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lukefergusblogs · 5 years

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Week 4

What are tomorrow Headlines

For this weeks class we learned about tomorrow headlines i had no idea what these were but i was very curious so i wanted to go in-depth in the idea.

What is it

The tomorrow’s narratives is an envisioning technique based on the idea of writing fictional articles that simulate the moment in which the product or service will be launched in the maket: how will the service be introduced to its potential users? What values and features will be highlighted? Who is going to talk about it? Writing and sharing these fictional articles with the project team (e.g. during ideation workshop) help explore different possibilities and align on a common vision. The article could be replaced with simulated blog posts, ADV posters or movies, TED talks, etc.: any form of communication that help projecting in the moment in which the service will be available to its users.

Used it to

Brainstorm ideas during co-design sessions and align on key values and visions.

Remember to

Push the boundaries: be provocative and creative when writing it.

Tomorrow Headlines

A new innovative application that is sweeping the nation.

a new way to expereicne Game of Thrones and tourism all into one. the newest best selling tourism app of the year. no need to have your hand held through guided tours when you have your own freedom.

where would my App be publicised

National Geographic Traveler

Ulster Tatler

New York times

I believe these would be the main magazines my Application would be publicised since of the tourism aspect and also since this will relate to game of thrones.

Websites - Product sites

I want to focus on looking for inspiration on different websites that will promote products, so this is what i will be doing. from what i already know i believe the best sites to look at is the apple website that has dedicated pages for the iPhone and MacBooks, these pages are simple and easy on the eye. they are very simple and user friendly this represents the product also. every new phone or mac becomes easier to use since it is the most.... this is what i want to do to for my website for my digital product.

On the apple site they have the past 4 generations of there phones with the different aspects of the phone. this helps the user found what they want to have and how much storage it is and the benefits of each phone and price listing.

Spotify

for the second site i looked at i thought this one would relate to me more since this is a digital product that has a freemium aspect to the product. Spotify is a music streaming platform that is free and also has a premium the app allows you to use it for free with non skippable averts play after a few songs, this is the same as sound cloud this is a way of making the user spend a certain amount of money each month. it works as a monthly subscription service.

so this is the leading page for Spotify, it first introduces the customer to premium straight away but also giving an offer to anyone who joins making it free for 3 months . this is an incentive to make the customer interested in the product and lets them free it before they buy technically. spotify has a simple landing page promoting the premium aspect of the digital product.

the

As you scroll down the page Spotify want to reinforce the benefits of the premium version of there product. the premium subscription for Spotify is the main revenue of money they would get compared to the “free” version of the product. the main aim of the free digital product is to deter the user from using it. Spotify want to focus on getting premium subscriptions from users so they promote the benefits of it from there site.

Detailed Sketches

With my Research complete i want to the come back and focus on creating in-depth sketches for my digital product.

First Digital Sketches

These are my digital sketches i have created at this stage of my process. as i said i wanted a simple visual design for my digital product that would be easy to navigate these are not my final product or design these are a rough draft so that i have a good idea on what way i am going with my design and layouts. this is the first layout of this page , this is the set locations profiles , these page will have information on the set location and what season they are from and what happened in that location. also the page will have the address of the locations so the user can look it up themselves but my product includes a map that would tell you how far you are from the location at that time. by inlcuding a call to action button so the user will click on the button and look for the location of the set.

this is the drop down of each locations Image , i wanted to keep it simple since the app more focuses on the locations and i don't want top bulk my application out with text that will distract the user from interacting.

so this is the main page of the site its super simple but i want to have a better landing page for this app im not very sure if this needs more detail for the app i need to speak to Chris and see if i need to change anything. since this app is using a freemium style for the app so i need to add in pages which would ask the user to sign in and create an account of the product, and also be able to sign out of the app.

this is the page as you look for the locations of the different set locations on the app. i wanted to make this page look as much like google maps so that the app is user friendly and also is easy to navigate the product, by using the Google maps API’s that i can implement them into the my digital product. at this time i thought the layout was good and was detailed enough to be in the product.

I thought that the page looked a bit bland and didn't have any brand identity in the app, it really doesn't include any of the brands colours from it and i wanted to get feedback from different class mates, asking them break down the layouts and see what i can improve on, the page for the map looked appropriate for the app.

this is the NFC scanner page this would be the page that the user would use to scan the doors at the different locations for the app , as you scan the tag at the bar or restaurant then it will atuomaticafly stamp your icon of the different doors, since i was told before i should use the NFC tags since nearly every phone would be able to use it. as QR codes aren't always reliable to use and may cause frustration for the user., if i was to improve on the page , i really dont know i would change since this is the common layout of the NFC tag scanner pages , for this page there is no way to reurn back to the home page ore even to a different page , this will make the user frustated and not want to use the app again, by make the app simple and user friendly i want to make any user be able to use the app with out any problems .

this was the page the user would then be sent to after using the tags , i wanted to keep the colour of the brand and add different shades of gradients of my brands also after the pages are stamped you can style go and click into the different doors and get info from the page, the layout is the same as the set locations for the set profiles. this is the first layout of this page , this is the set door location profiles , these page will have information on the set location and what season they are from and what happened in that location. also the page will have the address of the locations so the user can look it up themselves but my product includes a map that would tell you how far you are from the location at that time. by including a call to action button so the user will click on the button and look for the location of the doors.

#ixd302

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dawnblade · 5 years

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i still think their decision to cut a lot of pokemon and moves in swsh is justifiable (though creating a paid subscription service to store pokemon you cant bring into the game is NOT justifiable), but the other stuff im hearing abt the games is......idk i havent played it so i cant say with complete confidence. from what ive seen, it doesnt seem as awfully terrible and completely unplayable like ppl are making it out to be, but also doesnt look, good, either. just looks like a lower-quality ds game put on console.

i mean thats definitely not like, a good thing obviously cause such a high-profile ip should be doing better. there should definitely be improvements in all aspects if you want to step up to console. im not buying the games cause i dont have a switch but uh. even if i did i might skip out on this one. doesnt seem like a total disaster but also doesnt seem like theres any love or passion in it. its unfortunate. game devs unionize challenge

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allofbeercom · 6 years

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Can Adele fix the broken music industry?

Unless you fell into a post-holiday food coma, you know that Adeles album25just sold more copies in its first week than any album, ever. The average human being had been conditioned to believe this was not possible in 2015.

Remember that narrative?Napster destroyed the music business, the iPod stopped the bleeding, digital and streaming services are still nascent, and a Google search can find anything for free, so the good old days of multi-platinum records are pretty much gone.

On the heels of her first single “Hello,” Adele waved goodbye to that doomsday line of thinking, crushing decades-old sales records by such a distance that, if she were an Olympic athlete, wed immediately assume she healed her damaged vocal chords with PEDs. Putting aside certain idiosyncrasies of Adeles album buyers (it turns out old people still buy CDs!), getting more than 3.8 million people to doanythingin the same week is a triumphant feat.

The ripple effect of Adeles astonishing sales figure is already visible. This past week, Rihanna and her management made a last-minute decision to postpone the release of her new album,Anti, at the apex of the heaviest consumer spending moment of the year. It turns out the shadow of Adele is the one umbrella Ri-Ri wont stand under.

And who can blame her? Between Adeles album sales and Taylor Swifts cultural and touring dominance (FYI: She played to a stadium full of 76,000 people in Sydney last weekend), its tough to stand out at the moment, even for Rihanna, one of Forbes top 10 grossing female artists. Despite working in a music industry with a dearth of women in meaningful executive positions, the strength and power of female artists has never been more profound. And unlike Hollywoodwhere thanks to the North Korean email hack of Sony and a courageous Jennifer Lawrence, we now understand the starkness of the gender pay gapfemale musical artists get paid on par with their male counterparts. In music, the entire ecosystem earns a sizable percentage of whatever the artist makes; record labels make a percentage of album sales, promoters make a percentage of ticket sales, merchandisers make a percentage of T-shirts sold, and so forth. Which means we are at a unique moment in history where A-list women hold much of the real power in the music business.

The strength and power of female artists has never been more profound.

So what will they do with it? And how does their massive success shine a giant spotlight, for better and worse, on everything thats happening with the music business and the streaming business and the concert business and artist representation right now?

Adele and Taylor started this upheaval by each flexing a particular muscle that belongs to them and them only. Taylor used her pen as the sword, bringing the mighty Apple to the bargaining table to pay artists for streams during the free trial for Apple Music. Adele turned herback on streaming services to break an album sales record that had stood since Justin Timberlake was fronting a boy band with Britney Spears on his arm. But beyond the PR success and ego boost thats generated from seven-figure first-week sales numbers, these efforts did little to make a lasting impact on the business of music.

Like the rest of the news cycle, we celebrate heroic outliers, write think pieces, marvel at the numbers, and move on within the confines of the same old structure. As President Business from The Lego Movie would have us believe, everything is awesome. Only it isnt. While artists have done much to break through decades of exploitation and capture more of the value they create, the fan experience in most facets of music consumptionlive and recordedremains unconscionably broken.

Nowhere is the dysfunctional tension between Los Angeles/New York-based content creation and Silicon Valley-based technology more on display than in digital music services. In the Valley, we scoff at companies that ship their org chart in a product. (Note: Microsofts Steve Sinofsky who coined this phrase for mass appeal, and for some time it was Microsoft who was guilty of this en masse.) You can tell when groups within or outside a company arent working well together based on the way the products features play wellor dont play wellin production. This is displayed everywhere in digital music from convoluted hardware options and endless interconnected devices in the home to cutting-edge software that never seems quite ready for primetime. In particular, Apple Music still feels like a house built on the foundation of an old home that the owners never wanted to fully tear down for tax purposes. The compromises and technical debt are palpable.

The fan experience in most facets of music consumptionlive and recordedremains unconscionably broken.

But those issues pale in comparison to the evolving royalty structure in musicbasically, the agreements for how much artists, labels and songwriters get paid when you buy or stream a song. Without hit music from the Taylors and Adeles, those subscription music streaming services are essentially useless. Even if they have the best user experience for fans, without music that matters, their core proposition (the music you want for a flat monthly fee) becomes completely hollow. Disappointed fans know theyre being misled, especially when YouTube and BitTorrent offer even the mildly unscrupulous a holiday table cornucopia of free access to all the music on earth.

We know the economics of music streaming are still being sorted out, but we also know this happened with video content a few years agoand, eventually, major players like Netflix, YouTube and Hulu figured out how to window content, present it exclusively,and generate their own product. If music follows that model, then the biggest artists will sell their exclusivity to distributors like Spotify, Apple, YouTube/Google, and others. Our best asset to help that happen? Just keep complaining about this stuff.

What we are seeing and (not) hearing now as fans is the very public sausage making of a new recorded music revenue model, the loudly creaking rusty hull of an antiquated ship turning a bit too quickly in a swift current. For most of us downstream, it creates a suboptimal listening experience and never-ending frustration.

And its only worse with live music, where artists now make 70 to 90 percent of their income, despite a gallingly offensive fan experience.For one thing, the industry continues to lie to fansblatantlyabout the price of tickets until the very moment of purchase.An upper deck ticket for the Demi Lovato and Nick Jonas tour in Los Angeles on Sept. 17, 2016, is currently available on Ticketmaster for $49.95. After a $15.30 service charge, the actual price of that ticket is31 percent higherthan advertised. At StubHub, where between buyer and seller fees the ticket is routinely marked up 25 percent, the company tried to show pricing all-in. But after competitors didnt follow suit, StubHub reverted back to the draconian way of tricking fans into moving down the purchase funnel by baiting them with a lower price point, before dropping fees on buyers at checkout. Most artists are consciously (or navely) complicit in this dirty game. Many touring deals for large artists stipulate that artists are paid more than 100 percent of gross ticket sales. How can this be? Its because the promoter and venue make their money off of parking, beer, sponsorship, and importantly, service fees.

This wont change until fans start pressuring the artists to facilitate that change. Artists are intensely sensitive about their brands. With social media giving loud voices to all, artists are hyper-concerned with criticism for high ticket prices even though they have historically enabled a service fee system that exploits their fans. Its why so many good tickets often make it into the hands of brokers from venues, promoters, and artists directly. Ever wonder why you see so many VIP packages for sale? Theyre designed to charge market price for a ticket with a few low-cost add-ons attached. So why cant artists own their income desires and get paid what they are worth, or alternatively restrict transferability of tickets to ensure that fans get in at an artificially low price? Service fees are an extension of the ticket price, so why arent they presented as such up front in the buying process?

Apple Music still feels like a house built on the foundation of an old home that the owners never wanted to fully tear down for tax purposes.

All of the carnival barking about ticket prices comes against the backdrop of a swelling period of time between the onsale of a concert and the actual show date. For the concert example above, a fan buying four mid-level tickets would be putting down more than $400 of his hard earned money10 monthsbefore the show. That same week the tour plays a Wednesday night in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Who the heck knows what theyre doing on a Wednesday night 10 months from now in Albuquerque? The answers fall into three categories:

I dont.

Im one of the few passionate fans who will move my schedule around this show and give you my money ten months in advance.

Im a ticket broker, and Im buying bunches of tickets now to arbitrage and capitalize on all the people in #1 above.

This practice of ridiculously early sales has been expanded by the industry to bank money early, test demand, and reduce risk. Do they care that the best tickets go mostly to brokers, that fans pay more money than they otherwise would, and that the most passionate fans lose out on 10 months of interest on their money? Of course not. Were moving backwards.

The big question: Is all of this a calculated plan by the music industry to keep things as unfavorable for fans as possible, or can we chalk it up to sheer incompetence?

The recent Paris tragedy reminded us that the music industrys obligation to provide a better experience for fans are growing ever more urgent. The attacks on fans at a concert hall and a sports stadium were the manifestation of a longstanding fear we had at Ticketmaster about live eventscrowds are so much more vulnerable than we want to believe. We already learned this in air transportation after 9/11; 14 years later, we collect loads of data and restrict transferability of tickets between passengers boarding a 200-seat airplane. But with 80,000-seat stadiums, we continue to do almost nothing. With the use of cash, paper tickets, ticket reselling, and an average of almost three tickets-sold-per-order, upwards of 90 percent of individuals entering an arena or stadium can be unknown to event organizers.

The entire paradigm of music distribution is staring down the barrel of an evolutionary leap.

There are common sense solutions that would make live events safer for fans. By reimagining a ticket as a digital access credential replete with identity, payment, and location metadata, we could do the forensic work before and after events to identify bad actors. This need not restrict ticket transferability or resale; it simply means maintaining a centralized system of record where tickets can be sold and the data associated with buyers and sellers infinitely logged. Existing and emerging technologies, including blockchain, are candidates for handling this challenge. They can also prepare us for the dawn of virtual reality in live events, ensuring this technology becomes incremental and not cannibalistic to the artists live performance. To do so fully requires sunsetting the idea of a ticket as a piece of paper; identity and access can be tied to a phone, a card, or a fingerprint.

Guess what? This is precisely the course of technology across most consumer products today. Like other products, these advancements have the happy consequence of actually improving the consumer experience. This data can serve to personalize the live experience for each fan before, during, and after the event. It could allow artists to over-deliver on an experience for which they are charging astronomical sums, up to a year in advance. As usual, we fell way behind the curve in the music business. So maybe this is about incompetence over anything else.

Indeed, the entire paradigm of music distribution is staring down the barrel of an evolutionary leap. Twitter, like its many mobile social messaging peers from Snapchat to WeChat to Line to Instagram to Facebook, is really a direct-to-consumer distribution channel that could fundamentally transform the relationship between artists and fans. Katy Perry has 78M Twitter followers, Taylor Swift has 67M, Rihanna has 53M, and Adele, essentially without even trying, has 24M. Roughly half of the 100 most-followed accounts on Twitter are artists, and the technology is now in place for artists to commercialize their follower relationships by selling songs, tickets, and T-shirts directly on these platforms. Twitter led this effort; others followed suit. Its the fastest way to remodel the entire music industry. Any artist who pined for more control over the distribution of their art, as well as the artist-fan covenant, have the powers at their disposal to take command.

Which brings us back to what we learned this week, and this yearthat the biggest artists (including these stellar women who showed their might) have real leverage and real power right now. If they wanted, they could change a sedentary, broken industry. Conventional wisdom is that Adele is an outlier, capable of holding out for her own good but not much more. What if Adele, Taylor, and other elite artists united to force progress for all? Athletes in major sports leagues banded together. Actors held their own. So did screenwriters, directors, producers, and show runners. Music seems to be the only branch of entertainment where the collective voice of creators is mute.

The underlying driver of this silence is artist fragmentation. It is the key environmental factor upon which the 20th century music business was constructed: allow rare stars to extract their pound, but keep the bulk of the talent uncoordinated. Beyond the occasional telethon, its rare to find examples of artists working collaboratively for a cause at scale. Why is that? The leading culprit is that artists have traditionally outsourced a lot of their business decisions to their managers. Now that the time travelled from anonymity to stardom has shrunk to mere months, and artist-as-entrepreneur is a near requirement for success, the role of the artist manager has taken on increasing importance.

Sadly, management remains as fragmented and cutthroat as the days when Colonel Tom Parker was shepherding Elvis. In many cases, the speed to stardom brings along in its slipstream a relatively unsophisticated crew of hangers-on surrounding the artist. Cousins, classmates, boyfriends and the like, with little to no experience become entrusted with decisions that can impact decades of an artists revenue streams. Because most managers are paid on a percentage of the artists revenue streams, near-term money is usually prioritized ahead of long-term career value for an artist. Partnership and collaboration gets lost in fears and insecurities about acts being stolen away by other managers. Even the more sophisticated and professional managers suffer from the epidemic of the shark tank. Irving Azoff (Front Line Management) and Coran Capshaw (Red Light Management) are the two managers who have assembled artist management companies with meaningful scale. Ive apprenticed for them both, and they are excellent at what they do. But competition for the artists they manage (or would like to) remains high, and for their own business self-survival they are perpetually on alert. They do not operate in an ecosystem that fosters cooperation.

Music seems to be the only branch of entertainment where the collective voice of creators is mute.

Even the law works against artist representatives working together. California passed a law in 1978 called the Talent Agency Act that effectively says a person cannot be a manager and also book an artists tour. In practice, artists must carry both a manager and an agent, fragmenting the power of decision-making (and also the artists income). Entire cottage industries have been built on this church-state separation. Alliances are routinely built and broken between agencies and managers, further fueling the lustful competition and mistrust between artist representatives. One can surmise this is generally the scene that inspired the late Hunter S. Thompson quote: The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. Theres also a negative side.

Yet the opportunity for artists in the music business today is wonderfully beyond what even Thompson could have imagined (or hallucinated). And so it rests, finally, on the shoulders of artistsand the biggest ones, at thatto wrest control of this shallow trench of an industry away from those who have kept it in a state of morass, and give it depth. All that stands in the way of advancing the industry forward is overcoming the fragmentation within the artist community today.

And thats why Adeles eye-popping success last week is so confounding. Why, exactly, did she show her strength? The cynic will tell you it was for the money. But just as she could care less about what you think of her weight (somehow I dont expect the press to repeatedly address Chris Martins post-breakup body fat when the Coldplay album drops this week), she seems unmoved by the chance to make a few extra pounds. Which leads to the conclusion that like the rest of us, she falls somewhere on the scale between competitive and vain: She withheld her music from streaming services explicitly in search of setting a mark that none of her peers or predecessors ever did.

Having vanquished them now, will she flex her muscle for more than just the charts? She seemingly has willing partners in this effortin Taylor Swift and many of her now powerful female counterparts, as well as popular artists like Jay Z who have made recent business strides around artist empowerment. In so many ways, Adeles sales figures are less about her, and more a reflection of the continually crescendoing role of music in peoples lives.

In spite of all its dysfunction and fan neglect, our follower graphs on social networks hint that our accelerating interconnectivity is still threaded together most tightly by music. By following suit and binding together in this moment, Adele and the artist community can move the business and experience of music forward for all of us. As the Beatles knew: Come together, right now. Records are made to be broken. Adele and her peers have the chance to be indelible.

Nathan Hubbard is a former touring and recording artist, former CEO of Ticketmaster, and current head of commerce at Twitter. A version of this story was originally published on Medium and has been reprinted with permission.

Screengrab via AdeleVEVO/YouTube

from All Of Beer http://allofbeer.com/can-adele-fix-the-broken-music-industry/

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tricityrevivals · 7 years

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Blog Chapter 2.1: The Journey Continues..

Exactly one year ago I wrote our first of now twelve blogs: “Chapter 1.0-The Journey Begins..” and it’s crazy to look back and read that blog and see where we were at that point in time, and remembering our mindset. This year has gone by so fast and it’s been filled with twists and turns along the way. I don’t even really know where to start with this one. Here’s our newest blog as our journey continues with a glance into the past and upcoming year of Tri-City Revivals.

We admittedly didnt know much about A business starting off. Where there’s a will there’s always a way. We knew how to make money selling things, and we translated that into “lets open a business doing this”. It’s pretty funny and crazy to think back and just say hey we can do this based off of that idea, but we took a shot, and it paid off.

The amount of knowledge we’ve learned this year is insane. Neither of us were really interested in college or schoolwork because the subject matter wasn’t of interest to us, but when we are interested in something we become geniuses. We still have a lot to learn, there’s always room to learn more and more each day. I can say absolutely we can school the majority of people double our age on picks about a bunch of items. They just look at us with the “wtf” look. How do these kids know all this stuff?

A year later we have an amazing instagram following, a tremendous website, an inventory of items that fly off the shelves, and an a pick list that’s double sided upcoming.

Our instagram community has been amazing. From making sales and interactions with all our followers to getting feedback it’s been a very powerful tool for us. There’s no magical social media potion we use, but it’s more of a place to display the work we put in and image of us. The majority of that credit goes to Luke and his keen eye and photography skills. I know the work we put in, but I just don’t know how to translate that into a photograph for our viewers, he does. Our followers have went from 0 to 3,000+ in 1 year. It speaks volumes, and we appreciate every single person who at least gives us the opportunity to see what we are about.

Our website gets compliments from everyone who visits. Our view of what we wanted was completed by NJ Tech Team. Specifically Vin and Jess. Since we graduated High School with both of them, they knew us, our personality, and also listened to what our vision was. They worked their magic, and gave us exactly what we wanted. We could not have been any happier with the way things turned out. Looking forward to this year, expect our website to take it up a notch. We don’t want to give anything away so stayed tuned. Its going to be much more interactive for those visiting the site.

As far as picks- we’re expanding our search. There’s still plenty in our area but we’ve been traveling up and down the East Coast as a test run recently, and expect that to go full throttle in the new year. People are finding us now, as opposed to us finding them. Word is spreading quick on Tricity Revivals and we couldn’t be any more stoked about it. They’re finding us several different ways- from friends of friends, or seeing us at shows/sales, or finding our business card in a local eaterie. That ones always funny.

“Hey I saw your card at this bagel shop and figured I’d give you a call because I have some stuff you may be interested in”

Trust me its not always this simple but it has happened before more than once.

One thing that really sticks out in my mind this year: We had so much fun. All too often you hear about the dreads and sighs of going to work and its really unfortunate. I mean we had a blast-just looking back and remembering certain moments could still crack me up. I couldn’t even count on two hands how many times we were doubled over laughing throughout this year in all the different situations we were put in. We’re friends first, business partners second. We’ve spent a lot of time together throughout our lives but this past year it was more than ever. I can’t wait to do it again next year.

We’re excited about what the next year may bring. I think we’ve exceeded everybody’s expectations except our own really. There’s no one else doing this the way we are. There’s no business plan we can mimic off of, or no monthly subscription payments to be accepted. No latest and greatest equipment we can buy to make our jobs easier. I think we’ve dealt with those circumstances pretty well, and have thought up pretty much any idea thats associated with us or how we do business all on our own. Whether it’s a minor change or a major one, we’re always the ones bringing that to the table and we can only hope it shows to our audience.

There’s always more work to do and more knowledge to learn. With anything new in life you need that grace period to learn the ropes and make adjustments. I feel like that was this year. Neither of us knew what to expect, but we figured it out pretty quickly. We’ve experimented with different methods and formulas. Some worked, others didn’t. Either way we kept pushing forward. There will always be mistakes but you have to capitalize on them.

There weren’t many mistakes this year but we are far from perfect. I won’t even call it a mistake I’d call it a lesson learned. To name one:

We overestimated the value of a bunch of items on one of our first picks in the beginning of the year. The items were great and we just thought we could sell them for a lot more than we bought them for. It was a mixture of our error and the seller being greedy or delusional. He was a lifetime collector and he knew there was no money for us to make on the items but he continued to sell them to us for over retail and promised someone would pay the moon for these things. Lesson learned. We’re human. You live and you learn. It obviously didn’t break us and made us look at things a little differently going forward. It has never, and will never happen again.

No need to harp on that in this blog. Just trying to give a glimpse showing it hasn’t been neat and dandy all year.

It’s hard to write a blog and find compliments for yourself and your business, especially when our mindset is that we can always be better, but I have to say we made it a year and we’re gaining more and more momentum with each day, each pick, and each restoration job.

Speaking on restoration- Most people don’t realize this is one of our services, and just see us as pickers. We did get our start restoring free furniture but we can do much more than that, and have restored some great items this past year. Especially when we have our full Tri-City Team with us. Let’s be clear we’d rather not touch the item at all. It’s only original once! I’d say instead of calling it Restoration we deal more (and enjoy more) of doing Rust-orations. It’s the biggest trend in this game right now, and its exploding. It’s basically restoring something so that its in working order, but the outter part is untouched or touched up very slightly. It still gives that original look. As I said, its only original once. People dont want something that looked like it did brand new in 1950. They want something that looks like it was made brand new in 1950 and survived to 2018. We love it and couldn’t agree more.

What to expect of 2018?

I honestly don’t know what 2018 is going to bring for us. I know we’ve had conversations saying we feel like we’re coasting a little bit at times. Admittedly, as we always say and think, we can be doing more, but if this is coasting than watch out if we’re going 110%. There’s a lot of things upcoming that we have to be excited for. We have a lot of really interesting and enormous opportunities that are ahead of us coming from all different ways. Some may work out, others may not, but it’s going to be an exciting time either way and I’m pumped to see how everything plays out. The relationships we’ve built throughout the past year will continue to hopefully form a stronger bond. All I can say is, I feel bad for the other side of those relationships if they choose to forget us, because eventually you’re going to remember the name.

As our best friend and Tri-City Team Member always says, “You guys are playing chess, everyone else is playing checkers”. We’re two steps ahead already even though it may not seem that way. We’ve always got a plan.

Besides that, we are excited at the thought of finding new items this year. We’ve sold over 400 different items this year approximately. Every single one of those items we found in a barn, attic, garage, or home. We’ve shipped items all over the United States and Internationally as well. People will stop in from time to time at Tricity Headquarters and its always the same question

“Where the hell is all your stuff?”

“Gone. Sold”

Every single item we found we learned the background on, educated ourselves, and that’s where the knowledge I was talking about previously comes into play. Every item we shipped to someone who appreciated that piece which makes it all the more special. Everyone isn’t out there getting dirty and looking in barns or attics for it, but they will spend their hard earned cash on it. That speaks volumes to us.

As long as time on earth continues, there is always going to be a market for vintage or antique items. Years go by, people don’t like the new stuff being made, so they go with something vintage. Or they just have great memories of something they had in their past and it’s not being made or sold anymore, whether it be decor or a functional piece. I wouldn’t say its a fad or a trend. This has been going on for much longer than we have been doing it, but the key is that now it’s in the spotlight. Not everyone can do this. I know plenty of people that do the same thing as us but they can’t sell an item to save their life. You can have a storefront, a big name, and a following but that doesn’t make you successful. Your reputation and work ethic will lead you to success. You have to put in the work, test out the market, learn the history, and be smart with your decisions. As long as we keep doing that Our Journey Will Continue.

Lastly, and on a side note: We want to thank everyone who took the time to help us out this past year. Family, Friends, and Relatives who were supportive from the beginning when all of this was just an idea. Spouse’s and our Fur Children who sometimes get put on hold when we are leaving you in the dust running out of the house for a pick or on our phones negotiating a deal or finalizing business opportunities-It doesn’t go unnoticed, and we cannot thank you enough for dealing with us. Even something as small as you giving us a like, or a follow, or a call, or bought something from us you have all had a hand in where we are at today. Thank You! God Bless! We look forward to sharing 2018 with you!

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lookingatinterestingthingsf-blog · 7 years

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Invisible unicorns: 35 big companies that started with little or no money

Joseph FlahertyContributor Joe Flaherty is director of Content & Community at Founder Collective. More posts by this contributor: Theres no shame in a $100M startup Overdosing on VC: Lessons from 71 IPOs Venture capital is a hell of a drug, and its possible tooverdose on VC, but for most founders that is a champagne problem. More often the question investors hear is how do I get a VC to back my startup? These founders arent worried about how overcapitalization will make their IPO prospects trickier theyre scrambling to get someone, anyone, to sign their first term sheet. Theres a widespread belief among founders that venture capital is a precursor to success. VC is a common denominator of the most successful tech startups, but it isnt a prerequisite, especially at the early stages. Entrepreneurs can prove out quite a bit with little to no capital. Capital wont make your company insightful. If you cant creatively turn $1 into $10, why do you expect to be able to turn $1 million into $10 million? To help illustrate how startups can move forward, here are 35 examples of companies that started with a few thousand dollars, or even just sweat equity, and went on to become exemplars of what I call efficient entrepreneurship. Many of these companies have subsequently earned billion-dollar valuations, some even have billions of dollars in revenue, but none started with anything other than what would be considered a seed round. Most of these startups raised money from VCs, but only after they established the fact that their success would come with or without a wire transfer from an investor. Even now, many of them arent widely known they are the invisible unicorns of the tech industry. So before scrambling to schedule meetings with investors, read these stories. They provide a counterbalance to the VC-centric outlook held by many founders, and provide alternative ways to think about funding. What follows are brief and simplified descriptions of these companies (categorized by approaches they share) and links to stories where you can read more about them. Remember, taking venture capital should be a choice, not a compulsion. These companies show how its done. Figure something out, then ask for money You dont need venture capital to get started in most industries if you can solve a real problem for customers and charge money for it. Here are three ways to think about this: Automate your workflow The easiest way to build a useful product is to automate some part of your daily workflow. This will ensure youve got proven demand for what youre building and a pre-existing funding source for your project. MailChimp: Co-founder/CEO Ben Chestnut was running a design consulting business in the year 2000 and had a stream of clients who wanted email newsletters created. The only problem was that he hated designing them. So, to spare his team the tedium, he decided to build a tool that would streamline the process.MailChimp, a $400 million run rate business, was born. Lynda: Lynda Weinman started as a teacher in need of tools to instruct web designers in the late 1990s. The offerings at bookstores were bland, so she began producing training films that better educated her students. Tutorial by tutorial her company helped software developers and designers improve their skills. She spent two decades building a content library and tech assets that had enough scale to entice LinkedIn to pay $1.5 billion to acquire the company. Start with a capital-efficient product Many entrepreneurs make frontal attacks on industry leaders, usually resulting in failure. This is especially true in the case of hardware. Instead of trying to compete with a company like Apple, these scrappy startups filled the gap left by RadioShack and built businesses worthy of respect and emulation. AdaFruit Industries: Limor Fried started her DIY electronics e-commerce empire as a student at MIT by assembling DIY kits comprised of off-the-shelf parts. Fried merchandised the same building blocks found at electronics stores, but also crafted quirky content that made the prospect of soldering a replica Space Invaders cabinet seem reasonable. Now she has 85 employees and earns $33 million per year. SparkFun: Similar to AdaFruit, Nathan Seidle started SparkFun out of his dorm room by selling electronics kits and oddball components to a coterie of engineers who wanted to explore exotic new sensors and systems. Now his e-commerce empire employs 154 and has revenues of $32 million per year. Solve an existing problem and leverage an existing business model Startups dont have to be particularly innovative in terms of business model. Building a better mousetrap on top of a more modern technical platform, or with a UX layer, can be enough. None of the companies that follow reinvented the wheel, but all wound up creating real value. Braintree Payments: Exchanging money online, without being fleeced by fraudsters, is one of the oldest problems on the web. All parties to a transaction happily agree to pay a fair tax for a superior experience. Braintree built a better tech solution and survived on the proceeds of those transactions for four years before raising $69 million in two rounds of venture capital, which preceded an $800 million acquisition. Shopify: Shopifys founders were looking for a shopping cart solution when they were starting an e-commerce site for snowboarders. Unable to find one, they decided to scratch their own itch and built a bespoke solution on the then red-hot Ruby on Rails framework. It turned out to be a perfect solution for plenty more people, and the founders ran the business independently for six years on the revenue they generated. They ultimately raised money from VCs and later IPOed, which rewarded them with a billion-dollar valuation. Self-reliance rules Many entrepreneurs waste their time playing CEO, crafting a strategy and drawing up a dream org chart for what their business might become. Dont do that. Instead, figure out what you can do, today, to advance this idea using only the resources you have. Ipsy: Sending boxes of makeup to amateur beauticians has become a growth industry thanks to pioneers like Birchbox. YouTube star Michelle Phan didnt have first-mover advantage, but she leveraged her online celebrity (8 million+ YouTube subscribers), relationships with cosmetics brands and <$500,000in seed funding to build a subscription box startup that generated $150 million in revenue before raising $100 million in VC. Capital wont make your company insightful. ShutterStock: Jon Oringer was a professional software developer and an amateur photographer. He combined this set of skills and used 30,000 photos from his personal photo library to start a stock photo service that is currently worth $2 billion. His capital efficiency paid off and ultimately turned him into a truly self-made billionaire. SimpliSafe: People scoff at the idea of trying to bootstrap a hardware business, but SimpliSafes Chad Laurans did it. He raised a small amount of money from friends and family and then spent eight years building a self-install security business, literally soldering the first prototypes himself to save money. Eight years later, the business has hundreds of thousands of customers, hundreds of millions in revenue and $57 million in VC from Sequoia. Everyones money is green Funding doesnt always come millions of dollars at a time. Founders can scrape together money from grants, incubators and angels, or even pre-sales. The savviest entrepreneurs design their business model so they collect payment before they deliver their product, turning customers into a source of growth capital. Tough Mudder: Track & field entrepreneur Will Dean turned $7,000 in savings into a company with more than $100 million in annual revenue. The secret was pre-selling registrations to races and then using those funds as working capital to construct the electrified obstacle courses that have made Tough Mudder a global phenomena. CoolMiniOrNot: CoolMiniOrNot started out as a website where geeks could show off their ability to paint Dungeons & Dragons figurines. Eventually, the sites founders decided to design and distribute games of their own, leveraging Kickstarter as a channel. They have run27 Kickstarter campaignswhich have raised$35,943,270million dollars of non-dilutive funding. Game on. Sell! Sell! Sell! Usually the best source of capital is a customer, and selling has two benefits. First, you make the cash register ring immediately. Second, you quickly learn what resonates with customers and can use those insights to refine your offering. Scentsy: DNVBs are hip, but they are over-reliant on twee launch videos and Facebook ads to drive revenue. Scentsy sold candles at swap meets when they couldnt afford to buy ads. It wasnt glamorous, but it did give the founders a solid grounding on the messages that resonated with buyers now they have more than $545 million a year in revenue. CarGurus: This app leverages data analytics to help customers find the best deal on used cars, but the companys CEO credits its $50 million a year in revenue, and profitability, to hiring a sales team early in the companys life cycle. Nearly half the companys 350 employees are busy making sales calls, not writing software. LootCrate: LootCrate had more than 600,000 customers and $100 million in revenue before they raised institutional capital. Part of the reason they were so efficient was that the company started charging customers from its first weekend in existence. The founders were at a hackathon, set up a landing page, collected orders and used that capital to buy the geeky goods that would fill the packages. Be miserly with marketing Startup marketers might not want to waste time with unmeasurable brand marketing. Efficient entrepreneurs need campaigns to be additive, immediately. Wayfair: The home goods e-commerce company was profitable from its first month of operation because they skipped brand advertising and bought up hundreds of domain names that were exact matches for common search terms. This model kicked off a decade of profitable growth until they ultimately raised a Series A worth $165 million shortly before going public and earning a market cap that is currently over $4 billion. If you cant creatively turn $1 into $10, why do you expect to be able to turn $1 million into $10 million? Cards Against Humanity: With just $15,700 in funding from Kickstarter, the Cards Against Humanity team built a business that grossed more than $12 million in its first year. Theyve also sustained their brand with a series of canny marketing stunts, selling cow poop, cutting up a Picasso, digging a big hole representing the ennui of a post-Trump America, then selling Trump bug out bags and simply asking for money. These promotions arent cheap to run, but they make enough money to defray costs while earning a disproportionate amount of free media. GoFundMe: Viral marketing is dismissed, rightfully, when it is tacked on to a business model, but it can be a powerful driver when properly integrated into a business model. Paired with hyper-efficient conversion rate optimization (CRO), it can be unbeatable. The founders of GoFundMe were able to use these twin forces to bootstrap a business to the point where it was valued at ~$600 million. Efficiency > Capital Startups are often measured by how much money theyve raised. Its more important to ask how efficiently those companies use the capital. Efficiency doesnt mean penny-pinching, but instead, finding entrepreneurs who orient their business around a technology or business model that is intrinsically more effective at multiplying capital. PaintNite: The idea of combining Monet and Merlot has been around for a while, but the founders of PaintNite wanted to make the model more cost-effective. While their competitors relied on a slow, expensive franchise sales model, PaintNite paired art teachers with existing bars that wanted to sell wine on weekdays and created a business that did $30 million in revenue the year before it raised venture capital. Plenty of Fish: The dating site was founded in 2003 and didnt change dramatically regarding functionality or aesthetics over the next decade. Other sites had more features, flashier graphics and copious amounts of venture funding, but PoF was free and spent most of its resources fighting spam accounts. As with Craigslist, Plenty of Fishs biggest asset was its reputation as a well-stocked pond. The company iterated on the product over time, but never needed massive infusions of capital. Ultimately, the company sold for $575 million. Mojang: The masons behind Minecraft never raised any venture capital, employed just 50 people and earned nearly a billion dollars in profit before selling to Microsoft. The Swedish studio never got sucked into fads like Zynga-inspired social spamming and predatory microtransactions. Minecraft grew by charging users a flat fee, resulting in a $2.5 billion acquisition. Fortune favors the boring Boring isnt a value judgment. Many of the most impressive, successful companies that managed to grow without capital thrived by solving acute, if somewhat dry, problems. If you solve a hard problem, customers will happily fund it. SurveyMonkey was founded in the dot-com bubble of the 90s and though it wasnt as disruptive as peers like Kosmo, it was more durable. It survived the dot-com crash and steadily grew into a nine-figure run rate, only raising $100 million 11 years after getting started. Protolabs does for plastic injection molding what Vistaprint does for business cards, and is currently worth $1.2 billion. Cvent, worth $1.3 billion, builds event management tools and Textura, acquired for $663 million, handles construction management neither typically considered a hot or hip market. Grasshopper is a phone networking company that had 150,000 customers and more than $30 million in annual revenue, but no VC on the books, and was eventually acquired by Citrix. Epic was founded by Judith Faulkner in 1979; the Wisconsin-based electronic medical records provider may be the largest bootstrapped software company operating today. eClinicalWorks was founded in 1999 when the mantra was get big fast, and many of its contemporaries crashed and burned. By focusing on excelling at the dull, yet profitable work of managing clinical data, the company survived and now employs more than 4,000 workers and generates $320 million in annual revenue. Unity became a backbone of the mobile gaming industry by focusing on all of the unsexy aspects of game development, like cross-platform compatibility and bump mapping. They went years without raising capital, but now have a valuation over $1.5 billion, and are more successful than the majority of branded game startups. GitHub took the pain out of version control and became a critical part of the tech ecosystem before raising capital. Qualtrics started as a tool to administer surveys for schools and businesses in a basement in Utah and now employs 1,000 and rakes in $100 million a year, profitably. Blessed are the unfundable Sometimes raising capital is almost impossible. Weve seen companies with tens of millions in revenue, triple-digit growth rates and other advantages struggle to raise even small amounts of money. Fortunately, these startups tend to prevail in the end, despite this apparent disadvantage. Atlassian: One of the benefits of building a startup outside Silicon Valley, NYC, LA or Boston is that there isnt much VC available. This may sound like a curse; after all, how could it be helpful to have no access to capital? It can be a blessing in disguise. This kind of isolation prevents you from daydreaming about what youd do with millions of dollars and forces you to make happy the paying customers you do have. Atlassian, based in Australia, bootstrapped its way to a $4 billion market cap. If it had easier access to funding, they might have found themselves chasing low-quality growth and gone under before they figured out how to scale efficiently. You dont need permission from funders to found and scale a startup. Campaign Monitor: One of the odd features of capital-efficient companies is that their first rounds of funding tend to be eye-popping sums that look more like proceeds from IPOs. This is the case for Campaign Monitor, whose first round of funding amounted to $250 million. Sydney-based Campaign Monitor didnt have easy access to venture capital, so they bootstrapped the business and built a unique technology that offered superior email analytics to companies like Disney, Coca-Cola and Buzzfeed. Time will tell if raising a quarter billion dollars helps or hurts the company, but it is certainly a validation of the progress theyve made so far. The Trade Desk: While he had a unique view of how to power the programmatic advertising industry, founder Jeff Green started The Trade Desk late in the funding cycle for modern adtech. This overcapitalization of the market, combined with investors getting burned by bad performers, made every round of funding a struggle throughout the life of the company. Green was a consummate startup CEO, who raised only $26.4 million in venture capital during the companys first six years and turned it into a billion-dollar business traded on the NASDAQ. How? By embracing the constraints of having less capital, focusing on the highest return activities and building a culture of innovation powered by ideas rather than infusions of capital. (Disclosure: Founder Collective is an investor in The Trade Desk.) VCs arent perfect, and even the best miss out on ideas that seem like sure things. It is shocking how common it is to hear founders talk about how they couldnt sell investors on an idea that went on to become a billion-dollar business. AppLovin founder Adam Foroughi sold his business for $1.4 billion, but found it hard to raise venture capital, even with serious revenue. I couldnt find anyone to give us an investment at what I thought was a reasonable starting point valuation (maybe $4 million or $5 million) and, by the end of our first year of operations, we were profitable and doing over $1 million a month in revenue. The rest, as they say, is history. Takeaway: Avoid designing your business around VC Too many founders orient their businesses around venture capital from day one. Startups used to figure stuff out and then ask for money. Today, they ask for money to figure things out. Outside of drug discovery or aeronautical hardware, this is usually the wrong decision. In fact, making progress without resources is the best way to get VCs to take an interest in your company. The companies mentioned above chose not to raise money for protracted periods of time, but when they did, they had their pick of investors and could set the terms. Our advice isnt to try to bootstrap a business in perpetuity. Venture capital has powered nearly every major tech company from Apple to Zappos. Just remember that you dont need a penny to get started. You dont need permission from funders to found and scale a startup. So the next time a VC tells you they pass, remember these three principles: Its possible to get a tech-enabled business off the ground with no capital. Its feasible to scale a tech business rapidly with very little capital. Its often in the founders best interest to limit the amount of capital they take. If you know of some other companies that self-funded their way to an extraordinary outcome, please let me know.

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frunoni-blog · 7 years

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PSN Code Generator 2017 — PSN Card Giveaway 2017

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viralhottopics · 8 years

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Nintendo Switch review: a brave and fascinating new console

At 280 the Switch is a gamble, but Nintendo has again done its idiosyncratic best to challenge the way we think about games hardware

Nintendo remains a puzzling phenomenon for a lot of modern gamers. The company never makes powerful consoles, or cool consoles; it never pushes the processing envelope, and it always seems a little eccentric when it comes to online infrastructure. Unlike Sony and Microsoft, it isnt trying to make gaming PCs designed to resemble dedicated games machines it just makes games machines.

The Switch is the latest evolution of an idea Nintendo has been playing with since the arrival of the Wii in 2006 a console for everyone, with an interesting, accessible and flexible interface. The console itself is basically a tablet, and completely portable, but plug it into the stand and the action immediately appears on your TV. It is a weird hybrid, a new mid-point between home and handheld.

The big question is is it fun?

The basics

Priced at 280, the Nintendo Switch is a hybrid system a cross between a home console and a handheld. When you buy one, you get the console itself, as well as the two JoyCon controllers, the stand for plugging the device into your TV, and a controller grip. HDMI and power cables come too.

Nintendo Switch whats in the box. Photograph: Nintendo

Games are on small cartridges (that rattle rather suspiciously) and they slot into a port at the top of the console. Unlike with PS4 and Xbox One, you dont need to install the software on to your hard drive, which is just as well as the Switch drive is a measly 32GB. Theres a Micro SD slot at the rear of the Switch, which adds additional storage capacity.

Optional accessories include a wired LAN adaptor and pro controller which offers a more refined and traditional interface for 65. Extra Joy-Con controllers (necessary for multiplayer games like Arms) cost 75.

Specifications

Size: 10cm x 24cm x 1.4cm (with Joy-Con attached)

Screen: 6.2-inch LCD Screen, 1280 x 720 resolution

Processor: Nvidia Custom Tegra processor

Storage: 32GB (with Micro SD card slot for additional space)

Connectivity: wifi (IEEE 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac) and Bluetooth 4.1

Weight: 300g (400g with Joy-Con attached)

A design of two halves

The Nintendo Switch looks like a very small, budget-conscious tablet, with the same sort of build quality (ie solid and kind of sleek). The capacitive touchscreen is not as precise as youll find on your new smartphone, but its a definite step up from the spongy Wii U GamePad and reacts to the slightest touch rather than a frustrated jab. The experience really does merge the accessibility of playing on a tablet with the added controller accuracy of a handheld. Its like a modern take on the multifaceted approach of the DS and 3DS, but with a larger screen and much more granular control.

When you want to plug it into into your TV, you slide the Switch into the dock, until it clicks into the port. This is a smooth, seamless procedure, but the console does rattle a little in its toaster-like home. The dock has HDMI, three USB ports and a power socket but thats all. Its just a hunk of plastic.

Nintendo Switch compared with a Wii U GamePad. Photograph: Keith Stuart for the Guardian

The Switchs built-in 6.2-inch display is 720p HD, and the picture quality is usually very good, with rich colours and a nice sharpness. When you plug the console in to your TV, Switch can output in full 1080p (though not 4K). On a larger display, its very clear this console is far behind Xbox One and PS4 in terms of visual fidelity the graphics have that familiar Nintendo look; cartoony, slightly hazy, but also artful. Titles like Legend of Zelda, Mario Kart and, later, Super Mario Odyssey do look beautiful, but in a more stylised way than the photorealistic aspirations of the other consoles.

Shared pleasures

Once charged, the Switch can be taken wherever you go and this is a key feature. With this console, you can put the screen down wherever you are, slide the Joy-Con off, hand them out and start multiplayer sessions with friends. The fact that the controllers can be used independently means Mario Kart, Bomberman, Just Dance and SnipperClips can all be played without the need to buy extra pads. Its the whole games-for-everyone philosophy of the Wii, joyously emancipated from the home.

On top of this, the console offers ad-hoc local networking for up to eight Switches. The idea of being able to meet up with pals wherever you are and play Mario Kart or Splatoon 2 together in big team sessions is an enticing one and the concept becomes even more interesting if/when we start seeing community-focused titles like Monster Hunter and Pokemon coming along. It was the former that more or less kept the Sony PSP alive, exploiting the machines ad-hoc connectivity; and we saw how powerful Pokemon Go was as a roving social experience. If Nintendo can harness this potential, it would be a major plus for the console. Sitting in a park with a whole bunch of people playing Mario Kart is a really fun proposition.

Joy or con?

Perhaps the most intriguing element of the Switch is its two Joy-Con controllers, which can be used separately, or snapped either side of a plastic grip to make a standard pad. Each Joy-Con has an analogue stick, a button array on the front, and four shoulder buttons along the edges. They also have built-in accelerometers and gyroscopes for motion control, while the right Joy-Con has a motion-sensitive IR camera, which can sense movement in front of it. Theres also a Capture button which lets you take, store and share in-game screenshots (but not video just yet).

The Switch Joy-Cons, close up. Photograph: Nintendo

The Joy-Con are small, but theyre very comfortable in the hand and the plastic is good quality. To make them more sturdy, there are wrist strap sections that slide on to the side of each controller, clipping into place. Theyre easy to get on, but removing them is an unnecessarily fiddly process of lifting a small locking mechanism, pressing a tiny black button then sliding them off it takes some practice (and brute force) and if anyone accidentally puts one on the wrong way round which really shouldnt be possible they become wedged pretty fast. It doesnt really feel like the neat, graceful, child-friendly industrial design were used to from Nintendo.

But theyre definitely good fun to use. Gripped in your hands they become almost invisible facilitators of ridiculous interactions. Whether thats milking a cow or pretending to scoff sandwiches in 1-2 Switch, or cutting out shapes in Snipperclips they take on the forms that each game requires; like the computer mouse, they simply become extensions of your own movements. This could (and in Nintendos hands should) lead to whole new interactive experiences

The Zelda box?

The Switch is launching with eleven games, but many of these are updates of already released titles like I Am Setsuna, World of Goo, Skylanders Imaginators and Just Dance 2017. One exception is Super Bomberman R, a re-invention of the classic multiplayer maze battler.

Of the two major Nintendo titles, 1-2 Switch really should be bundled with the hardware. This collection of competitive mini-games is fun for a while, but its purpose is to exhibit the capabilities of the console and with no lasting challenge to any of the 28 tasks, youll soon tire of it. Even a limited demo of the game would have been a welcome addition to the console package.

The key draw right now is The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and honestly, what a draw it is. Expansive, refined and exciting, it could well be one of the greatest launch titles ever released.

Later in the year, well get Splatoon 2, Super Mario Odyssey, Arms and Super Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, which all look wonderful; then there will be Xenoblade Chronicles 2 and a Fire Emblem title, pretty much capturing the RPG market. Nintendo claims there are 100 games in development from 70 publishers highlights include the Elder Scrolls: Skyrim conversion, a Dragon Quest, a Sonic game, Ultra Street Fighter II, and follow-ups to cult titles like No More Heroes and Shin Megami Tensei. Thats a lot of fun to be had.

The big draw The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Photograph: Nintendo

Nintendo has announced 60 indie titles as well: successful releases like Stardew Valley, Shovel Knight, Cave Story and Overcooked are on the slate, as are newcomers Yooka-Laylee, Snake Pass and Wargroove.

The big test of course is whether the big hitting franchises will come over. We know EA is making a Switch version of Fifa, and theres a Switch Minecraft, but will there be a Switch Call of Duty (and if the series goes back to WWII this will really matter), a Switch Red Dead Redemption?

So far it feels like theres more industry positivity around Switch than there ever was around Wii U. If Zelda starts shifting machines, the big publishers will want a part of that especially with the costs of producing high-end Xbox and PlayStation titles exploding with every new hardware iteration.

The end of the Miiverse

One disappointing aspect is that two favourite connected services Street Pass from the 3DS and Wiiverse from the Wii U will not be returning on Switch. Instead were getting a more conventional online subscription service offering multiplayer gaming and other content including monthly free titles.

At the same time, online lobbies and a voice chat app will replace the community hub that made your Wii U desktop feel like a thriving virtual town rather than a staid menu system. Indeed, the Switch desktop is rather sparse, so far consisting of large icons for any games youve played, as well as smaller options for the eShop, photo album and controller settings. Youll be able to import your Nintendo Account ID, make your own Mii character and set up friends lists, of course but currently the UI is very bare and uninspiring (although you could also see its simplicity as a bonus, especially as it also has to function on a smaller, portable display).

In many ways, Switch is going to be a lot more like Xbox and PS4 in its connected philosophy and thats a shame. And whats missing from this more conventional set-up is apps: currently there are no video-on-demand options like YouTube or Netflix, though Nintendo has said its considering them. Furthermore, we still dont know how much the subscription will cost, but it will be free until the autumn. On a more positive note, the eShop looks to be getting some excellent support from indie developers who are looking to support and explore the unique feature-set of the console.

Verdict

The Nintendo Switch is a brave and fascinating prospect. While the Wii U hinted at a dual screen future (and provided some truly brilliant games), this update truly gives us a strong standalone handheld platform as well as a home console that produces beautiful visuals and trademark Nintendo experiences. Those who well say buy a PC/Xbox/PS4 instead are too entrenched in conventional wisdom to understand the appeal of Nintendo hardware, which has always stood slightly to the side of the industry product pipeline. The Switch is playing in a very different space, a space of its own, and we now need to see if the rest of the industry, and a large enough audience of casual gamers, will join it.

Whatever happens, Nintendo has once again done its idiosyncratic best to challenge the way we think about games hardware. Right now, it has the best launch game in at least a decade, and enough compelling possibilities on the horizon to warrant enthusiasm and hope. At 280 it is a gamble; when the price drops, as it inevitably will before Christmas, it may prove irresistible.

Pros: fascinating hybrid concept; interesting controls; good quality screen; some excellent games on the way

Cons: areas of fiddly and below-par hardware design; limited launch line-up; unclear digital strategy