Fireside chat on Social Gaming at EpCon 2010
One of the more exciting and interactive sessions during EPIC's EpCon 2010 conference in Waterloo w
as its Fireside Chat on Friday afternoon. Featuring Shobeir Shobeiri, Kevin Li, and Anish Achariya the panel discussed many interesting aspects of social gaming. If you're not familiar with these 3 personalities , here's a brief bio on each one:
Shobeir is a founding member of Plug & Play Technology Centre which has fuded and incubated more than 270 start-ups worldwide. Kevin is more connected in Silicon Valley (even a a student at Waterloo University) than Mark Zuckerberg is. At least that's my impression. But seriously, he took a year off school to work in the Valley for start-ups such as NeoEdge and Watercooler. Anish is a former Amazon.com engineer and is a co-founder and CEO of social gaming company, socialDeck.
The Chat started off on a light-hearted foot with Kevin arguing that to become rich and famous, o
ne should get into mobile porn apps. After a few nervous looks and laughs the panel shared some interesting thoughts such as:
- Shobeir - If you're interested in starting a company focus on solving a problem and not on monetization.
- Kevin - Study the business of "drugs" and understand how to get people hooked to your product. Retention in online social gaming makes more money for companies than getting new customers.
- Anish - Mobile is the next frontier for social gaming.
- Kevin - The next huge market for social/virtual goods is China. In North America this market in worth $1 billion. In China the market is just $5 billion. As the largest country in the world, this is a small number.
If you were on this panel, what thoughts would you share?
