hi5 Wraps Up a Successful Week at GDC (pictures & video)

hi5 concluded a week of high-profile and heavily attended activities at the 2010 Game Developers Conference this week.  Our presence at the show kicked off with a mixer event on Tuesday, March 9 to end the first day of the Social & Online Games Summit.  The event was attended by over 400 show goers in the North hall lower lobby.

Apart from running out of beer (GDC conference organizers only expected 200 people), the event was a huge success.  In addition to a progression of retro video games from different eras, we raffled off some fun prizes, including a Pac-Man joystick USB game, an Atari Flashback2, and DJ Hero.

The reception was a great start to the conference, and demonstrated how much excitement there is in the community around the development of social games.

The festivities continued on Wednesday, with Alex St. John's appearance in a panel at the GamesBeat@GDC conference.  The topic of the panel was "Disruptive Game Platforms" and was moderated by Dean Takahashi, Lead Writer at GamesBeat and VentureBeat.  Alex's fellow panelists included Jack Buser, U.S. Head of Sony's Home Virtual World, Gareth Davis, Games Platform Manager for Facebook, and Peter Relan, Founder and Chairman of Aurora Feint and CrowdStar.  The panel sparked some spirited exchanges, several of which were captured on video.

Alex St. John's remarks prompted several articles in major tech blogs, including:

• Them's fightin' words: Hi5 prez calls Zynga games 'mediocre', Games.com
• hi5 CTO: Zynga Is Mediocre. It Isn't Social, It Just Discovered An Opening For Spam, TechCrunch
• GamesBeat in Pictures: Part 1, VentureBeat
• hi5 CEO: Facebook's game strategy is schizophrenic, VentureBeat

For the many meetings during the week, hi5's huge lightbox display in the entrance to the Social & Online Games Summit area was a popular meeting spot to connect with potential partners and press throughout the event.

hi5's GDC run culminated with a dedicated speaking session on Wednesday, March 10 at 4:15.  By 4:00, a long line had already formed outside room 122 where Alex St. John was to speak.  The room filled to capacity and spilled out into the hallway, where hi5 employees did spontaneous Q&A with those who were unable to get into the session.

For the over 200 people who made it inside, they were treated to an entertaining presentation by Alex St. John, who went through the details of hi5's new Game Developer Program.  In addition to Alex's remarks, three early partners in the program spoke about their experiences developing games for hi5 and why they chose to launch their games exclusively on hi5.com.  The speakers included:

• Matt Wilson, Founder & Director of Development, Detonator Games
• Steve Victorino, President & COO, Immortal Games
• Dave Long, CEO & Co-founder, Exponential Entertainment

For those who missed it, the full session as well as the Q&A at the end was captured on video, including some shots of the standing-room-only crowd.

Also on Wednesday, hi5 issued a press release announcing the Game Developer Program.  The news was the latest in a series of announcements by hi5 leading up to GDC, including the acquisition of Austin-based social developer Big Six and support for a new set of Facebook compatible APIs.

The announcement garnered widespread media coverage, including the following articles:

• Social Network Hi5 Gets Its Game On, BusinessWeek
• Social network hi5 launches program to court game developers, VentureBeat
• hi5 Launches Game Developer Program, DevWebPro
• hi5 Launches Game Dev Program To Attract Studios, Exclusive Titles,  Gamasutra
• hi5 Launches Game Developer Program Offers Special Access to Users and Monetization, Inside Social Games
• Hi5 Launches New Game Dev Program, Virtual Goods News

Thanks to everyone from hi5 and all our partners who made this year's GDC a huge success!  We'll see you again next year.

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Alex St. John to Speak at AlwaysOn's OnMedia NYC 2010 Conference

hi5's President & CTO, Alex St. John, will be speaking at AlwaysOn's OnMedia NYC 2010 conference on February 2.  The two-and-a-half-day event, hosted at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in New York City, brings together hundreds of top executives from the Internet, advertising and entertainment industries.

Alex will join a panel discussion on the topic "Are Virtual Goods and Gaming the Holy Grail of Brand Integration?" moderated by Atul Bagga, a vice president at ThinkEquity and one of the leading analysts on the rapidly emerging virtual goods and social gaming marketplace.  Alex's co-panelists will include:

• Nir Eyal, CEO, AdNectar
• Kevin Xu, COO, IGG
• Mitch Davis, CEO, Live Gamer

The panel will kick off at 5:30 PM on Tuesday, February 2 in Ballroom 1.  For a full agenda of the conference and registration, please visit the OnMedia NYC 2010 site.

hi5 was honored along with Twitter as an AlwaysOn AO Global 250 Category Winner in the Consumer & Community category last year.

hi5 included among Fastest Rising search terms in Google's Zeitgeist

Google released their annual Zeitgeist results today of the most frequently searched terms, and hi5 was included as #5 among the Fastest Rising search terms in the U.S.

Media coverage of the announcement appeared on the TODAY Show (re-run in print on MSNBC), TechCrunch and eWeek.

hi5 President, Alex St. John, to speak at DiscoveryBeat

Alex St. John, hi5's President and CTO will be speaking at DiscoveryBeat on Tuesday, December 8 at 5:40 PM.  The event, being held in San Francisco at the Automattic Lounge in Pier 38, will feature industry experts from social gaming and entertainment discussing the "secret recipe" for application discovery and success.

Alex will join a panel discussion titled "Discovery 3.0: Bringing in the big guys" -- a description of which follows:

Established video game companies and entertainment giants are eyeing the social networking and mobile platforms as a source of future growth. For success, the big guys need to apply the secret ingredients in different proportions.

• How much should they invest in these areas, and how should they do it?
• Which kinds of partners should they recruit? Which business models are the best?
• Who has made the transition already?
• What's the right mix of social networking, marketing, analytical measurement, advertising and web design ingredients they should apply?

Panelists:

• Jon Vlassopulos (CEO, Moderati - maker of the virtual light Zippo iPhone app)
• Alex St. John (President & CTO, hi5)
• Michael Chang (Founder & CEO, Greystripe)
• Lisa Marino (VP Sales, RockYou)
• Moderator: Roy Bahat (President, IGN Entertainment)
  

Additional speakers and panelists in this afternoon event include: Randy Angle, Director of Game Design, SGN; Julian Farrior, CEO, Backflip Studios; Ge Wang, Co-Founder, CTO & COO, Smule; Peter Farago, VP Marketing, Flurry; Sebastien De Halleux, COO, Playfish; John Pleasants, CEO, Playdom; Roy Sehgal, GM, Zynga & Executive Producer of Cafe World game; and Neil Young, Founder & CEO, ngmoco.

More details about the event and the agenda are available on VentureBeat's site at http://events.venturebeat.com/discoverybeat2009/  Limited spaces are still available via online registration.

DiscoveryBeat event highlights innovation in social gaming

The DiscoveryBeat conference -- organized by Matt Marshall, Editor-in-Chief of VentureBeat, and Dean Takahashi, Lead Writer at GamesBeat -- was held yesterday in San Francisco.  The standing-room only event was packed with developers, entrepreneurs, and executives from leading social entertainment companies.  Alex St. John, hi5's President and CTO (second from right), joined Michael Chang, Founder & CEO of Greystripe (far left); Jon Vlassopulos, CEO of Moderati (second from left); and Lisa Marino, VP of Sales at RockYou (far right) in a lively panel discussion about the challenges and opportunities of large entertainment companies entering the social gaming category.

St. John remarked that the recent "discovery" of micro-transactions and virtual goods as a business model has actually been a vibrant and growing part of the gaming industry for years.  He also highlighted several crucial differences between traditional console games and social games -- including designing virality into the core game mechanic, the need to build an addictive game that will maximize yield from users who start playing for free, and the increasing irrelevance of IP licensing to a game's success.

The previous panel discussion included Sebastien De Halleux, COO of Playfish; John Pleasants, CEO of Playdom; Roy Sehgal, GM and Executive Producer at Zynga; and Neil Young, Founder & CEO of ngmoco.  The panelists discussed the rapid pace of innovation in the social gaming space, the importance of continuous measurement and testing of key game metrics, and the fact the space is still looking for the category-defining hit -- among other topics.

For more coverage of the event, see the following articles on VentureBeat:

• 11 things I didn't know about app development
• Playfish exec says social gaming is still waiting for its Super Mario Bros.
• Zynga's tips for social gaming success
• Game makers say Apple is still the gatekeeper of success