My third iPhone application launched last night on the iTunes App Store. Touch Type is an app I wrote to enable the use of Apple’s wider landscape keyboard for drafting email messages on the iPhone.
If anyone has support questions or otherwise would like to contact me, feel free to drop me a line at support@thisistech.com.
Thanks to everyone who has sent feedback. Excerpt from the TechCrunch review below:
For whatever reason, Apple decided not to allow “landscape mode” on iPhone email. If you want to turn the phone when the web browser is open and get the larger keyboard that makes two thumb typing realistic, no problem. But the email app is portrait only.
Now a new iPhone application called TouchType (iTunes link) fixes the problem. Open the application and you get a landscape mode keypad. type an email, hit the send button and it auto-populates the email application. Type in the email addresses and you’re all set.
The application, which costs $.99, comes from the same developer, Mike Schneider, who created Direct Line (easy phone tree navigation) and Private-I (loJack for your iPhone). I like how this guy thinks.
It is tough to gauge the relative success of an iPhone application unless your app makes it to the top 100 on the iTunes App Store. Fortunately in Japan and France my most recent iPhone application, Private-I, has broken this barrier. In the last week Private-I moved into 45th ranked spot in Japan (out of over 4000 applications). In France, Private-I is teetering on the brink of top fifty at #55.
There have been several articles and blog posts over the past couple weeks calling iPhone app development a gold rush, and asserting that iPhone developers are making millions of dollars on modest applications. The potential for iPhone riches exists, but it is vastly overstated in the press. Applications in the top 100 get featured in the “most popular” applications list on within iTunes, and the top 50 get featured in the most popular list on the phone itself. Having seen the difference being in the top 100 and top 50 makes to sales, I am fairly confident that true iPhone riches will remain limited to a very small group of applications.
Despite the complaints about Apple’s arbitrary governance of the App Store, I still think it is an amazing platform for hobbyist and individual developers. The cost of creating an application is low enough that you don’t have to make hundreds of thousands of dollars to make your project a success. But it seems that there are only a small number of positions prominent enough to support a full-fledged business or recoup any significant investment in application development. While I love the low barriers to entry, I think there are so few visible spots on the iPhone deck, that there can only be a handful of true success stories. It will be interesting to see who the first company will be to build a business on the iPhone platform that achieves a decent exit for its founders.
My second iPhone application hit the App Store last night. The application is called Private-I and is intended to help users recover lost or stolen iPhones. The program was written using Google’s App Engine as its back-end, and sends the user an email with the iPhone’s location whenever the program is opened. The icon for the app was designed to lure thieves and curious finders to open the program. You can check out the full description on the App Store here.
[UPDATE]: Private-I got some great press in the last couple days. Reviews on Techcrunch, Gizmodo, and Wired, to name a few.
For developers of online multiplayer games, a game is only as strong as its community. The problem is that publishers can’t fully control the social aspects of their games. So how does a game company foster the type of online community that provides the most value to players?
Terms of Service.
Community management starts with a publisher’s Terms of Service. I discussed Terms of Service briefly in my previous article about virtual property. In a multiplayer online game, the Terms of Service are the law. They create the framework for what is and is not acceptable in the game’s community. As game companies draft their Terms of Service, they need to make choices about the type of community that they are trying to create. This article walks you through some of those choices.
How Will You Enforce.
Is your company prepared to ban players from your community if they do not follow the posted code of conduct? How active a role will your company take in policing the community? In large online communities, it is not practical for the publisher or developer to monitor and stop all offending or unsportsmanlike conduct. In order for the terms to have a real effect on the nature of the game’s community, there must be consequences for failing to comply. For serious violations, banning a player’s account is the most effective choice. For more minor violations or simple unsportsmanlike conduct, incorporating penalties and rewards into game play is another solution. If certain in-game items, arenas for game play, and matchmaking opportunities are only available to members of the community in good standing, players are penalized if they act in ways that ruin the game for others.
Complaint Based Systems.
Fully policing an online community is a difficult, if not impossible, and most companies have limited resources to spend on community management issues. The best mechanism for maintaining law and order without paying people to moderate the game is to build community policing mechanisms into your game. If you make your rules clear and available, your players can be the eyes and ears of your policing efforts. Most players want to preserve a good gaming environment, and are willing to complain when a player is clearly breaking the communities’ rules. Complaint-based systems are becoming the standard for policing online communities, and incorporating some form of formal complaint system into your game gives a remedy to players that are affected by griefers and other negative elements of the community.
There are conflicting opinions on how best to respond to in-game complaints. Some companies take a hard line and ban players from the game that receive too many complaints. Other companies suspend a player’s account for a period of time or take an even more hands off approach. Companies making this decision are typically torn between wanting to maintain a positive, fair and welcoming game community, and not being faced with continually making judgments on where the line is with respect to bad conduct in the game. One solution that I have been advocating to clients is a reputation based filtering system as a means of automatic policing of an in-game community.
Reputation-Based Filtering.
In a reputation-based online community, individual players establish a conduct-based reputation through their interaction with other members of the community. Complaints by other players negatively affect a player’s reputation. Actions that indicate cheating negatively affect a player’s reputation. Good feedback from a wide variety of other players positively effects reputation. With a reputation system in place, players can set a threshold reputation for their matchups with other players. Sensitive members of the community may only want to come into contact with players of their own reputation level and above. Players that offend enough people in-game would find they no longer have access to the more upstanding members of the community. The benefits of this approach are that it allows the community to police itself, and allows players to screen themselves from disruptive players. This approach also avoids the complications of banning a player from a game all together.
Liability Issues.
When managing an online community, it is important for game companies to create policies that provide protection from liability based on bad actors within the community. The best example of this is the implementation of a properly crafted DMCA Safe Harbor provision. In some circumstances, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act can provide safe harbor from liability for contributory copyright infringement. If your online community allows gamers to communicate with each other, post items of content or design in-game items, the concern is that copyright infringement by a player in-game, could expose the publisher to liability. The DMCA can provide a defense against contributory copyright claims, but only if the game company takes some fairly specific measures. First, a game company’s terms of service need to include a DMCA compliance notice and take down provision. This language indicates who content owners should contact if they believe their work is being infringed in the online community. Additionally, a company must file a form with the US Copyright Office identifying its copyright agent for notice and takedown purposes. Among other things, it is essential that a company enforce its notice and takedown policy and act promptly in response to complaints. Companies should also enforce a policy of banning repeat infringers. DMCA issues are complicated, and game companies operating on-line communities should work closely with their attorneys to best position themselves to take advantage of the safe harbor that the law can provide.
DISCLAIMER: Please read the disclaimer language using the link at the top of this page, or click here. This article is not intended to be legal advice, and no attorney client relationship should be inferred from this blog. The law varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction and you should consult with an attorney before relying on anything you read here. This article and this blog do not reflect the views of Wilson Sonsini Goodrich and Rosati.
Readers of this blog know that posts have slowed down in the last few weeks, as I have been spending more of my spare time thinking about iPhone development. Last night my first iPhone application, Direct Line, launched on the iTunes App Store.
Direct Line is a program that automatically navigates you to a person when you dial customer service numbers. The application includes a list of companies that can be dialed with a tap. Once connected, your iPhone will automatically punch the numbers necessary to get you to a person.
In the half day since the application launched, the program has received some great press. Mike Arrington at TechCrunch posted a review this morning calling the application a “must have.” Doesn’t get much better than that for a first day.
Apps take a while to work their way through the approval process at Apple, so stay tuned. I have two other applications awaiting approval. Like Direct Line, they are very simple apps that hopefully will create some value for users.
The iPhone is an amazing development platform. I am a hobbyist and have found writing applications for the phone to be a simulating challenge. I hope you enjoy the program.
Thanks to Cory Doctorow at BoingBoing for bringing my attention to David Byrne’s latest collaboration with Brian Eno, Everything that Happens will Happen Today. David Byrne is a genius. So glad he is still at it. Full album embedded in flash below. If you like what you hear, there is a link in the embed to buy the album directly from DB:
It has been a while since I have posted. I have been sidetracked for the last few weeks working on a slate of iPhone applications that should be hitting the iTunes Application store soon.
My wife got me a Lama IV remote controlled helicopter as an anniversary gift, and it has been a blast. Video below of the helicopter in action. This video is from YouTube, and was not made by me. If I had made the video there would have been more crashing and blades breaking. The learning curve on the helicopter is a little slow, but I am crashing less and less as time goes on.
I recommend picking up one of these (and some extra blades) and give it a try. For $75, it is good fun.
In the dark of night, after everyone goes to sleep, I have been working on an iPhone application to solve one of my pet peeves about composing email on the iPhone. Posts on the blog has suffered a bit over the past week or two, as a result of the all encompasing frustrations of making an application that runs as intended.
I will post details once the application goes live on the App Store. For now, I can say that the application is extremely bare bones, but is intended to increase productivity on the iPhone. Learning the basics of Objective C and the iPhone SDK has been a fun challenge. Some things that you would expect to be very difficult, like handling screen rotation transitions, and provisioning code certificates, were incredibly simple. Some of the simple things were less intuitive, like making the keyboard appear and disappear.
I am not sure how long the approval process with Apple takes, but once/if the application is approved, I will post a full description here. Stay tuned.
On Friday I had the pleasure of speaking with Peentoo Patel, Technical Lead at mDialog. We discussed iPhone application development and his company, mDialog. mDialog has created a high quality video sharing site built around the open h.264 format. The upside of mDialog for consumers of video is high rez user submitted content that can be browsed and shared using an iPhone or iPod Touch. The upside for content creators is a platform that supports broad and narrow casting, and simplified publication of video through integrated RSS.
Social video is a crowded space, and there are some big players spending a lot of money to own the market for user created video. That said, mDialog is innovating in the way small and nimble startups can. The iPhone application for mDialog only tells part of the story. Where the mDialog service really distinguishes itself is in the control that it gives content creators. On the mDialog website, the upload process is fast and intuitive. Videos are automatically optimized for a number of devices. From there, the user can drag and drop their videos into channels that they create. These channels can be public, or made available to only those that the user invites. This means I can create a video channel for videos of my family, and make it available just to my family. With a few clicks, my Dad can subscribe to the channel in iTunes and have the latest family videos synced to his iPod as a podcast. Embedded example below:
Based on the iPhone application alone, it is easy to miss how advanced mDialog really is. My first impression was that the iPhone application was doing what a lot of other applications and websites have already done. The difference, it turns out, is that mDialog does a better job with respect to video quality and ease of use for content owners.
If you like to share video, or are considering publishing a video podcast, you should give mDialog a try. If you have an iPhone or iPod Touch running the v2 firmware, you can find mDialog in the iTunes App Store as a free download.
To hear my interview with Peentoo Patel click the play button below.
Virtual property is a topic that gets lots of attention from legal scholars. There is something intriguing about the lawlessness of virtual worlds. Most of the legal writing in this area focuses on which laws apply and whether traditional legal principles can be transfigured to apply to virtual worlds. As I have mentioned in earlier posts in this series, the focus of these articles is not the theoretical, but practical information for people who make games.
In a virtual world, the publisher’s Terms of Service are the Law. While scholars think theoretically about which real-world laws should and shouldn’t apply in virtual worlds, game developers fortunately have the ability to move past the issue and create their own law. In a virtual world, this means creating a clear and well drafted Terms of Service. A developer or publisher’s Terms of Service are the constitution for its new world. If the publisher says it is legal for people to steal in-game items from each other, then it is. If the publisher’s Terms of Service say that the publisher can suspend player’s accounts, or repossess in-game items, it can. That said, while publishers can create the law, like real world legislators, if the publisher’s laws are too restrictive, arbitrary or unfair, gamers will rebel or take up residence in a more favorable world.
As a game company develops its rule of law, there are two decisions that will have a significant effect on the type of game it creates.
Who Owns Player Created IP?
One issue that that gamers have been paying more attention to in recent years is who owns items that they create in-game. Some publishers of virtual worlds, like Linden Lab, give IP rights in creations to the gamers that create them. Other publishers maintain ownership of all in-world items.
There are upsides to giving players rights in their creations. Second Life’s policies with respect to IP ownership have resulted in a vast and diverse world created primarily based on the time and effort of its players. When Second Life shifted to a policy of allowing players to own the IP rights in their creations, development in-world increased dramatically
The downside to allowing users to own IP rights in their creations is that the publisher looses some degree of control over its world. This is less of an issue in Second Life, because it is not trying to tell a story in the way that many games do. In story driven games like the the Matrix Online or Starwars Galaxies, valuable intellectual property is embodied in the virtual worlds themselves. The Matrix and Starwars universes, for instance, are too valuable to risk allowing users to create derivative characters or stories within the world.
Whether to Acknowledge Virtual Property?
Many game companies do not consider this question in enough depth before launching their game. There are two positions a game company can take with respect to in-game property:
Disavow Virtual Property. The first position is that in-game property has no real world value. Under this theory, in-game items (e.g., swords, articles of clothing, game cards, gold) are purely licensed rights that can be used within the game. Companies that take this approach typically ban the sale of in-game items inside and outside the game. In most cases these companies don’t actively enforce this rule. The most compelling reason that companies take this position is to avoid anti-gambling laws. Each State has its own rules with respect to what constitutes an illegal lottery. To oversimplify this explanation, a common theme among the States is that gambling equals wagering plus chance (G = W + C). Companies that take the position that virtual items in their games have no real world value are working to eliminate the wager part of this equation. The argument is that if in-game items have no value, it is not gambling to put them at risk in a game. The downside to this approach is that the game company looses the ability to get involved in the marketplace for in-game items, which can be a profit center.
Embrace Virtual Property (but eliminate chance). The second position is to acknowledge that in-game items have real-world value. This can make a game or virtual world more compelling for gamers, and can permit a game publisher to become involved in the market for virtual property within the game, but this approach comes with a variety of risks. One risk is the gambling issue described in the previous section. By acknowledging property rights in in-game items, a publisher reintroduces the wager element into the equation. In order to reduce the risk of a claim that its game constitutes gambling or an illegal lottery, the element of chance must be eliminated (or reduced, depending on the jurisdiction). This is a difficult thing to achieve, and typically involves modifying the game rules to eliminate the degree of chance involved. The common law theory that provides this leeway for skill-based games dates back to times when governments sought to encourage athletic competition as a means of encouraging a physically fit armed forces. The legacy is that in many states skill-based competitions are permitted, even when the participants pay an entry fee to compete for a prize. Game companies that are interested in pursuing this approach, should consult with an attorney to help craft game rules that eliminate as much chance as possible.
Another risk associated with embracing the existence of in-game property is that a player may argue that a game publisher has taken his or her property rights if the game is discontinued, or the player is banned from the online community. A player recently sued Linden Lab alleging this type of taking. The player had manipulated Lindon Lab’s land purchasing engine in Second Life to purchase in-game land at below market values. When Lindon Lab discovered the manipulation of the system, it suspended the players account. The player sued and the case eventually settled. Since the case didn’t proceed to judgment, the law is still unsettled. Until such time as this issue is resolved by the courts, these risks are best mitigated through well drafted and forward-thinking Terms of Service.
Conclusion
This article is a fairly gross simplification of the framework around this area of law. My hope is to provide some high level thoughts, without writing a treatise on gambling or skill-based gaming. That said, if you have questions about the area, or there are glaring gaps in the summary, please feel free to let me know and I will update accordingly.
DISCLAIMER: Please read the disclaimer language using the link at the top of this page, or click here. This article is not intended to be legal advice, and no attorney client relationship should be inferred from this blog. The law varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction and you should consult with an attorney before relying on anything you read here. This article and this blog do not reflect the views of Wilson Sonsini Goodrich and Rosati.
) fixes the problem. Open the application and you get a landscape mode keypad. type an email, hit the send button and it auto-populates the email application. Type in the email addresses and you’re all set.
Wed, Oct 8, 2008
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