I do not update this website since summer 07. This site is outdated and many links/posts/etc. are broken. I plan to start working on it again in summer 09.

Lots of interesting new challenges to come!

The guys at DChoc are great in all aspects so I really look forward to working closely with them. Follow this link to read the press note in spanish or read the press note in english below:

Digital Chocolate Expands Global Footprint with New Operations in India and Spain

Digital Chocolate, Inc., a leading publisher of high-quality, original software for mobile phones, today announced its continued global expansion with the acquisition of operations and studios in Bangalore, India, and Barcelona, Spain, from Small Device Mobile Technologies and Microjocs Mobile, respectively. These acquisitions give Digital Chocolate the local talent to better serve and support the largest mobile operators in the world, and allow the company to develop localized content for consumers in southern Europe and Asia.

Small Device is a well-known leader in mobile applications porting with tremendous depth and scale. Coupled with Digital Chocolate's proprietary Catapult porting technology, the company's capacity stands to more than triple with the addition of the Operations Center in Bangalore, which will be headed by Dikshant Dave, managing director of APAC operations.

Digital Chocolate will also increase its Studio output capacity as well as add multi-platform expertise to its portfolio with the addition of the award-winning Microjocs Studio. Gerard Fernandez will continue to lead the Studio after the acquisition as an employee of Digital Chocolate.

"Just as the Bangalore Operations Center brings us a step closer to key regions in Asia, a strong presence in Barcelona is important to our expansion in Spanish-speaking parts of the world," said Gary Schofield, president of networks of Digital Chocolate. "With key sales executives in place - including Shrinivasa Sharma, former VP Sales for Small Device and Xavier Mas Kaupp, formerly with Gameloft - we are committed to aggressively pursuing these new markets."

In addition to the new growth in Asia and Europe, Digital Chocolate is experiencing key successes and significant growth in existing studios across Europe. The number of employees at the Helsinki, Finland, studio has grown 328 percent since its inception in 2004, and still employs all original co-founders. This studio is currently spearheading the launch of DChoc Cafe(TM) Series, a new series of casual games that is being embraced by mobile phone operators worldwide.

"Digital Chocolate now ranks as one of the largest independent, pureplay mobile game publishers with more than 300 employees worldwide," said Trip Hawkins, founder and CEO of Digital Chocolate. "We will continue to build on our development operation and effectively leverage our technology investments to deliver high-quality, original games for our customers on a global scale."

The expertise and reputation of both Small Device and Microjocs Mobile is synergistic with Digital Chocolate's business and will help the company become a significant force in these important markets.

About Digital Chocolate

Digital Chocolate is a leading developer of original, high-quality games and applications for mobile phones. Based in San Mateo, California and founded in 2003 by software gaming pioneer, Trip Hawkins, Digital Chocolate offers some of the world's most popular and top-rated games, already earning over 20 Game of the Year Awards and over 50 Editor's Awards by top gaming press. In 2006, it was named Best Games Developer at the Mobile Entertainment Awards, decided by a voting panel of over 300 mobile company executives including leading Operators, OEMs, Publishers and Developers. It was also named a 2006 Fierce 15 emerging wireless company for its innovation around community, networked and social games with products like award-winning MLSN Sports Picks, and newly released AvaPeeps(TM): FlirtNation. Since its inception, Digital Chocolate has secured relationships with more than 200 carriers and partners, including Verizon Wireless, Sprint, Vodafone, T-Mobile, Cingular, Orange and 3 and its products are available in over 60 countries around the world. For more information, please visit www.digitalchocolate.com.

The extremely busy thays are now fading off, which is nice as I get more time for myself. On the last few months there's been lots of interesting things going on such as the Nintendo Wii new gadgets or mario party 8 topping US sales charts. I may upload a few pictures I took at develop conference & expo a couple of weeks ago, I must say I got to know quite a few very interesting individuals there, far more than I originally expected. BTW thanks to the UK trade and investment people for the valuable commercial mission.

I also plan to upload a couple of programs I did as lecture companions for computational geometry and physics lectures I gave at university, simply a solid leaf BSP and a verlet integrator. I'll see when I get some extra time.

Tomorrow the Microjocs World of Warcraft (WoW) Trading Card Game (TCG) league starts!
If you don't know what TCGs are and you work on the entertainment industry I highly recommend you to spend some time looking into this form of entertainment.

The first TCG was Magic: The Gathering. It was designed by Richard Garfield who earned a Ph.D. in combinatorial mathematics from Penn in 1993. As you'll see Maths and combinatorial mathematics have lots to do with TCGs.

TCGs, aside of being a great form of entertainment, are one of the best ways to monetize entertainment that I know: great viral spread combined with micropayments. There are many reasons why I find this form of entertainment specially interesting but rather than describing those I'll summarize a set of game play tricks that may help you at winning some competitons.

1) Average games run from 6 to 9 turns. So a total of 20 cards (7 at the start of the game, 9 at the start of each turn, plus extra 4 via quests/others) will be dealt at turn 10. That means players will only play 33% of their cards on each game and that if you have to plan your game at no more than 9 turns ahead.

2) You can compute the probability of a card being drawed in a game by doing the following basic computation:
numberOfCardsLikeTheDesiredOneInTheDeck*(100/TotalNumberOfCardsInTheDeck)

3) You can compute how likely are you to draw an specific card at any given time by performing what is called hypergeometric distribution analysis. To do this you can use Excel.
Example 1:

=hypergeomdist(2,7,8,60)
This will give you the probability of drawing 2 cards at the start of the game when you draw 7 cards in a row, if you have 8 cards of that same type in a deck of 60.
Example 2:
=hypergeomdist(1,1,4,53)
This gives you the probability of drawing a card which is repeated 4 times in the deck after the you have drawed the first 7 cards and none was of that desired type.

It was not too long ago that I got interested in the System Dynamics field which I've been following since. System Dynamics was founded in 1955 by Jay W. Forrester of the MIT Sloan School of Management with the establishment of the MIT System Dynamics Group. Yes, 50 years of system Dynamics!

I find System Dynamics very interesting, it is one of the fields that I personally think will expand the most during the current century. It can be used for so many different things, one of which has to do with games!

At first, System Dynamics may seem something complicated or a bit abstract but it has been proven to be very accessible and successful when presented to the masses with the right interface. Those who understand them well have been able to create great games. Will Wright is a great example, he did the design for games such as "Sim City", "The Sims" and later "Spore" all of them very successful games and heavily based in System Dynamics. So if you are thinking about creating a game such as the ones mentioned above, knowing about Sytem Dynamics is a must!

Now check the top10 best selling PC games (at present):

The Sims (16 million)
StarCraft (9.5 million)
World of Warcraft (Over 8.5 million)
Half-Life (8 million)
Myst (6 million)
The Sims 2 (5 million)
The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind (4 million, including Xbox release)
RollerCoaster Tycoon (4 million for the original in North America alone)
Half-Life 2 (4 million)
Populous (4 million)

4 out of 10 are based on System Dynamics. (In bold)
Another 2 have some relationship with System Dynamics. (In cursive)

If you feel like reading more about System Dynamics, you can check the following links out:
Sample Models
System Dynamics Society

Spore (http://www.spore.com/)