All articles

12 articles for Game Developer, ReadWrite, SiliconANGLE, and more, on product design, platforms, and play.

• How the Shape of Tokyo Trains Can Dictate Your App's Success (Game Developer, 2023): Product design lessons from Japan on how daily context, commute length, device posture, and attention shape what people actually use.
• Luxury Paid For in the Currency of Privacy (SiliconANGLE, 2010): A cloud-era privacy essay on the real cost of free products, user data, platform trust, and the tradeoffs behind connected services.
• What Nokia Got Wrong About Platform Strategy (Arctic Startup, 2011): A widely read platform-strategy essay on Nokia that became one of ArcticStartup's most-read pieces and was picked up by Helsingin Sanomat.
• How Rovio Builds a Brand to Last (ReadWrite, 2016): How Angry Birds became more than a hit game: brand systems, distribution, repetition, licensing, and long-term franchise strategy.
• Design Tips from the Designer of Fruit Ninja (ReadWrite, 2012): How Fruit Ninja's feel, polish, collisions, bounce, and rhythm were deliberately engineered to make every action satisfying.
• The Quiet Rise of the Hobbyists (Game Developer, 2012): How tools like GameMaker, RPG Maker, and Twine opened game creation to non-developers with ideas worth playing.
• 10 Lessons from Finland's Summer of Startups (ReadWrite, 2011): Lessons from serving as head coach for a summer program where student founders built real startups instead of taking summer jobs.
• The Unsung Hero (Arctic Startup, 2010): A piece on the overlooked people who make startup ecosystems work before the spotlight reaches the companies they helped create.
• The Accidental Cyberactivist (2009): Coverage in El País (2009): I posted working proxy addresses to Twitter so Iranians could route around state censorship during the Green Movement.
• How Heavy Rain Delivers, and Fails in the Process (SiliconANGLE, 2010): A close reading of Heavy Rain: where its cinematic, choice-driven design pulls you in and where it breaks, on interaction, immersion, and managing player expectation.
• The Brief History of Funrank, an Agile Startup from Finland (SiliconANGLE, 2011): A founder's postmortem of Funrank: validating a product, recognizing a market that would not scale, and the judgment to kill it and move on.
• How I Became the Robert Scoble of Buzz (ReadWriteWeb, 2010): My first ReadWriteWeb piece (2010): a weekend spent figuring out how Google Buzz's discovery and follower mechanics worked, then publishing what I found.