A 5-week experiment to practice Lean methods in game development by testing and iterating concepts around mobile, location-based social gaming and apps. Presented at GDC 2011.
7 Habits of Breakthrough Entrepreneurs - Casual Connect 2015Amy Jo Kim
It’s easier than ever to create a startup around a new, innovative idea. But most startups fail -- and most innovative products never take off. What differentiates the projects that DO take off? What habits, behaviors and attitudes are shared by the teams who create genre-defining hits? In this talk, you’ll learn the 7 habits of breakthrough innovators - brought to life with front-line stories from the early days of eBay, Ultima Online, The Sims, Rock Band, Covet Fashion, Happify, Lumosity and Pley. You’ll come away with a smarter approach to innovative product design - and practical, actionable design shortcuts you can use right away to turbo-charge your path towards product/market fit.
5 Design Hacks to Build a Better Product in Less TimeAmy Jo Kim
Do you want to accelerate your early design and development process? Is it tricky to identify the right early customers to test your ideas on? Would you like a roadmap for creating a stripped-down yet compelling MVP? Learn the key design hacks and powerful step-by-step system for accelerating early design, perfected by Amy Jo Kim, CEO of Shufflebrain. Startups, game companies and media giants have used her GettingToAlpha system to turn innovative ideas into breakthrough hits.
In this presentation, created for MIT's Integrated Design & Management (IDM) program, I cover some of my lessons learned from past jobs.
Topics include startups, entrepreneurship, recruiting / team-building, a little bit of angel investing and advisory, and a couple of case studies.
The 3 most common mistakes smart entrepreneurs make building their MVPAmy Jo Kim
In this information-packed webinar you'll discover the most common and costly MVP mistakes that cripple promising startups. You’ll also learn how to avoid these mistakes, and super-charge your path to product/market fit with Game Thinking. Taught by Amy Jo Kim, CEO of Shufflebrain, this training session covers:
- How coaching 50+ design teams worldwide revealed huge, costly blunfers in common MVP practices
- How leading startups like Slack use game thinking – NOT gamification – to avoid these mistakes and build products that people love
- How our Getting2Alpha system has helped dozens of entrepreneurs build the right MVP and find product/market fit
- Why the CEO of fast-growing startup Pley called Getting2Alpha ‘an invaluable investment’ after using it to go from idea to MVP in 5 weeks
Turbo-charge your product with Game Thinking - Lean Startup Conference 2015Amy Jo Kim
It’s easier than ever to create a new, innovative product, game, app or service. But most innovative projects never take off and reach their intended audience. What differentiates the ones that DO? What do teams who create genre-defining hits do differently? In this talk, you’ll learn 5 early design hacks that will help you find and delight your aspirational audience – illustrated with front-line stories from eBay, Ultima Online, The Sims, Rock Band, Covet Fashion, Happify and Pley. You’ll come away with a smarter approach to early product design – and 5 practical, actionable hacks that will increase your odds of success.
7 Habits of Breakthrough Entrepreneurs - Casual Connect 2015Amy Jo Kim
It’s easier than ever to create a startup around a new, innovative idea. But most startups fail -- and most innovative products never take off. What differentiates the projects that DO take off? What habits, behaviors and attitudes are shared by the teams who create genre-defining hits? In this talk, you’ll learn the 7 habits of breakthrough innovators - brought to life with front-line stories from the early days of eBay, Ultima Online, The Sims, Rock Band, Covet Fashion, Happify, Lumosity and Pley. You’ll come away with a smarter approach to innovative product design - and practical, actionable design shortcuts you can use right away to turbo-charge your path towards product/market fit.
5 Design Hacks to Build a Better Product in Less TimeAmy Jo Kim
Do you want to accelerate your early design and development process? Is it tricky to identify the right early customers to test your ideas on? Would you like a roadmap for creating a stripped-down yet compelling MVP? Learn the key design hacks and powerful step-by-step system for accelerating early design, perfected by Amy Jo Kim, CEO of Shufflebrain. Startups, game companies and media giants have used her GettingToAlpha system to turn innovative ideas into breakthrough hits.
In this presentation, created for MIT's Integrated Design & Management (IDM) program, I cover some of my lessons learned from past jobs.
Topics include startups, entrepreneurship, recruiting / team-building, a little bit of angel investing and advisory, and a couple of case studies.
The 3 most common mistakes smart entrepreneurs make building their MVPAmy Jo Kim
In this information-packed webinar you'll discover the most common and costly MVP mistakes that cripple promising startups. You’ll also learn how to avoid these mistakes, and super-charge your path to product/market fit with Game Thinking. Taught by Amy Jo Kim, CEO of Shufflebrain, this training session covers:
- How coaching 50+ design teams worldwide revealed huge, costly blunfers in common MVP practices
- How leading startups like Slack use game thinking – NOT gamification – to avoid these mistakes and build products that people love
- How our Getting2Alpha system has helped dozens of entrepreneurs build the right MVP and find product/market fit
- Why the CEO of fast-growing startup Pley called Getting2Alpha ‘an invaluable investment’ after using it to go from idea to MVP in 5 weeks
Turbo-charge your product with Game Thinking - Lean Startup Conference 2015Amy Jo Kim
It’s easier than ever to create a new, innovative product, game, app or service. But most innovative projects never take off and reach their intended audience. What differentiates the ones that DO? What do teams who create genre-defining hits do differently? In this talk, you’ll learn 5 early design hacks that will help you find and delight your aspirational audience – illustrated with front-line stories from eBay, Ultima Online, The Sims, Rock Band, Covet Fashion, Happify and Pley. You’ll come away with a smarter approach to early product design – and 5 practical, actionable hacks that will increase your odds of success.
Here is the presentation file I'll use in Lean camp to talk about the gamification for startups. Benefits and dangerous of using a good design or a bad design!
Talk : Innovation Games : Perfecting Your Brainstorming Technique for Killer...Ben Sykes
“It is an exciting time to be alive. We seem to be on the edge of limitless technology.
I wonder if we are
trying to solve the right problems?
How many people want to see another Instagram or uber clone?”
The world needs you to be fearless in your innovation.
A talk on how to build digital products – apps, websites, and other kinds of software or digital media – to take advantage of machine learning and artificial intelligence to make them more compelling. This talk takes some of the concepts of lean startups and lean product development and turns them on their head. It discusses how to identify a good problem or opportunity to solve with machine learning, and how to go about solving it in a staged way without spending huge amounts of money up front.
The Game Thinking Roadmap: a PMs path to masteryAmy Jo Kim
Have you ever wondered if you're building the right MVP, and testing it on the right customers? Are you eager to avoid "leaky bucket syndrome" and drive long-term engagement? Would you like a roadmap for what to build, what to test, and who to test it on throughout your product development process? Level-up your PM skills with Game Thinking -- a design system and product roadmap for building products your customers will return to, again and again. You'll get a powerful framework, actionable tips, and a chance to apply these ideas to your own project.
Chris Paton UX Australia 2013 - Our billion-dollar baby: From greed to goodChris Paton
"If you won $1 billon, how much would you give to charity"
Jaro is a "Gamified Crowd Funding Platform" that launched in April this year. Users of Jaro pay to play in the knockout tournament for a cash prize that is split between charitable causes and one lucky winner. The best part is that our users get a say in how much is given to each.
Existing as a startup within the Vivant agency, balancing agency practices (deliverables) with a startup mentality (ship it) has been a long and unique journey for the Vivant UX team. Many mistakes and paradigm shifts occurred along the way.
Chris will take you through the Journey from the first patent lodgement in 2008 through Jaro's launch in 2013 and beyond:
- The many pivots Jaro went through and how it affected who their users and target market were.
- How as a team they got stuck at the very first hurdle, how they were able to shake it off and move forward.
- How they designed features that nobody knew how to start, by failing fast and failing hard.
- How they moved from a tangled mess of features towards a seamless experience.
- Finally, the story post launch. What they are doing to gain traction in the market and other lessons learned along the way.
Learning's from book: The steve jobs way:
Key Aspects covered: Thoughts of steve jobs on:
Marketing
Team
Competition
Product and Design
Organization
Be your self
Three Powerful Ideas to help investors make smart decisionsAmy Jo Kim
Have you ever been confused by conflicting advice from your stakeholders & colleagues? Do you fall for the siren song of seductive mockups? Learn how to navigate these challenges and spot the signs of a team that's headed for product/market fit.
Living the iDream: Opportunities and Challenges in the Children's App Market ...Carla Fisher
Following up on her iKids 2014 presentation, Dr. Carla Fisher shares an overview of the three major challenges for children’s app developers and ways to address them. An overview of the presentation can also be read at kidscreen.com/category/blogs/kids-got-game.
In this presentation, first given at #TravelTalk in London (30th March 2017), Simon Quance (Head of Strategy, Digital Visitor) takes a look at 'digital footprint' and how it's possible to manage and improve your own 'PVP'.
For more information get in touch: info@digitalvisitor.com
Find out how to use simple innovation games to build better solution requirements for SharePoint projects. You will learn seriously fun ways to do work – Seriously! Learn how to tap into true innovation and discover new ideas. Come learn how to put your ideas into action.
Tips and tricks for how to work together when you are looking to find a novel solution to an existing problem, or a solution to a problem that others didn't even know existed.
There’s something incredibly powerful about the deep long-lasting engagement that Kickstarter built into their platform. You find yourself coming back again and again - and getting better at something you care about. You’re deeply engaged.
That’s the power of Game Thinking. Learn how to harness Game Thinking for YOUR product at Game Thinking Live http://gamethinkinglive.com. Learn how leading-edge companies like Slack, AirBnB, Happify, Kickstarter build deep engagement into their products and services.
http://gamethinkinglive.com
(Short version) Building a Mobile, Social, Location-Based Game in 5 WeeksJennie Lees
A 5-week experiment to practice Lean methods in game development by testing and iterating concepts around mobile, location-based social gaming and apps. (Short version for Where 2.0)
Here is the presentation file I'll use in Lean camp to talk about the gamification for startups. Benefits and dangerous of using a good design or a bad design!
Talk : Innovation Games : Perfecting Your Brainstorming Technique for Killer...Ben Sykes
“It is an exciting time to be alive. We seem to be on the edge of limitless technology.
I wonder if we are
trying to solve the right problems?
How many people want to see another Instagram or uber clone?”
The world needs you to be fearless in your innovation.
A talk on how to build digital products – apps, websites, and other kinds of software or digital media – to take advantage of machine learning and artificial intelligence to make them more compelling. This talk takes some of the concepts of lean startups and lean product development and turns them on their head. It discusses how to identify a good problem or opportunity to solve with machine learning, and how to go about solving it in a staged way without spending huge amounts of money up front.
The Game Thinking Roadmap: a PMs path to masteryAmy Jo Kim
Have you ever wondered if you're building the right MVP, and testing it on the right customers? Are you eager to avoid "leaky bucket syndrome" and drive long-term engagement? Would you like a roadmap for what to build, what to test, and who to test it on throughout your product development process? Level-up your PM skills with Game Thinking -- a design system and product roadmap for building products your customers will return to, again and again. You'll get a powerful framework, actionable tips, and a chance to apply these ideas to your own project.
Chris Paton UX Australia 2013 - Our billion-dollar baby: From greed to goodChris Paton
"If you won $1 billon, how much would you give to charity"
Jaro is a "Gamified Crowd Funding Platform" that launched in April this year. Users of Jaro pay to play in the knockout tournament for a cash prize that is split between charitable causes and one lucky winner. The best part is that our users get a say in how much is given to each.
Existing as a startup within the Vivant agency, balancing agency practices (deliverables) with a startup mentality (ship it) has been a long and unique journey for the Vivant UX team. Many mistakes and paradigm shifts occurred along the way.
Chris will take you through the Journey from the first patent lodgement in 2008 through Jaro's launch in 2013 and beyond:
- The many pivots Jaro went through and how it affected who their users and target market were.
- How as a team they got stuck at the very first hurdle, how they were able to shake it off and move forward.
- How they designed features that nobody knew how to start, by failing fast and failing hard.
- How they moved from a tangled mess of features towards a seamless experience.
- Finally, the story post launch. What they are doing to gain traction in the market and other lessons learned along the way.
Learning's from book: The steve jobs way:
Key Aspects covered: Thoughts of steve jobs on:
Marketing
Team
Competition
Product and Design
Organization
Be your self
Three Powerful Ideas to help investors make smart decisionsAmy Jo Kim
Have you ever been confused by conflicting advice from your stakeholders & colleagues? Do you fall for the siren song of seductive mockups? Learn how to navigate these challenges and spot the signs of a team that's headed for product/market fit.
Living the iDream: Opportunities and Challenges in the Children's App Market ...Carla Fisher
Following up on her iKids 2014 presentation, Dr. Carla Fisher shares an overview of the three major challenges for children’s app developers and ways to address them. An overview of the presentation can also be read at kidscreen.com/category/blogs/kids-got-game.
In this presentation, first given at #TravelTalk in London (30th March 2017), Simon Quance (Head of Strategy, Digital Visitor) takes a look at 'digital footprint' and how it's possible to manage and improve your own 'PVP'.
For more information get in touch: info@digitalvisitor.com
Find out how to use simple innovation games to build better solution requirements for SharePoint projects. You will learn seriously fun ways to do work – Seriously! Learn how to tap into true innovation and discover new ideas. Come learn how to put your ideas into action.
Tips and tricks for how to work together when you are looking to find a novel solution to an existing problem, or a solution to a problem that others didn't even know existed.
There’s something incredibly powerful about the deep long-lasting engagement that Kickstarter built into their platform. You find yourself coming back again and again - and getting better at something you care about. You’re deeply engaged.
That’s the power of Game Thinking. Learn how to harness Game Thinking for YOUR product at Game Thinking Live http://gamethinkinglive.com. Learn how leading-edge companies like Slack, AirBnB, Happify, Kickstarter build deep engagement into their products and services.
http://gamethinkinglive.com
(Short version) Building a Mobile, Social, Location-Based Game in 5 WeeksJennie Lees
A 5-week experiment to practice Lean methods in game development by testing and iterating concepts around mobile, location-based social gaming and apps. (Short version for Where 2.0)
Inbound Marketing Conference 2016 SummaryJimmy Smith
Inbound 2016 was an excellent digital marketing conference. A summary of some of the best speakers and sessions follows. I selected sessions based on personal preference and what I thought would be of value to my company. With few exceptions, I got many ideas and great value out of each session.
Launches, SEO, Adwords, Twitter, Blog, Search Engine, Keyword ResearchMike Roberts
- Embarrassing Mistakes I've Made In Launches
- Things I've Learned
- Detailed Launch Plan for SpyFu SEO RECON Files (Agency Ready White Label SEO Reporting).
See the presentation here: http://vimeo.com/14965166
I was invited to speak about this and four other topics at the Kajaani University of Applied Sciences in Finland. This first lecture explains to the students how they should understand and treat the importance of pr & marketing in the creation of their games in order to one day turn them into products. The topics covered in part 1 are:
2.00 Traditional game marketing
2.45 Marketing basics
3.15 Why you need marketing
3.45 Why you need need it even more
4.00 Why you need it forever
4.40 The obvious chores
5.30 What you can do right away in four easy steps
6.00 Step 1: PR ≠ Marketing
9.00 Step 2: Create Assets
10.15 Step 3: Join (and participate in) Communities
11.00 Step 4: Understand how press works
13.45 Why you don't need marketing
14.30 Some handy tricks
14.45 #1 Use SEO and be unique
17.15 #2 Don't forget social media
I was invited to speak about this and four other topics at the Kajaani University of Applied Sciences in Finland. This first lecture explains to the students how they should understand and treat the importance of pr & marketing in the creation of their games in order to one day turn them into products. The topics covered in part 2 are:
0.00 #3 Having the look
1.10 #4 Find your champions
4.45 #5 Show your face
5.15 #6 Act like you're already successful
7.20 #7 Deal with the stress
10.45 Summary & Further reading
Killer Design Patterns for F2P Mobile/Tablet GamesHenric Suuronen
Presentation on Design Patterns for Mobile and Tablet games presented in July 2013 at ChinaJoy in Shanghai by Henric Suuronen, President & Co-Founder at Nonstop Games
16 million downloads and 300.000 da us later when those numbers can't keep ...Mary Chan
Some of the biggest causes of a game studio to fail include: a demotivated and/or burned out team, lack of funds, legal trouble, not seeing the problems ahead, a neglected game and/or audience, internal arguments and publishing problems. At the start of January 2014, Critical Force Entertainment based of Kajaani, Finland had every single one of those challenges one way or another. This talk is intended to share the insights, learned lessons and best practices of how we succeeded through failing endlessly, even with a game that had a huge audience which we sadly never managed to properly monetize and the stigma of being a 'cloner'. Regardless of that, being creative and coming up with solutions to our problems on a step-by-step basis got us to become strong than we ever thought we could be. The main focus of this talk is on sharing our story of performing a complete startup turnaround regardless of the relative success we've had with our games. Topics include:
Team Culture
- we were lacking a defined team culture, so we decided to completely fix that Product management
- we never had anybody focus on this, now we do Legal Concerns
- we were facing 300+ websites that iframed our game from Kongregate, we show how we turned this into profit Funding
- we were making money, but didn't properly manage our budget.
Titanic Effect
- we were focusing too much on growing quantity instead of improving quality Community
- we had neglected our audience, now we're going to leverage them Partnerships
- finding the right partners to work with has saved us a lot of hassle for a worth-while share of our revenues.
We will be sharing concrete examples of how we tackled the above topics and will provide various forms of data, references, tips, best practices and learned lessons. Part of these can be found in the attached presentation draft.
Intended audience & prerequisites: Mostly intended for small-medium sized independent developers or developers intending to start their own company.
Session takeaways: We want developers to walk away with a new toolkit that allows them to see opportunity in every bit of adversity that might cross their path. Our story is but one of many, but will illustrate some of the most fundamentally necessary mindsets, perspectives and attitudes that developers can adopt to turn the biggest failure into something useful.
Customer and mobile first — 5 insights from working at findmypastAndrew Fox
Five design insights from working for 7 months at findmypast: bringing user-centred design to the company, and moving to a mobile-first world. Note: Not sure how much of it makes sense without my commentary, but knock yourself out.
Digital, Grumpy Cat and social media update 2013Steven Bradley
Update given at a recent conference on Digital Strategy, New Media Trends, Grump Cat and Social Media in 2013. No template theme | Cut down version | feel free to use what you want
Stephane Zerbib: Master Of The Mall, An RPG For The Classroom
http://youtu.be/ZZfM9CMuK_Q
Computer games seem to motivate young people in a way that formal education doesn't. It is repeatedly pointed out that young people of their own volition choose to spend many hours playing complex computer games outside school. Games, it seems, 'have something', they seem to have a way of engaging and interesting young people. The desire to harness this motivational power to encourage young people to want to learn is the main driver behind an interest in computer games for learning.
Similar to Building a Mobile, Social, Location-Based Game in 5 Weeks (20)
Neuro-symbolic is not enough, we need neuro-*semantic*Frank van Harmelen
Neuro-symbolic (NeSy) AI is on the rise. However, simply machine learning on just any symbolic structure is not sufficient to really harvest the gains of NeSy. These will only be gained when the symbolic structures have an actual semantics. I give an operational definition of semantics as “predictable inference”.
All of this illustrated with link prediction over knowledge graphs, but the argument is general.
Slack (or Teams) Automation for Bonterra Impact Management (fka Social Soluti...Jeffrey Haguewood
Sidekick Solutions uses Bonterra Impact Management (fka Social Solutions Apricot) and automation solutions to integrate data for business workflows.
We believe integration and automation are essential to user experience and the promise of efficient work through technology. Automation is the critical ingredient to realizing that full vision. We develop integration products and services for Bonterra Case Management software to support the deployment of automations for a variety of use cases.
This video focuses on the notifications, alerts, and approval requests using Slack for Bonterra Impact Management. The solutions covered in this webinar can also be deployed for Microsoft Teams.
Interested in deploying notification automations for Bonterra Impact Management? Contact us at sales@sidekicksolutionsllc.com to discuss next steps.
Generating a custom Ruby SDK for your web service or Rails API using Smithyg2nightmarescribd
Have you ever wanted a Ruby client API to communicate with your web service? Smithy is a protocol-agnostic language for defining services and SDKs. Smithy Ruby is an implementation of Smithy that generates a Ruby SDK using a Smithy model. In this talk, we will explore Smithy and Smithy Ruby to learn how to generate custom feature-rich SDKs that can communicate with any web service, such as a Rails JSON API.
JMeter webinar - integration with InfluxDB and GrafanaRTTS
Watch this recorded webinar about real-time monitoring of application performance. See how to integrate Apache JMeter, the open-source leader in performance testing, with InfluxDB, the open-source time-series database, and Grafana, the open-source analytics and visualization application.
In this webinar, we will review the benefits of leveraging InfluxDB and Grafana when executing load tests and demonstrate how these tools are used to visualize performance metrics.
Length: 30 minutes
Session Overview
-------------------------------------------
During this webinar, we will cover the following topics while demonstrating the integrations of JMeter, InfluxDB and Grafana:
- What out-of-the-box solutions are available for real-time monitoring JMeter tests?
- What are the benefits of integrating InfluxDB and Grafana into the load testing stack?
- Which features are provided by Grafana?
- Demonstration of InfluxDB and Grafana using a practice web application
To view the webinar recording, go to:
https://www.rttsweb.com/jmeter-integration-webinar
LF Energy Webinar: Electrical Grid Modelling and Simulation Through PowSyBl -...DanBrown980551
Do you want to learn how to model and simulate an electrical network from scratch in under an hour?
Then welcome to this PowSyBl workshop, hosted by Rte, the French Transmission System Operator (TSO)!
During the webinar, you will discover the PowSyBl ecosystem as well as handle and study an electrical network through an interactive Python notebook.
PowSyBl is an open source project hosted by LF Energy, which offers a comprehensive set of features for electrical grid modelling and simulation. Among other advanced features, PowSyBl provides:
- A fully editable and extendable library for grid component modelling;
- Visualization tools to display your network;
- Grid simulation tools, such as power flows, security analyses (with or without remedial actions) and sensitivity analyses;
The framework is mostly written in Java, with a Python binding so that Python developers can access PowSyBl functionalities as well.
What you will learn during the webinar:
- For beginners: discover PowSyBl's functionalities through a quick general presentation and the notebook, without needing any expert coding skills;
- For advanced developers: master the skills to efficiently apply PowSyBl functionalities to your real-world scenarios.
Kubernetes & AI - Beauty and the Beast !?! @KCD Istanbul 2024Tobias Schneck
As AI technology is pushing into IT I was wondering myself, as an “infrastructure container kubernetes guy”, how get this fancy AI technology get managed from an infrastructure operational view? Is it possible to apply our lovely cloud native principals as well? What benefit’s both technologies could bring to each other?
Let me take this questions and provide you a short journey through existing deployment models and use cases for AI software. On practical examples, we discuss what cloud/on-premise strategy we may need for applying it to our own infrastructure to get it to work from an enterprise perspective. I want to give an overview about infrastructure requirements and technologies, what could be beneficial or limiting your AI use cases in an enterprise environment. An interactive Demo will give you some insides, what approaches I got already working for real.
Encryption in Microsoft 365 - ExpertsLive Netherlands 2024Albert Hoitingh
In this session I delve into the encryption technology used in Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Purview. Including the concepts of Customer Key and Double Key Encryption.
Builder.ai Founder Sachin Dev Duggal's Strategic Approach to Create an Innova...Ramesh Iyer
In today's fast-changing business world, Companies that adapt and embrace new ideas often need help to keep up with the competition. However, fostering a culture of innovation takes much work. It takes vision, leadership and willingness to take risks in the right proportion. Sachin Dev Duggal, co-founder of Builder.ai, has perfected the art of this balance, creating a company culture where creativity and growth are nurtured at each stage.
Accelerate your Kubernetes clusters with Varnish CachingThijs Feryn
A presentation about the usage and availability of Varnish on Kubernetes. This talk explores the capabilities of Varnish caching and shows how to use the Varnish Helm chart to deploy it to Kubernetes.
This presentation was delivered at K8SUG Singapore. See https://feryn.eu/presentations/accelerate-your-kubernetes-clusters-with-varnish-caching-k8sug-singapore-28-2024 for more details.
Securing your Kubernetes cluster_ a step-by-step guide to success !KatiaHIMEUR1
Today, after several years of existence, an extremely active community and an ultra-dynamic ecosystem, Kubernetes has established itself as the de facto standard in container orchestration. Thanks to a wide range of managed services, it has never been so easy to set up a ready-to-use Kubernetes cluster.
However, this ease of use means that the subject of security in Kubernetes is often left for later, or even neglected. This exposes companies to significant risks.
In this talk, I'll show you step-by-step how to secure your Kubernetes cluster for greater peace of mind and reliability.
State of ICS and IoT Cyber Threat Landscape Report 2024 previewPrayukth K V
The IoT and OT threat landscape report has been prepared by the Threat Research Team at Sectrio using data from Sectrio, cyber threat intelligence farming facilities spread across over 85 cities around the world. In addition, Sectrio also runs AI-based advanced threat and payload engagement facilities that serve as sinks to attract and engage sophisticated threat actors, and newer malware including new variants and latent threats that are at an earlier stage of development.
The latest edition of the OT/ICS and IoT security Threat Landscape Report 2024 also covers:
State of global ICS asset and network exposure
Sectoral targets and attacks as well as the cost of ransom
Global APT activity, AI usage, actor and tactic profiles, and implications
Rise in volumes of AI-powered cyberattacks
Major cyber events in 2024
Malware and malicious payload trends
Cyberattack types and targets
Vulnerability exploit attempts on CVEs
Attacks on counties – USA
Expansion of bot farms – how, where, and why
In-depth analysis of the cyber threat landscape across North America, South America, Europe, APAC, and the Middle East
Why are attacks on smart factories rising?
Cyber risk predictions
Axis of attacks – Europe
Systemic attacks in the Middle East
Download the full report from here:
https://sectrio.com/resources/ot-threat-landscape-reports/sectrio-releases-ot-ics-and-iot-security-threat-landscape-report-2024/
9. Assumptions
• People like going on walking tours.
• Other people like telling stories to strangers while wandering
around their home city.
• Game mechanics can encourage this behaviour.
• There is demand within the travel industry for new ways to
monetise content.
10. Interviews
• Talk to people who will validate your
assumptions
• Asked tourists about their travel
habits and likes
• Asked tourists about their phone
behaviour
• Learnt that people hate walking tours
and don’t like using their phones!
11. Making Interviews Work
• Find people who fit your target
• Ask them outright if they would play your game, use your
product, etc
• “What do you enjoy playing?”
• “What problems do you have?”
• Find out what makes them tick!
12. Learning 1
No amount of whiteboard thinking is as
valuable as talking to real people.
14. It won’t work!
• Our core idea was flawed.
• No matter how fun we made it, nobody would have used our
app!
• Fail fast: back to the drawing board.
• Nothing is wasted: use learnings from the interviews to
suggest a good pivot.
16. Assumptions
• Loneliness is a big problem for solo travellers.
• We can fix this by making social events fun and less awkward.
• Enough people with smartphones and data plans travel by
themselves to big cities to make this concept work.
• People are inherently social and would meet up with strangers
in a strange city if nudged to do so.
17. Surveys
• Mass response gives a big picture
• Ask for email address: instant mailing
list
• Can bribe people with giveaways
• Of 300 people, only 27% said they
would try our app
• 98% click through rate on survey!
22. Assumptions
• People waiting in line get bored.
• When bored, people play games on their phones.
• Adding coupons would incentivise people to play our game,
not other games.
• Businesses would partner with us to get more customers.
• We could create a compelling game experience that lasted
less than 30 seconds.
23. Storyboarding
• Walk users through potential
gameplay
• Paper prototypes
• Easy to get feedback on multiple
ideas
• Coupons element turned out to be
more important than we expected
24. Learning 4
Finding a compelling
hook is important.
25. Playtesting
• Environment plus game
• Emulate the final product
• Test out core mechanics
• Learnt a lot about types of game,
motivation and the viral elements
needed
26. ‘AdWords’ testing
• Imagine you have built the game. How would you promote it?
• Create a landing page for your brilliant game idea.
• Track every metric possible.
• Obsessively A/B test.
• “Enter your e-mail address to beta test!”
30. Rapid prototyping
• Web
• Can constrain what you build, but is fast
• Platform independent
• Frameworks
• Learning curve, but ‘real’ product
• Examples: Torque, GameSalad, Corona, libgdx, ...
• Native code!
31. Test-focused development
• We can test our minigame concept quickly by focusing on one
type of game
• Pick a game that can be built fast: trivia
• Will this validate any assumptions?
• What are we really testing?
• What metrics make up the bottom line?
35. Twitter trivia
• Low barrier to entry
• High viral coefficient
• Mechanics the same
• Test core assumptions:
• Involving other people spreads the game
• People enjoy core trivia concept
36. “Concierge” testing
• Why code if you don’t have to?
• Use a human until scale means you need to automate.
• Write code in parallel.
• A human “Wizard of Oz” ran our trivia quiz!
37. Learnings
• Viral mechanics had a low rate of infection.
• Certain types of questions were more engaging than others.
• Having a character behind the game really helped!
• Challenges for the real game:
• Initial user adoption
• Viral spread
• Rewards
38. Recap
• Started as a travel app
• Switched to location + minigames = deals
• Tested viral mechanics using Twitter and trivia
• Learnt that growth required incentives from businesses, but
businesses required large numbers of users
• ...but the viral mechanics were weak.
Introduce self and the experiment. Encourage people to find another session if they thought this would all be about coding something up as fast as humanly possible. This is a session about pretotyping - you can’t build it right before you find the right “it” to build.\n
How did this experiment begin? With the founding fathers of the lean movement. Eric spoke at GDC last year about applying lean principles to game development, and in many ways this talk will cover some of the same ground, but with a smartphone angle.\n
What does this mean? Simply that you shouldn’t be throwing resources away on something that will ultimately not succeed. Lean is about maximising success by constantly testing you are on the right path.\n
The flipside of failing fast is knowing when to pivot - change direction - and following through on it. There’s an economic principle called the sunk cost fallacy - people are psychologically less likely to change direction if they have invested time (and money!) into something, even if that investment is now worthless. \n\nSo your aim is to do enough research to show what’s going to work and what isn’t early on, keep pivoting - drastically or gradually - until you find the sweet spot, where you have both data and instinct pointing to success. Even then, keep testing!\n
I’m going to walk you through a five week experiment a team of us conducted (two developers, one UX designer and myself, a product manager). Our aim was to build a smartphone game within the 5 week timeframe, but not just to build it - to prove it would work. We wanted to fail fast, and to pivot.\n
We started off with a load of assumptions, many of which we didn’t realise -were- assumptions.\n\nThe key here, and this is something I will mention again and again, is to figure out what you are assuming to be true in order for your game to succeed. You’re assuming it’ll be a great game, it’ll be fun, everyone will want to play it, the reviews will be awesome, and so on - but what else are you assuming about the people who will be playing it? About the way it will fit into their lives? About the way they play games right now?\n\nSmartphone games are an interesting case to dive into, because they really do fit into people’s lives in a way that a console or PC doesn’t. We started out by thinking about people’s needs when they are out and about with their phones, and problems we had personally run into.\n
This was our starting point. We love location and mobile, so we combined the two into a walking tour idea. It’s not actually a game yet, although we envisaged gameplay elements as being key to the interactivity. The basic idea was about allowing people to walk around their city recording an audio tour through our app, while travellers in the area could pull up the app to see the tours locals had created and follow them.\n
There are a ton of assumptions behind this idea, and before we even started coding anything, we listed as many as we could find. Actually, it helps here to get external feedback if you’re able.\n\n[explain each bullet]\nHow many of you would wander around your city for an hour or two talking into a phone as if it were a stranger who wanted to explore the city your way?\n
Talked to 10 people along Fisherman’s Wharf as well as phone interviews with 25 people who travelled a lot. Quickly learnt that we had made two very wrong assumptions. Nobody liked walking tours, and nobody cared about using their phone when they were travelling. In a very specific tech-savvy data-plan-free world, we might have been on to something, but the feedback we got was universally pointing us in one direction: away from this idea! And notice - we didn’t even start to test the gameplay elements yet.\n
How can you make the most of time in front of real people?\nTarget: Is your target player “everyone in the world”? Really? Whether it’s “people that buy games on smartphones”, “people who own a smartphone” or even “people who play Angry Birds addictively”, there’s some factor you can use to hone in on finding people who would actually, under the right circumstances, install your game. Even if you have nothing but an idea yet - hey, I’m going to do a game about fruit - you can find out more from real people that is super valuable in giving you context during the development process. And you can find out their likes and problems, which might give you a flash of insight into something new you could do.\n
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Step 2 - learning from feedback on the assumptions\n
We quickly realised there was a serious problem with our idea. You know what? That was OK. We didn’t think we would by chance have stumbled on something perfect right away, and the time we had spent talking to people really helped us learn what went through their heads and what issues they had.\n\nSome of the things people repeated to us: when they travel alone they feel lonely, that they have issues getting to know a new city, that if they are by themselves they are less likely to do some of the cool stuff that’s around. This led us on to a natural pivot...\n
We thought there was room for a location based mobile app that would pull together fellow users and arrange a ‘flashmob’ style event for strangers in a city, whether it was a get together or group tickets to a local attraction. Think of it as Groupon meets friend dating meets location.\n
We’d already validated the first assumption here to some extent, but as it was the core of this new direction, we needed to validate it more. Plus, there was a big assumption inherent in our plans - that there would be enough people with the right technology and situation to even make this work assuming 100% of them wanted to use the product.\n
To test this new style of assumption, we felt we needed mass data as well as more personalised responses. We continued to interview travellers, but also sent out a survey to 300 people to learn more about their solo travel experience and to ask directly if they would use this app. Surveys are one way of testing a product that doesn’t exist yet, although there are other means that I will get into a little later, such as setting up fake landing pages and driving traffic via AdWords.\n\nOne interesting fact about our survey: from people who saw the form, 98% filled it in. People love to talk about travel!\n
Let’s rewind. We’d talked to people directly and found out that loneliness was a big problem. Yet when we asked people en masse, anonymously, where there’s not even a hint of embarrassment, we found that half of them don’t have the problem at all. How could we have been so wrong?\n\nActually, as the statisticians here already know, there are various biases and issues at hand here. It’s perfectly possible that we got the two conflicting data points - and also possible that the two can coexist. In fact, 50 people said they did feel lonely. The question is whether that was good enough, combined with the 27% who said they would try the app.\n
One of the most useful things that came out of the work we had done so far was a building gut instinct among the entire team. We had become much closer to our target market and we had learnt a lot about what works and what doesn’t work for them. We’d all spoken to people directly and we’d all helped get our survey responses, which I think is important: especially in an engineer focused culture, it’s good for everyone to have the data, not just the project manager or CEO.\n\nAs a team, we realised our gut was telling us one thing: we were in the wrong place altogether. We were passionate about location and mobile, but not travel, and the mixed messages and lack of a clear “Yes!” moment in all our travel interviews were telling us not to continue down this path. Fail fast!\n\nSo we took a step back and looked at some of the other learnings and hypotheses we had about location based apps.\n
Aha! Now the good stuff, you say!\n\nFocusing on a location-based smartphone game let us widen our target audience and pull in some of the things we had learnt so far about people’s behaviour with phones while travelling. We wanted to bring in some elements of the real world to the game, so our game design was to have a set of minigames that could be played quickly while waiting in line, with a coupon as the reward if you got a particular score.\n
How many of you play games when you’re in line somewhere? I know I do, in fact our entire team did, which was part of the genesis of this idea. We wanted to take that game experience and make it special based on the location. \n\nHowever, there was a key assumption around distribution and uptake that this coupon idea centred around: that businesses would partner to give us coupons, leading to all kinds of scaling problems, or that we could get the coupons somewhere else. \n\nWe spoke to a couple of businesses and other companies which worked with coupons and discounts, and realised a crucial factor: businesses buy users, not ideas. “Come back with a million users”. This reframed our problem into one of figuring out the most compelling way to get people playing our game, and for them to keep playing it - and tell their friends!\n
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From storyboarding several ideas, and despite our personal assumptions and experiences with mobile games, we discovered an important thing: the compelling hook was a really big factor. When we tested out a paper prototype with no real reason to play, people were lukewarm, saying they would probably play it but weren’t sure why they would bother in the first place. This is a vicious circle a lot of mobile games can get into, where you build something that is in and of itself fun, but without the big press coverage and massive buzz, nobody will find that out in the first place.\n\nThere are many answers to this. Sometimes the compelling part of a game is a really core part of the game itself. Hitting stuff with birds that make cute noises is fun. Sometimes it’s great marketing. Sometimes it’s finding a way to tap into an audience that already exists. And sometimes it’s a case of finding a compelling part of the game that is enough to make people curious and want to try it. We found, by storyboarding different scenarios, that adding in the promise of monetary gain (or saving) was enough to make people want to try it out at least once. From then on, it’s our job to make the game fun enough that the once becomes ‘every time I’m in line’.\n
While we were testing out assumptions still, we did start building an actual game in code, as we thought this idea was going to go somewhere interesting. However, this was nowhere near ready to test. So how did we playtest a game we hadn’t built?\n\nAs our concept centred around minigames, we identified a few different types of games that we wanted to focus on initially, and backed this up with a survey to find out 50 people’s favourite mobile game types, knowing that we could easily expand our repertoire if needed. Games of skill, competitive games, and trivia games were three popular responses that we found it very easy to test - because similar games were already downloadable and playable on smartphones.\n\nThe first step of this test was to find a place where our target players would play our game: waiting at a coffee shop. We could actually test out two different hypotheses around boredom - would people play while in line, or after they had ordered their drink, in the few minutes it took to arrive?\n\nThe second step was to mock up the game experience using existing apps that we paid for and downloaded, and faked screens that showed a win or loss depending on the score the player got. \n\nHere’s what we learnt:\nGames of chance work well, as long as it’s balanced: the player has some chance of winning eventually, but doesn’t win immediately.\nEven people who were waiting together were not interested in competitive games.\nA game we had found a lot of fun in isolation was not so much fun in context; have you played that game where you drag out toilet paper as far as possible in 30 seconds? People were a little embarrassed to be playing it ‘in public’, though with friends it’s fine.\n\nWays of tying the game into the venue itself were generally well received (but we couldn’t test these at this stage). The two ideas we explained to users here were a trivia game based on the venue, or minigames that were specific, e.g. a Diner Dash style game if you were in a fast food joint.\n\nThe social aspects of friends’ high scores were important, but not as important as the coupon. So this wasn’t the viral hook we had hoped for.\n
How will we get our first users?\n\nWe wanted to try this “startup lean marketing” approach with a game, as we thought the results would be interesting. A lot of the normal ways of promoting a game won’t work if you haven’t finished building it yet, but this technique does. It’s used a lot by people starting up web products to see if there are even enough people interested in it in the first place.\n\nYou create a website for your game, explaining how awesome it is, even showing screenshots and listing all the benefits. For us, we focused on the concept of ‘play this game while you’re in line, and save money’. We then set up a Play Now link that led users to a form saying “Our game is being developed, but leave your email and we’ll give you exclusive access to our beta”.\n\nThen we took out online ads against the site. You can do this on any platform, from AdWords to Facebook ads to, I guess, mobile advertising or even a billboard. What you need to do is track EVERYTHING. The final email signups are going to be the really dedicated people - if you get a significant proportion of those, drop everything and build it already! But it’s not too likely that everyone will give you their email address. You can look at how many people visit the site in the first place - what’s your click through rate? Are you advertising to the right people? Then look at how long they spend on the site, and where they look, and whether they click through to try it or not. There’s some really interesting data in there, even for a game. \n\nAnother thing you can do here is obsessively A/B test your site. Change the ads, the wording, the text on the button (“Try Now”, “Play Now”, “Try for Free”, “Install”, “Beta Signup”...). Use stock photos, screenshots, drawings. You can test everything. Don’t get too carried away with it, but don’t overlook this as a good source of data too.\n\n
And it tells you a lot about whether it will sell or not when you do have it...\n\nBut be careful and don’t be evil!\n
Step 5 - prototyping\n
In this world of ‘doing stuff the lean way’, the prototype is the minimum viable product.\nActually this is a little misleading - let me explain why.\n\nThe minimum viable product is the absolute minimum thing you can create to test out your assumptions. So we already had a MVP of sorts - we had storyboards and fake playtest material, which were enough for us to start testing. When it comes to code, though, MVP is all about throwing everything you can away. Get something built as soon as is possible for you to learn from it.\n
It’s what you build, not what you build it in.\n
We realised building a great prototype in a matter of days wasn’t going to happen. So we needed to focus on creating a minimal viable product as fast as possible - something that could validate our main assumptions. However, in the process of reworking code, evaluating frameworks and designing out minigame mechanics, we lost sight of the core concepts we needed to test first and foremost.\n\n
Those of you who’ve stayed with me so far will remember we had a couple of aspects to our game. Location, motivation, minigames, boredom. \n\nSo far we’ve tested some elements of all four, but we had also discovered that a core part of the ‘deals’ equation involved getting enough users that we could even get businesses interested. So a missing part here is ‘viral’/‘social’, a term that is so overused and yet really important.\n\nHow on earth do you test this without going the whole way and publishing the game and hoping that the viral elements you designed will work?\n
The mechanics matter. The platform, in this case, is secondary. Your mileage may vary.\n
Back to minimum viable product. The concept we needed to test was the viral mechanics, and we focused on trivia as something we could trivially (sorry) implement.\n\nWas this a huge assumption? Yes!\n\nShould we have tested different types of game with the social mechanics? Yes!\n
Eh?\n\nHow does Twitter fit into all this?\n\nThe important part for us was to test whether we could get any kind of viral traction with a simple game. We realised that in picking trivia for our first game type, we had picked something that would work outside the mobile context, and decided to take advantage of this.\n
Concierge testing is another kind-of-lean concept. It’s that you don’t NEED to spend a long time creating fancy algorithms if you can do the job in five minutes with a person. If you can find people willing to interact with the person (even if they think it’s a computer), you’re in a good place to take it further.\n\nWe had a “Wizard of Oz” setup with our twitter prototype. Instead of spending an hour or so coding up a simple question/answer counter script, we started immediately with a human operator who took on a Frankenstein character (it was close to hallowe’en) and typed out questions and timers as if they were automated. The initial volume was low enough that we could count up the correct answers without needing any code, while in parallel we could code up a script to help when needed.\n
We found that opinionated questions were far more popular and engaging than simple trivia. What’s the best game of all time? had more responses than Who’s the President of the USA? or How many times a day do a clock’s hands overlap?\n\nbandwagon jumping - trying popular topics such as justin bieber and directly addressing people didn’t work either.\n
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What would you have done?\ninteractive part. Ask people\n - What might you have tested\n - What else might you have done at this stage\n - would you just release and see?\n