Trapper Markelz

What is happening at the job: MeYou Health

It has been a busy few months at MeYou Health, but things are starting to come together... enough so that I can talk about them and not worry that the ground will shift under our feet! We launched a preview site today to introduce ourselves and some of the things we are working on:

We recently finished a fantastic design engagement with Essential Design. I am new to the health care problem space. It isn't like gaming where I have been doing it my entire life and know the ins and outs of the gamers, the publishers, the community etc. So working with someone to dissect all of our assumptions and bring some clarity to the real opportunities was extremely valuable. Over the course of the 36 interviews that we conducted, I was amazed how complicated people's lives are. How intertwined we are with our own barriers and motivations... how influenced we are by the people around us and how that impacts our Wellbeing. All of this has been essential in thinking about our products.

This whole year for MeYou Health is really about learning. Our goal is to bring a variety of products to market on many different channels and learn how people respond to them. The one theme tying them all together is the concept of small actions.

Every product we build will focus on introducing you to small actions that you can take that over time can deliver big results. Humans like to practice Hyperbolic Discounting, which is picking smaller immediate rewards over larger long term ones. So in order to succeed, everything we do has to be about making any action short, attainable, and rewarding. It is from the gaming industry that we can draw inspiration from. Games are good at creating immediate rewards... so we have to do the same for healthy behaviors.

As a few of our products get ready for launch, we will release more information. Definitely head over to the site and sign up to be notified of the private beta.

We are also launching a Sweepstakes next week so sign up to be notified of that as well.

Also, head over to our Facebook page and FAN us!

Goodbye GamerDNA, Hello MeYou Health!

Tomorrow I officially start a new job for a Boston health start-up called MeYou Health. Our mission will be to design and build innovative software products that use patterns from social media, gaming, and mobile to engage consumers around their health and wellness. The entire company is two months old and I am excited to get in so early... before there is a product team... before there is a product... to craft every aspect of it from the ground up. It is truly a fascinating and exciting opportunity.

What happened to gamerDNA?

As you might have heard, gamerDNA is undergoing a transformation to a primarily commercial business. Because I am a consumer product guy, it doesn't make sense for me to hang around while this transformation happens. GamerDNA.com is not going away... none of the aspects of the company are going away... but they are transforming... and have been transforming behind the scenes for the last month. I am still involved in gamerDNA as needed, and will continue to follow and support it however I can... but as you all know, I have beautiful kids to feed! Time to move on to the next big adventure!

What will happen to 360voice?

I know many of you read my blog are from 360voice.com... that site is staying up... and I will continue to support it in my spare time for free as I always have. I am committed to the community there and I could never just walk away. I still play my Xbox 360... and will always enjoy the friend ships and community we have built there... so it isn't going away any time soon as long as I can help it. If that ever changes, you will be the first to know.

So what is next?

Tomorrow I dive in head first into learning as much as I can about the health space... about the existing products on the market (designated Health 2.0)... and figuring out how to pull together a team of really talented people to do some truly inspired and innovative work across a variety of platforms. I hope to build the kinds of products that anyone can use... so many some of you will be lucky to be in my beta programs! :)

Change is the one true constant in life, whether we acknowledge it or not. This is just one more change, one full of opportunity... and I stand here at the beginning of this challenge just as optimistic as I was when I moved to Boston.

One aspect of this opportunity is that if we are successful, we will make the world a healthier place. I did tell Maureen that I wanted my next job to make a difference in a tangible way... so it is exciting to have gone out and found that.

Wish me luck!

I get to be on a panel at MIT

I have been asked to be on a panel at MIT for the Futures of Entertainment conference. The panel will be at 3pm on November 21st 1pm on November 20th [rescheduled].

Changing Audiences, Changing Methodologies
Audience Research has long been a vital part of the media industries: research help determine which ideas get produced, where content is distributed, and how content is monetized. Shifts in consumption patterns brought on by cross-platform digital distribution have forced media researchers to re-evaluate their notions of the audience. How is knowledge about the audience produced when emerging sites of consumption are not completely understood? How have research practices adjusted to new ways of gauging audiences and making that knowledge useful? How do researchers understand audiences across platforms? How do different stakeholders ascribe value to the audience? How does research contribute to monetization models for digital content distribution? How has traditional research adapted to keep up with the demand for better metrics? This panel will draw from a variety of industrial and academic perspectives to understand how we imagine media audiences and how we make them valuable.

Panel
JuYoung Lee – Co-Founder & Chief Scientist,ACE Metrix; David Spitz – Director of Business Development, WPP;  Mark Zagorski   – Chief Revenue Officer, eXelate Media; Trapper Markelz – VP Products, GamerDNA

Should be a good time! Almost all that we have done this past year at gamerDNA has been about coming up with data-driven methods for quantifying the gaming audience... taking it beyond the stereotypical classifications of "hard core" and "casual" and finding the true segmentation around genre... content... play mechanics, etc.

Back at work, thinking about competition and enabling

I am getting back into the swing of things at work. These are interesting times that we live in. Exciting, complicated times. Lot's of decisions to make over the coming weeks.

I have mainly been contemplating market competition. Truth be told, I am not a competitive person (in a typical sense). I use to be... in high school... but college sort of took it out of me. I also managed to read a book that really had an impact on me called NonZero: The Logic of Human Destiny which caused me to see competition and cooperation in a different way.

My friend Kevin linked me to an article the other day called The Awesomeness Manifesto:

Innovation: it's the ultimate source of advantage, the undisputed heavyweight champion of the economic ring. Innovation is what every organization should be ruthlessly pursuing, right? Wrong.

I'd like to advance a hypothesis: awesomeness is the new innovation.

Let's face it. "Innovation" feels like a relic of the industrial era. And it just might be the case that instead of chasing innovation, we should be innovating innovation — that innovation needs innovation. Why? When we examine the economics of innovation, three reasons emerge.

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The article goes on to explain why "Awesome" is the new innovation... and as I read it, I find it has roots in the non-zero way that we can think of markets.

In short, the way I think of competition:

We should be trying to enable markets to be more valuable instead of destroying markets for the sake of other markets.

Given that I work in the gaming space, the commercial question to myself is, how do we expand the commercial success of the gaming industry by using the tools available to us: Content, data, relevance, experience, technology, creativity?

But at the larger level, what other markets are ripe for enabling? Given that my family just went through a personal tragedy, I find myself directly plugged into the tragedy that is happening all over the world. Why did I have to experience tragedy to feel connected to something that already existed in the first place? Is there an enabling way to bring that connectedness to others without them having to actually experience a loss? In this case enabling the support and charity markets of the world.

I stand at a personally interesting cross roads, working in an industry that is ready to embrace technology to make everyone's experiences better. To connect people in relevant and repeatable ways that is good both for the consumer and the content creator. And I can't help but thinking about all the industries out there that could benefit from some of the patterns that I am seeing emerge.

It makes me excited to still be in technology.

A big day at GamerDNA

Yesterday we launched a new version of our product at GamerDNA. It marks another step forward for my company... and we are all really excited about the new opportunities that this revision will open up for us. This is the result of about three months of hard work by my awesome team. Everyone pitched in, used all their skills to not only make a beautiful application, but also a much more usable, high-performance, and scalable one.

To give you some sense... here is where we were:

Here is where we are now:

 

A couple of the accomplishments include:

• A system wide alerting system to let you know when things are happening. Making it easier to get involved in the conversation.
• Complete conversion from a "friend" model to a "following" model.
• Real-time activity feeds of what people you are following are doing on the site, as well as any content being added around games that you are interested in.
• A "Spotlights" feature that bubbles up stuff you might be interested in based on all your past gaming and content consumption... it learns as you use the site... each day suggesting up to 10 items for you to check out.
• A roll up of games that your friends are playing, what is hot, new, and upcoming based on people similar to you.

In general, we have done everything we can to make the site smarter about you as a gamer. As you use gamerDNA, these systems learn what you like and the content you get becomes more relevant.

In addition, the profile section is revamped to better showcase your identity. Here are some examples...

The profile page starts out with showing your most recent gaming activity.

 

All of your gaming history is aggregated. Because we now import games for new users from their favorite services, you can have a rich game page of data from the get go. In some cases (when we can) we pull your friends form networks as well, so you can have a good set of people to follow as well giving you a good content stream.

 

Media is also a big part of interacting on the site... so the content you upload (screen shots) is now presented in a fun gallery format.

 

All in all, it has been a really fast three months. What you don't see is also all the improvements that were made to the system architecture... and also all the work we did to build a full set of commercial tools for our targeted media network (which is really exciting if you are into behavior targeting and ad networks).

In short, times are awesome at GamerDNA! We have an awesome new consumer product, some really powerful commercial products that are lighting fires in the ad world... what more could we ask for?

I love my job!

Commercial vs. Consumer

It has been awhile since I did a full blown work update... so here goes.

I have worked on many types of products... most of the enterprise... some of them consumer... ecommerce sites... consumer facing company sites... movie review sites... blogs... 360voice of course... and most recently gamerDNA.com.

In the case of consumer... the reality is that your users don't want to pay you any money... so in order to build a real business around a consumer experience, you have to monetize those users indirectly through advertising, or through a few direct methods (paraphrased from a JP Morgan report I read a ways back): 

• Performance based advertising models (where the user actually completes an offer)
• Some form of virtual good sales (microtransactions)
• Something that exposes you to classifieds or ecommerce markets (real money!)
• Premium memberships... or "Freemium" as the new buzzword is called that grant access to higher quality features. 

One thing you might notice immediately is that there is one thing required here... LOTS OF USERS... what is called SCALE. No users... no eye balls for ads or people to buy things at your low price that aggregates together in volume to make lots of cash.

This is why the old mantra was get users first, make money second. If you are Twitter that is great... if you are thousands of other startups out there... scale is a very... very... hard thing to come by. You often have to spend money to get it... and that is a really bad idea in most cases. 

So switching gears, if consumers don't have a lot of money... by contrast, companies do! A commercial business can be very high margin... and it doesn't take many deals to gain some product traction... assuming you have a good product.

In short... that is what I have been grappling with lately... how do you build a really compelling product for consumers... but come up with a product strategy that also leverages a strong commercial opportunity... so that you can leverage both the low margin/high volume models for consumer monetization, and also take advantage of the low volume/high margin world of commercial products.

I have also found that there is a lot of really awesome technology available in commercially targeted software. The problem is, because it is targeted at companies with lots of money to spend on licensing, it tends to be very expensive. If you want to augment you consumer experience with anything remotely advanced (and you are a scrappy start up), you more or less have to build it yourself... because honestly, you aren't going to be able to justify buying six-figure software licenses when you aren't going to directly recoup it from your consumers. However, if you can work that spending into commercial models... the landscape changes... and the technology options available to you multiply.

Did I think that when I joined GamerDNA this consumer/commercial product balance is what I would be grappling with? No... but let me tell you it is pretty awesome. We are in this for the long haul people. We aren't just building a site... we are building a scalable multifaceted business. I have Jon Radoff, my boss and GamerDNA CEO for teaching me this lesson.

As soon as things are locked down, I will post all about the awesome... for now we are just cranking away... a small, motivated company, packed with ideas, innovation, and a passion to build a great business around gaming, community, and data.

365 Days of gamerDNA

It has been a year since I started the wild journey that is gamerDNA.com. Sometimes it is hard to fathom that it has only been a year... but what an exciting year it has been. The product itself has come a long way... more so than you can see... I made a list of the main things and sent it out to the team... but I wanted to republish it for my friends and family... some of you will know what I am talking about, others will simply say... "nice list of computer stuff."... I feel like many of you say that all the time anyhow... :)

So where has gamerDNA come from over the last 365 days?

Well there was our first day in the office... no projector... no coffee... barely any chairs... such humble and exciting beginnings... we were all so innocent... we could not concieve of the volume of effort that would be cranked out over the next 12 months.

1. Convert the GuildCafe brand into the gamerDNA brand. A full site redesign in two months with a complete relaunch.
2. In the process of that, convert the site (most of it) from PHP to Ruby-on-Rails
3. Build out a product architecture that would serve as the back bone of our underlying systems that still provide us the flexibility to iterate to this day.
4. Implement the Xbox 360 data capture
5. Implement Steam data capture (pc game data)
6. Implement Xfire data capture (pc game data)
7. Build out an automatic experiences system (with auto-narratives) - a conversation catalyst. Since retired, but hey... it was fun. :)
8. Revamp the World of Warcraft Character/Item/Guild capture to pull more accurate data with better consistency.
9. Construct a new registration process (that can be cobranded for partners)
10. Install a streamlined guild hosting sign up process.
11. Construct a gamer quiz system, write content for four genre based quizzes and install a gamer behavior trait system (how people play) underneath it.
12. Implement an OpenID authentication system in our product with co-brand capabilities and a white-label version that can be deployed to partners.
13. Import information and content of over 50,000+ games in our catalog.
14. Construct a moderated folksonomy-based game traiting system that powers a rich and extensible discovery algorithm.
15. In combination with the launch of game traiting, produce a new homepage.
    
16. Build a social media syndication system for Twitter, Tumblr, and FriendFeed.
17. Perform a full performance and caching pass on all systems and sub systems to enable faster system scale.
18. Added Warhammer Online Character/Guild capture and dynamic signature images.
19. Installed rich monitoring systems for performance of our rails architecture.
20. Begun delivering user-facing and documented Helix APIs based on REST XML.
21. Built a WoW Achievement capture system that powers dynamic signature images.
22. Deployed a full clustered architecture to allow 100% uptime upgrades and a middle tier cache model.
23. Built out a new, scalable development environment for better productivity.
24. Participated in the Child's Play Charity Drive by providing a system for communities to get involved with custom signature badges.
25. Created widget versions of all quizzes with skin/sponsor capabilities.
26. Produced a music genre quiz and matching signatures.
    
27. Created custom member profile signatures/gamerDNA cards.
28. Eliminated the DNA panel and created a new (and better, more flexible) home for all profile/gamerDNA entry.
29. Deployed new Game and Member Directories to provide more flexible options for navigating content.
30. Implemented a game activity system normalizing all game play into a single feed with multiple events and tracking/displaying those events on a game play calendar.
31. Replaced our watchlist technology with a more consistent activity feed technology.
32. Imported all iPhone games into our catalog.
33. Established casual game partnerships to import web based games into our catalog.
34. Built out a new game page with a gameCURRENT system for delivering filtered content about games.
35. Added Buy.Rent.Play actions with multiple vendors (Buy.com, Amazon, Amazon Marketplace, Addicting games, Bigpoint, Kongregate, Gamefly)
    
36. Began integrating external vendor content (pics, reviews, video).

...and the awesome continues.

I work with a fantastic team at an exciting and fun company. The work is hard, rewarding, and in the end... it is just video games! Who doesn't like video games?!?

Cheers to the next 365 days... hell the next 90 will be more exciting than the last 365, just wait and see

The Universe of GamerDNA

Jon Radoff, the CEO of my company gamerDNA just did a massive interview at Obsessable.com. It is LONG and informative... it covers all of our major features... touches on a few older ones... and also hints at a few major changes that we are working to deploy as I type this.

It is pretty easy to forget how much we accomplish month to month (and in aggregate) when your head is so buried in the trenches. Every month when I prepare my board presentation, that often gives me a chance to peek up for a moment and realize how far we have come... but I also can see how far we still have to go!

In the end, interviews like this will be fun to hang on to years from now. This interview at Obsessable is a great snap shot of where we are and I am really proud of it all reading through it. 

I do warn you, the interview is huge. Grab a cup of coffee... and settle in... or you can skim it:

With the gaming social network space becoming pretty crowded these days — including sites like former Napster founder Shawn Fanning's Rupture (sold to Electronic Arts for an undisclosed sum between $15 and $30 million last year), former Xfire founder Dennis Fong's Raptr (check out our interview with Dennis here), Ugame based in the UK, WeGame focused around a client tool enabling gameplay video capture and sharing, and others — what does gamerDNA, originally founded as MMO social news and guild hosting site GuildCafe and galvanized into a bigger entity thanks to a $3 million venture investment from Flybridge Capital Partners, bring to the table that's different? We discovered a few key points during the interview, among them the Discovery Engine that takes a few different factors including gameplay history, the results of personality quizzes, and traits directly identified by gamers to create a gamer profile or "gamerDNA" that aims to identify something salient about you as an individual player, in order to better connect you with new games you might enjoy across gameplay platforms as well as with other players like you to connect with and share some of those game experiences with.

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It is always fun to see all the features laid out like they are in the article. Makes me really amazed how far we have come... all of that we have accomplished in 10 months... and much more that isn't shown there. A pretty fun ride

GamerDNA progress

For those of you not following my company blog religiously (shame!) we are in a pretty good spot after 8 months on the job. We have built out an array of critical information systems. Rebranded... redesigned various pieces (still more to go), added more content... new features... all the while working supporting an accelerating number of users and a wide array of existing features.

We recently rolled out the beginnings of our gamerDNA Discovery System that will grow to provide information and recommendations around games across a variety of retail, mobile and causal spaces... We are using a moderated folksonomy that allows users to mark why they liked a game and what aspects using "traits" (tags). Over time as the database fills out, we will have a fun way of looking at similar traits across game setting, tone, character archetype, enemy archetype, and game-play mechanics/features and driving discovery of new opportunities for fun and conversation around gaming.

We also launched a fun music quiz recently... If you play games like Rock Band or Guitar Hero... how do you stack up? I came in as:

Take the quiz yourself... see how you rate!

So the train keeps plowing forward! If I had to predict, I would say the next three months are going to be pretty pivotal as we roll out some pretty massive redesigns to key portions of the site. That will set the stage for where we go throughout 2009... so it is exciting!

GamerDNA marches on with social media integration

We launched a new feature at gamerDNA this week... something that is already turning out to be pretty fun, just in the first few days:

CAMBRIDGE, MA– October 8, 2008– GamerDNA.com, the social platform for video game identity and discovery, today announced the integration of new tools that will allow gamers to share their game experiences across all forms of social media. Beginning with Twitter and Tumblr, the popular microblogging services, gamers can now share PC and video gaming preferences and stories, gaming quiz results, and automatic summaries of games they have recently played.

The new social media features of GamerDNA connect the networks where people play with the places they share their opinions and stories about gaming, helping members discover new games being played and enjoyed across many segments of gaming culture. GamerDNA also extends the capabilities of networks and software such as Xfire, Steam and Xbox Live, allowing users to share their game experiences on social media with the software they are already using.

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The great part is when you start to see all of the conversations that are arising by pushing out game play activity over social networks... I have already had lots of great conversations about the games I am playing... with people I had never talked to before... just because of this info flowing out over my social graph.

The pace at GamerDNA is really frenetic. With the economy the way it is, there are many aspects that can (and will) effect a VC backed start up. This means we have to continue to do more with less... and be as innovative as possible in as short amount of time as possible... but is it still fun? Hell yes!