Coverage of Social Gaming Summit 2009

I’m catching up on the Social Gaming Summit 2009 on the net, and here’s my bounty of news, twitter tidbits and links to further coverage.

Presentations

• Superb preso on Metrics from Siqi Chen / Serious Business and David King of (Lil) Green Patch
• Justin Smith / Inside Social Games’ great preso on the Social Games landscape

Blog coverage

• Gamasutra’s coverage on the Building Social Games on Scale panel
• Inside Social Games: Live notes from Building Social Games on Scale panel
• Jeremy Liew / Lightspeed VP’s notes on panels and further links
• GigaOM’s Four takeaways from the Social Gaming Summit
• Virtual World News’ writeup from the event
• @Mayankdhingra’s crowdsourced coverage: the 70 tweets that summarize it all
• Venturebeat’s coverage and discussion on social games in general
• Offerpal’s blog on What did we learn at the Social Gaming Summit
• Gamasutra’s opinion piece on the event & state of industry – great read, check also the reader comments
• Worlds in Motion has two posts: In-Depth On The State Of Social Gaming and The Platform Holders Speak

Misc tidbits from #sgs09 backlog

These are misc tidbits from the backlog that stuck out.

• Social Gaming ARPU’s: top games $1-2/month, good FB $0.30-0.40, good MS $0.60-.070
• Conversions to paying users for social games 0.5% to 1.5% much lower than traditional MMOG’
• Greg Tseng/Tagged: The most important social network conversion rate is # of monthly users that become daily users look closely at conversion from monthly active to daily active — and see 50% as a gold standard.
• Jia Shen/RockYou – 5-7% of daily returning users is good (discounting promos), Shukla – RPGs can see 40%
• Panel on retention/acq: use FB and provide free virtual goods at a staggered pace to bring user pack to app/game
• Jia Shen/RockYou: Vanity URLs help with branding and discoverability in Facebook. Finding apps is still hard
• Simplest thing for retention is to give incentives or alerts at a specific amount of time. Mafia Wars’ alert says New Jobs available
• jnusser/vindicia: in RMT, friendly fraud 100x real, malicious fraud
• Women, 34 to 50 in the US is the best audience you can get for monetization
• Jia Shen/RockYou: FB retention is easier. Nobody uninstalls apps, devs can always try to reingage. MS has signif churn on apps
• Jia Shen/RockYou: News feed momentum is important metric for distribution that is overlooked now. The reciprocation must happen quickly
• Jia Shen/RockYou – the new FBook redesign is creating the same engagement growth as FB had during prev peak… but less spammy
• Super Rewards: Free-mium social game monetization rates ~5% of users playing on any given day.
• Zong: Fraud chargeback rates often in 5% range. Developers usually very happy with 1-1.5. Paypal: greater than 0.5% a concern
• Virtual goods business in China is worth $4.5-$5Bn this year. Many games have over 1 million concurrent users
• Playfish:5 weeks ago, we launched RestaurantCity with no cross promotion & grew to 5M users.
• MySpace interesting stats: 70MM monthly in the US, 30MM are active app users
• Playfish sold 20 million christmas trees and ornaments mirroring social behavior in real world
• Zynga invested $2mil in guild of heroes. Seems kind of high!
• on FB, there are 100 games with 100,000 players 30 games by 1 million, 3 games with 10,000,000 games
• Zynga: Building social capital can go beyond your real friends” – Pincus; but 70% of the time you log into Poker, a ‘real’ friend is there
• Playdom sold $100K worth of virtual pink Volkswagon’s on Sorority Life in 2 days
• Keys to a successful social game by Mark Pincus at Zynga: 1) real friends, 2) self expression, 3) stored value
• Zynga (Pincus) games have to give you 1) feeling of playing with friends, 2) social outlet, expression 3) invest in game
• 3rd secret to Pincus – buy items (i am paraphrasing). Result is that players has social capital. Pincus is master of buzz words
• 2nd secret: Pincus from Zynga – social games must be playground for your personality. Express yourself (channeling Madonna)
• 1st secrets:  Pincus:  Games must appeal to your friends
• A pillar of social game is to invest in game over time and give players a sense of value. This is why virtual goods are valued.
• Design games as objects of social interaction, you get the benefit as a user of inviting your friends into the game
• game themes (pets, farms, restaurants) in top 10 apps – starting to mirror the over 35 crowd (similar to casual games)

Read the full backlog via Twitter search

Lean startup mindmaps

I’m a big believer in the customer development and lean startup concepts championed by Steve Blank and Eric Ries. The concepts have definitely been the most valuable concepts I’ve learned while running Everyplay as they provide a much needed framework around the activities any startup faces, articulate the need to get to product/market fit thru making validated learning about customers the unit of progress and provide practical processes that you can apply immediately (e.g. the Five why’s approach).

Steve and Eric have recently given presentations and interviews on these concepts. As mindmaps are my preferred way of brainstorming, making notes and communicating complex ideas, I tried to capture the gist as well as the detail of these presentations in the mindmaps linked to below. Hope you find them useful!

Startup2Startup

Steve and Eric recently gave a a joint presentation at Startup2Startup

• Video on Ustream
• Slides on Slideshare
• Mindmap notes: PDF - Mindmanager

Lean startup on O’Reilly

Eric presented the lean startup concept on O’Reilly’s webcast.

• Video on YouTube
• Slides on Slideshare
• Mindmap notes: PDF – Mindmanager

Mixergy interview with Eric Ries

Mixergy is a great source of entrepreneurial insights with Andrew Warner interviewing serial entrepreneurs, tech guys, marketers and bizdev folks.

• Podcast on Mixergy
• Mindmap notes: PDF - Mindmanager

P.S. Here’s a link to Eric Ries’ latest Lean Startup presentation given at Tokyo (Geeks on a Plane).

Speaking at Nordic Game 19th – 20th May

Nordic Game is the premier nordic game developer’s conference, now on its fourth year. It has been going from strength to strength and last year was an exceptionally good year with great presentations, excellent networking and a nice, tight-knit feeling to the whole event.

Last year I had a chance to participate at a panel on emerging trends, and I was very delighted to be invited back  to speak again this year. My presentation on How to start a game a company at Casual Connect Europe 2009 got tremendous feedback, and I’m happy to presenting an updated version of it at Nordic Game on Wednesday 20th of May at 14:45.

I’m also participating in the “Art of the Deal” panel on Tuesday 19th at 13-15 o’clock . This is about pitching game concept to game publishers, but I hope to bring into the discussion what I’ve learned and experienced from pitching to VCs.

If you are at the show, come and say hi!

Thoughts after Mini-Seedcamp

I spent today mentoring fellow entrepreneurs at Mini-Seedcamp at Helsingborg. Going in I felt that most value I could add would come from sharing what we have learned on the road of getting Everyplay off the ground. It turned out that while that was valuable as a background for the day, most of the time was spent in brainstorming ideas for growth, monetization and financing together with the other mentors and the entrepreneurs themselves.

After each one of the twenty startups had given their five minute pitch in the beginning of the day, we started in-depth sessions with two startups at a time. It was great working with passionate entrepreneurs and experienced fellow mentors to dig thru the startup’s assumptions and try to nail down how they could get more customers, create more revenue, scale faster and finance all of that.

There were a couple of startups that had big ideas ranging from really creative and cutting edge uses of peer to peer technology (Peerialism) to transforming paper receipts into electronic ones on any point of sale terminal (Kvittar). On the other end of the spectrum it was great to see real operational and growing business like Red Apple Apartments, who are adding a lot of value to the apartment rental business and are struggling to manage the fast growth (what a happy problem! ;-)).

The high points of the mentoring sessions definitely were those couple breakthroughs where the entrepreneur and the mentors would jointly come up with a new twist to the startup’s take on the market and you could literally see the entrepreneur’s eyes light up in a heureka moment. One of those moments took place in the mentoring session with 1Calendar, who simplify the hassle that juggling university course schedules is. After thinking thru the market and how they could scale faster, we came up with a pretty nifty crowdsourcing twist for getting more universities rapidly into the system. I can definitely see 1Calendar running with that idea and scaling a lot faster than they could have done before.

Most of the startups were really early and one shared criticism between every mentor I spoke with was the challenges in articulating what they really were doing. Way too many dressed up their perfectly good business idea into a Dilbert mission generator-esque mumbojumbo that you’d need 10 gigawatt lasers to pierce thru. It was also obvious that many of the startups need more practice on pitching and presenting as the morning presentations were somewhat lackluster except for a five-six standouts. It’s easy to critize, but I’d hope that every single startup pitching would video record themselves pitching, analyze the recording and repeat at least 15 times before appearing in front of a demanding audience like the one at Seedcamp.

One thing I felt that could have been added to the mentoring sessions is the notion of methodologies or approaches that a startup could use to structure their business development activities. I’ve become a huge believer in Customer Development, and I can’t help thinking that every startup founder needs something similar to help guide them.

Personally I’m totally stoked after working the day with fellow entrepreneurs at the Mini-Seedcamp. The passion and energy totally swept me along. Each startup had their own unique approach and I could learn something from every single one of them.

Best of luck to all of the Mini-Seedcampers – follow your passion and execute relentlessly!

Mentoring at Mini-Seedcamp at Helsingborg on 5th of May

Seedcamp is a catalyst for European startups. The main event is a week long bootcamp for handful of pre-qualified European startups in London. Fellow Finnish start-up Scred was selected to participate last fall. I chatted with Kristoffer from Scred after the event and he was very impressed about the learnings they were able to take away from the event.

So I was definitely excited when I got invited to act as a mentor at one of the Mini-Seedcamps being held across Europe. Karri and the crew at the ever-so-fantastic Arctic Startup blog recommended me to the Swedish organizers of the Helsingborg event held on 5th of May and I jumped at the chance to participate.

The Mini-Seedcamp mentors are VCs and serial entrepreneurs including Daniel Blomquist from Creandum, Hjalmar Winbladh from Rebtel and Thomas Weilby Knudsen from Northcap Partners.  And yours truly. It’s an interesting situation to be a mentor when we are down in the trenches at Everyplay (with nothing public to show yet). I can’t offer recent “here’s how I’ve succeeded” type of lessons. Instead I can offer “here ’s what I think works” and “this is how we are doing it”. There are definitely war stories and lessons learned in how Everyplay got off the ground, the 17+ years spent as entrepreneur in running ASSEMBLY (6000+ participants every year, over 200 person volunteer workforce) and the parallels between pitching video games to game publishers and pitching startups to VCs.

I expect to learn at least as much from being a mentor as the startups can learn from the successes and follies I’ve encountered on my road to Mini-Seedcamp at Helsingborg.

Top VCs on investing in games (Gamesbeat 2009)

I’m today at the Gamesbeat 2009 event hosted by Venturebeat. The day opened with the best VC panel on games that I’ve ever witnessed. Every VC on the panel had invested in games,  had their finger on the pulse of the market and had good insights to share. The pace of the session was blazing fast and it covered everything from what they are investing in to how social games is an user acquisition tactic instead of full-blown category of games.

I tried to record everything in a mindmap and I was typing away at breakneck speeds , so the mindmap may contain mis-quotes and may be somewhat hard to decipher at times. Jetlag doesn’t help either ;-).

Download the mindmap as a PDF.

At Game Developer’s Conference 23rd – 29th March

The Game Developer’s Conference is the event for game developers. I thought I could take a break from going this year as GDC’s focus is mostly “traditional” game development (consoles, PC etc), but I couldn’t resist the siren’s call after all ;-). Personally it is going to be primarily about meetings and networking, and hanging out with fellow game developers.

The most relevant stuff for Everyplay is in the Worlds in Motion summit held on Monday and Tuesday. I especially look forward to Raph Koster’s kickoff for the summit – his presentations are always thought provoking. It’s too bad that I’ll miss the Tuesday sessions of Worlds in Motion summit, as I’m going to be VentureBeat’s GamesBeat 2009 event).

A couple of friends are also presenting at GDC. Check out e.g. Adam Martin’s, Sulka Haro’s, Petri Purho’s, Matt Swoboda’s and Thomas Bideaux‘ presentations.

If you are at GDC or in downtown San Francisco, and would like to meet during the week, drop me an email at jussi dot laakkonen at nospam-gmail dot com.

Twitter for the geographically-challenged outsiders

To continue on my previous post on how to survive 8727km from the Silicon Valley, here are a couple of practical tips on how to get the most out of Twitter.

Search for relevant keywords

Twitter’s Advanced Search is great tool for finding interesting people and topics serendipitously. Define the keywords you are interested in, run the search  and subscribe to the RSS feed. My search terms are “Jussi Laakkonen”, “social games”, “casual games”, “funware” and “virtual goods”. See who tweet about the topics you are interested in and what the discussion is.

Trawl thru the following lists

This tip comes from @mitch_olson of Small Worlds, who trawled thru my following list to find new people to follow. If you find an interesting person to follow, check out who they follow to find more interesting folks.

Add yourself to WeFollow

Simply tweet “@wefollow #yourtag #yourtag #yourtag” to classify yourself to make yourself more foundable. First, checkout the most popular tags on WeFollow. To find more interesting people to follow check the WeFollow lists on the tags you classify yourself with.

Re-tweet and see who re-tweet you

Re-tweeting is about sharing something valuable. You are doing a service to the person who you are retweeting as well as to the people who follow you. See who re-tweet you for more interesting people.

See who they are conversing with

Often you follow a particular person, and they are chatting away with @ replies with  somebody you are not yet following . See who that other is, perhaps she will be worth a follow.

Establish a tweeting style & reinforce it at your profile

I personally use Twitter for business and tend not to share personal stuff or tweet funny jokes. Your followers will expect consistentency, so when they check your profile, they’ll decide at an instant if they want to follow you or not.  Your latest ten tweets and secondarily your 160 char description play a huge role on who follow you.

Check before you follow

The corollary to the above is to check the profile before you follow someone. I’m picky about who I follow people to avoid cluttering my stream (if only Tweetdeck had a longer backlog of tweets ;-)).

Hashtags

Hashtags make some sense out of Twitter, especially during conferences like SXSW. Tweetdeck nicely supports hashtags by integrating to the Twitter Search. It’s a godsend for tracking topics especially when I’m 7-10 timezones away and top discussions take place in the middle of the night (for me).

Tweetdeck

Some prefer Thwirl, but Tweetdeck is the way to go ;-)

Read Guy’s advice

Guy Kawasaki has further advice on How to use twitter as twool.

If you have more advice for geographically-challenged Twitter users, please share it in the comments!

Read, read, read – how to survive 8727km from Silicon Valley

(CC) Will Lion

The web is an amazing equalizer. It brings everything closer. To be precise 8727km closer (the distance from Helsinki, Finland to Silicon Valley, USA).

Since before I started Everyplay I knew I had to learn a lot, but I never imagined I could learn so much by simply being at my computer and devouring blog posts, following people on Twitter, watching conference videos and tracking hashtags. I’m truly grateful to every conference organizer like Charles Hudson (Virtual Goods conference) or Mike Arrington and Jason Calacanis (TechCrunch50) and to every conference presenter, who post their presos, videos and transcripts online. I’m truly grateful to every blogger like Eric Ries, Andrew Chen and Raph Koster, who share their hard earned lessons and insights freely with the world.

If you are geographically-handicapped like me, the best thing you can do is to drink from the fire hydrant. To get you started, here is the list of the 250+ blogs I track. The list gets roughly 400-500 posts per day, so the best thing to do is to just skim the list and read the interesting parts.

The blogs are in a quasi-ranked list of relevance and quality (i.e. I moved the blogs I pay most attention to the top of their respective lists). I’ve bolded a few top selections, that anybody interested in games, startups, virtual goods, and venture capital should follow. If you want to import a whole bunch of these feeds, feel free to grab my OPML file (you can import it to e.g. Google Reader)

Game design

• [RSS] Raph’s Website (Raph Koster, brilliant designer and thought leader for MMOs, founder of Metaplace)
• [RSS] Avant Game (Jane McGonigal is one of the thought leaders in using games outside of games)
• [RSS] Lost Garden (Daniel Cook is a very prominent game designer, great articles e.g. on Funware)
• [RSS] Zen of Design (Damien Schubert is a very prominent game designer, highly experienced on MMOs)
• [RSS] DESIGNER NOTES (Soren Johnson, designer at Firaxis for e.g. Civilization)
• [RSS] musings of a social architect (Amy Jo Kim’s blog, CEO of Shufflebrain, game & community designer)
• [RSS] Sulka’s Game (Sulka Haro, lead designer of Habbo)
• [RSS] frans goes blog (Personal blog of Frans Mäyrä, professor at Hypermedia lab, academic perspective)
• [RSS] The Funware Blog @ rmbr (Gabe Zichermann’s blog, not very active anymore, used to be about Funware)
• [RSS] Broken Toys (Scott Jennings, formerly of NCSoft, now in a top secret online games startup)

Online games, virtual worlds

• [RSS] Virtual Worlds News (top source of VW news)
• [RSS] Inside Social Games (top source of social games news)
• [RSS] Worlds In Motion (Gamasutra’s sister site focused on online games, in depth articles)
• [RSS] Kzero (great research on Virtual Worlds)
• [RSS] +8* | Plus Eight Star (great research and analysis, focused on Asia)
• [RSS] Virtual Economy Research Network (best research of virtual economies, from Helsinki Institute of Information Technology)
• [RSS] Bret on Social Games (Bret Terrill’s blog, superb archive on social games, no longer updated)
• [RSS] PlayNoEvil Game Security News & Analysis (read this blog to avoid getting your game pwned)
• [RSS] Terra Nova (the blog for virtual worlds, great archive, academic)
• [RSS] The Forge (Matt Mihaly’s blog, MUD veteran, virtual goods pioneer)
• [RSS] Erik Bethke and The World of GoPets (Erik Bethke, founder of GoPets, mix of professional & personal, great articles in archive)
• [RSS] DPerry.com (David Perry, prominent game designer, entrepreneur now focused on online, F2P games)
• [RSS] ICO Partners (insightful articles from MMO veterans, European focus)
• [RSS] Metaplace.com Developer’s Blog (Official blog for Metaplace, pioneering MMO/online game building)
• [RSS] Life at Playfish (Playfish’ official blog)
• [RSS] Zynga Blog (Zynga’s official blog)
• [RSS] SGN Developer Blog (Social Gaming Network’s official blog)
• [RSS] Media Shifters (great new blog on social games)
• [RSS] shufflebrain (Official blog for Shufflebrain, makers of Photograb)
• [RSS] Caleb Booker (great roundups of virtual world news)
• [RSS] Second Tense (Hiro Pendragon’s blog, in-depth articles on MMOs)
• [RSS] Dogster Inc. Company Blog
• [RSS] MoiPal Blog (official blog for MoiPal, mobile virtual world)
• [RSS] MMPOW / Published News (MMO news)
• [RSS] the Zong blog (mobile payment processor)
• [RSS] Payment Guy – “Everyone can pay!” (controversial, sometimes over top claims on certain topics, but still strangely interesting stuff on payments)
• [RSS] Ministry of Game (fan blog for social games)
• [RSS] eightbar (virtual worlds blog, former IBM evangelist, often Second Life related content)
• [RSS] Mark Pincus Blog (Mark is the CEO of Zynga, mostly personal stuff but sometimes also Zynga news)
• [RSS] From The Chief Technical Monkey (CTO of Rebel Monkey, a virtual world/casual MMO for tweens and teens)
• [RSS] Mathieu Nouzareth’s Blog (founder of Cafe.com, a social games outfit)
• [RSS] GAMES | Roman Nouzareth | Boonty | CAFE.COM (co-founder of Cafe.com, a social games outfit)
• [RSS] PlayOn (Xerox PARC’s blog on virtual worlds)
• [RSS] Virtually Blind | Virtual Law (virtual world & law)
• [RSS] Andrew Wooldridge Dot Com
• [RSS] Conduit Labs Blog for Input (official blog of Conduit Labs, makers of Loudcrowd)
• [RSS] Economics of Virtual Worlds
• [RSS] Virtual Greats
• [RSS] Virtual Worlds Forum Blog
• [RSS] Scott Hartsman – Off the Record
• [RSS] We Can Fix That with Data (MMO design)
• [RSS] Virtual Cultures
• [RSS] Sharendipitous Moments (Sharendipity’s official blog, a game building toolkit)
• [RSS] PlayCrafter’s blog (Playcrafter’s official blog, a game building toolkit)

Virtual goods

• [RSS] Virtual Goods News (best news source on virtual goods)
• [RSS] SharkJumping (Sean Ryan’s blog, CEO of Meez, on board of Twofish, knowledgeable entrepreneur, pioneer of virtual goods in USA)
• [RSS] Virtual Goods Insider (great blog on virtual goods, not updated too often though)
• [RSS] The Offerpal Media Blog (Offerpal is a CPA provider, corporate stuff but also HOW-TO articles)
• [RSS] SnipClip. Paid content is back. (German startup working with virtual goods)
• [RSS] Freemium (all things Freemium – not focused on virtual goods, but very relevant)
• [RSS] Free To Play (used to be great blog for virtual goods, but Adrian Crook hasn’t updated it in a while, great archive)

Game industry general

• [RSS] A Tree Falling in the Forest (Keith Boesky is a former CEO of Eidos USA, insightful blogger)
• [RSS] T=Machine (Adam Martin’s great blog, opionated & insightful – love it!)
• [RSS] GamesIndustry.biz (very good site covering the business side of games)
• [RSS] Bruce On Games (hailing from UK, Bruce has sharp commentary backed by more than a decade as game marketing exec)
• [RSS] FingerGaming (latest on iPhone games)
• [RSS] Gamasutra Feature Articles (Gamasutra is the top resource for “traditional” game developers on the actual development of games)
• [RSS] GameDaily News Feed (good up to date feed on what’s going on)
• [RSS] GameDaily BIZ Features Feed (same, but for business news)
• [RSS] Next Generation (great game development site, often featuring articles from EDGE, the best print game mag)
• [RSS] Jay is Games (great indie & casual game reviews)
• [RSS] DFC Intelligence (DFC is the one game industry research organization I tend to trust on their forecasts)
• [RSS] bizpunk (games & business)
• [RSS] TechSoup (Sonja’s blog on all things game)
• [RSS] Jim on Web Games
• [RSS] Business & Games: The Blog
• [RSS] Game Matters (Scott Miller of 3DRealms)
• [RSS] Level Up (N’Gai Croals blog for Newsweek, probably no longer updated as he’s moved on. Archive is great!)
• [RSS] kevin’s blog
• [RSS] ZenAndGames.com

Entrepreneurs & entrepreneurship, startups

• [RSS] Lessons Learned (the best blog for any tech startup)
• [RSS] Futuristic Play by @Andrew_Chen (the best blog for any online startup)
• [RSS] Master of 500 Hats (Dave McClure a.k.a Master of 500 hats, opionated, insightful & colorful language = great stuff)
• [RSS] blog.pmarca.com (Marc Andresseen, the blog archive is solid gold)
• [RSS] Arctic Startup (Best blog about Scandinavian startups)
• [RSS] OnStartups (Darmesh Shah’s great blog on startups)
• [RSS] Sachin Rekhi’s Blog (great blog with practical posts on social media, monetization)
• [RSS] Charles Hudson’s Weblog(Charles Hudson works organizes e.g. the Virtual Goods summit)
• [RSS] charleshudson’s shared items in Google Reader (Charles Hudson works organizes e.g. the Virtual Goods summit)
• [RSS] Hacker News (always a great source on what’s going on for hacker startups)
• [RSS] SKMurphy (SK Murphy’s blog, follow for customer development process related posts)
• [RSS] Tane.li (Taneli Tikka’s blog, one of most vocal Finnish serial entrepreneurs, on our advisory board)
• [RSS] zengestrom.com (Jyri Engeström, co-founder of Jaiku)
• [RSS] StartupCFO (excellent posts on financial aspects of startups)
• [RSS] Startup Marketing Blog – by Sean Ellis (good marketing posts)
• [RSS] blog maverick (Marc Cuban, entertaining & provocative)
• [RSS] Loic Le Meur Blog (the European in Silicon Valley)
• [RSS] You’ve gotta be kidding me (Max Levchin, co-founder of Paypal and Slide)
• [RSS] traction matters… (good stuff on startups)
• [RSS] Jason Nazar’s Blog (CEO and co-founder of DocStoc)
• [RSS] Don Dodge on The Next Big Thing (investor perspective)
• [RSS] Startonomics (blog for the Startonomics conference)
• [RSS] Noam Wasserman’s “Founder Frustrations” blog
• [RSS] Emerging Enterprise Center Blog
• [RSS] Inspired Startup
• [RSS] Startupbin (Finnish angle)
• [RSS] Asmo Halinen (co-founder of Apaja Online Entertainment, now CEO at OneDidIt)
• [RSS] Fishpool (Osma Ahvelampi, CTO of Sulake (makers of Habbo))
• [RSS] James Hong (of HotOrNot fame)
• [RSS] tippingeurope (Ville Vesterinen, lead dude behind Arctic Startup)
• [RSS] Quick Sprout (Neil Patel of KISSmetrics)
• [RSS] brinking – nabeel hyatt (Nabeel Hyatt’s blog, founder of Conduit Labs)
• [RSS] Riverture …
• [RSS] Bill Joos’ Tips from the Trenches (I only wish Bill would actually blog, so I’ve subscribed to this at the off chance he starts again, because he is one of the smarkest folks I’ve ever met)
• [RSS] Infectious (startup marketing and more from Sean O’Malley)
• [RSS] Laserlike
• [RSS] Cerdafied – Startups, People & the Variety Hour (Michael Cerda of CC:betty)
• [RSS] collapsing geography (Cory Ondrejka, co-founder of Linden Labs, now SVP at EMI Music)
• [RSS] ScreditCrunch (official blog of Scred, Finnish group/micro-finance startup)
• [RSS] ideasonideas (Eric Karjaluoto’s blog)
• [RSS] Dirty Aura (Teemu Aura, ex-Jaiku developer)
• [RSS] The Startup Lawyer
• [RSS] Tech, Startups, Capital, Ideas.
• [RSS] Technology Startup Law BLOG
• [RSS] Tony Wright dot com
• [RSS] Texas Startup Blog
• [RSS] Start Up Blog
• [RSS] Startable
• [RSS] Startup Blog Network
• [RSS] Startup Company Lawyer
• [RSS] Startup Toolbox
• [RSS] Startupping Blog
• [RSS] ScottDig
• [RSS] The Startup Journey
• [RSS] Bill Flagg
• [RSS] Startup Developers Gathering
• [RSS] Ada Chen’s Weblog
• [RSS] Ahtisaari (Marko Ahtisaari, CEO of Dopplr)
• [RSS] Seattle 2.0
• [RSS] Silicon Valley Blog
• [RSS] Joseph Ansanelli
• [RSS] Nick’s Blog
• [RSS] Simply Albert (Albert Lai of Kontagent)
• [RSS] pearltrees (Swiss startup)
• [RSS] Nonsense! (From the founders of Stardoll)
• [RSS] Web Startup Help
• [RSS] Ustrategy
• [RSS] Biz Crusader

Venture Capital

• [RSS] Venture Hacks (the best blog on how to “hack” venture capital – must read)
• [RSS] Lightspeed Venture Partners Blog (superb articles, a lot of them on virtual goods & games, often from Jeremy Liew, one of the managing directors at LSVP)
• [RSS] A VC (Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures, great blog)
• [RSS] Altgate (Furqan Nazeeri’s blog, one of the best blogs on VC from entrepreneur’s point of view)
• [RSS] Ask The VC (Brad Feld and Jason Mendelson of the Foundry group, great blog)
• [RSS] How to Change the World (Guy Kawasaki’s blog, excellent blog archive)
• [RSS] Get Venture by Mark Peter Davis (good advice, short and sweet posts)
• [RSS] The Equity Kicker (Nic Brisbourner of DFJ Esprit, good posts & often, European perspective)
• [RSS] VCMike’s Blog (good stuff)
• [RSS] The Riskmaster (Tim Draper of DFJ)
• [RSS] Feld Thoughts (Brad Feld’s personal blog)
• [RSS] TVC Points-of-view (contrarian VC opinions & insights, good stuff)
• [RSS] BarshBits (Steve Barsh, great articles)
• [RSS] alarm:clock (keep up to date with VC deals)
• [RSS] alarm:clock euro (same, but for Europe)
• [RSS] Morten Lund – It’s all about luck (Morten Lund, angel investor e.g. in Skype, a blog from the heart)
• [RSS] Fred Destin (Fred Destin of Atlas Ventures (France))
• [RSS] Redeye VC (good posts)
• [RSS] Unstructured Thoughts by Taylor Davidson
• [RSS] True Ventures
• [RSS] localglo.be (Saul Klein, partner at Index Ventures)
• [RSS] abovethecrowd.com (Bill Gurley of Benchmark)
• [RSS] Who Has Time For This?
• [RSS] Seeing Both Sides
• [RSS] The Accelerator Group (TAG) (British top VCs, Seedcamp backers)
• [RSS] Jeff Clavier’s Software Only (Jeff Clavier of Softtech VC)
• [RSS] Altos Ventures Musings
• [RSS] Felicis Ventures Blog
• [RSS] EarlyStageVC
• [RSS] BeyondVC
• [RSS] Brian Feinstein (of Bessemer Venture Partners)
• [RSS] WSJ.com: Venture Capital Dispatch
• [RSS] iFundVC (Sequioa iFund’s blog)
• [RSS] Southeast VC
• [RSS] HighContrast
• [RSS] VC Confidential
• [RSS] VC Perspectives
• [RSS] VCball
• [RSS] Susan Wu – Venture Capital (Susan used to be at CRV, now entrepreneur at Ohai, a great blog archive for especially virtual goods)
• [RSS] Venture Capital
• [RSS] McInblog
• [RSS] The coffee shops of Mayfair:
• [RSS] Venture Chronicles
• [RSS] Venture Explorer
• [RSS] Video Games and Venture
• [RSS] VentureBlog
• [RSS] Video Game Venture Capital – VGVC
• [RSS] Soaring on Ridgelift
• [RSS] Going Private

Web 2.0, social media

• [RSS] Occam’s Razor by Avinash Kaushik (the best blog on analytics & metrics)
• [RSS] Web Strategy by Jeremiah (analyst at Forrester, cutting edge insights on social media)
• [RSS] O’Reilly Radar – Insight, analysis, and research about emerging technologies (the latest from O’Reilly, always very insightful)
• [RSS] KISSmetrics Blog (great blog on analytics for social media)
• [RSS] Kevin Hillstrom’s MineThatData (hard core analytics)
• [RSS] JayWeintraub.com – Internet Advertising Analysis and Commentary (more hard core analytics)
• [RSS] Joi Ito’s Web (Joi Ito of Creative Commons, angel investor)
• [RSS] Lookery Blog (official blog for Lookery)
• [RSS] Signal vs. Noise (37Signal’s official blog)
• [RSS] Mixergy.com (great interviews)
• [RSS] The Kontagent Blog (great analytics for social media apps)
• [RSS] Bokardo – Social Design by Joshua Porter (on designing social media services)
• [RSS] SMC:posts (syndicated feed on all thing social media)
• [RSS] The Altimeter by Charlene Li (author of the Groundswell, social media)
• [RSS] Noah Kagan’s Okdork.com
• [RSS] Henrik Torstensson’s Weblog (Swedish perspective on the latest & greatest going on the web startups)
• [RSS] Life With Alacrity (good, in-depth articles)
• [RSS] innonate
• [RSS] Future Exploration Network (futurist research, social media research)
• [RSS] Information Arbitrage
• [RSS] Conversion Rate Experts
• [RSS] Conversion Rate Optimization
• [RSS] This is going to be BIG.
• [RSS] Web2List
• [RSS] SomBiz (aggregator of Finnish social media/web 2.0 blogs)
• [RSS] The Social Software Weblog
• [RSS] The Social Times
• [RSS] Facebook Developers News Feed (well, naturally you need to subscribe to the source =))
• [RSS] Building Web 2.0 Reputation Systems: The Blog (from Yahoo’s team behind their great Reputation System’s library)
• [RSS] bub.blicio.us
• [RSS] ValveBlog (official blog of Valve, Finnish digital marketing firm)
• [RSS] Dion Hinchcliffe’s Web 2.0 Blog
• [RSS] Clickable Culture
• [RSS] Quintura blog
• [RSS] Best Engaging Communities
• [RSS] Bill Johnston: Online Community Strategy

Flash game tech

• [RSS] Alternativa Game blog (one of the best Flash 3D engines, closed source though)
• [RSS] ProgrammableWeb (best resource of mashups)
• [RSS] RockOnFlash \m/ :: John Grden (keep up to date what’s going on with Papervision 3D)
• [RSS] UnitZeroOne (another cutting edge Flash blog)
• [RSS] Technoracle (a.k.a. “Duane’s World”) (blog for Flash evangelist)

Professional blogs

• [RSS] VentureBeat
• [RSS] TechCrunch
• [RSS] ReadWriteWeb
• [RSS] Inside Facebook
• [RSS] All Facebook
• [RSS] Mashable!
• [RSS] GigaOM
• [RSS] paidContent.org
• [RSS] TechCrunch UK
• [RSS] Scobleizer — Tech geek blogger
• [RSS] CenterNetworks
• [RSS] TheNextWeb.org
• [RSS] Download Squad

Misc

• [RSS] Presentation Zen (Garr Reynold’s outstanding blog on presentations and presenting)
• [RSS] Seth’s Blog (Seth Godin, marketing guru & author, always insightful and thrill to read)
• [RSS] Slideshows by User: garr (Garr’s presentations)
• [RSS] Slides that stick (good, practical tips)
• [RSS] Slideshows Most Favorited Today (follow to see outstanding presos)
• [RSS] Ypulse (stay tuned to what Gen Y thinks)
• [RSS] Copyblogger (learn how to blog better =))
• [RSS] The Long Tail (Chris Anderson’s blog for the book by the same name)
• [RSS] Six Pixels of Separation – Marketing and Communications Insights Blog and Podcast – By Mitch Joel at Twist Image
• [RSS] advertising/design goodness – advertising and design blog (for design inspiration)
• [RSS] MarketingCharts
• [RSS] John Ndege.com
• [RSS] Vex Appeal
• [RSS] Burnham’s Beat

Did you find the list useful? Am I missing a blog that an online games entrepreneur should definitely follow? Please shout out in the comments!

Casual Connect Europe presentations online

Quick note: the presentations from Casual Connect Europe are now online among all of the great Casual Games Assocation presentations and articles.  My personal favourites from the show include:

• Community & Social Gaming: Is there any meaning behind the buzzwords? This was a great, interactive session lead by David Nixon. The best stuff is in the audio recording, as the whole point of the session was to get the audience to participate.
• Game Technology. 3D, Flash and Licensed Engines This session provided a good introduction to 3D on Flash. If you are new to the topic, this is a good starting point.
• Stats Amazing! – How metrics can help you to sharpen your creative sword A good intro on Flash game metrics
• “PSN rock crushing and casual golfing on XBLA” – Developing downloadable games for console platforms a fellow Finnish game developer, Ilari Kuittinen, CEO of Housemarque, that has a great track record on pioneering digital downloadable console games. Hard facts, good insights.

I had a great time in Hamburg, and Casual Connect Europe 2010 will definitely be on my calendar.

P.S. I will be speaking at Nordic Game held in Malmö from 19th to 20th of May. I will be reprising my “How to start a game business” presentation with more lessons learned since.