FX premiered their newest series, Damages, last night. Tom Shales of the Washington Post suggests,
“Damages,” making a sensational premiere tonight on the FX network, thoroughly justifies adding yet another high-powered law firm to the prime-time population. The firm is not only high-powered but it’s also “high-stakes,” we keep being told — and so is the show. “Damages” is also emphatically, and almost tortuously, high-tension, and the pilot script is one of the most artfully crafted since the debut back in the 20th century of “The Sopranos.”
FX decided to include our social podcasting application, FanPodCast (via API, design by Big Interactive), for the launch. Check it out here.
The Big in Japan team was out in force at the World Series of Video Games at the Gaylord Texan. Our involvement with gaming really started this year with our work with the LEGO MMOG (massively multiplayer online game). It took us a while to figure out the how social communication and gaming could intersect, but very quickly it clicked. Since then we have really ‘amp’d-up’ our involvement in the gaming arena. If you are in the Dallas area we recommend stopping by the WSVG if you get a chance. Check out the photos from the Flickr Stream or see a few below:
The Big in Japan team let out a cheer today when Apple announced that we will get access to the iPhone via web applications. Development for typical phones require complex SDK development, but Apple has decided to open the platform and allow firms like Big in Japan access the phone’s functions such as ‘making calls, sending emails while connecting to Google Maps. It is not clear how the iPhone’s browser will expose the Domain Object Model to allow phone-specific functionality. In a related move, Apple released Safari for Windows. Presumably this will allow non-Mac developers to build applications for the iPhone without using an emulator. Nice work Apple! [via]
Less than a week after we decided to build and launch ServiceGuy, the final logo has arrived. Thank you for your comments, suggestions and ideas. What do you think:
Hopefully ServiceGuy grows on you. It is not certain that ServiceGuy will catch on outside of Dallas, but the team is excited enough to invest a week of their lives to see. The guys are in Portland for RailsConf and should start in earnest next week.
Earlier this week my son (Ethan) came to our offices to hang out. He knew we did work for Lego and found a stack of unopened Lego sets under one of the desks. We opened one of the boxes and he began building. When he left we just left the Legos on the conference table.
I had always hoped that as the team here at Big in Japan grew the interaction between our people would result in great new ideas. In reality we all get busy with projects and rarely have time to just ‘hang out’. Yesterday I woke up and decided that I would work on the business, instead of in the business for the day. Quickly I realized that I needed to engage the team directly in order to figure out what was ‘next’.
I tried to get everyone engaged, but with PDAs, cell phones, interruptions, Twitter, email and computers just laying around everywhere it was almost impossible to get everyone’s attention at the same time. One by one the team began ‘fiddling’ with the Lego parts on the table and our meeting shifted from a speech to a discussion. Mike came up with a great idea. Jake had a good point. Scott added a bunch. It was great. The Legos provided the guys with a harmless distraction from their ‘personal technology’ devices. It was still hard, my phone must have rang once every five minutes ~ I resisted the temptation to even look who was calling. Perhaps this will become a regular thing: harmless distractions to increase engagement!
Anyway, thanks Ethan! Great idea. . .
We are playing with a new look for the Big in Japan website and blog, let us know what you think. The current design is beta as well as the internal pages (i.e. they are currently being written or rewritten). We figured we could wait until everything was perfect, but decided to open source our site development.
More than 400,000 people have used the PodServe platform since we launched more than a year ago. Today, around 2,000 power users actively use the service to host their podcasts. The truth is that we have done a lousy job supporting our unpaid users, primarily because the service was free. We have determined that our ‘unpaid’ model is unsustainable and as a result we are moving to a ‘paid’ model starting in May. PodServe has been a great marketing tool for Big in Japan resulting in a handful of lucrative private label projects including projects for Nip/Tuck, Dirt, The Shield and The Riches.
Starting May 1st we are asking that users pay an annual fee of $25 to use PodServe via PayPal. We certainly won’t make any money with this fee (if every active user paid we would generate $50,000 per year, hardly enough to pay someone to provide basic support), but it will help defray the costs of operating the service and allow us to continue to use PodServe as a marketing tool for Big in Japan. We have a plan to make PodServe better:
Our plan: a) add additional dedicated servers and a larger SAN, b) integrate updated code base to PodServe code for increased stability, c) add statistics, and d) provide basic support to users.
Interested? Go ahead and send $25 via PayPal to sales@biggu.com, providing your user name with the payment. Alternatively, you can wait until April and signup on the site. Remember, if you are not going ‘Pro’ you will need to move your podcast before May 1st.
Is this a good deal? If PodServe works for you it is a great deal. If you need additional features like a flash creator, http://www.hipcast.com might be a better fit. They have three plans ranging from $49.97 to $119.40 per year.
Back in December, Big in Japan began a project with LEGO on their recently announced Massively Multiplayer Online Game (MMOG). The project was only revealed to the world a week ago, but has been in discussion, development, and planning for a long time.
LEGO has partnered with NetDevil to create the game, and Big in Japan is helping out with community management. You see, this game takes a different tact to most games. We’re helping LEGO to engage various enthusiast groups in the actual development of the game. It is a LEGO game, after all!
Details are still thin due to confidentiality issues, but if you’re interested in finding out more, or pitching in on the project sign up for updates at:
More and more details are going to be revealed in the coming months, so stay tuned. From what I’ve seen of the early development, this is going to be one fantastic game.
(On a related side note, check out this hilarious fan-created comic)
Since we released many of our tools publicly using an open source license lots of folks have set up their own versions. Most people have integrated the functionality into their own services. Relying on our free, no warranty, tools for your business is not a great idea due to the fact that it is so easy for mean people to overwhelm (i.e. that was the primary reason we released them for free).
Now we never really considered that some folks would launch our tools and then put them up for sale. Several folks have slapped on a new name and then posted them on ebay as fully functional businesses. For example,
[XYZ].com is a URL redirection service that has been operational for over a year. It generates $3,000 per month in ad sales from various startups. I need cash and will sell the site for $9,000 right now. You get pay back in six months. Who knows this thing might even grow faster. Email me right away at scammer@gmail.com.
Of course you don’t need to pay this scammer for the site as you can download the code and run your own version for free. Additionally, I know they have only been running for a month or so and the likelihood they have advertising revenue is very unlikely. I suspect that the ads are from shills and will go away once you buy the property. I thought about linking to these “scammers” here but thought better of it when my inner-lawyer came out.
For more than a year Big in Japan has been building and hosting social tools for various brands. Initially we assumed that large corporate clients would want to ‘house’ our tools in their own state-of-the-art data centers, but soon we realized that the opposite was the case. 100% of our clients require that we provide our tools as managed services, instead of simply delivering them executable code. We realized that as our client base grew our data center needs would grow as well and as a result we acquired an operational data center from McLeod in late 2006.
Our managed environments include:
Don’t call us for hosting, but if you need social tools built and managed we can provide a turnkey solution ~ no need to call a third-party hosting company. That said, if your brand is the next Second Life we have great partners such as NeoSpire who can handle huge, million+ user virtual worlds.
Our team has been busy working on various social interaction tools for Courtney Cox’s new television series, Dirt. The launch is scheduled for January 2nd, but the premiere is December 9th. The Big in Japan team will be out of the offices Friday the 8th so please excuse our absence. We will let you know how we like the show (of course Jake has already seen the pilot ~ darned social media experts get all of the perks!).
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