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News for nerds: why a career site bought Slashdot

Jeff John Roberts — Tue, 18 Sep 2012 16:23:38 +0000

In a surprise deal, job site Dice has acquired Slashdot and two other tech sites from Geeknet for $20 million cash. The move is risky but could pay off if Slashdot’s millions of smart, Star-Wars loving readers stick around.

For the unfamiliar, Slashdot is a self-described “news for nerds” aggregation site that is home to a rabid base of commentators who will debate topics like Firefox updates and the DMCA until their dying breath. The site relies on unpaid moderators who filter incoming stories and watch over the readers who vote each other’s comments up and down.

As the site emerged as the first big tech aggregator, “getting Slashdotted” became an honor for writers and resulted in a burst of traffic for publications. Slashdot’s founder, Rob “Commander Taco” Malda left the site in 2011 to join the Washington Post as a digital strategist (see some of his comments here from paidContent 2012).

But what does all this have to do with a career site? Good question.

“The strategic interest is to build content and user engagement,” said Mike Durney, the CFO of Dice Inc, in a phone interview. Durney explained that Dice provides advice not just on finding a career but on managing one — and that Slashdot’s deep pool of tech-savvy commentators can help supply that. In other words, Dice will get a lot of quality content with a heavy social component.

This is a shrewd idea but success could depend on how Slashdot’s iconoclastic readers react. Durney says that Slashdot will remain independent and that Dice will be “very, very careful” in deciding how to interweave its content into the career site. The good news for Dice is that other arms-length owners like Conde Nast and News Corp have been able to let their respective sites, Reddit and AllThingsD, flourish from a relative distance.

More broadly, though, Slashdot’s new owners must also decide how to invigorate a 15-year-old site that has lost some of its luster next to upstart aggregators like Hacker News and Reddit. Financial documents show that readership at Slashdot and Sourceforge (a much larger site for coders also acquired in the deal) declined from 49 to 45 million unique visitors in the last year. Dice’s task is not urgent, however, as the records show that the former sites are for now their earning their keep through advertising.

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$300 Indie Dice Nails the Film Noir Style

Liz Shannon Miller — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 00:08:21 +0000

It’s hard to get more indie than a show shot on $300 by a team of three friends, but that is indeed what’s behind the five-episode drama Dice, a highly stylized trip through the criminal underworld that focuses on Dice (Kyle J. Downes), about whom we know little — except that he isn’t afraid to take risks.

Dice isn’t the first film noir I’ve seen in the web series world, and it’s perhaps not quite as authentic to the reality of criminal life as other examples, such as the Chattanooga-set The Steps. However, the first episode of Dice…Oh, it’s so hard to resist the “starts off with a bang” cliche. Let’s just say that it’s attention-grabbing. And the subsequent episodes feature great cliffhangers and a cool polish that appeals to any Bannen Way fan.

And the style of the piece can’t be denied, especially given the extremely limited resources. Given the claimed budget of $300, the production values are decent and the cinematography is great, notably the desaturated palette enhanced by the bright red dress worn by a femme fatale. Yes, the femme fatale wears a bright red dress, it’s a total cliche, but it’s still a striking one. So really, the only technical flaw is the sound design, which is thin and tinny at several points — dragging down the series, though not overtly so.

The other thing the show is missing is a cleaner perspective on its hero. The titular Dice is portrayed as a take-no-prisoners type, in it for himself, and while there’s a nice twist on his true identity at the end, it’s still not quite enough to make for a fully realized character. The promise of a season two intrigues for that reason, though — because with more episodes and more time, the show could go beyond its style and achieve some real substance.

Related GigaOm Pro Content (subscription required): By The Numbers: Budget Analysis of a Web Series

Channel Your Inner Ancient Riverboat Gambler with MotionX Poker Quest

Darrell Etherington — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 00:00:52 +0000

My attention span when it comes to gaming, and especially mobile gaming, is not very long. Most titles on my iPhone never get a second play, in fact. Hence my surprise when I spent many hours over the past few days on MotionX’s newest title, Poker Quest.

MotionX is the developer behind MotionX Poker, one of the most talked about and impressive early titles for the iPhone and iPod touch. The dice poker game features an incredibly well-rendered virtual dice simulator, with realistic physics. MotionX has since released Dice, a free version of the dice simulation without the Poker game features, and GPS Lite, a tracking and navigation app.

With Poker Quest, MotionX is sticking to familiar territory. Not that that’s a bad thing. When you’re good at something, there’s no reason not to improve, and Poker Quest does just that. On its own, a poker game is entertaining, but as with most casual games, eventually you come back less and less, since winning is always pretty much the same.

Poker Quest gives a reason to win, and to keep winning, by introducing unlockable rewards and level progression. Set in ancient Egypt, you play at “temples” along the Nile, each of which features a different, attractive table and its own unique dice set (although you can change which you use by default in the settings screen). At first, you only have access to the first temple, but once you amass enough coins, you unlock others. Each new temple you unlock features higher stakes, and the required bank to enter the next grows accordingly.

Your opponent changes each time you unlock a new temple. Computer players are represented as ancient Egyptian gods, like Anuket and Horus. Players and the dealer take turns for three rounds, after which the best hand wins.

The rewards system is a nice touch. You can unlock up to fifty additional dice sets by rolling 5 of a kind, though it took me a while to figure out that that was actually what was triggering the rewards. You can also unlock trophies, which don’t actually do anything, but do appeal to the part of me that wanted to find every single star in Super Mario 64. The graphics for the trophies are also well done, and seem to be based on genuine Egyptian artifacts.

With 12 temples in total to unlock, I don’t foresee my interest in this solid game waning any time soon. The only problem will be getting the game away from my girlfriend, who hijacked my iPod touch because she’s also hooked.

MotionX Poker Quest is available now for $2.99 in the App Store. A Lite version is also available for free, but only the first two temples are playable.

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