business idea: video game bartering

Initial idea for gamers barter service

Video gaming is an annual, multi-billion dollar industry. Gamers have an insatiable appetite for newer and more interesting games. The problem is, how to satisfy that voracious need on limited budgets. Games are increasingly expensive to purchase and harder to pirate. Once a game is played and finished interest is lost and the game essentially becomes a piece of junk.

An online bartering service would allow gamers to exchange new and used games and equipment at very little cost. Such a service would facilitate the barter transactions and offer insurance that the terms of barter are met and enforced. Users would ship barter items to a central repository for inspection and repackaging. This would ensure a fair and equitable exchange. BRENT: This wouldn't work, way too much over head for company to deal with thousands of items and the user has to pay postal twice, once to the repository and once more to the final recipient.

A better system would involve each user deal directly with each other and the implementation of a rating system similar to that used by ebay. Self-enforcement, a poor rating from other users would indicate an untrustworthy user.

BRENT: In terms of complexity, a simple 'one to one' barter service could be set up relatively easily. From there a much more complex search matrix would be necessary for more efficient pairing of users and barter items. E.g. a user has items available for barter and a list of items that he/she would like to barter for. The system search capability should be able to find another user with the same or similar barter status. If it can't find any matches the system should be intelligent enough to find alternatives such that the needs of the user can still be met in a round about manner. It may require that the user needs to trade with a third user to acquire that wanted from the first user, etc. This triangulated transaction would be facilitated as a single transaction. An architecture like this would require a vast amount of work.

This service would be free to attract initial customers and as the user base grows, banner ads would generate income.

Service can also facilitate cash or credit card purchases instead of bartering and would mean the implementation of a paypal/verotel style billing solution with SSL encryption. BRENT: This is easy to set up.

While initially an idea to service the gaming market this is conceptually adaptable to any market.

Craigslist offers a form of barter service in the guise of an online classified page. The difference between Craigslist and a dedicated bartering service is that the bartering service would be far more user friendly and purpose built for bartering. Users will be attracted by it's ease of use and more powerful search and matching engine.

COMPETITION: This is not a new idea, the only thing that I came up with while doing a quick google search is barterfest.com and u-exchange.com. There are other barter sites but they seem to be more business to business type bartering and their web pages tend to look uber corporate. In order to out compete sites such as barterfest, we would need to make the service much more usable and maybe target a specific market such as video games. A more extensive search for available services out there needs to be done.

There does not seem to be a single definitive source for games bartering. One can visit many of the infinite number of gaming forums and online message boards out there and find many users bartering, but there is no one-stop source for the exclusive bartering of games. Perhaps by targeting the video game market, it would give an edge over the more generic bartering sites which don't seem to carry much gaming content.

Some barter sites, such as canadianbartersystem.com converts goods and services into a credit system that can then be exchanged.

Many bartering networks that deal in business to business bartering require a paid membership.

A successful franchise would then be open to being acquired by a larger game portal such as IGN or gamespot.com.

wrestler

body patches WIP

nose reference

randomness

Creature wrestling / jaba the hut creature fest

Wrestler mug and stats incorporated into comic.

scrawny angry chick wrestler

PMS girl / tank girl

salary man

Hado ge

Post comic book pages on lamp post. Something to read while waiting for the streetcar?

Project blog

wrestling collectible cards or Magic style game.

ULTIMATE MUSCLE

business idea: experimental marketing (wrestling concept )

The following is an edited MSN chat thread I had with a friend that turned into a brainstorming session.

......................
Rhody Belo says:
we can start by doing fake hype and pinup work...a bit of advertising
Sydney says:
lamp post stuff
Sydney says:
Yah, for now it's gotta be a fun thing and not so much for the money
jobs like this aren't going to make us rich
Rhody Belo says:
legal graphitti
Rhody Belo says:
maybe I'll go under an Alias as Suplex
Sydney says:
superplex
Rhody Belo says:
Morphic Suplex
Sydney says:
I'll be atomic drop
Rhody Belo says:
Superplex and AtomicDrop
tagteam Morphic
Sydney says:
The pile driver. He's missing a luchador
Rhody Belo says:
before Bustamante sees this opportunity
Sydney says:
ok crap yah he'd be on it like fly on shit
Rhody Belo says:
pile of shit driver
Sydney says:
hahaha, we should call the luchador, Bustamante in honor of him, Bukakkemante. Nah, I'm not worried, our portfolio is superior, unless he does it for far less pesos.
Sydney says:
We need a Hado Ge too, Hado Ge vs. Bustamante. Hahaha, I think we have a better story already just between us...
Rhody Belo says:
yeah....I think so too
Sydney says:
the thing that I notice that is missing in the Bauer script is that the characters have no character, they aren't the colorful personalities that we see in Hado Ge or any other wwf wrestler. That is what I feel will sell the comic. The dynamic actions and the over the top characters.Hard guy organization. The wrestling moves have to be way way overly exaggerated. The action can't just be text book stuff, gotta have alot of original signature moves.
Rhody Belo says:
a wrestling gimp. Lots of speed lines and vainy muscle tone and broken bones
Sydney says:
I think if this comic does do well,that writer is going to need us in a big way. I don't think he has the vision for the characters
Rhody Belo says:
then we can charge him or branch off, introduce our own characters
Sydney says:
we could just do our own now, drop him now and self publish our own, do our own luche libre
Rhody Belo says:
we'll do a better job for the fans
Sydney says:
We should do a police lineup of characters first, make a poster for lamp posts, make it all campy. An event poster that doubles as a comic bookcover, like this one, http://homepage.mac.com/viktor2/btw/threeheels.jpg. We don't even need to have art on the poster, just a cheezy event announcement for a wrestling match and you'd get attention. Maybe make a url link on the poster to our website where the comic is. Question is, is there enough of a market just in TO to make private publishing profitable.
Rhody Belo says:
hahaha...kool, good idea...I like...even cheezy shirts like this. oh yeah...make it sound like real underground matches...like a fight club. Now we have a gimmic
Sydney says:
I think alot of people would get disappointed it isn't a real fight club
Rhody Belo says:
true atleast we get exposure, lets find a real fight club we can represent, they need to read the comic to find out where it is.
Sydney says:
it can definitely lead to that, branch out of comix eventually into real fight promotion, maybe we can make a proposal to the WWF to do some promo for them...
I think this wrestling idea, if it takes off could end up creating a label for us, HARD GUY COMIX
Sydney says:
How about this, we try this bauer dude and formulate a style and if we are satisfied with it we can do our own
Rhody Belo says:
thats right this should be a testing grounds to see what can work








Sydney says:
I think we can't alienate traditional wrestling too much, it still must have the spirit of wwf wrestling or else it just ain't wrestling. We're trying to appeal to the hard core wrestling fans out there, but with a new interesting twist. To do straight wwf wrestling is just too boring.
Rhody Belo says:
I like the fact that maybe we can use the midget chars as the main char.. We can almost do the afro samurai kinda story using wrestling
Sydney says:
urban guerrilla pop
Sydney says:
I was thinking instead of a mutant wrestler... Have one big wrestler piggybacked by 6 midgets. Both opponents would have 6 midgets that hang on to a specially designed sling worn by the big carrier wrestler. The carriers would jump in the ring and the midgets would do tag teams on each other. They can link to each other and do chain style attacks. The signature move will be the 'meat whip' or the 'multiplex'.
Rhody Belo says:
the midgets are like armour in a way
Sydney says:
I was also thinking of a big traditional wrestler type. I was going to call him Texas Burger Boy. He'd walking into the ring eating those one pound burgers
Rhody Belo says:
he can look like a lucha dor with a Cowboy hat and always eating burgers even when hes fighting when he looses his burgers he loose his strength but the fan throws food he regains strength like popeye especially burgers. Its greatest fan is a hamburger mascot like ronald mcdonald or the king of burger king or a parody of grimmis
Sydney says:
mini nachos, I wonder if he could represent Burger King or McDs, endorsement. He'd have a cape with the logo on it
Rhody Belo says:
maybe Burger king seems more edgey right now
Sydney says:
He'd look like fat southern white trash, kinda like Hacksaw Jim Duggan but much fatter
Rhody Belo says:
give him a mullet with a mask
Sydney says:
I was thinking of a wrestler with a goalie mask on, kinda like that guy from Mad Max or Casey Jones from TMNT

schlock fest

Whaaaaa?

FOBilicious: History of japanese chick fashion

I've always tried to describe the whole kogal/ganguro/yamamba scene in Japan to my friends, but the only way to really understand it is to go there and see for yourself. But this video is the next best thing. I've not seen anything remotely like it outside of Japan. Social scientists will tell you it's a knee-jerk reaction to the traditionally austere female role in Japanese culture, they are the Japanese equivalent of the free lovin' easy riders of the 60s. A lost generation or bleeding edge feministas, regardless, it's damn ugly but refreshingly creative and eccentric, a real eyesore but you gotta admire their audacity and pure sass. Fugly and repulsive... yes, but these girls represent the most powerful gender class in Japan today and they know it. While I was in Japan during the height of the yamamba craze in '97, I couldn't believe the droves of them strutting the streets of Shibuya. I understand it's since been long on it's way out and I'm curious to find out what the latest extreme angry chick fashion is.

Prada anyone?

pop science idea

Was discussing an interesting topic with a friend the other day. Posting this as a reference post.

Many technologies today are artificial analogues of comparable biological systems. That is to say, the camera is essentially a poor representation of the human eye, or the flash drive, data base or operating system clunky man-made abstractions of our brain. Indeed, all these technologies have greatly enhanced our collective human experience, but when matched with the acuity of the real human eye, or the shear processing power of an organic brain, they all fall way short.

Much of modern applied science has followed this notion of synthetic abstraction. However, instead of simulation, why not assimilation? Why not actually use a biological eye as a camera lense? or a chip implant that would harness the expansive memory features of our brain for its limitless storage capacity and raw processing power?

Of course the camera wouldn't literally have an eyeball in it, but would instead contain a biologically synthesized optic nerve with cones and rods instead of a CCCD sensor. The acuity would be optimized well beyond human scope to say that of a cat which has well documented night vision capabilities or a fly that has thousands of lenses packed into the space of a pinhead. The list of possible augmentations are endless.

To take the camera example a step further what's to say the images captured by this enhanced camera couldn't be wirelessly uploaded directly to our brains negating the need for roll film or a flash card. Can you imagine the limitless storage capacity a human brain offers capable of storing an entire life's experiences?

We are all walking computers and cameras, why not develop technologies that enhance these basic biological functions instead of trying to contrive ersatz versions of them? Or vice versa, use what evolution has created to enhance our synthetic technologies many fold.

This is obviously not a new idea and I have no concept of the mind boggling technical hurdles facing something like this but simply something that came up in conversation that I had never really given much thought for before. It certainly makes for an interesting jumping off point for science fiction geeks and otaku.

finally Ears

Finally finished an approximation of the ear. By far the most difficult modeling task so far. Definitely not a great thing for nurbs.

This represents my 5th attempt and is a rough approximation of an ear. The problem areas included a huge buildup of isoparms along the front edge of the ear causing smoothing problems, the challenge was to keep the isoparm count down while not loosing detail. I was able to get the surface density down to 13 x 9 spans. The other problem area involved capturing that middle flap of cartilage that starts from the front edge of the ear and sweeps rearwards. While I can't speak for polys or subD's, nurbs has a tendancy to want to flow in a uniform direction, but that flap of cartilage interrupts the circular flow around the ear by curling in towards the middle. That was a pure sculpting challenge and I've come to realize nurbs are a total bitch for something as complex as an ear.

In a previous iteration, I had sculpted a decent ear, even matching the right number of spans to interface with the head patches. The problem was, the ear isoparms did not line up to the head isoparms. They were so off in position that it was impossible to align them without fucking up the ear.

My first attempt came from a tutorial which involved duplicating the edge surface isoparms that defined the ear opening into curves. Those curves were then attached and closed. The resulting curve was then duplicated numerous times to form the ring profiles of the ear. Once lofted, the surface was then properly sculpted, detached and stitched to the head patches. This didn't work because positioning the profile curves with any accuracy was impossible, but that was to be expected, and the sculpting process introduced a lot of smoothing problems, not to mention the final ear isoparms did not align evenly with the head isoparms. The other problem involved the final stitch process, the ear was nowhere near properly aligned to the head patches and the stitching became problematic.

Someone else suggested I build the ear profiles out from the head isoparms and then do a radial loft. This was the worst solution as the resulting loft not only introduced so many ring isoparms, the isoparm flow looked like a wavy mass of uncontrollable spaghetti.

The method that eventually worked for me was to build out tangentially aligned 1 degree curves from each head isoparm, lofting them and then closing the lofted surface. I then strategically started inserting ring isoparms and pulling the cv's out slowly sculpting the ear. I was careful to keep the isoparm count down and made sure the difficult sculpting areas were dealt with first so that they would not become problems later on when there were a greater number of isoparms to deal with. Finally when finished sculpting, I detached the ear surfaces and was able to easily stitch them to the head patches.

The next step is to take the ear into mudbox or zbrush for more accurate deep grooving.

Another tweak on the nose to properly shape the nostril and this head should be done.

No matter what pains I took to accurately sketch the character in orthographic, it still contained monstrously glaring flaws in accuracy. I now realize the modeler must also have an intimate knowledge of anatomy. The concept sketch is exactly that, a 2 dimensional abstraction. At best a roughly measured guideline for the modeler who then must translate the spirit of that sketch into 3 dimensions. Therein lies the true skill of the modeler and what sets a good one apart from a mediocre ones.