I really enjoy and appreciate the Minna Mingle, the get-togethers for the casual games industry.  Terrific way for friends, peers, and new contacts to get together and strengthen our industry.  The mingle last night (June22, 2006) made for some ripe situational comedy. 

The venue for the Mingle, the Mars Bar was double booked: the casual games association and the XXX Gay Film Festival awards (really! ask anyone who was there!). 

Here are some out of context comments overheard at the event:

• “Out? Yeah we were out to friends and family first, then on AOL, and next month we’ll be out in Europe.”
• “You figure 95% of people don’t do it at all, so let’s start them out playing with one thumb first.”
• “Backend is preferrable, but sometimes you need a little front end action to get things started.”
• “Initially the size was huge, but I got it smaller after streaming.”
• “If you link three or more in a row, they pop.”
• “He started out hardcore, but now he is all casual.”
• “I am good for ten 5-minute sessions or 50 minutes straight.”
• “The new producer thought that a full house was better than four queens!”

I’ll see all the casual game gang up in Seattle for the conference!

Think about the things that make mobile Mobile.  A portable, connected, location aware personal computing and communications device.  (Trip Hawkins sums it up best as a “Mobile Social Computer” here) The very things that present the promise and possibilities of mobile are the very things which the Carriers control the most tightly.

The Carriers control the distribution of software.  They control the APIs to allow programs to access hardware like the camera, Bluetooth, GPS chip, and microphone.  They even control the list of networks and servers accessible to the mobile devices. 

Carriers, with one foot in their telegraph pole dial-tone 48-volt twisted pair graves, are the ones with a chokehold on our future.  They hoard the tools needed for Mobile to become a new medium, or at least a fully realized continuation of the personal computing medium.

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I read this Steve Jobs quote from Insanely Great, by Steve Levy.  Struck a chord, sums it up for any software developer; thought I’d share the quote and excerpt.

Jobs’s speeches were punctuated by slogans. Perhaps the most telling epigram of all was a three-word koan that Jobs scrawled on an easel in January 1983, when the project [the release of the first Mac] was months overdue. REAL ARTISTS SHIP. It was an awesome encapsulation of the ground rules in the age of technological expression. The term “starving artist” was now an oxymoron. One’s creation, quite simply, did not exist as art if it was not out there, available for consumption, doing well. Was [Douglas] Engelbart an artist? A prima donna—he didn’t ship. What were the wizards of PARC? Haughty aristocrats—they didn’t ship. The final step of an artist—the single validating act—was geting his or her work into boxes, at which point the marketing guys take over. Once you get the computers into people’s homes, you have penetrated their minds. At that point all the clever design decisions you made, all the twists and turns of the interface, the subtle dance of mode and modeless, the menu bars and trash cans and mouse buttons and everything else inside and outside your creation, becomes part of people’s lives, transforms their working habits, permeates their approach to their labor, and ultimately, their lives.
But to do that, to make a difference in the world and a dent in the universe, you had to ship. You had to ship. You had to ship.

Real artists ship.

Wilbur and Orville.  Walt and Ub.  Steve and Steve.  Trey and Paul.  Walt and Roy. Harvey and Bob. Ernest and Julio. Ben and Jerry. Larry and Sergey. Donald and Doris.  Will and Jeff.