Echelon 2010 Part IV

As a closing session on day 1, a startup launchpad were presented by few start-ups such as
Pandaform
MyCube
Maxus Media
Scraplr
Stream Media
zelrealm
Time Voyager
FlickEvents
TangoFX
Foound

During the pitching session, things to be noted, you need to explain what is your product difference from your competitors, not only the features, but also the specific demographic profile.

Day 2
Started with presentation by Bret Terrill, Social Gaming Analyst and Blogger, he is the senior director of corporate development at Zynga, the largest and most popular social game network in the world.

"It is hard to give up on your own ideas but you should not be so in love with your own ideas that you cannot change. However, it is still important to maintain a long term vision that guides you along to ensure that progress is made."

Continue to the panel discussion, some points I've taken here :
* Eveyrything can be socialize in some points, from games, email, messenger, facebook,etc
* Social games is so much powerful that it carries social graphs anywhere with you
* People buy emotions, experience, from your product
* Western-made games will be more successful on Facebook because of their culture Asian developed games may have to modify their content to appeal more to the global crowd. Both Asian and Western social games try to achieve the same goal through different angles. It seems like Asian developers will be able to succeed, once they are able to identify what global-content is for their games
* Non-paying users, who make up the base of the social gaming community, are still important to developers as they are able to pull in paying-users with the buzz they create
* The future of social gaming on Facebook will be, 3D gaming
* The main difference between the West and East is that innovation happens in the East, not in the West. West only has Facebook and they think that that’s all. In the East, there are many online social networks sprouting up like Mixi and RenRen that provides a lot of opportunities for social gaming. - Bret

One last stuff to share- Text-based games like Mafia Wars doesn't need Flash -