The World's Most Successful Drop Outs

1. Dropped Out: Paul Allen attended Washington State University for just two years before dropping out.

Accomplishments: Allen co-founded Microsoft in 1975 with Bill Gates, who he convinced to drop out of Harvard. In addition to his stake in Microsoft, Allen owns a dozen professional sports teams, seemingly endless tracts of real estate, and has stakes in dozens of technology and media companies such as Dreamworks Studios.

2. Dropped Out: Richard Branson left school when he was only 16.

Accomplishments: Branson has built his brand Virgin—which includes Virgin Records, Virgin Atlantic Airways, and hundreds of other companies—into an international powerhouse that has driven his personal wealth into the billions.

3. Dropped Out: Michael Dell started a computer company called PCs Limited while attending the University of Texas at Austin. He dropped out of school to operate it.

Accomplishments: Dell’s company was later renamed Dell, Inc., which reported revenues of over $61.4 billion last year.

4. Dropped Out: Larry Ellison is a two-time drop out. He went to both the University of Illinois and the University of Chicago. But he never got a degree.

Accomplishments: Ellison put up $2,000 in 1977 to start what would become Oracle Corporation, the world’s second-largest software company.

5.Dropped Out: David Geffen never attended college.

Accomplishments: Geffen is known as Hollywood’s richest man. He founded Asylum Records and Geffen Records, and later built DreamWorks with Steven Spielberg.

6. Dropped Out: Stanley Ho left college after just a few years.

Accomplishments: Known as “The King of Gambling,” How is responsible for almost 1/3 of Macau’s GDP.

7. Dropped Out: Mike Hudack left high school and never attended college

Accomplishments: Hudack is the founder and CEO of blip.tv, a hosting platform for creators of digital video content. Blip is now backed by venture capital, including Bain Capital Ventures.

8. Dropped Out: Steve Jobs attended college for just one semester.

Accomplishments: He’s the founder and CEO of Apple Inc. He became Disney’s largest shareholder after selling it Pixar. Fortune has described Jobs as America’s most powerful businessman.

9. Dropped Out: David Karp dropped out of the elite Bronx High School of Science when he was 15. After two more years of homeschooling, he moved to Tokyo.

Accomplishments: Karp went on to found Tumblr, the blog hosting and social network company.

10. Dropped Out: Ralph Lauren studied business for two years at Baruch College before dropping out.

Accomplishments: He founded Polo Ralph Lauren. He’s why you have the pony on your shirt.

11. Dropped Out: Kirk Kerkorian dropped out of school in the 8th grade.

Accomplishments: Kerkorian has been one of the most important shapers of Las Vegas, and currently has a large stake in some of the most hotels in Vegas: Bellagio, Excaliber, Luxor, Mandalay Bay, MGM Grand, New York-New York, Circus Circus, and The Mirage. He’s said to be the richest man in Los Angeles, with a personal fortune of $16 billion.

12. Dropped Out: Kevin Rose dropped out of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas in 1998.

Accomplishments: Rose used money planned for a downpayment on a house with his (now ex) girlfriend to start the website Digg. He graced the cover of BusinessWeek in 2006 with the headline "How This Kid Made $60 Million In 18 Months.

And the last one ....

Dropped Out: Mark Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard after starting a social networking site in his dorm room in 2004.

Accomplishments: The social networking site he founded is Facebook. In 2008 Forbes valued his net worth at $1.5 billion, though reports say he may have to scrape by with only $1 billion for 2009.

Zynga's Secret To Success: Steal Great Ideas!

*Here is a good article I found about Zynga secret ingredient to success ... in China certain online games companies applied the same strategy over the years by just copying successful online games and had achieved success for themselves too. "Tian Loong Ba Bu" ( Changyou ) vs. "Genghis Khan" ( CiLing ) is a good example.

Here's Zynga Secrets ...

One reason people love to hate Zynga is the approach Zynga has taken to becoming so successful: The Microsoft approach.

Specifically: Copy a competitor's product, then crush the competitor.

Bill Gates did not grow Microsoft into an global giant by purely innovating or creating completely new products. Instead, he identified successful products, duplicated them, and used Microsoft's superior positioning and power to crush the existing competition.

For instance, Microsoft's Windows banished the Macintosh to years of relative obscurity; Internet Explorer killed off Netscape; Excel walloped Lotus, and Word replaced WordPerfect as the gold standard in word-processing. Similarly, to grow his company, Zynga founder and CEO Mark Pincus has applied this model to the social gaming industry. One way Zynga creates huge hits is by identifying popular games from other studios, creating a near replica, and then beating the original with a bigger marketing budget.

As with Microsoft, this strategy has made Zynga unpopular. The company has already paid one seven-figure settlement, and is mired in a slew of ongoing lawsuits. But unpopularity -- and even perpetual legal battling -- may be problems Zynga is happy to put up with. As Microsoft has demonstrated, the strategy works.

Until his recent displays of philanthropic munificence, Bill Gates was never a beloved figure -- not the way Steve Jobs and Larry Ellison were. But you never caught his shareholders complaining.

So far, Mark Pincus and Zynga appear to be making that same trade-off.

New Genre New Platform : Social Games

Social gaming, in particular gaming on Facebook, is the fastest growing and one of the most exciting areas in tech right now. Zynga the current social games leader, has gone in just a few months to a 10-figure valuation, while established companies like Electronic Arts are putting serious resources into the space and acquire PlayFish for 400 million to get to the top of the business.

The explotion of the social gaming sector had been attracting more and more talent from the traditional PC and video game industry. Infact everyone wants a piece of this social games pie, DigitalChocolate from the mobile games industry had marked as a new top performer on Facebook. Social gaming really is just becoming an extension of the overall games ecosystem, it's another new platform that games companies can target like console, handheld, mobile, PC, iPhone, iPad and so on.

Start-Up : Who to listen to ?

At a board meeting a new startup CEO delivered the bad news. “Our current plan isn’t working. We can’t scale the company. The user numbers is not growing and sales is all time low. But I think I know how to fix it.” He looked around the boardroom table and then proceeded to outline a radical reconfiguration of the product line (practically reengineering the entire game software they had invested the last 18 months on) and a change in sales strategy, focusing on a different customer segment.

Some of the junior investors and directors blew a gasket. “We invested in the plan you sold us on.” A few investors suggested he add new product features, others suggested firing the CTO of the company or the lead game designer. Through all of this, the lead and senior VC just sat back and listened.

Finally, when everyone else had their turn, the white-haired VC turned to the founder and said, “If you do what we tell you to do and fail, we’ll fire you. And if you do what you think is right and you fail, we may also fire you. But at least you’d be executing your plan not ours. Go with your gut and do what you think the market is telling you. That’s why we invested in you.”

He turned to the other VC’s and added, “That’s why we write the checks and entrepreneurs run the company.”

*The VC always invest into the people running the business and not the business. Is this always the truth ? Sadly it's not always so !

Why Every Startup Should Make A Business MODEL Before Wasting Time On A Business PLAN

Serial entrepreneur Steve Blank has an excellent post about the value of business models vs. business plans.

He points out the ultimate benefit of making a dynamic business model: being able test your assumptions before you waste time crafting a plan that might not actually work.
Blank compares two early-stage startups: one that had spent the last 3 months researching and writing up their business plan -- while the other spent their 3 months building and testing their business model.

The startup with the business plan was failing.
The one that had been testing their business model in the real-world was debating which seed round offer to go with.

How did that happen?

According to Blank, the key flaw in spending so much time researching and developing a business plan is that you risk discovering that your assumptions were wrong when you finally go out and test it. There's all your hard work, down the drain.

With a business model, however, you take your initial assumptions and immediately go out to get feedback. When you're ready, you can even make a mock-up and do some initial testing with customers. All the while, you keep modifying your model based on what you find.

One is static; the other is flexible.

This doesn't mean that you should throw your business plans out the window. Blank writes, "Putting together the financial model forces you to think about how to build a profitable business. But you just discovered that as smart as you and your team are, there were no facts inside your apartment. Unless you have tested the assumptions in your business model first, outside the building, your business plan is just creative writing.

A Happy Farm 2 Story

Chinese developer Five Minutes brought its popular farming application, Happy Farm to Facebook, one of many developers from the country that has pushed on to Facebook. The game has now grown to a respectable 3.1 million monthly active users.

How can you follow the game up with a sequel? Why you make it bigger, of course! Take Happy Farm as a base, spice it up with some elements of Pet Society, add a dash of YoVille, and throw it all into a miniature virtual world and you have the makings of a 681,000 MAU Happy Farm 2. Well… a Chinese language version of it anyway. Although Facebook is banned in mainland China, millions of Chinese speakers play games on the service throughout Asia and the rest of the world. 5 Minutes is making these Facebook users their target, at least for now.

An English-language version exists, although it's not viewable in Facebook's search and we didn't have it in AppData. Its MAU count is also looking decent so far, with 281,000. Thankfully, most of the icons are, well, iconic enough to allow a English-speaking individual to figure things out, and despite the language barrier, Happy Farm 2 proved to be quite entertaining.

Getting down to basics, the game is your basic farm title. Players create plots of land, plant seeds, water them, do a little pest control, and eventually harvest them for some coin. Players then use the money to decorate their farm as they see fit with the added feature of creating ponds to place fish in. Unfortunately, for us, most everything is only in Chinese, so we honestly have no idea what the fish are telling us. No, we’re not crazy: the fish and plants talk, but other than the phrase “Happy Day,” lord only knows what they have to say. Nevertheless, it does display an interesting difference in culture: How often do your crops talk to you in FarmVille? Different, and pretty cool.

Unlike Happy Farm, where the game was static and unmoving, players can move about their fields with a cartoonish (though a bit uninspired-looking) avatar. This is where things get interesting though, as players can actually enter their home.

From here, the game takes a more YoVille-like approach, allowing players to decorate their isometric abode (of a respectable size) with a rather impressive variety of furniture. Obviously, this creates a great deal more longevity for the app, as now players are not only building up their farm, but their house as well.

This is where the Pet Society elements comes in. To buy said furniture, players leave their farm and enter a miniature city that feels only slightly smaller than the one in the Playfish title. Conveniently enough, your farm is located, more or less, in the heart of town and players walk about the city streets visiting a collection of stores, including places to buy gifts, fish, seeds, outfits (yes, you can decorate your avatar too), farm decorations, functional farm items (fertilizer, for example), as well as visit the bank (for virtual currency, presumably) and a breeder for farm animals.

Social elements, that we could understand, seem fairly standard for farming games too. You have your gifting, leaderboards, and the ability to visit and take care of each others’ farms. Actually, it is worth noting that this last feature has a nice bit of polish too. If a farm is left unattended for too long it gets a dusty, abandoned town feel to it.

Honestly, despite the language handicap, it really turned out to be a great game for us. The only issue that comes to mind is that compared to all the character designs for the shop keepers, the player’s avatar is a bit ghastly. Nonetheless, if that’s not an issue for you, and you can read Chinese (or even if you can‘t, for that matter), then by all means, Happy Farm 2 is a game certainly worth a play.

And, considering the tendency of Western developers to build their own versions of features that get big in China, perhaps we’ll see the many competing Facebook farm titles out there add more Happy Farm 2 features to their games.

What Virtual Worlds can Succeed ?

What kind of virtual worlds and not which virtual worlds can succeed ?
Previous blog was on virtual worlds closing down and shutting doors including one of my fav highly praised virtual world for its web innovations - Metaplace. Those closing down includes Vivaty ( *3D UCG world which caught my eye when they jump on to Facebook ) and Fortera ( *which had a booth just next to us at one the virtual worlds conference a year or two back ). In 2010 and 2011 there will be more virtual worlds closing down certainly, in China both the 3D worlds UWORLD and NOVOKING is gone too leaving only HIPIHI whom was saved by Singapore Technology giving them the YOG project ( Singapore Youth Olympics virtual world ) worth USD 10 million which was never publicly publicized now for reasons unknown. China Telecom 3D world - CHINAQ is not going anywhere too and may soon be closed ! Then there is the famous date November 19th 2008 - "Google Kills Lively", when my company iLEMON was in the midst of raising our Series A.

Does all the above news makes one wants to just leave this virtual worlds business alone ? So what kind of virtual worlds can make it towards success ?

1.) Habbo - where we originate from is still moving strong with about USD 80 million in revenues and profitable. But far from an IPO thought Habbo had been around since 2000.

2.) Disney with its virtual worlds and Club Penguin is still moving strong. Disney just launch CARS virtual world and I heard they will be moving into China with CARS to push their toys.

3.) Kids virtual worlds such as Poptropica and 51Mole ( *in China ) is gaining good momentum.

4.) GaiaOnline is moving along too but towards more game centric.

And lets look at some YOVILLE a virtual world on Facebook by Zynga with 20 million monthly active users and is currently the top 20 social games on Facebook and Zynga top 10 games in its portfolio.

Can You See The SECRET ?

On a separate blog page I will paste a review of HAPPY FARM by 5 Minutes a social game developer in China. If you read and play the game HAPPY FARM you will notice that - it is a virtual world hidden under the brand name of a Social Game, slapped with a market position of FARMING following the famed foot steps of Farm Ville and lastly paste in front of the game with a FARM first before others.

So virtual worlds just need a little more work and some rebranding to move towards the next step. I must say that iLEMON missed this step and now we are playing "Catching Up" with the mouse that had lead.

Vivaty Closing Down

The party is over for Vivaty virtual world.
Virtual world company Vivaty announced on its site today that it will shut down its user-generated “virtual scenes” site on April 16. Jay Weber, chief technical officer and co-founder, announced on the company’s blog that the site will close because its business of letting users create their own 3D virtual spaces just hasn’t taken off. The Menlo Park, Calif.-based company received $9.5 million in funding from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Mohr Davidow Ventures. It was founded in 2007.

Recent closings include Forterra, Metaplace, and There.com. Virtual worlds been hit hard and many industry experts are predicting that virtual worlds just didn't meet the expectations and hype created and started by Second Life. Glimpse of hope will be that IMVU and Linden Labs’ Second Life have boasted continuous growth. But Google Lively never got off the ground back in 2008. By contrast, social networks such as Facebook and social games such as those made by Zynga have taken off, leaving stand-alone virtual worlds in the dust.

Here's what Vivaty said of what went wrong ?

"Why it didn't work out. That is a long story. But I think the fact that we were targeting casual (web) virtual world users that still wanted a higher quality and 3D experience rather than 2D Flash was a key challenge. And then requiring the user to download a plug-in further made the proposition challenging. And as you pointed out in your article, virtual worlds are just not growing as a market segment, and may be shrinking. And social gaming has taken all the consumer interest.

In the end I think we can say Vivaty worked out as a technology platform to enable 3D avatar community experiences on the web. Which was our stated goal. I think the acquisition proves the technology is best of breed and desirable. We thought there would more consumer demand for a lightweight web based 3D avatar community along the lines of a simpler Second Life, and it just didn’t turn out that way.

When we started, Second Life was all the buzz. We thought that if the web was going to flourish with hundreds of Second Life like experiences, then someone would have to build the infrastructure. That was our goal. But it turned out Second Life was a single product and definitely not a foreshadowing of the future transformation of the web. At least not for a good while."

"LOOK DEEPER"
If you think you are the marketing experts then think again as Vivaty tried various key methods I would have suggested them to do to get success including ...

1.) Vivaty's was the first virtual world to lock into Facebook using Facebook Connect. So it's not about putting yourself on to a big crowded space to acquire and share users. They did it and tried it but failes.

2.) UCG contents ? Vivaty's had plenty to go ...

3.) More payment methods ... nope again !

Some industry experts mentioned ...

• Not cool enough aesthetically and not convenient enough for the users too of course.
• It's not about the economy, ONLY. If you have a product that people can truly enjoy, and for cheap - it won't matter what the economic conditions are, people will pull out their wallets.
• Virtual world without online MMO games, e-commerce and other content will never work.

What's my say ?

View - What Virtual Worlds can Succeed ?