Artificial ignorance

I’ve always been an avid basketball player. Of all the sports out there, I find basketball to be one of the few sports that has the fewest barriers to start playing. But living in San Francisco, a city that tends to be fairly cold year around, I find it difficult to play ball outdoors. So back in December 2006, I found one of the few full-fledged indoor basketball courts near San Francisco – a ClubOne facility in Oakland. I headed over there and played ball. I played for about 4 hours straight. The last time I’d exerted myself like that was back in high school.

Soon after I was done, I noticed that I was surprisingly short of breath. I sat in the locker room thinking about how I’d gotten through 4 hours and not felt a thing (I’ve since noticed that typically the adrenaline overrides any sensations that I may have been feeling while I play). What was bothering me even more was this heavy feeling I had in the left side of my chest. Against my best judgement, I decided to suck it up and go home. I was convinced that I wasn’t having a heart attack – I was 26 and in pretty good shape. There was no way. Right?

I woke up the next morning, and didn’t feel any better. My chest pain had gotten worse. So I headed to the ER at UCSF Parnassus and got myself checked out. After an epic wait of about 3 hours, and some fairly simple tests, the physicians concluded that I was perfectly fine. The diagnosis was … fatigue. The medication … advil. I was asked to go home and rest. Several days passed and the chest pain got better but it didn’t go away entirely. I did my due diligence and Googled the heck out of this condition. Try googling for “chest pain”. Trust me, it will scare the living daylight out of you. You will be convinced that you’re having a heart attack. Continue reading

Let’s start off by taking a look at some facts.

IGN’s mobile traffic is on the rise. Here’s a chart of monthly unique visitors coming to IGN.com from mobile devices.

Monthly unique visitor traffic coming from mobile devices has doubled compared to where we were in January 2010.

What tends to be more interesting data is what percentage of our site’s total traffic is coming from mobile devices. Continue reading

I live in San Francisco, a metropolitan city, some 50 odd miles from Silicon Valley, the heart of everything technology to the world. This place is filled with “technology early adopters” and  can be considered as the Apple fanboy mecca of the world.

Bear with me for a sec as we look at the scope of just *my* observations… Furthermore, if we were to narrow down the scope of Apple products to just phones…I went to 5 group dinners with anywhere from 4-10 friends in October 2010. Every friend that I went to dinner with, had an iPhone. I take public transportation pretty regularly, I usually see a majority of the people carrying iPhones (an overwhelming majority – more than 70%). I used travel a lot in my previous job, and at SFO, I used to see more people with iPhones than any other device. I started noticing this trend back in 2007:

Continue reading

Today is my first day at IGN. IGN is one of the premier gaming websites on the internet – they focus on providing reviews for games. The website is extremely popular among avid gamers – from http://corp.ign.com/:

We capture one of the top concentration of men ages 18-34 online, driving over 37.2MM unique views and 532MM page views each month with leading sites including IGN and AskMen. For millions of guys, we have cemented our reputation as an authoritative voice on games, entertainment and men’s lifestyle by delivering sharp opinions and ground-breaking visual content. For you, we offer the creativity, authenticity and relevance to help you engage our vital, premium audience.

I’m joining IGN as their head of product for mobile and other connected systems (slates/iPads, TV etc.). My responsibilities will include helping IGN’s foray into the this world. We want to help users get IGN content on their mobile phones better, and also be a hub to help people discover and share mobile games. Continue reading

I was still in college when I read this article titled “Two Stories” by Joel Spolsky. Here a couple of quotes from that article (the bold highlighting was added by me):

“…

At Microsoft, if you’re the Program Manager working on the Excel macro strategy, even if you’ve been at the company for less than six months, it doesn’t matter – you are the GOD of the Excel macro strategy, and nobody, not even employee number 6, is allowed to get in your way. Period.

… Continue reading