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This week, Goshi, a new mobile app developed by Chad Lomax and Jack Eisenberg of TriplePoint client MapDing, Inc., launched on the App Store.  While utilizing new and emerging technology to enable the buying and selling of items is not in itself a new concept, the team at Goshi has created a unique way for users to create their own local marketplaces  – “the hub.”

The process of buying and selling an item using Goshi is rather simple: take a photo of any item with your iPhone, describe the item, add a price and then post it to a Goshi hub – local areas such as coffee shops in which Goshi users can congregate to exchange the items being sold.

TechCrunch notes, Goshi aims to “disrupt Craigslist” – taking advantage of the iPhone geo-location and photo-taking capabilities to create a much more personal way for users to engage in item exchanges. While the process of selling items using web-based services can often be cold and impersonal, Goshi connects users based not solely on the item being sold itself, but rather shared interests and popular destinations where people would organically meet as part of their daily life.  For example, one looking to sell art using Goshi can sell their paintings to other art enthusiasts who frequently gather at specific places such as the aforementioned coffee shop.  As NBC Chicago points out, Goshi “sounds like a good idea to get like-minded people with shared interests paired up to buy stuff.”

A product born out of Excelerate Labs in Chicago, Goshi has partnered with ten local coffee shops for its initial push out of the gate in Chicago.  If you’d like to see hubs in your city next, contact the team at contact@goshi.me.

You can try out Goshi for yourself here.

One of the most daunting and exciting tasks in media relations is having data dropped on your doorstep. While on one hand it’s a treasure trove of thousands of datapoints, it’s also a treasure trove of thousands of data points. 

In this case, Pando Networks, a provider of content delivery solutions for popular free-to-play games such as Riot Games‘ League of Legends and Turbine‘s Lord Of The Rings Online worked with TriplePoint to synthesize download speeds and completion rates (how many downloads were completed) into a story to tell the press.

The challenge was simple – how do you take a bunch of numbers and turn it into a narrative?

The story turned out to be one focusing on the disparity in connection speeds across the USA. TriplePoint worked with Pando to understand the data and tell the story to the media – both the technology press who would understand the implications of broadband connectivity across the US, and a games press that understands readers are consistently being made to download 5 or 10 gigabyte games. Creating more than simply a release and calling down, TriplePoint created interactive intensity maps using Google Fusion Tables to visualize millions of datapoints in a second.

To say the story was a success is an understatement. A games press thoroughly entrenched in digital downloads appreciated the commentary on an issue that many users understood – notably Kotaku,  Gamasutra, IndustryGamers, Joystiq, and ZAM. The business and technology press understood the significance too – including BetaNews, Forbes, Gizmodo, NPR Marketplace Tech Report and TechCrunch to name a few.

Better yet, this is just the beginning. Pando, after all, is a global company…

While many of us have forgotten about our New Years Resolutions, those that have stuck by them have used many different methods – including TriplePoint client Fitango, a social lifestyle marketplace based in New York built for buying the means to complete your goals. Founded in December by Dr. Dovik Biran, they’ve grown from selling plans to complete marathons, detox and lose weight to teaching language courses with Berlitz, parenting and making wedding favors.

They just launched the planbuilder, too – anybody can create their own Actionplans to share with their friends for free or sell to the general public with Fitango’s help.

And with TriplePoint‘s help, Fitango launched in December with a bang, with pieces from LifeHacker, Mashable and CNET to name a few. Crain’s New York Business soon profiled them in their ‘One Promising Idea’ series, and TechCrunch liked them so much that they ran not one, but two separate pieces on them in as many months. It wasn’t just the cream of the tech crop who had interest, either – Business Insider, Woman’s Day, SheKnows and WCBS all enjoyed Fitango’s work. Then again, so did ReadWriteWeb, VentureBeat and WIRED.

Parinda Muley, Fitango’s VP of Business Development, had this to say: ” TriplePoint have helped Fitango tremendously in featuring our company in the most appropriate publications.  They’re quick, efficient, and they deliver. I would highly recommend them to any company looking to increase its market visibility.”

The first annual Gamification Summit (January 20–21, San Francisco) lived up to the excitement surrounding the sold out event by attracting four hundred attendees and bringing together thought leaders in the tech, business and digital frontiers. Gamification, or the use of game elements outside the gaming world, is seen as an emerging trend, but has actually been around in various forms since the 19^th century. As long as there have been rewards like “buy one, get one free” and spelling bee competitions to promote learning, gamification has been motivating people to unlock their potential through games. The GSummit was headed by Gabe Zichermann, an entrepreneur who literally wrote the book on gamification. He headed up the summit festivities wearing green, his trademark power color, and led the speakers in discussions including the challenges of using gamification as a business tool, games’ power to motivate people and upcoming trends in gamification for 2011.

Several key takeaways include:

• Gamification is not about the game mechanics used, but the experience players have
• The term gamification will disappear when the technique becomes part of the standard toolkit for business marketing
• It’s essential to know your market and what satisfaction that demographic is looking for from the gamification experience
• Modern audiences seek meaningful challenges, anyone can make a game, but it’s more effective to exercise people’s creative and learning capacity
• There is no game that does not teach (this inspired wild applause)
• There isn’t anything you can’t gamify, including taxes and calculus lessons
• Even Jay-Z applied gamification to promote his book launch, Decoded, with a world-wide treasure hunt

The second day of the Summit was a workshop that taught participants how to use gamification effectively and avoid spraying random rewards and points systems around the internet without engaging anyone. Gamification is labeled a “digital drug” because it stimulates humanity’s base instinct to compete and meet challenges. When used in meaningful ways, gamification can unlock people’s potential to improve society and themselves.

Additional coverage of the Summit:

Venture Beat

Bloomberg Businessweek

There are many problems a business can solve – never forgetting to buy your pet food or trying to lose weight, for example, but few take as anatomical a view as Andy Dunn, Co-Founder of new TriplePoint client Bonobos, who realized a core, under-served market in fashion:

Men.

Sure, men’s fashion has been around for quite some time, but in a reasonable price-range it’s not been a great experience shopping for clothing for your average man. Enter the ninjas, an elite customer service corps and the 85% self-made and 15% curated Bonobos shopping experience – free shipping both ways, easy returns and an ethos of making the customer ecstatic versus merely ‘happy.’

This ethos eventually (it’s only three years since Andy founded it with his Stanford Business School roommate Brian Spaly) – attracted a significant $18.5m investment led by Accel Partners and Lightspeed Ventures – as well as significant media attention, with pieces by The New York Times, Crain’s New York Business, Mashable and VentureBeat amongst others. All within the first day.

Bonobos is a fascinating story that, at one point, made me search for a thesaurus to describe the particular qualities of their legendary fit – and proof that even if people tell you your idea’s impossible, you can prove them wrong – and mention the humble derrière with regularity.

Fishing.  One may call it a sport.  Another may call it a hobby.  Regardless of how it may be classifed, fishing is an activity that requires great patience, dedication, and knowledge of  the creatures one is in pursuit of and the environment which they inhabit.

Perhaps a deceased master of management practices does not serve as the ideal fishing companion, but this past weekend, the late Peter Drucker tagged along in spirit on my initial fishing endeavor of the 2010 season.  The first official weekend of spring presented a prime opportunity to gather my fishing rod and head down to the lake in hopes of snagging the big one.

After baiting my hook and casting my line, I sat on the dock of Carnegie Lake and perused through the 392 pages of Drucker’s 1954 TriplePoint cult classic, The Practice of Management.  Having spent a larger portion of the past few weeks reading and digesting the book (I am not alone), I searched for anything particularly motivating as I waited for signs of life to surface from the vast body of water that lay in front of me.

Continue reading Fishing with Peter Drucker – Lessons Learned in Public Relations

While the Media Monkeys and their Junky Junkies will laud praise upon Silicon Valley developers, they’ve been missing out on the development of two of the most original and fascinating indie games of the year. Both of them were developed on the same street – the Pilestræde in Copenhagen, mere steps from the tourist haven of Nyhavn.

Max and the Magic Marker and LIMBO cleaned up at the IGF, with Max grabbing the D2D Vision Award and LIMBO sweeping both the Excellent in Visual Art and Technical Excellence awards.

Two fun facts about the developers:
1) Press Play (Max and the Magic Marker) and PlayDead (LIMBO) shared a table at the IGF awards.

2)  Press Play and PlayDead are separated by nothing but a floor in Copenhagen, Denmark.

Their games border on mirror images. Max’s adventure spans a vibrant and colorful cartoon landscape, using the Wii-mote or a PC’s mouse to draw shapes to progress through a slowly but surely perilous environment that has delighted players of all ages.

Diametrically, LIMBO is a monochromatic, slow-paced and bloody odyssey –  the dark journey of a young boy trying to find his sister in a world dead-set in stopping him at every turn through a series of logic and environmental puzzles – and absolutely no markers.

Both games – remarkably different in subject matter and release-date (Max having just been released mere days ago and LIMBO being months away) – have both been lauded with praise.

IGN’s Matt Cassamasina described Max as a a “WiiWare Gem,” and Kotaku’s Stephen Totilo called it a “tight, carefully designed experience.”

LIMBO’s time with the press has led to such praise as Eurogamer’s Will Porter saying that it’s “…liable to be mentioned in the same breaths as Portal or Braid, potentially even Another World,” and much of the gaming press salivating to play it when it’s released in the Summer.

So, forget your preconceptions about where the greatest games in the world are made. The Danish are already kicking down your doors and filling your rooms full of genuinely innovative gaming – and that’s just the stuff we’re allowed to tell you about.