September in a Nut Shell

The last month and a half have been very crazy, wildly different, and sometimes a rough journey.

The week after my last blog post, I went down to Hartford to see Blink 182 and Weezer in concert.  I had pit tickets and I was very excited since it was the first time I’ve ever seen them that close in concert.  Unfortunately, the night before the concert DJ AM died, a guy who was a very close friend to the Drummer and Bassist of Blink (Travis Barker and Mark Hoppus), and was the only other person (other being Travis) who survived a fatal plane crash last year.  This made the concert very emotional for the guys in the band, with the guys being visibly upset on stage during the show.  You definitely could tell that this was a tough show for everyone, and about four songs in Mark had the band and everyone in the audience have a moment of silence.

It was a really interesting experience for me as a fan, to be a part of this very emotional and very personal time for these guys.  This is a band that is very responsible for my musical tastes today, and a group of guys I’ve admired as people and musicians for several years.  All in all I’m very glad that I could be there and be a part of this historical moment for the band, and it’s something that I’ll remember for a long time.

Now that brings us into the first week of September, which was the launch week of the new GamerDNA.com.  This was something that we had worked on for a substantial amount of time, and it was my first PR project that I worked on entirely by myself.  I had to make the PR plan, write the press release, coordinate all the press interviews and demos, and much more.  It was an interesting learning experience since I had never done anything like that before, but it was satisfying in the end.

All the work ended up paying off when we had write-ups in Kotaku, Mashable, VentureBeat, Big Download, Fast Company, SideQuesting, and an appearance by myself on GamerTag Radio Podcast.

The night before we officially announced everything, I stayed up way too late making a Walk-Through video of the new site and uploaded it to YouTube.  I’ve never done that before either…and Adobe Premiere continues to be a big frustration, particularly when it comes to Codecs.  I’m happy with the outcome, though, so check it out here!

Literally the next day after the launch, I was on a plane to Seattle for PAX 2009.  I spent my first day in Seattle hanging out with my friend Dayne, who is an Associate Producer and Community Manager for Monolith.  Dayne gave me a tour of the Monolith (my first game studio I’ve ever been to!), and it was very cool.  Everyone at Monolith is very nice, and the team there is working on some very cool stuff!

After that, Dayne gave me a tour of Seattle..and I’ve got to say..I love that city.  There were some awesome parts of the city, and it really reminded me of parts of Cambridge/Boston (except the crappy winter weather).  Seattle was officially added to my “Cities I wouldn’t mind living in” list, alongside San Francisco.

The remainder of the weekend was All PAX, all the time.  On Saturday I had my community management panel, which I put together with help from Morgan Romine from Ubisoft, and our awesome panelists.  Here is the description of the panel:

Saturday, 1:30pm – 2:30pm, Unicorn Theatre

Twitter and Beyond – New Game Communities Online

Online game communities are changing rapidly as social media is being used more and more by gamers. No longer are people primarily congregating on official game forums. They’re talking with each other on Twitter, Facebook, and in other types of online communities about games. For this reason, Community Managers are actively leveraging social media tools to keep online communities informed and engaged with their games. This panel will discuss the exciting transition of game companies using social media to build, communicate with, and engage with players as well as highlight the macro-trends that impact all online communities. Panelists include executives from both the game development and social media side of the fence.

Panelists Include: Michelle Broderick [Moderator] – (Marketing Director and Community Manager, Yelp.com), Morgan Romine (Fragdoll Team Captain, Ubisoft), Jaap Tuinman (Director of Social, Community, & Online Marketing, EA), Sam Houston (Online Marketing Manager, GamerDNA), Meghan Rodberg (Senior Manager of Online Community Relations, Turbine)

The panel had a pretty good attendance, with mostly game industry folks in the crowd (very weird for PAX?). The audience questions after the panel were particularly good, and I enjoyed helping out one of the PAX Enforcers by answering her questions about how to get into the Game Industry and Community Management.

PAX this year was very good for me personally, and the feedback and conversations I had with people about GamerDNA were also very good. The previous year’s PAX was basically GamerDNA’s coming out show, so it was interesting to note the differences between last year and this year’s conversations. GamerDNA had much better brand recognition amongst industry folks and press, which makes me really happy as member of a team of people that work non-stop to bring more awesome to GamerDNA and the Game Industry as a whole.

The remainder of the month was up and down, with the last two weeks being a bit rough.  I found out that a guy I graduated High School with was killed in Iraq by an IED earlier in the month.  That shook me up a bit and definitely made me think about some things differently.

That same weekend I also learned that a very close friend and coworker, Trapper, had a terrible tragedy happen to his family.  His baby daughter had died earlier that morning, and I received the call from another coworker/friend who was helping out.  The next few days were very sad, but it was great to see how we all came through for our friend in need.  Everyone at work showed up for the Memorial Service, and I was very proud to be a part of such a great company and a great group of people.  Trapper gave a great Eulogy for his daughter June, and I encourage everyone to check out his blog post and give him and his family some support.

Life continues to be a journey..filled with awesome times, and sometimes I’m put in some trialling situations.  Here’s to hoping that October delivers more awesome

Little bit of Catch-Up

Turns out that I haven’t been that great on keeping up with the blog this year.  Maybe I’m not cut out to be a blogger…but I’m glad I have it.  I’ve got an idea for a post about Twitter that I’ve been meaning to do…and I imagine I’ll also have a lot of stuff to talk about this summer because of all the adventures at work.

First off, GDC was a great time and I’m really glad I got to go.  Being at a convention that was filled with Game Industry Professionals was a very cool experience/feeling – you could really feel the tight knit community that the Game Industry has become.  Everyone knows each other, helps each other, great discussions are had, and tons of fun is had as well .  I definitely want to go back next year!

Since GDC things have been pretty busy both at work and outside of work.  Earlier this month I was given the opportunity to speak on a panel with Scott Macmillan and Darius Kazemi at the Independent Game Conference (IGC) in Boston.  Scott and Darius are two local independent game developer guys, and I’ve came to know and become friends with them mostly because of Twitter…so it was very fitting that we did a panel about “Networking for Indies” that focused on leveraging Twitter.  Overall I think we did a pretty good job and I learned a decent amount about what I’d like to do in the future, if I get the chance to do a similar panel.  It was my first panel/time speaking at a conference, so I’ll strike it up as a WIN!

My last bit of news that I wanted to document was that I’m going to E3 next week!  When I look back at what all has happened over the past year..it’s pretty hard to believe that I’ve had the opportunity to go to PAX, GDC, and now E3.  I’m super greatful to GamerDNA for sending me to these events and letting me take part!  Right now I’m putting a few things together for E3 that I can’t really talk about, but I’m very excited about them.  This will be my first E3 and I’m expecting it to be an awesome experience, with lots of new things to done and lots of new people to meet either for the first time, or the first time outside of Twitter

That wraps it up for this blog post, I hope to stop by after E3 and share some pictures/stories, as well as write a couple blog entries about Community Management and another on Twitter.

A Historic Day

Today I voted for my first time in a presidential election and today the United States of America elected our first African America president, Barack Obama.  I just got done watching his amazing acceptance speech and I am so happy right now.

Congrats America.  We did it!

Yes we did

Wow, what an exciting week

Like the title alludes to, this week has been exciting..but really the past two weeks have been good for me.  Since a decent amount of stuff happened I’m just going to dive in, so hold on!

First off, I’m very excited and happy to announce that I’ve been promoted to Community Manager at gamerDNA.  It was official last week but I wanted to sit on it first before I announced it on my blog.  I’m very stoked to be in this position and I’ve been told gamerDNA will be sending me to gaming events in the future to represent the company to gamers.  I’ll also be more active on forums, blogs and in game communities to help represent the company there.  In just about two weeks I’ll be at PAX giving away gamerDNA t-shirts and inviting people to our gamerDNA party so if you’re there, please let me know and you’ll get an invite and a shirt!

I’m still getting used to the job and all the new responsibilities and expectations but I’m enjoying it.  I love the challenge and it is fantastic to be able to work with two things I love to do:  working with games and working with gamers.  Over the coming months you’ll be seeing a gamerDNA podcast unveiled(finally), some more contests for the 360Voice and gamerDNA communities, as well as a TON more blog posts on the gamerDNA company blog .

This week brought the August meeting of the Boston IGDA Chapter which was sponsored by Harmonix (Guitar Hero 1&2, Rock Band, etc) and Ralph Baer, who basically created home video gaming back in the 60s, was the speaker.  Due to the awesomeness of Mr. Baer and Harmonix we had about 5 guys representing gamerDNA at the meeting.  Mr. Baer’s speech was very interesting because we gained so much insight into how little these guys had back then technologically, but all that they did with what they had.  In today’s world you could call this guy a hacker, making the craziest inventions out of what little they had, bringing the video game console to your living room.

After Mr. Baer finished his presentation Harmonix took over the stage and had the E3 preview build for Rock Band 2 for everyone to play.  Incase you don’t know…Rock Band 2 hasn’t even came out yet and it has been played by hardly anyone, so it was super awesome to be able to play the game.  Steve Sopp and I took the stage and rocked out, which

you can see here:

Steve Sopp (far left) on guitar and Sam Houston on Drums

You can also watch a slighly embarrassing video (for me) of us playing Rock Band 2, shot by the Harmonix job recruiter.

Finally, I’ve decided to join the Warhammer guild "Casualties of WAR ", ran by a few bloggers/fansite people I knew from Vanguard: Saga of Heroes.  The guild is made up of a *ton* of MMO bloggers/podcasters and industry people, so it should be a pretty awesome time.  I’m really looking forward to joining these folks in ventrilo and having a good time sacking cities and taking down some keeps.

That about wraps it up, soon I’ll be getting ready for our gamerDNA trip to PAX and I’ll be sending out invites to the gamerDNA party (with free booze!).  Stay tuned

All moved in and rockin’ a new TV

Well I’m all moved in, I’ve got my own internet and cable setup from RCN and I’ve been enjoying my new TV.  The move itself went fine and only took a couple hours and about 3 car trips – so not bad at all.

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Moving…again

Yes, that’s right I’m moving again. This time I’m only moving a couple miles down the road, rather than across the country. The new place has a bigger room and some pretty cool room mates, one that works part timem for a game development company that is making an MMO. I’m excited about the new place and I’m looking forward to living in a new area and hanging out with some new people. We’re right next to a river and a bike path so it should be a nice area to be in as the weather warms up

Work has started to pick up a bit and we’ve got some exciting things going on. This week we implemented some cool new features, like our Xfire Auto-Blogging feature which checks your Xfire account every day and creates an automatic blog entry about it. Players can later go back and add their own details to the blog entry, like your experiences, perhaps some screenshots or youtube videos, whatever you want. We’re going to be implementing the same thing for Xbox Live and World of Warcraft soon so I’m very excited to see some cool stuff on our site that we’ve been working on for awhile. We’re shooting to officially launch GamerDNA.com sometime in June so check that out and let me know what you think when we launch

This week we decided to kick it up a notch on our company blog and update it more frequently with information about new patches and features, stuff about the company or what we’re doing internally, funny little anecdotes from the office or stuff that we see on our site….all sorts of stuff.  We want to be transparent to our community and show them that we’re gamers just like they are so whether it’s an update about a cool feature, a blog post about how we’re all addicted to GTA4 and Age of Conan or whatever it may be, it’ll be up there!  We also just launched our GamerDNA Twitter which is a great way to keep up on what we’ve got going on, stuff that we’re talking about or checking out or if we’re having any uptime or killer bugs (hope not!).  Check those out and subscribe to our feeds and follow us on Twitter!

That’s about it for now.  I’ll try to update later with some stuff about this week, some of the games I’m playing and I’ll check in after the move this weekend.  Until then have a great 3 day weekend!

GamerDNA Launches!

Today we announced that GuildCafe has changed it’s name to GamerDNA! We’re all pretty excited about our new name as it reflects our direction of the company and our focus: Giving a place for gamers to have their own personalized space that is all about their gamer history and accomplishments. Towards the end of this spring we will have a GamerDNA that resembles the future of what our platform is going to do and offer. I’m so stoked about this and can’t wait to see where we go and watch us grow as a company over the next few months.

Here’s an excerpt from the announcement:

GamerDNA Inc. announced that it completed a $3 million Series A financing led by Flybridge Capital Partners. The company, previously known as GuildCafe Entertainment Inc., will use the funds to expand product development, open new offices in Cambridge’s Central Square, and launch GamerDNA.com — a community that allows videogame players to join forces with friends, share their stories and discover what’s happening in the games they love.

For the full press release on our company blog go here.

Today Xconomy published a great interview with our CEO Jon Radoff that goes into more detail about what we’re trying to do with GamerDNA and what the future of the company will be. Check it out here.

That’s it for now. Cheers to GamerDNA!

Big things on the horizon

I’m back! I’ve made a promise to myself that I’m going to keep up on blogging and I’m going to write about my feelings of different things going on in the gaming world, music, whats going on at work, etc. So, let’s get on with the updates!

I’m making some attempts at diving back into alternative media like IPTV shows and podcasts, as well as trying to use all the different Web 2.0 technologies. Over the past couple weeks I’ve started listening to podcasts much more than I used to because I’m now listening to them on my way to work and on the way back. I’ve found some excellent marketing and video gaming podcasts that I’ll make sure I add to my links on the side of the page. My current favorite IPTV (internet TV) shows are DiggNation and Cranky Geeks, though I’m checking out some of the other shows on Revision3. I really like being able to watch TV shows about stuff I’m interested in on demand through the internet. My hope is that this is the way things will go in the future and that eventually I’ll be able to watch History Channel, Discovery, Comedy Central, etc live via my internet connection via my browser.

In the Web2 department I’ve started using Twitter and I’ve added a little widget for it on the side of my blog page. Some of the guys I work with use it and really like it and use it as a way to keep up on news in the industry so I’ve decided to check it out. I’m currently using the Twitter app for Google Desktop which makes it very easy for me to Twitter whenever I want to. It kind of serves as a tiny little micro blog about what I’m doing right then or whatever I want to tell people about. I’m starting to really like it and plan to keep up with it quite often.

Tomorrow(technically today) will be our third week in the GuildCafe office in Central Square. So far I think everyone really likes the office and it’s been great to work with in an office setting. Communication is so much easier now that we’re all in the same place and we’ve had a lot of very good, important discussions about the company in these past two weeks. What we’re doing now is determining the future and direction of the company so its quite an exciting time. It’s fascinating to me to be in the company in the very beginning and watch it grow week after week.

On Wednesday we’re having our Office Warming party at GuildCafe. In conjunction with that we’ve got some big announcements to make which we’re all very excited about. Over 60 people have RSVP’d and we’ll have beer, pizza and video games for everyone to enjoy. Expect a blog post Wednesday or Thursday about the announcement

Besides that Boston has been great so far. I’ve been to the Boston Web Innovators Group meeting as well as the Boston Chapter of the IGDA (Boston Post-Mortem). Both were great networking events that I enjoyed quite a bit and I plan to go to all of their meetings in the future. I’ll talk about those more in the future as it’s late and I need to get to bed.

Looking forward to this week and make sure to check back on Thursday!

Moving into the office tomorrow

GuildCafe moves into our new office tomorrow, March 31st.  The office will be right smack dab in Central Square in Cambridge, just a stones throw from Harmonix which is the company who made Guitar Hero 1 and 2 as well as the awesomely fun Rock Band.  It’ll be my first time ever working in an office environment so it should be interesting and a lot of fun since everyone I’ve in the company has a good sense of humor and we enjoy video games.  It’s pretty cool to be able to talk about the upcoming WOW patch or what our favorite games, at work.

So far work hasn’t been too bad, though it’s starting to get a bit stressful because I need to read about two books for work and I’ve got a final exam in my Business Principles class in about two weeks.  I’m learning a lot because there is quite the learning curve jumping into a company with very experienced and professional people behind it..and you’re 20 years old.  I don’t mind it all, though, since it helps me become more knowledgeable about what we’re doing here and it’s also exciting to learn new cool and interesting stuff.

This month has been very exciting at work because we’ve almost doubled the size of our staff in just a few weeks time.  We’ve hired four new engineers along with myself (I work in Marketing) and my hope is that with this increase in staff there will be an increase in production.  There are so many cool and exciting features that we want to put in GuildCafe…just a matter of time until they get done.   Hopefully the increase from 3 engineers to 7 will help things along

I’m enjoying Boston, though it’s ridiculously expensive to live here.  I’m looking forward to using the public transportation system to get to work instead of driving every day.  Since the office is right off of the red line I’ll be able to get to work in just about 20-30 minutes, a lot quicker than the commutes I’ve had to make at my past jobs.

Overall the transition from small town Ohio to Boston is going well.  I’m excited about exploring the city and going to new places in April with my unlimited bus/subway pass and work is pretty kick ass.  Let’s hope April is even better than March and that it brings some great times to GuildCafe!

I’m officially in Boston!

As of today, I’ve moved in to my apartment in Boston and I’m going to go to work tomorrow   I officially started last week and I’ve been slowly starting, getting some concepts and ideas together, as well as trying to track down some contacts. We’re supposed to be able to move in to the GuildCafe offices within a couple weeks..and they’re supposed to be the same offices that Harmonix is in..or atleast used to be in?!

Either way it’s pretty kick ass and I’m excited.

Now I just need to get a desk and chair and I’ll be like 10x happier