Posts Tagged ‘Darkstar’

Stevie Case to present on Metanomics.net

Saturday, October 11th, 2008

fatfoogoo’s Stevie Case will be joined by Jay Geesman of Xstreet to present ‘Monetizing the Metaverse’ – a talk about their business experiences in Second Life and other Virtual Worlds.  Professor Robert Bloomfield, Director of the Business Simulation Laboratory at Cornell University, will moderate the show.

Stevie will be going live this coming Monday, October 13th at 12 noon PST.  The show may be seen either within the Second Life virtual world in the Metanomicsregion at http://slurl.com/secondlife/Metanomics/129/174/40, or directly on metanomics site at http://www.metanomics.net/WatchNow.

Stevie is expected to discuss primary markets in which publishers sell directly to players, and secondary markets where players sell to other players.  She’ll also be talking about fatfoogoo’s unique white lable solution that can handle any type of microtransaction for publishers, including time to integration.  Stevie will also give viewers a rundown of fatfoogoo’s partnership program with Sun’s Project Darkstar, with a focus on Call of Kings.  Last but not least, a previous episode of Metanomics struck a chord with views, and Ms. Case will be addressing a “universal avatar” whereby users can more from virtual world to virtual world seamlessly without the need for separate registrations and release of personal information with each new virtual world the visit.

With over 50 one hour long programs dedicated to virtual world economies, metanomics is a storehouse of information coming directly from the industry experts.  Focusing mainly on economic and business situations and scenarios present in virtual worlds such as Second Life and There, Metanomics aims to understand and provide a better insight as to how residents of these virtual worlds establish, manage, and operate their virtual businesses.  Conversely, the show also looks at real world businesses and non-profits and how they interact with the growing virtual world and economy(ies).

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A little about Project Darkstar

Friday, September 12th, 2008

fatfoogoo’s been making waves again with the official announcement of our joint venture with Sun Microsystem’s Project Darkstar.  While this news alone is excitement enough, I’d like to take a step back and talk about who and what Project Darkstar is, and why fatfoogoo’s contributions are groundbreaking.

In a simple phrase, Project Darkstar is relatively simple: Harness the power of an open source community and avoid/tackle common problems facing all gaming developers and operators.  The goal of the infrastructure is to simplify the development and operation of massively scalable online games, virtual worlds, and social networking applications.

Some of the typical challenges that developers and operators face include zone overloading, data corruption, and server under-utilization.  While tackling these challenges, another goal for the Project Darkstar gameserver is to support new dimensions in game play such as evolving virtual worlds and massive scale battlefields.

Ok, so you’ve probably got the basic idea here, Project Darkstar is an open source development tool for gaming, virtual worlds, and social networking applications.  Check.  So what’s the big deal about fatfoogoo being involved?

Glad you asked friend, glad you asked.  Ok, let’s have a look at the Project Darkstar Online Game Value Chain:

Got all that?  Right.  Let’s break it down into a more understandable language.  In the gaming/virtual world space, we’ve got three major players; the Developers, the Publishers, and the growing space of Operators.  Each has their own unique and special function in bringing your favorite pixilated love to your LCD.  Let’s think of Operators as facilitators to markets that either the publisher or developer could not, or had no interest in reaching at the time of launch of said game.  Operators are often the ones that take on little to no risks that the publishers and developers have already taken, but seek to capitalize on the title via distribution and montetization methods.  Up until now, Operators have been piecing together microtransaction monetization models via a hodge podge method.  A bit of this, a bit of that…let’s hope it all works nicely together.

Enter stage left, fatfoogoo.  By providing a standardized monetization software package, any developer, publisher, and/or operator can now all work from the same set of ‘rules’ to ensure 100% compatibility across the entire gaming/virtual world experience.   The fatfoogoo software package allows operators to monetize their game, while giving them unparalleled flexibility in how they’d like to do it:  including but not limited to, Subscriptions, gWallet, Primary Marketplay, or Player-to-Player trading.

The real benefit here is obviously to the gaming/virtual world community.  With the addition of the fatfoogoo software to the overall Project Darkstar gameserver development process, designers, developers, and publishers have one less thing to worry about, and can focus on what they do best: make great games.

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fatfoogoo to Offer Micropayment Software for Project Darkstar

Thursday, September 11th, 2008

Monetizing Software Services Now Available to Thousands of Game Developers in Sun Sponsored Community

fatfoogoo, the leading provider of in-game commerce ecosystems, today announced that it will enable integration of its microtransaction software with Project Darkstar, an open source development environment created by Sun Microsystems Laboratories, that caters to the online games, virtual worlds and social networking industries. In a first step, fatfoogoo’s monetizing software services, such as virtual item trading, subscription management and in-game economic control, are now available to thousands of developers in the Project Darkstar Community.

fatfoogoo is the first company to offer commercial billing and transaction software that is explicitly designed to work with Project Darkstar technology. Project Darkstar simplifies the development of online games that take full advantage of today’s multi-core processors to deliver a new generation of scalability. Pairing fatfoogoo with Project Darsktar opens these games and virtual worlds to real money transactions, by enabling developers to leverage fatfoogoo’s secure and easy-to-use micropayments for in-game transactions.

“The work that fatfoogoo is doing to extend the reach of Project Darkstar exemplifies and underscores the value of open source communities,” said Karl Haberl, Director of the Project Darkstar research initiative at Sun Microsystems. “fatfoogoo has openly shared their expertise with others, enriching the Project Darkstar Community with their code contributions, interactions with game developers, and now with commercial software offerings. We are very pleased with the positive results of fatfoogoo’s Community participation, including the new opportunities they have presented to developers of online games, virtual worlds, and social networking applications.”

“We are bringing microtransactions first to the publishers and developers and, as a result, to the gaming community,” said fatfoogoo CEO, Martin Herdina. “Implementing micropayments into a game is a complex process that needs close attention. We make it easy for game developers to integrate our services into their games, so they can focus on their core competence. The real beneficiaries, however, are the gamers who can now easily make small and secure payments within the flow of the game.”

About fatfoogoo

fatfoogoo is the leading in-game commerce ecosystem for monetizing online games and virtual worlds. fatfoogoo’s solutions allow both publisher-to-player and player-to-player financial interaction, as well as traditional user and subscription management. Publishers can choose white label turnkey solutions or individually configured modules. Founded in 2006 by Daniel Petri and Martin Herdina, fatfoogoo is headquartered in Austria and also has offices in the US and the UK. For more information, please visit www.fatfoogoo.com.

About Sun Microsystems, Inc.

A singular vision — “The Network Is The Computer” — guides Sun in the development of technologies that power the world’s most important markets. Sun’s philosophy of sharing innovation and building communities is at the forefront of the next wave of computing: the Participation Age. Sun can be found in more than 100 countries and on the Web at http://sun.com.

About Project Darkstar

Project Darkstar is software infrastructure designed to simplify the development and operation of massively scaleable online games, virtual worlds and social networking applications. Created by Sun Microsystems Laboratories as a research effort, it is today advanced as an open source project through the Project Darkstar Community. Learn more at http://www.projectdarkstar.com.

Contact
Heather Sorensen
Plugged In PR for fatfoogoo
+1-503-841-0625
Email Contact

Cate Powers
Bite Communications for Sun Microsystems, Inc.
415-365-0477 – desk
970-846-3857 – cell
Email Contact

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fatfoogoo joins Sun and Project Darkstar as official partner

Tuesday, July 15th, 2008

fatfoogoo has been accepted to the SUN Partner Advantage Program as an official partner and will work very closely with Sun Microsystem’s Game Server Initiative “Project Darkstar” in building tools to monetize online games based on this open source program.

“We see this as a win-win situation.” says fatfoogoo CEO Martin Herdina. “It not only allows fatfoogoo services to be a click of a button away for game developers, but also allows us to contribute to this exciting project.”

By contributing code to Project Darkstar fatfoogoo is providing open source gaming engine builders highly valuable tools that can either be used from the ground up, or simply added to game development at a later date.  The choice is up to the developer.  While fatfoogoo is developing their own in house tools and then submitting the code to interface with the existing Darkstar model, they are also working on code for the game engine itself.  This code will not interfere or alter any existing code but rather assist the engine in maximizing the interface with fatfoogoo’s suite of monetization tools.

About fatfoogoo: fatfoogoo specializes in game monetization via a wide variety of products and services including micro transactions.  They have a wide range of experience and are industry experts on micro transactions and in game commerce and monetization.  The fatfoogoo philosophy is simple: Allow developers do what they do best, develop games, and leave the transactions and monetization to us.

About Project Darkstar: Project Darkstar is a software infrastructure that is designed to simplify the development and operation of massively scalable online games, virtual worlds, and social networking applications. It helps developers avoid problems such as zone overloading, data corruption, and server underutilization that typically come with these kinds of applications. This revolutionary platform offers a dramatically different architecture that features a flexible and efficient scaling model, a robust data model, and a simple programming model. Project Darkstar software is freely available under an open source license from the Project Darkstar community.

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