We’re extremely proud to congratulate one of our newest employees, Seth Sivak, for his work on Winds of Orbis, which was recently awarded as a winner of the Independent Games Festival 2009 Student Showcase. Winds of Orbis features ground-breaking use of the Nintendo Wii-mote and floor pads to promote more physically active play. See more (including a video of the game in action) here.

We here at Conduit love seeing games that explore new frontiers, so we’re thrilled to have Seth become part of the team as our newest Gameplay Engineer. (Stay tuned to see his newest creations on loudcrowd.com!)

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.

For all of you in the private Beta, we’ve got an update that will make the perfect stocking stuffer to fill your long winter days. So come on by and check it out!

Tracks Page and dB

With this release, you can now collect songs that you can play for everyone to hear, it’s our jukebox for everyone.  As long as a Guest DJ isn’t currently playing, you can queue up your song and include a shout out which will show up at the top of the page in the “now spinning” area. These tracks will drop as sweet loot from the dance game and you can make the request from the new “tracks” page.  You’ll have to spend some dB to make the song request, but you can build up plenty of it by playing.

Performance Improvements… Seriously

We’ve done some work on performance in the past, but this time around we went a little crazy re-doing much of the front end of Loudcrowd.  We started with a complete retool of our site to take better advantage of the features Django has to offer.  This should elminate some weird behaviour that happened from time to time on the old version.  We also tore Flash a new one and drastically increased perfomance in the dance game, which includes a massive reduction to the memory footprint.  Don’t believe me? Look at this graph!

As an added bonus, we’ve added a sweet trippy effect to the dance floor (see screenshot at the top of this post).  Get into the groove enough and you can see it for yourself.

Invites

Have some friends that want to get into the Beta? Now you can earn invites and send up to 5 at a time to your friends using Facebook. Now when you say, “I know a guy who can get you into the club,” you’ll be talking about yourself!

The updates are coming fast and furious now. First, great to see so many of you turn up for the A/V Club playlist, we’ll have new playlists at least every week now, so drop back by. There are a bunch of new updates, including the often requested Closets for your clothes. Below are the biggest, let us know what you think.

Introducing the Closet

We know that in the past you’ve had a painful moment where you have make a difficult clothing decision, like whether to say keep your Pumpkin Head or scrap it for a sweet new A.V. Club headband, and we want to put an end to the dilemma. Why not keep them both?  Ladies and Gentlemen, I present to you – the Closet!  Now you can store up to 20 items to mix and match as you please.  Only downside is now you have no excuse for uncoordinated outfits. Also, this means you can finally remove that zombie head you’ve been wearing the last few weeks.

Profile Support

Met someone on the dance floor that you want to meet up with again? Click the Fan icon from their mini-profile (available from private chat in the Dance game) or cruise over to their full profile for some extra info like a link to their homepage or even when they are most likely to be playing.  Click the start to become a Fan of someone, so you can check-up on people whenever you want, even if they are offline.

Performance Tweaks and Misc

The Dance game has recieved a few more performance tweaks and some UI retooling.  It should run better on lower end machines now and will hopefully be a lot easier for new people to get the hang of.

We’ve spruced things up a bit as well all over the site.  Shinier buttons, more flair, a ton of new pre-generated whispers.

We can probably all agree that T-Pain says it best in Kanye West’s “The Good Life”:

Is the good life better than the life I lived
When I thought that I was gonna go crazy
And now my grandmamma ain’t the only girl calling me baby
And if you feeling’ me now then put your hands up in the sky
And let me hear you say hey, hey, hey, ooh
I’m good

It’s in that same spirit that the guys from Conduit Labs will be gathering at The Good Life on 28 Kingston St. (near the Downtown Crossing T stop) on Election Night, Tuesday, November 4th.

If you’re in the Boston area come join us on the second floor in the vodka lounge at 7pm where we’ll be getting our drink on to some televised election returns.

With any luck the networks will call this race when west coast polls close at 11pm, and we’ll be able to look back at these last eight years of thinking we were gonna go crazy and just say right along with T-Pain: Hey, ooh, we’re good.

New update for you guys hanging out at Loudcrowd. There are some obvious things that you’ll notice right off the bat and some behind the scenes stuff that we’re really excited about too. It’s not ready for everyone yet, but if you’re in the Beta read on about the new stuff below.

New Music and Guest DJ Support

First off, we’ve added some great new tunes (if we do say so ourselves) and we have a whole bunch more that we are just about ready to unleash.

We’ve also started getting the site ready to host what we’ve been calling “Guest DJs”.  In the a couple weeks you will be able to login and dance to hand crafted, limited-play music lists and win special exclusive loot to commerorate the occasion!  More details will come as we get closer to our first Guest DJ appearence.  But basically – if you like things that are awesome, you will love these.

Social stuff – New Start Page and Whispers

Next time you log in to Loudcrowd, you’ll be greeted by our fancy new start page.  This is a great place to catch up on the latest happenings in Loudcrowd and will evolve over time.

You’ve asked for greater chat support, so for this release we added the ability to continue whispering outside of the dance game. Now you can pop out the whisper dialog from private chat, and continue your secret whispery conversation on the feed (that vertical bar on the left of the screen where all the song info pops up).

Technology! – EC2 /Multiserver Support

The internet is a pretty wild place with all sorts of magical things, like Amazon EC2. You can create virtual servers on the fly for however long you need them, for as long or as short as you like. Freedom! Getting all of our systems up and running EC2 took a lot of work but has enabled us to be able to handle a huge range of server load, have test environments that are exactly the same as our live ones, and save a fair amount of cash on operating costs – so we’ll have more funds to spend on sweet new features… and maybe also a few burritos. We gotta eat sometime!

Misc

Also, notice the groundbreaking new ability to adjust volume. There are also some new sounds in the dance game,  and a few performance tweaks. More coming soon, and your ideas are always welcome at GS.

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.

Hello internet! Billy here.  For those of you in the Loudcrowd alpha we wanted to give the lowdown on what’s been updated recently. We are constantly adding cool new music to keep things fresh, but it’s probably worth a blog post when we add self-esteem restoring options, like freeing your internet persona from being forced to be hipster-rail thin. Cause hiptsers come in all shapes and sizes! Anyways, if this sort of blog post is useful, let me know through our new Support page (I’ll explain what that is below) or just leave a comment and I’ll make sure there are plenty more updates in the future.

Performance Tweaks

We’ve received some really great feedback from all you alpha Loudcrowdians (Loudcrowders? Loudies? Peoplewithexcellenttasteinwebsites?) and a frequent issue has been running the site smoothly on some machines. We’re doing some really cool stuff like 3D rendering in Flash, which isn’t particularly well suited to handling memory. In this last update we fixed a bunch of memory leaks and added some tricky stuff to increase your overall client performance.  We definitely have some more work to do in this area, but things should run a lot better now.

Character Customization

Everyone wants to express their creativity, so of course we get plenty of feedback on being able to customize your character. We have a whole lot planned for this, but in this last update we gave you a sneak peak at what’s to come by adding support for various body build types.  Don’t worry, no matter what size you choose, you’ll still look sweet in your super tight jeans. Check it out by loggining in and navigating to My Profile -> Edit Character and messing around with the “Build” buttons.  On this same page we also added a link for those of you that ended up with a character of the wrong sex.  We no longer force you to stay as a man/woman, but be careful: if you switch genders you’ll lose all your sweet loot!

Support/Feedback

We knew we wanted to start a dialog with you all early to get feedback, ideas, and hear about issues you are running into. But forums are too chaotic for that purpose and a blog-box email form isn’t our style. So we’ve rolled out a support area powered by GetSatisfaction. It’s a good place for everyone to get together and ask questions, report problems and/or start discussions about Loudcrowd.  What’s really great about this all is that every interaction is out in the public and auto-organized, so everyone get’s to benefit from any discussions / troubleshooting that goes on. Check it out by clicking the Support link from the Alpha Loudcrowd page.  Create an account, login, and you’re ready to go. We’re not particularly happy with the strange re-registering you have to do the first time you log in, but we’re working with GS to try and get something nice and smooth.

Keep the ideas and emails coming and we’ll continue cranking away over here with much more to come.

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)