Favorite quote is from Wired, “if games are the future of everything, then Conduit Labs is the future of music.”

How’s the second game look?

I’m officially very excited about getting all the stuff we’ve been hacking away at out for you guys to start playing with. This past week we invited some of our most passionate private beta users, as well as a handful of folks who have never used the site, to come by the Conduit HQ and give some feedback on the latest set of changes that are about to go live. Or, as we like to call it, the “pizza test.”

One of the first surprises was the extent to which folks who have been playing Loudcrowd a lot have figured out every nuance of the scoring and mechanics, thanks for caring! Then we got down to testing the entirely new site flow that we have been planning to do as soon as we launched our second activity. We took the requisite hits for a few UI inconsistecies and bugs that we have since worked out, but the best news of the evening was the unanimous thumbs up for the next game to hit Loudcrowd. We are pulling a few more late nights than I would like getting this next release out, but I’ve got the suspicion it’s worth it.

We had Governor Deval Patrick in our offices on Friday playing a little Loudcrowd and talking startups. In case this becomes a trend, we’ve decided to start a Facebook group called, “Politicians playing Loudcrowd.” Hey, you never know.

You’ll be happy to hear that the Governor, besides being all buddy buddy with the new President, also does fairly well at dancing for random college kids online.

David here again, the UI guy here at Conduit, prodded to talk a little about the process for designing the Loudcrowd logo. To jump right in – this first batch was just brainstorming to get things rolling and get all the bad ideas out.  The first few dozen ideas are going to be obvious solutions and invariably suck, so it’s best to just plow through them.  We knew we wanted Loudcrowd to be feel edgy, fun, a little ’social’ and ‘gamey’ even though everyone despises those words.  We also had our avatar style nailed down which is graphic with strong black outlines, so the logo needed a similar illustrative treatment.  We also wanted the logo to be uh… loud.  And possibly crowded.  This direction would haunt us for months… it would take over 50 logos to stop drawing speakers.

Noteworthy appearances in this initial batch are ‘the web 2.0 chat bubble circa 2004′ the donut shop, techno sock monkey, the vomitous mass and speakerbot.

Direction from this batch included ‘hand-drawn fonts are kinda crappy, let’s find some fonts’ and ‘it needs to be more cerebral.’  The idea was – we needed a clever idea.  Catchy.  Something that would take a second to parse so you could relish in your own ‘a-ha’ moment the next morning in the shower and congratulate yourself.  Like when you finally notice that subliminal arrow in the FedEx logo and realize why people pay design firms hundreds of thousands of dollars.  Incidentally, I wasn’t paid hundreds of thousands of dollars, and if I was, I would probably have already lost it in the recent credit/banking crisis.

So this second batch moved towards a few font selections, the final teal blue makes an appearance, and ‘loud things’ take center stage.  Firecrackers, bombs, a jackhammer, more speakers, a jet engine, etc.  ‘Music’ starts to make an appearance at this stage too.  You would think with Loudcrowd being a social/gaming service revolving around music I’d arrive there sooner, but you’d be wrong.

Of note in this batch – the first appearance of the retarded squirrel, which is now our ‘Sweet Loot’ mascot.  The ‘knob turned up to 11′ would have been both awesome and raw concept-theft.  And in my humble opinion, the handgun at the bottom is the best by far. I seriously thought that one nailed it, but then folks suggested that ‘hyper violence probably isn’t the best message for our product.’  Ah well.

So the team spent a lot of time going back to combining the initial concepts of music, play, and social.. ness. Combining concepts seemed to be getting closer, even if some of the actual combinations didn’t work. No one needed kids playing jump rope with audio tape. But the best concept here focused on Loudcrowd as synchronous music, more of a shared experience and less a kid drowning out the world with an iPod.  That was what ultimately resonated.

So the winner of this batch and our final logo, after a little more polish – features two kids listening to one pair of headphones. Two key concepts were nailed down, and hopefully ‘play’ reads in just a little because it’s kids doing something goofy.  Maybe not.  Mike mentioned it has a bit of a creepy siamese or ‘The Shining’ vibe to it, which in my opinion is completely awesome.

Reserve yourself a shirt so you can hawk it later on EBay.

Finally, Moving Day! On August 31, 2007 we packed up our computers, took pictures of our notes on the white boards, and stacked our kitschy toys onto our desks. One by one we rolled our stuff into the service elevator and ascended. No longer would we be sharing a small windowless closet that barely fit four desks and four chairs that we have been in since April. It was the first tangible change since we got funding, finally I could back up my chair and not bump into anyone.

Upon opening the door of our new space, golden rays of sun poured through the door and into the room as if the gods themselves were welcoming us to Mt Olympus. I’m sure if we were quieter we could have heard the herald call of an angel choir, but in our giddiness, we drowned out any other sounds. The back wall is an entire window that looks westward toward Central and Harvard Sq. The other walls are modern with aluminum and glass while the loft like ceiling provides much head room for the taller members of the team. Could this space BE more perfect?

Well, it turns out that, yes — it actually could. What became apparent nearly immediately was that that we had already out grown this space and we hadn’t even been in the office for an hour. The next 3 hours could only be described as company-wide battle Tetris with 10 desks, 10 chairs and a ridiculous number of filing cabinets. For some reason the CIC folks continued to bring us a couple filing cabinets every few minutes.

To add insult to injury, the CEO of the company next to us stopped by to tell us that “You guys will be able to hear us as much as we can hear YOU!” Was this a “welcome to the 14th floor or were those fightin’ words?” Chill out guy, we’re moving in. What’s more is that Linden Labs, creators of Second Life, are two doors down and they have TONS of room, however we rarely see more than a third of their chairs filled at any one time. In fact, there have been times when we have walked by their offices in the middle of the day and don’t see ANYONE in there. Where are they and why are they hoggin’ the office space?

Well anyways, we have been in our new space for 2 weeks now and our tenth hire starts tomorrow. We are all pretty psyched. Over the next couple months we will ramp up the new hires, dive into production and look for a larger office space. Until then, the office chairs will continue to crash into each other, elbows will be rubbed, and some folks will have to suck it in to let others pass by.

I’m very excited to announce the closing of our A round of funding here at Conduit. Having just raised $5.5m from Charles River Ventures and Prism VentureWorks, I figured this was a good time to open up the company blog with the story about how Conduit came together and what we are up to.

what do war reporting, sports, and live action role playing games have in common?

My father was a foreign correspondent, a broadcast journalist who had to go into Cambodia and Vietnam a number of times while I lived in Bangkok as a kid. Those were often dangerous assignments, and, not surprisingly, a special type of bond was formed with the friends that he made during that time. The danger, excitement, and sense of adventure helped to form lifelong friendships.

In 1994, the World Cup came to the US and both my father and I caught the soccer bug. In much of the world, the soccer experience is so tied to a person’s sense of self that it’s easy to see why it bonds people together. That passion helped me and my father get closer than we had ever been, and also led to my second start-up, an Internet sports media company.

And in college I got involved in Live Action Role Playing Games (LARPs), a mixture of improv theatre and gaming. I witnessed and experienced the strong friendships that LARPs helped to form on a personal level, as well as the global community of players that was a harbinger of Massive Multiplayer Online (MMO) Gaming. The extraordinary growth of that network we built highlighted the power of simulated conflict.

Each of these examples is profoundly about people. Not so much about how they met, but how they formed relationships, how they built communities, how they bonded. And, in their own way, each of these examples illustrates the concept behind Conduit.

anyway, back to the present day…

Today, you don’t have to spend much time online to realize that there really isn’t any place to “hang out” with friends, an online community where you can get involved in a whole range of activities, a place where you help create a steady stream of new adventures. MySpace is about visiting profiles and passing of messages back and forth, a kind of pen pal for the Intertubes. In Virtual Worlds, the ideas of complex interaction with friends seems to stop with chat. Even blogs, which we thought would be a great democratizer, have fragmented into echo chambers, with most people subscribing only to the ones that cater to their pre-determined beliefs.

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