It has been an incredibly exciting period at Conduit Labs lately as we’ve been in closed alpha for our first game. We’ve been busy watching our early users spend some amazing amounts of time seemingly enjoying themselves while we gather important feedback ahead of our full site rollout. We still plan to let our product do the talking when it launches (I can’t wait to share all the stats at a future conference), but in the meantime Dan Kaplan over at VentureBeat broke the news almost a week ahead of the piece about CIC in this Sunday’s Boston Globe Magazine. I’ve excerpted the parts about us below.

The Idea Factory

By Robert Weisman August 10, 2008
(Photographs by Jonathan Beller)

TONIGHT IS HUGE. It’s approaching 6:30, and most of the office buildings around Kendall Square have cleared out. But inside Conduit Labs at One Broadway, nobody’s going anywhere. A stack of pizzas sits untouched, growing colder by the minute. The staff is in that manic state of flux obligatory for a year-old start-up. About a dozen over-caffeinated engineers in T-shirts and baggy shorts are hunched around computer monitors hustling to fix software bugs in LoudCrowd, their multiplayer Internet dance game that’s been under development for five months.

They are young and burning with ambition. They have grown up playing with animated images on screens, and now they are eager to create their own. They fervently believe LoudCrowd will be the next hot breakthrough in Internet gaming, the platform on which high school and college kids around the world will want to cyberboogie during homework breaks.

Until now, only a handful of outsiders have ever seen it in action. So tonight’s session could answer the single most critical question for the company as it moves forward: Will its target demographic – rabid social networkers and video game lovers – spend 15 minutes on LoudCrowd without getting bored and straying to some other site? Because if they won’t, LoudCrowd is destined to be just another firework that never popped, one more cool idea for the Web that fizzled before it ever exploded. For every Google, YouTube, and Facebook, there are hundreds of thousands of Pets.coms.

THE LOUDCROWD TESTERS EVERYBODY is waiting for, mostly students and college grads recruited on MySpace and Facebook, were supposed to have checked in about 20 minutes ago, but only one has arrived. The promised pizza sits in boxes on a leather couch across from a giant Xbox monitor with an exploding psychedelic screen saver. And the crew, bleary-eyed from their bug-patching “surge,” is growing hungry.

Nabeel Hyatt, the 31-year-old goateed Conduit chief executive who is wearing an unstructured army-style jacket, strides into the cluttered bay where he is running his fifth start-up. He scans the room, seeing mostly familiar faces. “One tester,” he says, disappointed.

“They’re on their way,” Dan O’Brien, the technology vice president whom everybody here calls Dan-O, assures him.

“They’re college kids,” another voice chimes in. “They’re probably picking up beer on the way.”

But the restless Hyatt, who started his first company in high school in McLean, Virginia, begins pacing, stepping over a Rock Band controller on the floor and passing a whiteboard plastered with Post-it notes. The company is a work in progress. Hyatt, a founder at the trendy consumer electronics maker Ambient Devices, has the entrepreneurial itch again. This time, he wants to fuse gaming and social networking to create a new kind of activity – and a new kind of business – on the Internet. And he’s convinced LoudCrowd is it.

Suddenly, the door swings open. Three more testers shuffle in. Showtime.

CONDUIT CHIEF NABEEL HYATT STANDS OVER one of the LoudCrowd testers, Lise Caldara, an 18- year-old senior at Lincoln Sudbury Regional High School, who’s wearing a hooded sweat shirt. “What you can do for me,” Hyatt says, “since I don’t do a real good job of reading minds, is tell me anything that comes to mind – ‘This is cool. This isn’t cool.’”

Caldara puts on her headphones and listens to disco-style dance music and stares at a colorful background image as LoudCrowd loads. “I like the background. It’s awesome,” she says. But then she hesitates. “I don’t know how to start,” she says. “This looks cool. Very confusing, but . . . nice.”

Hyatt squints over Caldara’s shoulders at the computer monitor and watches her reaction. She peers at an animated scene of shadowy figures dancing and colored lights flashing. In the foreground, an avatar performs a series of programmed dance moves: air guitar, airplane bang, safe zone, slip and slide, thriller wave.

“Oh, I get it now,” she says. “Man, I’m really bad at this.”

Hyatt prompts her. “Click for dance,” he says.

“So I can dance with other people?” she asks. “Awesome.”

`Hyatt scribbles on a notepad as Caldara fumbles with the game. On the screen, words pop up: “Looking good. Now try dancing for someone.” Caldara punches arrows on the keyboard, trying to match the beat of the music. More words appear: “Damon catches your eye.”

Across the room, Conduit employees monitor another tester, explaining how he can win clothes, shades, hairstyles. “What did you win?” someone asks. “A hairstyle? What is it? A mohawk?”

Tester Brannen Huske, 25, a curly-haired employee of a nearby wireless start-up, sits ramrod straight. He creates a user profile for the male avatar with a green-and-white baseball cap stomping around on his screen. He chooses its skin and hair color. A succession of messages appears: “Jump around.” “Slip and slide.” “Guest 511 wasn’t impressed.” “You charmed Hula.”

Hyatt explains the game. “You pick a dance move,” he says. “You try to charm as many people as possible and pick the right people to charm.” A player whose avatar charms another’s gets points.

Huske complains to Conduit programmer Adam Conroy about a bug. “Essentially, what I’m trying to do is dance with the person who has the highest points,” Huske says in a tone of frustration. “But I’m not really sure why one person has more points than another.”

“It’s a usability issue,” Conroy concedes. “We don’t really make it clear enough. Ideally, you want people to just be able to sit down and figure it out right away.”

Conduit board member Will Kohler, seated at an empty desk, has begun playing the game himself. Within a few minutes, he’s offering suggestions to Hyatt. “You should let me preview what I’d look like in these cool sunglasses while I’m trying to earn them,” he says.

Hyatt nods. He’s clearly pleased about the way things are going. One hour after the testers got down to business, only one has left his chair for more pizza. The rest are absorbed in the game and showing no sign of tiring.

(full article at Boston Globe)