Looking forward to fresh snow on the slopes… It’s about time!

Zen Bound is a truly unique and beautiful game.

The game is very different from anything you may have tried before. No timer, no monsters to shoot.

The goal is to paint wooden figurines by wrapping them with a rope. You simply turn the piece with your fingers. Very intuitive. There’s a tactical pleasure to manipulate those primitive, yet gorgeous sculptures.

It’s THE perfect iPhone game.

There’s tons of list of ‘things to focus on’ to be successful.
but this one is really excellent (well, it seems excellent, we’ll try and let you know!):

http://www.paulgraham.com/13sentences.html

And because I’m all for brevity, here’s my condensed version:

1) Deliver to your users. Bring something valuable to them, listen to them, serve them well.

2) Adapt constantly. Launch often, accept to change your initial ideas, test and measure.

3) Keep it lean. Don’t over spend, don’t over engineer. You know what’s great about being ‘good enough’? Well, it’s that it’s good enough…

4) Monitor goals. Pick up meaningful metrics, and mind them constantly. They are the only objective and quantitative measures of your success, so do really focus on them.

5) Don’t give up. Success is always slower to come than expected. Bad news happen. Investors or journalist may not ‘get it’. Deals will fall through. Just go on.

About the latest definition (a Stackelberg game is a game/competition where the player in leading position is also the first mover)…

One may consider it’s the ‘natural’ order of things, but think twice: most of the time, when someone is in a leading position, it’s his best interest to keep the status quo.

It means the best choice… is to follow the strategy of the player behind, rather than taking risks.

And indeed, that happens in sailboats racing (yes, it’s called a regatta!).
Once a boat is leading, she often mimics the moves of the boat behind, so the distance between the two always remain the same until the finish line.

At last, it gives big corporations a strong justification NOT to innovate!

Since yesterday, we are now posting the list of available items on VALU VALU to Google Base. This gives extra exposition to potential buyers, and we can already see incoming visits from the searches of a peculiar game.

Best of all: sellers have absolutely nothing to do, we aggregate everyone’s listing and voilà! Unlike many other sites, we do not have to ask the sellers to push for themselves.

Because VALU VALU is all about standard goods, and because items for sale are always related to standard product data controlled by us, we have a much lesser risk of rogue items which would block the entire push.

The New York Times wrote about the fact that people tend to overestimate differences between small quantities and underestimate differences between large ones”.

For instance, people tend to see a larger difference between 5 cents and 500 cents than between 5 cents and $5.

Conclusion: Next time you lower price, show the markdown in cents or rupees.

“I can put down the price of this Hummer by an extra 50,000 cents if you take the mp3 stereo, which is only a 2 grands option”