All Posts Tagged ‘Op-Ed’
Casual Gaming appeals to a different demographic
I have a confession to make. I am a casual gamer, and, if I am being brutally honest, prefer solo action to anything social.
Trying to fit gaming time into my fast-paced 21st Century existence can be a struggle. The constant demands of being available 24/7 either through my smartphone or the joys of constant Internet access means that the majority of my console access is taken up by short bursts of activity. Thirty minutes here and there — occasionally I treat myself to an hour of Batman: Arkham Asylum and if there is nothing pressing in my life I can lock myself away in Grand Theft Auto for an undetermined time.
Even when I get the chance to travel with my PSP, the limited battery life means that extended play is not always possible.
But are Casual and Social Gaming taking over Nation’s collective idea of what videogaming is all about?
(more…)
Tags: Blue Fang Games, casual gaming, facebook, Farmville, Jon Radoff, mobile gaming, Op-Ed, social gaming, Turbine
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“It’s not that I’m lazy, it’s that I just don’t care.” –Peter Gibbons, Office Space
I spent this past week asking fellow entrepreneurs and creative people what they find most challenging about the creative process. Several people – some of the most motivated people I know – said motivation. Almost all of them said they had been thinking a lot about where motivation comes from. This question about motivation seems to be in our collective consciousness lately.
Our hope, I think, is that if we know something about where motivation comes from, we’ll be able to access it more easily, more frequently and then go do all those things we’ve been wanting to do or begin doing things differently.
For me, and I think many other folks, a lack of motivation means one of two things: fear or disinterest. This holds true whether we’re talking about motivation in the short-term (day-to-day work) or the long-term (the kind of careers and lives we aim to build over time). (more…)
Tags: Op-Ed
Posted in Around the Hub | View Comments
Some of us have experienced the joys of waiting for a bus. The longer you wait, the less likely it seems that one will actually show up. Then two will appear at the same time, both seemingly running to a schedule of their own choosing.
Former Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling’s 38 Studios are, at the moment, doing exactly the same thing.
For months, the silence from Schilling’s team has been deafening. One week after their forthcoming appearance at Comic-Con in San Diego, Calif., “Project Mercury” — the code name of 38 Studios’ first release — has trickled into the public consciousness. But the news that the studio is mulling over a proposed $75 million relocation to Providence, R.I. has brought the Company firmly into the spotlight. (more…)
Tags: 38studios, away from the hub, Boston Globe, Boston Government, Company News, Curt Schilling, loan guarantees, Mass High Tech, Op-Ed, Rhode Island
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"No country can get ahead if it leaves half of its people behind…” -Melanne Verveer, U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for Global Women’s Issues
I grew up believing the women’s movement was essentially over.
I was born in 1984, and as far as I could tell — apart from being occasionally harassed on the street — being a woman never held me back. When it came time for college, I wouldn’t consider women’s colleges. I believed in equality, so why should I exclude men?
What’s funny is that I ended up transferring to a women’s school. By the time I graduated, I realized I had been dead wrong about the women’s equality thing.
Today at 26, I find that the older I get, the more I see how much work still needs to be done — especially in startup business. For those of us in need of a reality check, here are the numbers (and some further reading):
- Just 3% of Fortune 500 companies were headed by women in 2009 and just 6 % of the 100 top tech companies are headed by women currently (Harvard Business Review).
- Only 10% of venture capitalists are female (Forbes).
- Women-owned startups receive just 4 to 9% of overall venture capital funding (The Diana Project).
Numbers like these are helpful because they tell a different story than the one we want to believe. Women may not be blatantly discriminated against much anymore (although this happens plenty), but we aren’t respected and rewarded for our contributions to society to the same degree or as consistently as men either. Do we consciously undervalue women’s leadership as a society? I don’t think so. But it still happens all the time.
The good news is that people are doing something about it. (more…)
Tags: boston women entrepreneurs, glass ceiling, Op-Ed, women's entrepreneurship, women's startups
Posted in Around the Hub | View Comments
Schilling's Project Mercury...or Anna Chapman's new view?
For those of us who still fondly remember the Cold War, this week has brought back happy memories.
Average people with normal names, living unremarkable lives that had a constructed sheen of respectability disguising their true intentions. Spies, in the pay of other organizations, hiding behind created identities to ensure that they could complete the missions they had been ordered to perform.
At the same time as “Anna Chapman,” “Tracy Lee Ann Foley,” and “Donald Howard Heathfield,” were being told that their time in the USA was over, World of Warcraft creators Blizzard, were informing their 11 million subscribers that they would have to post any comments on their onsite forums under their real names to stop the forums becoming “a place where flame wars, trolling and other unpleasantness run wild.” Also last week, locally-owned 38 Studios, operated by former Red Sox slinger Curt Schilling, came clean about what they’re working on… kind of. (more…)
Tags: 38studios, Cold War, Comic Con, Company News, Curt Schilling, Dejobaan Games, Disrupter Beam, Op-Ed, secrecy, World of Warcraft
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Some clichés are clichés for a reason. For example, people say entrepreneurship is a lot like distance running because it is.
For a while I thought it was just a personal observation. Running and entrepreneurship have both meant a lot to me at different times in my life, so it was all too easy to draw parallels. Then at various events across Boston, I began meeting quite a few entrepreneur-runners and many entrepreneurs with a distance running past. If it wasn’t running, then it was a sport requiring the same commitment, endurance, confidence in one’s own individual abilities, and high tolerance for, let’s be honest — cold, hard pain.
Our shared traits as startupers and athletes became impossible not to notice.
To me, the most interesting aspect of the entrepreneurship/distance running metaphor isn’t the glory of achievement; it’s this bit about pain or discomfort and a willingness to wrestle with associated feelings of self-doubt. We don’t always like to talk about it, but building a successful business is often a long and difficult process with unforeseen, personally frustrating challenges along the way. (more…)
Tags: endurance, entrepreneurship, Op-Ed, running, startups
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Go Ahead, Make My Independence Day
On July 4th, 1776, this nation became independent of the financial constraints that had been imposed by an overseas power and became self-reliant. Every year since then, this momentous event in American history has been celebrated with fireworks and community gatherings to raise a glass to the visionaries that established the country as an independent state which was no longer subordinate to the whims of a parent entity.
Independent, Autonomous, Self-Governing, Self-Reliant and Self-Sufficient.
The United States of America, the land of the free and the home of the brave. In many ways that could be the perfect background for a video-game, one in which the player has to battle against overwhelming odds to make his way through the numerous obstacles that the Land of the Free represents and which can be the difference between success and failure.
This week, following the E3 Conference, the nominees for the Game Critics Awards 2010 were announced (as reported by Bostinno’s Jennie White). Bearing in mind the exciting new game platforms that will be hitting our shelves later this year – including the introduction of 3D gaming – there were few surprises, with the domination of major corporations continuing to set the pace for game development. (more…)
Tags: Boston Indies, Dance Central, Dejobaan Games, Edu, Fire Hose games, harmonix, independence day, macguffin games, Op-Ed, Playstation Move, Turbine
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Not So Zen: When you're on vacation this summer, take an actual break
Human beings are funny creatures.
We carry around with us all these wonderful intentions about how to live, we generally give people good advice, and then very often we go and do the opposite thing.
For example, I’ve been an active entrepreneur for almost three years now. If someone asked me to talk about an ideal work/life balance for an entrepreneur, I’d describe a near-perfect week including a flexible four to six days of work, one or two non-negotiable days off, plenty of rest and exercise, and a healthy dose of socializing with friends. I’d be prepared to work longer hours now and then because I know entrepreneurship requires that I be willing to go that extra mile.
But ask me to tell you what my actual work/life balance has been since becoming an entrepreneur and my answer is quite different. Let’s just say I very rarely go dancing these days and it used to be my favorite thing. (more…)
Tags: Lists, Op-Ed
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They’re the undisputed kings of underground graphic design in Boston. The cats over at Alphabet Arm Design, founded in 2001 and located on Harrison Avenue in Boston’s South End, have developed design elements and whole brand campaigns for top music acts like The Fray and Sarah Borges and the Broken Singles, as well as some rockin’ local startups. (More on that at the end of this post.)
You might recognize their brand, because fans of the agency have pasted stickers featuring their logos on every bus stop and street corner in Boston.
Since Alphabet Arm are arguably the coolest brand creators in Boston, we thought we asked Founder Aaron Belyea and Designer Ryan Frease to sit down with us and pinpoint five of their favorite brands from in and around the city. They only stipulation? They couldn’t talk about anything they created. What Belyea and Frease came back with were five of the most smokin’ hot logo and brand strategies we could have imagined.
They’re not all startups, but the stuff Alphabet Arm mentions in this post and the reasons they like them are well worth the read. And for all you startupers out there, head to the bottom of the post for three additional brand strategies BostInnovation likes that Alphabet Arm designed — there’s plenty of startup-ey goodness in this article!
Without further ado, here’s what Alphabet Arm came up with: (more…)
Tags: Alphabet Arm, Alphabet Arm Design, NRG Bar, Op-Ed, The Daily Grommet, The Second Glass
Posted in Around the Hub, Social Media | View Comments
Your product's not cool? Time for New Marketing!
Imagine you’re the head of marketing for a company selling staples and have the task of making your company the No. 1 reseller of staples in the next two years. What do you do?
Seeing as staples are a relatively uninteresting item and not a positively motivated purchase, you might feel lost thinking about how to become the best seller of a product people don’t care about.
The excitement around staples may be dead in many people’s minds, but your company’s approach to reintroducing staples in a new way doesn’t have to be.
Traditional marketing rules would tell you to create a funny television commercial, a catchy radio jingle and a magazine advertisement. However, the days of traditional media advertising consumption are coming to a close and the focus is now turning to newer, more refreshing and creative ways of distributing brand concepts.
Boston-area companies like HubSpot and Communispace, and local industry professionals like Steve Garfield and David Meerman Scott have found highly effective and captivating ways of creating new marketing campaigns using video, search, and community building to sell all types of business ideas.
Today, compelling marketing strategies for even the most minute items can include viral videos, social media marketing, blogging, and SEO optimization to name just a few. (more…)
Tags: Communispace, David Meerman Scott, Diane Hessan, Hubspot, Op-Ed, Steve Garfield
Posted in New Marketing | View Comments
Do GOOD, like the San Francisco-based magazine that promotes social entrepreneurship
In my last post for BostInno, I wrote about simple, potentially transformative ideas and how they’re much easier said (and read and appreciated) than done (think absorbed or implemented). To me, social entrepreneurship feels like another one of these simple, but not-so-simple concepts. It’s a relatively new term — having first hit the scene in the 60s and 70s, gaining speed in the 90s due in large part to Bill Drayton — for what is certainly a major global trend, and still its meaning can easily get lost.
Hear a term often enough in many different circles and contexts and that term can begin to lose its intended impact.
So what exactly is social entrepreneurship? What does it look like? How do we know these companies are doing more good than harm in the long-run? What are some measures of success? These are just a few questions that typically come up in conversation around social entrepreneurship.
In essence, social enterprises are entrepreneurial ventures with the aim of solving one or more societal problems.
Social entrepreneurs seek to build companies that create jobs and turn a profit while also helping to cure social ills like poverty, hunger, disease, pollution—any number of things that have a negative effect on a particular group of people as well as the whole of society. They face unique challenges in growing their businesses and often partner with foundations, nonprofits, and corporations to accomplish their goals.
That said, I believe social entrepreneurship is best explained by way of example. (more…)
Tags: Op-Ed
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iPhone 4 lands Thursday. Here's how to afford it:
Hey, Boston Apple Fans: You’ve already ordered the iPhone 4, dropping on Thursday, so what are you going to do with your current iPhone 3G?
(The new iPhone operating system, iOS4, launches today so you can check it out on your current iPhone, but you’ll surely be left wanting more…)
Why not sell it?
While this sounds like the ideal option, it isn’t easy if you don’t have an existing account on eBay, a desperate little brother, or some other go-to way of exchanging your iPhone for cash.
That is, unless you know about Gazelle and NextWorth — Two local companies looking to buy your iPhone 3G, clean it up, and re-sell it to an audience of buyers aching to get their hands on your ostensibly outdated hardware. These companies both fall under the online sales tagline of “reCommerce,” or eCommerce for the reselling crowd, and they’re both offering a considerable amount of money in exchange for iPhone 3G. (more…)
Tags: Apple, Company Profiles, Gazelle, iPhone, iphone 3G, iphone 4, new iphone, NextWorth, Op-Ed, recycle, trade in iphone, Upgrade iPhone
Posted in Mobile | View Comments
We want to make some BostInnovation T-shirts that say, “Entrepreneurs Do It Better.”
While this would certainly be an un-original move on our part, we at BostInno believe this is often a very true statement.
Take for example the case of Bostonian Curtis Dalton, who was just named to a new security role at locally-based Sapient, a massive company that delivers high-tech enterprise solutions to businesses all over the world. According to an announcement made yesterday, Dalton has been named to a brand new role at Sapient: Information Security Executive.
What does it take to garner the special attention of a tech giant like Sapient? (more…)
Tags: Company News, Op-Ed, Sapient, SapientNitro
Posted in Digital | View Comments
Daily Grommet CEO Jules Pieri made the list... Read the full piece to see who else is included!
Every week I find myself attending events for the startup community here in Boston and Cambridge. Six months ago there were probably an average of five women in the room on any given night, including myself. That might even be pushing it. The BostInno team is now seeing more and more women getting involved in the startup community. There are a lot of amazing women out there who have done what you are doing, ladies. Call them Ladypreneurs, if you will.
Everyone is always talking about how supportive our community is for startupers looking to form a company. The women have not let us down. These successful, strong women have started companies here in the Greater Boston Area, and they are resources to us all. We can learn from the building of their companies, we can follow their footsteps, and by their sheer existence as powerful females, they can help us think outside the box.
Ladypreneurs, if you want to start thinking like an entrepreneur you should surround yourself with other women who have done it and are now running startups here in Massachusetts. Follow these women, monitor their Twitter feeds, and learn from them. Included in italics below each Ladypreneur on our list is a recent tweet we feel demonstrates the value they supply their followers.
Without further ado, here are our 12 favorite local Ladypreneurs on Twitter: (more…)
Tags: Lists, Op-Ed, womenpreneurs
Posted in Social Media | View Comments
