GigaOM

In this week’s episode of The GigaOM Show, we chat with Jim Greer, CEO and co-founder of Kongregate and Jameson Hsu, co-founder and CEO of Mochi Media about monetizing casual games. We discuss a wide range of topics, including the upcoming launch of Google’s game-related AdSense network. According to some estimates, casual gaming is the fast-growing segment that accounts for about 10% of the $30 billion global video game industry.

Download the show in quicktime, windows media or Xvid formats. There is an HD download available as well.

Related posts:

* Casual games worth $2.25 billion. But where are they going?
* How Casual Games can become money machines.
* Inside the YouTube of Games, Kongregate

In this season of giving thanks, Netizens feel grateful for the sense of connectedness and reconnectedness brought by online social networks. The big news, after all, isn’t that our Facebook profiles will soon turn into virtual Tupperware parties but rather that we can use them to stay in touch.

Bungee Labs executive and former Microsoft evangelist Alex Barnett says thank you to Facebook for the connections it provides:

I’ve rarely used a service that has brought me so much emotional satisfaction…connecting with good friends is a feel-good thing and it is this emotional value that makes Facebook hard to beat in terms of the gratification other services can provide. So much so, here I am even writing a thank you note to the service (I can’t remember doing that for any service…I’ve written about how “cool” stuff is, or how useful some service might be…but “thank you”? Never).

Yahoo! Personals product development executive Susan Mernit is similarly grateful for the personal and emotional connectedness the social web brings, noting in a blog post that she feels “amazement at how small the world is and how the virtual universe brings people together again and again.”

But just because Facebook provides real value to users doesn’t mean that value is easily monetized (through advertising, for example). Maybe Jason Calacanis was right when he said, “Social networking is second only to chat rooms as the worst place to advertise. The content there from your friends and your family is more compelling than any advertisement.”

Anne Zelenka, who writes about Web 2.0 topics for us, has a very thoughtful follow-up to
my post about teams and individual bloggers on on her personal blog. “It’s a natural tendency to limit exactly who we grant personhood and individuality too,” she writes, eloquently describing how people view the folks who make up a team.

In other words, the team is people too. Which is why group blogs as a business are still written by people — very passionate people. I am thankful for my team — each and everyone of them, and this Thanksgiving Day, in addition to my family, I’ll be thanking the good lord for bringing each one of them into my life.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

Now we all know that Facebook is worth one gazillion dollars, but how about the people who are always social networking? In other words, how much is your personal network worth? Germany-based Xing has come up with a tool called MyNetworkValue that lets you put a dollar value on your network. My network value was pretty high, though not as high as Robert Scoble, who must be a gazillionaire based on his Facebook network alone.

A day before Thanksgiving, this is a great time waster.

T-Mobile launched the new Sidekick Slide earlier this month amid much fanfare, only to discover some major design flaws that got the device to reset itself. That really charged up the customers.

The Motorola-made device from Danger Inc. was quickly pulled from the market. T-Mobile today announced that Motorola (MOT) has identified the problem as an “issue relating to the battery contacts.Motorola also has identified and tested a solution which it will implement for existing devices, and incorporate into newly manufactured ones.”Meanwhile, if you bought the admittedly handsome device, then T-Mobile is giving you three options: Exchange it for Sidekick LX (for no extra charge), return it and use the money towards any other phone, or just wait for the fix from Motorola.

Craiglist founder Craig Newmark chatted breifly with Into the Box host Rachel Natalie Klein about how to find an apartment in New York City, and —more importantly — how to avoid ‘turkey-listings’ on his sites. (“If something sounds too good to be true, it probably is.”)

An innovator for many reasons, two of Newmark’s key areas of thought-leadership are customer service and customer empowerment. If you’ve ever used Craigslist, or had the chance to speak with CEO Jim Buckmaster (he answers his own phone), then you know what we mean.

“We trust people… and as as a result we’ve given people this sliding [ad] removal mechanism. If you see any ad on our site, which is wrong, you feel, for any reason, you can flag it for removal. If enough people agree with you, we’ll remove it automatically. It actually works pretty well in practice.”

Then, riffing on the late, great British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, Newmark adds:

“There was this guy who said once, ‘Democracy is a lousy form of government, but it’s the only one we have.’”

There is a lesson here for founders:
Listen and be responsive to your customers. They are the key participants (or constituents!) in your business. If you do this well, and with sincerity, it will be good enough. After all, there is no way to protect any business against all the “turkeys” out there.

Oh and, Craig wishes you a Happy Thanksgiving! Read more of Craig’s musings on his blog, cnewmark.

Remember how we complained about Google-owned GrandCentral doing a switcheroo on their promise of one number for life? Well, Skype is doing the same to some Londoners who have SkypeIn mumbers. The company sent an email to some of the “0207” number owners with this explanation…

We’re very sorry to tell you that we have to change your SkypeIn number. As some of you may know, we get SkypeIn numbers from a variety of telecoms suppliers. Unfortunately, we have to return some of the 0207 SkypeIn numbers to one of our suppliers of London numbers.

The numbers stop working on Dec. 20th. The company says it will give you a new SkypeIn number and voicemail for free for 12 months. Many of these numbers could be in the 0208 numbers and 0203 area codes, Skype says. That said, it is pretty lame for the company to pull a stunt like this, especially a company as big as Skype. Their excuse is pretty weak.

Congratulations, founder! You’ve got a functioning site, a splash of capital, and a game plan for revenue — or maybe it’s a treasure map. Hopefully you’re on your way to achieving some personal liquidity, either through cash flow, or perhaps by selling some equity in your business. But I’m willing to bet that it’s more likely that you’re about to double-down on your startup and layer-up the debt. Either way, I’ve prepared for you an entrepreneur’s guide to amping up your personal credit rating — even in the midst of the current “credit crisis” at commercial banks on Wall Street.

Trust me, as your business develops, and your need for capital grows (and it will) hacking your founders’ credit rating could be increasingly valuable to your startup.

I’ll start with some speed bumps that can damage your credit rating. Continue »