#dan porter

[history-freak1]

Podrick said Braime and Oathkeeper Family rights.

[pokemonblog]

The Pokémon Company teams up with Overtime on a new jersey and lifestyle collaboration for all eight Overtime Elite teams, the lifestyle collection launches on Pokémon Day on February 27

A new Pokémon x Skinnydip collaboration has been revealed by The Pokémon Company International. Read on below to learn more: Pokémon and Overtime Partner for Overtime Elite Jersey and Lifestyle Collection All eight Overtime Elite teams will wear custom jerseys in the Pokémon Playoffs beginning in February New York, NY. (February 3) – Overtime, the leader in content for the next generation of…

The Pokémon Company teams up with Overtime on a new jersey and lifestyle collaboration for all eight Overtime Elite teams, the lifestyle collection launches on Pokémon Day on February 27

[giterdonenews]

A noo artikle has dunben rote ahn WWW.GITERDONENEWS.COM

thar's a noo artikle ha dunben wrote uhn www.giterdonenews.com calt

He Sold 'Draw Something' For ~ $200 Million — Now Dan Porter Is Back With A New Startup

Dun PerterDun Pert'r See Also Dun Pert'r lef Zynga n' April 2013, almos perzackly one year aft'r it ackwiret his'n startup, OMGPOP, fer ~$200 million. OMGPOP wuz t'mak'r o'Draw Sumthin, one o't' furst mobile games ta go viral. It racket up 1.2 million downloads...

[socialmediaisbullshit]

Your Product Doesn't Make Phone Calls

I got asked a question today from a startup in the U.K. They wanted to know if there really was a…

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[suryaray-blog]

Zynga on its Mobile plans: We are working on it

#SuryaRay #Surya David Ko (left) with Dan Porter, CEO of OMGPOP! Photo courtesy of Zynga.) When I met with Zynga founder Mark Pincus in March 2012, he was candid enough to admit that like many of the big web giants, he was still trying to figure out the mobile quandary, which he determined was a whole new beast. Fast forward to today and despite its splashy $200 million acquisition of Draw Something parent, OMGPOP, Zynga is still struggling to unlock the mobile mystery. Or at least that is the impression I got after reading this story in The Wall Street Journal. “We’re going to try different things..I’m not saying everything we do is a home run. ”I always tell people if they say, ‘Oh, there’s a Web division, there’s a mobile division.’ I’m like, ‘No. There’s one division’,..”That division is called Zynga.” [David Ko tells the Wall Street Journal.] The recent actions undertaken by Zynga such as having chief mobile officer David Ko reporting to CEO Pincus are just papering over the big issue: when you are a web native company and web-based metrics define your decisions and business model, it is hard to think of mobile. Mobile is an entirely different user behavior. Good news: Pincus knows that and unlike others, is not in denial about his company’s mobile challenge. --- http://dlvr.it/1yfj6M @suryaray

[wirebot]

New York-based gaming company OMGPOP has had so much success with their Pictionary-like game "Draw Something", that they are considering an entire show based on it. The game itself has more that 25 million registered users, and over 10 million daily users. Generally, we see televion made into game adaptions, but now companies are starting to work in reverse by making show and mercahndise out of games. More » via wirebot.com

[wordforwordforword-blog]

Interview with Dan Porter

Dan Porter is the owner of OMGpop, a social gaming website, but has been involved in Teach for America and Virgin Mobile. He lives in Brooklyn, and asserts that he has been on every street in Manhattan. He began out of college teaching in public schools in New York City.

This interview was conducted on November 16th, 2011 in New York City.

BVB: How would you describe OMGpop?

DP: OMGpop is a social gaming company; we make social and casual games for Facebook, mobile, and the web. More people now, because of their social networks and mobile phones, are playing games than ever before. All of these people are connected to each other on these networks and devices, so its opened up a whole new realm of games, like the old style casual games that everyone knows. They played Nintendo or Solitaire. And now, there’s a whole kind of deeper generation of social games that people can play.

DP: The company was started actually as a dating site called Iminlikewithyou, which used games, lightweight games, as a way for people to meet each other. But eventually, we changed the name to OMGpop, which does not mean anything. And sort of focused where all the action was, on Facebook and on mobile. Not to be played by people like you who…”

BVB: What was the inspiration for OMGpop?

DP: The company originally was started by a guy named Charles Forman SP, and a lot of his inspiration was two things. One is how gaming was developing in Asia, especially in Korea. And second was just the idea that playing games with other people, either alone or side by side had always seemed to be really fun, but was never really enabled until the internet took off and really connected people in a network.

DP: The side story is that in Asia there was always so much piracy of games, the way there is piracy of music and video. That’s why most record companies don't even bother making CDs. But the game industry is not like the movie or music business. Most games were just given away for free. Instead they tried to get people to play because people were interested in what they was involved in the game. That's what they call the ‘free-to-play’ model. That's really come out of Asia and taken both Facebook and mobile devices by storm somehow. Almost 100 percent of the games on Facebook and about 75 percent of games on mobile phones are all free. People to get in there and play is really easy. And then the games try to get you interested enough to play more.

BVB: So they try to hook you early on huh? How do you make money working in the gaming industry? From advertisements?

DP: The majority of the profits come from people paying to advance further in the game. Its what they call a micro-transaction for virtual goods. Traditionally, people play and they get to a point where in the game where they either want to catch up with their friends or they want to save time or they want to do better, and at that point they’ll spend money on their phone or on Facebook to buy items in the game as well. So, yeah, advertising is good, but virtual goods make five times more money on average than advertising does.

DP: An ad can be worth anywhere from half a cent or a penny for a user and a virtual good, which people tend to buy, can be worth anywhere from one to five dollars. You can get a lot more people to see ads, but the few people who actually spend money make you all the money. About five percent of people actually spend money. 95% of people never spend any money, so all of your money is … in a small amount of people.

BVB: How does OMGpop differ from other gaming companies?

DP: I think that we don't just run the site, we iphone games and cellphone games as well. The answer is that well…uh…how our games are different to some extent. One is we come from a very arcade style background and so no matter what type of games we make, we really try to use this fun and this thrill that you feel when you play arcade style. The second is that we have a very distinctive art style. One of the benefits of being in NY also is that there is a lot of visual talent. Secondly, we really focus on- because we’re on three platforms- the open web, facebook and mobile- some people are only on facebook or only on the phone, we are able to have interplay on those three platforms….so some people only have a website but they don’t have anything on mobile or Facebook.

BVB: What are your most popular games?

DP: We have three games that are kind of like franchised games. One is: this game called Draw My Thing, which is like a live Pictionary. IT is on Facebook and the web and is coming to mobile. The second one is pool, while there are a lot of pool games on the internet, we really try to have the most realistic physics, which is how it feels when you hit the ball and how the balls roll, and that's on Facebook and on the web. And the third is balloon-o, which is about monkeys…and that one is only on the web. A lot of those original games have that kind of cute Asian style…

DP: So, here’s the interesting questions that you should ask me…okay so number one is almost all of the major social gaming companies are in California, they are not anywhere else in the world-

BVB: -Haha, that was my next question

DP: So, is it a pro or con to be in NY? And the answer is, it’s really challenging. We’re out of the loop. We’re not near Apple we’re not near any other big companies and no doubt there’s a lot of informal knowledge that people share and stuff like that. The positive thing is that if you want to work in games, we’re one of the main places to work. When you’re all together in one place people tend to steal employees from each other. The second thing about being here is that there’s a tremendous amount of visual and graphic talent in New York that we really benefit from. So, in a way were kind of out of the bubble and it can be un-ideal, but we try to use it to our advantage. 

BVB: Mhm, definitely.

DP: The second question is how do you..-

BVB: -Oh, there's more! Haha

DP: -there’s a huge social gaming company out there called Zynga, with hundreds of millions of users, it’s about to go public any day now. They’ve raised almost half a billion dollars- how do you look to compete with somebody like that? The answer is, with Facebook and mobile phones, there are over 500 million users playing games. In the US and England alone, there are 100 million people playing social games every single day. So while there are really large competitors, its still a really large market and people are always looking for the next thing.

DP: What do I say when people don’t understand what we do? The most common question I get when people don't get what we do is: ‘did you make angry birds?’ I wish, haha, I wish.

DP: What about the students who hope to have a career in gaming? I would say that you know, the most common thing we look for in students is for developers in mobile- especially android and apple phone. Or if they’re artists, the number one thing that we look for is actually stuff that they’ve done. If they have an idea for a game, the lowest barrier for entry, every single person has an idea. To come in with artwork for a game or a game you made on your own, even though it’s not super polished, is huge. The dream job is to actually be a game designer, but the problem is that you come in with a bunch of ideas on paper it’s really hard to judge. So, my single biggest piece of advice is try to make a game in any way you can- even if it's a board game.

DP: No one is interested in an idea, they're interested in your reality. And if you cant do that, you have to be SO knowledgeable about every game out there, even my games and tell me what the pros and cons are. I think it’s a great career option. Gaming is a huge part of the entertainment business, the game business. Right now it’s bigger than the movie business, it’s bigger than the music business. I know NYU has a film school, I know they have music theory, but the fact is, games hire more people and it generates more revenue. People aren’t thinking about it, and games aren’t just for nerds anymore. 

BVB: You've just been...yep, those were all my questions I had come up with....

DP: Haha, the next question, hmm-

BVB: Oh, is this a guessing game now?

DP: Yeah, I'm going to tell you your questions. Haha. Why are games interesting to people who don't play them? The answer is: every business seems like right now that they’re trying to learn from games. Foursquare, which a lot of people know, uses achievements or badges that is an idea they are taking from games. Healthcare and fitness things are trying to use various game mechanics, as is education to get people interested in learning. There’s something about the way a game is designed. It knows how to move you along and it shows you how to play and it gets you excited. And now, retail is trying to use it. Fitness is trying to use it. Everyone is trying to use those mechanics. They’re looking at the facts and they’re saying, ‘people are spending a billion minutes every day playing Angry Birds, what is it about that game that’s so interesting to people and how can types of other businesses use that?

BVB: Oh boy…Hahah.

DP: Next question? How is your relationship with NYU? The relationship is good. We have a lot of interns from NYU. Software, management. We’d like to see better integration with ITP. People tend to want to do very abstract, creative things. But, we’re like two blocks away so…next? What does the future hold for OMGpop?

DP: Our games have been played by over 25 million people. Every game that we put out we want to be able to make a huge hit. We want to be able to say our games are played by 100 million people. We want people to know us, not just for our website but for our mobile and Facebook too.

DP: What else would you like to know?

BVB: Wow…I think those were honestly all of my questions that you guessed…This is more personal, this is for you, is this what you always saw yourself doing?

DP: No.

BVB: No?

DP: I never played games, when I was a kid in college- I’m ollldd- there were really just barely the beginning of computers.

BVB: Yeah, true.

DP: We still played board games and stuff like that. I’ve been working in start-ups in the Internet for over ten years. Previous to this job I was working for Richard Branson, making investments in businesses and Virgin had been out of music for a long time, and was really interested getting back into music and festivals. And more and more I saw how people were behaving and spending their leisure time, and it became very clear to me that games were much, much bigger. If you wanted to reach college students, kids, people in general. They were spending more leisure time in games. So I got into doing games for Virgin and then OMGpop started around here, I thought I would always be interested- I was in the music business, I actually went to NYU for the film school also-I was always interested in the stuff people used and consumed for entertainment. And, video and music seemed so much less interesting to me.

DP: And, I have a master’s degree from NYU in Latin American Studies. That has no bearing on this, and I will never use it again. And I think the moral for all of you young people, is that its okay not to know what you want to do. The only way you know what you want to do is by getting out there and doing a ton of stuff. So I would say this is the forth or fifth career that I’ve had. In short order: I have been a public school teacher, I was one of the founders of Teach for America, I worked in investment banking, I worked for a big company. It took me probably ten years alone to figure out what I wanted to do. I wasn't afraid to do a lot of different things. And now I love what I do. We’ve gone from seven people to fifty people. Hearing kids talking on the subway about our game, that's really interesting and that's cool. If you asked me when I got my undergrad degree and my master’s degree I couldn’t tell you. I didn't have the slightest idea what I wanted to do.

BVB: Well, that’s scary for someone who does know what they want to do!

DP: It's alright. It’s okay if you know what you want to do! I was just never one of those people who knew what I wanted to do. I spent a lot of time in college watching MTV and playing guitar.

BVB: And look at you! You turned out okay.

DP: Exactly, it just took me a while. Some people are very focused. I was always very envious of those people. I thought life would be so much easier if I knew exactly what I wanted to do. But I didn't, so…

BVB: I think that’s it. We covered pretty much everything. Thank you.