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.
Just a quick programming note here at Big in Japan. Jake McKee has been with the company as Lead Samurai for almost a year. He has been deeply involved with almost every project since joining Big in Japan and has made a huge impact on our business. Starting this week, Jake’s role within Big in Japan will be significantly scaled back allowing him to focus on his own speaking and writing efforts outside of the company. Jake will continue his work managing and supporting both the LEGO and TechData accounts for Big in Japan. Scott Bauer will take over his role with our other clients. We wish Jake the best of luck on his book and encourage anyone looking for a great speaker to give him a call!
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]
The Big in Japan team is now working on several Facebook brand integration projects. Now that Facebook has opened their platform to allow development companies, like Big in Japan, to develop applications within the network, a new opportunity for brands has emerged. How can we help?
Our latest project is to incorporate a popular strategy game into Facebook’s community. The challenge? It isn’t porting the existing application into Facebook, it is helping leverage the social advantages the site can offer the game. Just putting the game inside the community won’t really extend the brand, but incorporating the game into the community can potentially enhance the companies relationship with the brand.
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. . .
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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