The newest edition of WinCustomize.com's official podcast, PowerUser.tv is up and available to listen to. Kristin talks with the gang about problems with the iPod Nano (and a cheap fix for it), VoIP service possibly being disrupted by the FCC due to issues with 911 calls, and Wikipedia crating Wikibooks, a planned library of textbooks that they hope will someday replace paper textbooks. Guests: Derek Batting of www.neowin.net, Tom Chick of www.quartertothree.com and Brad Wardell of www.wincustomize.com.

For those of you who have Object Desktop, we're curious to hear your story on how you found out about it in the first place.

The map does not scale planets and stars in a way that is realistic in the absolute sense.  That's because the basis of interstellar travel rests on folding space.  Ships don’t travel that fast in real terms. Instead, propulsion systems such as HyperDrive (the key technology in the background of the GalCiv universe) fold space so that traveling from Point A to Point B is far less in real distance.  However, folding space is dramatically interfered with by mass – planets and stars.  As a result, the folding of space inside a solar system is far less than how much interstellar space is.  Hence, it takes longer to travel from planet to planet than it does to travel in deep space.  The game map is hence visually adjusted (much like a flat map of the world distorts the size of countries – Greenland looks huge on a flat map of the Earth) to support this mode of space travel.

 

The unit of measurement used to describe space travel is the adjusted parsec or just “parsec”.  The term parsec we know in the 20^th century is called a “true parsec”.  But a true parsec has no concept of how folded space operates. 

 

A true parsec is 3.26 light years. An adjusted parsec varies from 1.9 x 10^6  (million) miles to 1.9 x 10^14 miles depending on how much mass is in the area.

 

Simply put, a GalCiv ship that moves 1 move per turn is moving 1pc (adjusted parsec) per turn.  Going from Earth to Jupiter might take 2 moves.  Going from Earth to Sirius 8 moves or 8pc. Sirus is 0.8 true parsecs away in the real universe.

 

Here are the units in the game:

• Sensor range is in adjusted parsecs: pc. How many tiles out a player can see around a given ship.
• Ship range is in sectors (sct).  It’s how far away from a friendly planet (or starbase) a ship can travel as measured in sectors.
• Money is in billions of credits (bc).  It’s billions because credits by the 23^rd century have become the standardize form of galactic currency and no one is going to be building an interstellar cruiser for 120 credits. 

Cultural Influence:

Influence is in “ip” (influence points).

 

The way cultural take overs will work in GalCiv II is that when you click on a planet, there is a floating point number by influence:

 

23ip (0.45).  The floating point represents alien influence versus native influence.  If the number is >1 then that means alien influence is greater than native influence.  If the number increases beyond 4.0 then that means alien influence is >4 times as much as native influence. That planet may revolt and become part of the civilization they feel more in common with.

Thursday October 27th is when we plan to release Beta 4.

It will be available to all users who pre-ordered the game.  Beta 4 will be the official start of the main beta stage of the game.  That is, when the game is starting to come together.  Major new features can't be added at that stage but tons of playability features can still be added. And often, what makes a good game great are little touches.

Beta 4 is going to have the diplomacy in it. It will also have the fleets and fleet battles and hopefully the full starbase implementations in them.  There will hopefully be a few custom maps in it as well as a couple of custom scenarios.

There will be regular updates to Beta 4 going into Christmas.  Users who are particularly helpful will be given access to private beta and content that we especially need constructive feedback on.

The campaign, "Dread Lords", won't be in the public beta since the surprise ending is a major issue we don't want to spoil.

Advocates are users whose skins, themes, wallpapers, icons, forum posts, articles attract visitors from other sites. When someone comes to WinCustomize.com from another site through a link, the user who created what is linked to receives an advocacy point. Top advocates are elligible to receive random WC goodies.

This month, well, I kicked butt. That was because of the Microsoft PDC coverage (ex) which got a lot of people to come over (271,405 clicks to WC from other sites).  You can check the "referrrals" button on the bottom of a post to see who is linking to that post, skin, article, etc. A big things especially to JJ Ying and Steve Grenier who had very impressive advocacy ratings this month too.  To everyone who helps promote and advocate Windows customization - thank you!

1	Frogboy	271,405
2	JJ Ying	21,563
3	Steve Grenier	19,651
4	Jairo Boudewyn	10,743
5	mormegil	9,392
6	The Skins Factory	7,427
7	Tandis	6,453
8	wstaylor	6,144
9	Iben	5,420
10	KoL_	4,413

Apolyton.net has the first part of a 3 part series on how Galactic Civilizations II came to be.  I think those of you interested in the inside of how games are made and what set up Galactic Civilizations II will find this very interesting.

There are some people who think that the moment someone starts a business that they instantly become greedy, money grubbing corporate robots.  But the reality is, most companies are privately held and those companies do things based on what motivated the stockholders.  In a private company wealth may only be a secondary motivator.

I can say as the principle shareholder in Stardock that accumulating wealth has never been my motivator. I want to do cool stuff. And I consider it my "talent" to be able to generally take things I enjoy doing and be able to do them as part of my "job".  Some things are done strictly because we think they're neat to do even though there's no remote business justification for it (JoeUser.com for instance).  We recently started doing PowerUser.tv too. There's no money to be made in podcasting (unless you're a mega player). But it's fun.

WinCustomize falls into a middle category.  Stardock makes software such as WindowBlinds, IconPackager, DesktopX, and so forth.  People who buy that software or are thinking of buying that software will want to see what can be done with it.  So in that sense, having some sort of gallery of content is necessary.  Statistically, most people hear about the software somewhere else or see a screenshot, download the trial version, and THEN start downloading skins after they've purchased it. It's not the other way around -- as a percent, few people discover our software through the skins first.

WinCustomize is a lot more than a skin gallery though.  It's a whole web community.  It's the largest - by far - site dedicated to downloading content to enhance your Windows desktop experience.  With over 22 million monthly visitors, it's one of the largest sites on the net period.  And it's safe to say that of the 22 million visitors, only a tiny tiny % actually have purchased (or will purchase) a Stardock product.

The growth of WinCustomize has been steady.  In December 2004, the site was getting around 14 million visitors per month. In September 2005, it got just about 22 million.  That's a very significant increase for such a short period of time.  Yet subscriptions to the site have declined.  That is, people who pay $20 to support the continued existence of the site and receive a number of (I think) pretty cool services. 

Some people have argued that WinCustomize has no business even trying to get people to buy subscriptions. Since Stardock "owns" it then Stardock should pay for everything because it's a "marketing" expense.  Running a site that gets 22+ million visitors per month is not like running some home page.  It takes rooms of servers and hundreds of megabits PER SECOND.  It also requires an IT staff, database developers and web developers.  You're talking hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in expenses.

As a marketing expense, WinCustomize's value is pretty limited.  After all, DesktopX has been on WinCustomize since its founding and yet the wider world seems completely unaware of its existence.  You hear a lot about Konfabulator.  But little about DesktopX.  Why is that?  There's lots of reasons. But one of the root reasons is a lack of marketing.  A lack of ability to get the word out on DesktopX to get users and developers to try it out.  More developers doing things with it would mean more and better content which in turn would encourage more users to use it.  But in the end, Konfabulator ended up as the program people think of for adding mini-applets to their desktop.  And those who have heard of DesktopX are often unaware that it does a lot more such as build entire desktops and allow for desktop objects.  So how valuable is WC for marketing? Not much.  To be generous, I'd say $50k.  And that's just one example.

But WinCustomize currently costs over $300k per year to exist.  And in a year, it'll likely cost closer to $400k.  Advertising and subscriptions bring the cost down by around $100k. That leaves $200k left.  It WC worth $200k in marketing? Not on your life.  If Stardock had $200k in extra marketing dollars to spend each year, think of all the advertisements, high end PR firms, and community outreach programs it could have invested in?  

The point being, while WinCustomize has some value as a marketing resource, its value is pretty limited. The simple fact is that WinCustomize exists because of what I mentioned at the start -- Stardock, as a private company, can do things simply because it thinks it would be cool.  It cares about the skinning community and it thinks having a site like this is neat and worthwhile -- to a point.  Individuals have hobbies. Private companies have hobbies too (that's a big difference between private companies and publicly held companies).  But just as with personal hobbies, at some point they get too expensive to keep going.

To try to change things, Stardock has brought in two new people right away to help create more incentives for people to subscribe to WinCustomize -- more content for subscribers.  But odds are, things are going to start getting tighter for those who simply visit the site month after month who haven't contributed anything (on WC, skinners, even if they've not subscribed or bought anything are given access so that they are treated as subscribers).

Some things that come to mind:

• People with no accounts will only be able to download things that have been uploaded in the past 48 hours and only 5 megabytes of content.
• People without account will likely see a lot more ads. See www.gamespot.com for a good model.
• People with accounts will be able to download up to 50 megabytes. After that they must become an SD customer or a subscriber.
• People who have purchased a SD product (Object Desktop, CursorXP, etc.) will have unlimited downloads but there will be some skins that will only be available to subscribers.
• SD customers will see fewer ads but they will see some ads.

These are just a few ideas floating around -- ideas submitted by users incidentally -- that we're seriously considering.  Since WC isn't paid for by ads, the # of monthly visitors is not as much of a goal as one might think.  If we could cut our traffic in half, we could probably save around $50k per year in expenses.  Another $50k would likely result from increase SD product purchases and/or subscriptions.  That would be a net difference of $100k.

There are plenty of other good skin sites out there people can visit. Here are a few: http://www.skinbase.org, http://lotsofskins.com, http://skins.deviantart.com/, http://www.skinz.org, http://www.customize.org.

Stardock - the company - needs sites for people to be able to download skins and themes for its software.  But it doesn't have to be WinCustomize.com. Ultimately, if the wider userbase doesn't or can't support WinCustomize as it exists today, then WinCustomize will evolve to be a site that caters more to those who can support it.  The current model for it is unsustainable.

"Having your own business".  It's a phrase I have heard friends and others use.  But what most people think of when they say "Having your own business" is having a business that includes themselves and maybe a couple other guys.

In nearly all cases of companies that have 30 or more employees, the company is founded either by venture capital or through a group of friends/associates who build the business together.

My business I founded on my own.  I didn't have partners.  I don't have investors. And it's reached a size in which it's the operation of the business has become a job unto itself.  When you have 30 some people, it's difficult to keep all aspects together.

Up till this year, I used to pride myself on how low our turn-over was.  I could count on one hand the # of people who had left voluntarily over the first 10 years.  But when you start to have quite a few people, turn-over becomes a percentage. No matter how great your company environment is, you're going to have some % of people leave each year.  I've heard that the typical company turnover rate is 25%.  If you have 35 or so people, that's over 7 people per year.  I can't even imagine what it would do to us to lose 7 people per year.  Even if we keep it down to 10%, that's still over 3 people each year which seems high.

I like the environment that the company has. But I feel like more and more of my time is spent "running the business".  I am working on building up our management team further. But in the meantime, I end up doing a lot of the business development duties which, on top of the software development and project management duties means I'm working between 60 and 80 hours per week.  I just can't keep doing that forever. I have a family. I have two perflect little sons and a wife that I want to spend time with. 

And I don't really care very much about money. Growing up poor has meant that the financial "rewards" of having a company have little meaning. But I can't lower my hours until I build up our management team (particularly in the biz dev area) so that I can work fewer hours.  It's also becoming increasingly apparent that it's difficult to find good biz dev people. People who know how to sell and market but have enough technical knowledge to understand the market and the strengths of our product line.

Oye.  Just rambling basically. 

How are you today?

WinCustomize.com is having a subscription drive. From September 30 to October 31 we are hoping to gain 2,000 new or renewed WinCustomize subscriptions. 

Stardock has hired long-time skinner Mike Bryant who is going to work on creating at least one (probably two) premium suites that will be just for WinCustomize subscribers.  In addition, WishX has been brought on board to help better coordinate efforts between the site development team and the volunteer moderators and administrators so that new features, changes, and bug fixes can be done even faster. 

On top of that, monthly visitors have increased from an average of 14 million at the start of the year to over 22 million now.  Those extra millions of users mean more bandwidth and more servers which is very expensive when you're at that level.

IF we make the 2,000 subscription goal we will also commit to adding some specific new features such as:

1. Subscribers will be able to select their own "skin" for the site.
2. An extra premium suite for subscribers
3. Lots of additional new features for personal pages
4. RSS feeds for select galleries

Presently, a WinCustomize subscription provides:

• No Ads on site
• Two Premium skin suites
• The WinCustomize Browser
• Unlimited Downloads
• A WinCustomize Personal page with your name as part of the domain
• A Personal photo gallery to upload images to.
• And various minor features with more being added regularly.

A WinCustomize subscription costs $19.95 for an entire year.  Renewals cost $19.95 for an additional two-years.  We will be keeping you up to date on the status of the subscription drive.  In order to make 2,000 subscription we have to sell over 60 subscriptions per day.