significantly reduce that period over the next several weeks as we verify the stability of the Poke deletion system.

So essentially, Facebook only stores your Pokes for two days so if anyone reports you for offending them, like by sending unwanted images of what’s in your pants, it can see if the accusations are true. Then it effectively deletes the Pokes, and by 90 days after there’s absolutely no way to recover the contents of a message. Facebook is trying to cut down that window, which could help it appear just as secure as Snapchat.

Ephemeral messaging is a very new space and the norms are still being sussed out. Facebook could have saved Pokes forever, or it could delete them immediately. Instead, by saving them briefly for abuse-reporting reasons, Facebook may have found the right balance between privacy and security.

For more on Facebook’s new Poke app, read:

Facebook Launches Snapchat Competitor “Poke”, An iOS App For Sending Expiring Text, Photos, And Videos

Facebook Poke Vs. Snapchat: What’s The Difference?

Snapchat Co-Founder Evan Spiegel Responds To Poke: “Welcome, Facebook. Seriously.”

Touting its ability to notify someone immediately that you bought them a present, Facebook is showing large banners atop the web and mobile news feed telling people to buy Gifts. Facebook hopes tardy shoppers will purchase through its e-commerce arm because presents bought elsewhere wouldn’t arrive before Christmas. Facebook’s won’t either but at least friends would know they have a gift on the way.

Facebook debuted Gifts in September to give people an easy way to buy a wide variety of presents for friends on special occasions like their birthdays, engagements, or graduations. It’s since rolled out Gifts to all U.S. users who have been starting to see these banners over the weekend.

Gifts uses data on who you’re closest to and what a recipient likes to make intelligent suggestions for who you should give to and what you give them. Gifts range from physical goods like flowers, chocolate, and stuffed animals to digital gifts like Starbucks, iTunes, and Uber credits. Digital Gifts are delivered immediately, which makes them great last-minute presents.

Until now, the Gift buying flow usually started with you choosing a specific person and clicking through the Gift icon on an alert about their birthday on the Facebook.com homepage or at the top of the mobile news feed.

This holiday push is different. It first tries to get you to decide to buy Gifts at all. If you click the “Get Started” button on the “Send A Last-Minute Gift” banners appearing at the top of the small and big screen news feeds, you’re shown a smart list of your closest friends. These are the people you talk with and are tagged with most and therefore are most likely to want to buy gifts for.

From there you can choose a Gift, write a personal message, pay (or pay later), and have your Gift sent. That means your friend sees a “wrapped” version of it on their wall instantly. It works well for last-minute holiday shoppers because there’s evidence that you bought someone a Gift right away, even if physical gifts take a few days to come via snail mail and don’t arrive until after Christmas. Facebook warns you Gifts will be delivered after December 25th, so you don’t think it will overnight your presents.

By using its unique data set to match you with people to give to and what to give them, Facebook has a chance to usurp ecommerce sites like Amazon. A lot of people are happy to spend money on Gifts, but its the shopping process that deters them. Facebook’s suggestions take the decision-making out of Gift giving, so it feels like a quick and casual transaction rather than something you labor over. The holidays are stressful enough after all.

The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Keith Teare, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — fight a never-ending battle for truth, justice, and the American Way. The Gang feels blessed to have survived the Mayanocalypse, the Fiscal Cliff, and the complete inability of Microsoft to reverse its tailspin into massive mediocrity. You can verify that last comment by the fact that we don’t mention Microsoft once in the show.

We do talk at endless length (@scobleizer) about Google Glasses, which I suggest should be replaced with Google Underpants. Also Apple’s opportunity to extend AirPlay into a rewrite of the media industry formerly known as television. Facebook Gifts. Open standards and a Scoble end of year barnstorm on all the tech shows. Happy Holidays to Leo, Jason, and all the folks in the chat room.

@stevegillmor, @scobleizer, @kteare, @kevinmarks

Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor

If you’ve ever gone “deep” into the nastiness that the YouTube commenting section can be, then you know that it’s not a pretty place. Depending on the type of content you’re visiting, fights will break out, mothers will be dragged into the conversation and it’s just not fun to be around. Who are we kidding? No matter what type of content it is, a YouTube commenter troll or 10 will say something nasty to start a feud.

Today, a tipster sent us a browser extension called YuleTube and it works on Safari, Chrome and Firefox. What it does is turn naughty comments into nice ones. With precision and hilarity. Sorry, Internet Explorer users, you’re fucked not included.

Once you install the extension, all of the filthy words that appear in comments will be replaced with Holiday-themed ones that are much nicer, and thus funnier.

I implore you to install this extension if you use YouTube. Happy Holidays.

Editor’s note: Julien Codorniou is the head of EMEA Game Partnerships at Facebook where he works with the growing social games industry in Europe. Follow Julien on Twitter @codorniou.

New social gaming companies are emerging around the world (hot spots right now are Moscow, Tel Aviv and Helsinki), and in my role I get to speak with developers every day. Regardless of the size of the company, their locale, or the platform on which they’re building, I typically hear the same questions:

1. Do social games translate to mobile?
2. Are game developers leaving Facebook for mobile?
3. How do I get my game discovered and installed?

Here are my answers for why social is good for mobile games.

1. Do social games translate to mobile?

Mobile games are better when they are social for one simple reason: Games are more fun with friends. Games have always been social, from backgammon and chess to board games. Along the way, friends have been a central part of the game experience, including how we discover, play and talk about games. Social design concepts work wherever people are playing games – on desktop web and increasingly on mobile. As the online gamer demographic becomes more diverse, the best way for an app to grow is by reaching people and their friends across all screens.

Mobile developers can integrate their apps with Facebook SDKs to make them social, including adding Facebook Login and enabling multiplayer gameplay with friends. When you take a mobile app from solo to social, the opportunities for greater engagement, discovery and growth can be exponential. Social mobile apps plug into channels powered by the activities people share with friends every day, including sending invitations, passing one another on a leaderboard, and – the biggest driver of traffic to apps – posting to the News Feed. The social games industry got its start through games growing and getting discovered on Facebook.com. Social mobile innovation will disrupt the games industry the same way social web games did seven years ago.

People are increasingly bringing their phones – an inherently social device – with them everywhere. Recent data suggests that 58 percent of smartphone users check their phones at least once every hour. The emergence of mobile gaming has introduced a way for people to quickly jump into games from wherever they are.

Many top developers are also finding that if you’re big on Facebook, you can be big on mobile. Wooga’s Bubble Island and Diamond Dash, Jellyvision Games’ You Don’t Know Jack, Nordeus’ Top Eleven, King.com’s Candy Crush Saga, and Playtika’s Slotomania all became popular apps on iPhone and/or Android after getting big on Facebook first.

This is an ideal time to build a social mobile game. Currently more than 45 percent of the top 400 grossing iOS apps are built with Facebook. Soon we will no longer call these apps “social mobile games”; they will simply be “games.”

2. Are game developers leaving Facebook for mobile?

Developers don’t need to choose between Facebook or mobile – you should be thinking, Facebook and mobile. There are 1 billion people on Facebook and 600 million people actively engaging with Facebook on mobile devices. Not reaching these Facebook-connected mobile users is a missed opportunity. From Zynga’s Words With Friends and PopCap’s Bejeweled Blitz, to FreshPlanet’s SongPop, FishSticks Games’ Slots Journey, and Supercell’s Hay Day, there is a range of social mobile games that have propelled to the top of the charts.

In fact, nearly 200,000 mobile apps and games are built with Facebook APIs. At any given time, 6-8 of the top-grossing iPhone apps are integrated with Facebook. This year’s Apple’s Editor’s Pick is Bad Robot Interactive’s Action Movie FX, an app integrated with Facebook.

3. How do I get my game discovered and installed?

Discoverability is one of the biggest challenges mobile developers face. Real identity, friends and social distribution can solve this problem.

In order to have your app found among the masses, you need a good understanding of the following areas.

Different Screen, Same Channels: Be Everywhere Your Players Are 

When a person hears of a great game, they don’t think about which platforms it’s available on. They just want to play. Facebook is the connection that brings friends together across devices.

Social mobile games can get discovered and grow the same way games on Facebook.com have for years – including News Feed, Bookmarks, Requests, and the new mobile app install ads. This is true for “mobile-first” companies, as well as developers who started on Facebook.com and are updating to mobile as well.

King.com’s cross-platform Saga franchise has excelled across Facebook.com and mobile by encouraging sharing without spamming. Bubble Witch Saga (Facebook.com and iOS) and Candy Crush Saga (Facebook.com and iOS) have made King.com a top-five developer on Facebook, with more than 50 million monthly active users.

Trash Talk Is Gold

Social mobile games are a perfect setting for competitive play among friends. Players want to reach the next level to one-up a friend and brag about it on their timeline, which brings their friends into the game and creates a viral loop. As a result, Facebook-connected players tend to spend more time and money in mobile apps.

For example, SongPop grew with Facebook across web, iPhone, and Android. Playing a music trivia game isn’t nearly as fun if you play with strangers. Sixty five percent of SongPop’s mobile players sign in with Facebook, and those spend about 35 percent more time and money than those who do not login with Facebook.

Inform, Iterate And Impact

If there’s anything social game developers have learned over the last five years it’s that the ecosystem moves quickly, and if they don’t innovate fast enough, someone else will.

With Facebook Insights, developers can produce games-as-a-service, where they can gather user feedback and iterate based on what’s working or not working. Gone are the days of publishing a game and putting it on the shelves, only to wait for the next version to make updates. Today’s social games don’t have versions. They exist to provide ongoing quality experiences, and people increasingly expect the best.

Buffalo Studios has taken this approach with Bingo Blitz. The cross-platform game provides players with changing landscapes to keep them engaged and coming back for graphics and backgrounds that are available for a limited time. As a result, a quarter of players have been monthly active users for a year or more.

Fads vs. Franchises 

Similar to the movie and music industries, games have historically been a hits-based business. Today’s social game developers can build either quick hits or long-term franchises, but they should be prepared for the natural growth associated with each.

Developers with hits-based games must be ready for fluctuating growth and continue to pump out hits so their brands don’t go stale and they don’t lose users. Alternatively, if you design a game aimed at high retention, such as Texas HoldEm Poker, DoubleDown Casino, and Battle Pirates, you’ll create an experience that gets better as more friends play. Our platform can support both of these types.

Hardcore games are an example of long-term apps, as they attract a loyal user base that monetizes well over a period of time. Kixeye’s games, such as War Commander, have immersive graphics and engaged audiences, where the average length of time a player spends in the game is nine months to a year.

More than 10 percent of Kixeye’s players are paying customers, and the average player comes back three to four times a day, for more than 30 minutes each session. Specifically, 25 percent of revenue for Battle Pirates comes from people who have played the game 12 months or longer, and War Commander gamers play more than two sessions a day and spend 1.5 hours battling their friends/enemies on an average day.

Social Enhances The Freemium Model

An overwhelming majority of mobile developers are building their businesses with a freemium model. Discovery is still key here. Eyeballs lead to installs, which can lead to money.

Buffalo Studios uses social to its financial advantage with its mobile games. Eighty percent of Bingo Blitz‘s mobile revenue comes from Facebook-connected players. On average, people who log into the game with Facebook generate three times the amount of revenue and play twice as many rounds.

The Santa Opportunity

This holiday season Apple is expected to sell a record-setting 46.5 million iPhones. As people open their new mobile devices, they’ll inevitably ask friends and family which apps they should install. Imagine fueling this type of social discovery and word of mouth at scale among friends and family all year long, where your game is the app being recommended.

Be part of the disruption. Build the next great social mobile game.

As an old man, I find Snapchat to be baffling at best but Jordan and I duke it out in the Thunderdome that is Fly or Die and come, in the end, to a conclusion.

As Jordan notes, the draw to Snapchat comes from this era’s impetus towards over-sharing. Whereas my generation – slackers, baby boomers, and the like – feel that photographs are essentially permanent memories, this generation believes they are overexposed. By offering a vent for various silly urges, Snapchat lets kids post funny pictures without worrying that they’ll show up on Facebook or the evening news.

Some believe it’s a sexting app and we both disagree. As we note, it takes a lot longer than a few seconds to really pull off solid sexting.

In the end, Jordan and I disagreed and I deleted Snapchat, secure in my world of Kodachrome, Instagram, and the immutable image.

Remember all of this excitement hoopla over Facebook’s latest standalone app, Poke, yesterday? You aren’t the only one that is interested, apparently. As The Next Web reports, Poke by Facebook has hit the No. 1 free app spot on Apple’s App Store, just a day after being released.

Make no mistake about it, the big companies like Facebook and Google are going to have the best holiday season ever thanks to Apple and iOS. It’s very rare to see utility or social apps hold the top free app spot like Google Maps has over the past week, and like Facebook Poke probably will. It’s usually a game, or a boogers app that holds that down.

And they get massive downloads because of it, especially during this time of the year.

What does this mean for consumers…and for Apple? Most iOS users who are getting new devices, or even first-timers, are swayed by what’s hot on the App Store. The leaderboard is very important to onboard new users into the app ecosystem. Apple likes to highlight the best and brightest that shows off their technology, but the leaderboard shows what users are really interested in. Today, it’s all about Poke.

When Facebook said it was focusing on mobile, it wasn’t kidding. Holding the No. 1 free app spot is like having the biggest kiosk in a mall during the biggest rush of the year. This type of crowding from big companies isn’t what the App Store has seen over the years, as we usually have a big game launch right around Christmas, thus ruling the charts since Apple freezes new submissions and releases during the holidays.

Note that Snapchat is holding the No. 9 spot, and is clearly slipping in popularity, and Google is sitting pretty at both No. 2 (Maps) and No. 5 (YouTube). Even Pinger’s free texting and calling app is right up there at No. 6.

It’s also important to note that the new “hot” apps tend to surge up to the top quickly, as Poke clearly has, but remaining there for more than a few days is a real feat. Can Facebook do it? Let’s see as all of those new iPads, iPhones, Touches and iPad minis get opened next week. Also, having a billion users surely doesn’t hurt your distribution and marketing efforts.

Welcome, Facebook. Seriously. Who knew that a Poke would be so important?

[Photo credit: Flickr]