Video Conferencing

We know, video conferencing has been around for awhile (think Skype). Unfortunately, serial connections have not been able to support video conferencing at the game. With high-speed networking, you can now interact with your players in new ways. Notice a hot player is starting to slow down? Offer him tickets to the buffet. Have a high-roller who is playing into the wee hours of the morning? Maybe he would like a room.

The future is all about establishing relationships with your customers – making them part of your community. Whether they have an issue, question or just need to chat, video communications will give your players instant face-to-face access to casino representatives and let you better anticipate your customers’ needs. What better way to build customer satisfaction and loyalty?

Social Networking

Not only will technology make it easier for players to connect with you, it will make it easier for them to connect with each other. Whether it’s posting, texting, chatting, following or tweeting, many of you already use this technology to reach players. But these applications could be much more tightly integrated into the gaming experience to build your player community, bring players together and bring the excitement of playing with friends - even over long distances – to your properties. Best of all, social networking is increasingly becoming a real-time endeavor: players won’t wait until they get home to tell their friends about their experience at your casino – they’re more likely to give real-time updates and invite their friends to join them. This makes individual players even more important to your business because they have the potential to attract additional players during their visit.

GPS

There are so many possibilities for GPS technology, it’s hard to know where to begin. From a marketing perspective, GPS adds a new dimension to recommendations (for example, the “Trips” feature in Gowalla). Players can now, not only give your casino a thumbs up, but provide specific location information about the best places in your casino to visit. You can entice players into your casino by sending rewards directly to their phone if they come within a certain range of the property. Or, increase play on new games by sending players game-specific coupons as they walk through the slot floor.

As with social networking, integration of GPS technologies into the slot machine could add interest to the gaming experience as well as to expand your player base. What if players could use Google-Earth-like technology to find other players for multi-player games – not just in the casino they’re in, but in casinos around the world?

Smartphones

Smartphones give you instant access to players and let you keep the excitement going after they have left the casino. What about sending bonus games to the player’s smartphone? Or, did player X tell you that she’s a fan of Really Cool Game Y? Send her real-time, automatic game updates:

“HotPlayer6 just beat your high score on Really Cool Game Y! Come in today and we’ll give you three free spins to try and top it!”

Augmented Reality (AR)

What if AR adventures involved playing slots in your casino? Maybe even card games? What if players not only raced around one of your properties, but several, trying to be the first to earn the final reward? Sure 3D and Wii-like interactions are cool, but we think gaming companies should go in this direction:

While the above video is conceptual, the technology already exists. AR gaming has the potential for the competitiveness, interactivity and excitement to take gaming to a whole new level.

What technology would you like to see on the gaming floor?

But getting there is a serious challenge. We have five kids, one van and at least 17 hours on the road. So there is a great deal of planning that is done up-front. We plot out where to get gas, what rest stops to hit, what snacks to bring and where to find the first Chick-Fil-A once we cross into Tennessee. The goal is to have no surprises; to know exactly what we are doing.

And that is how we used to build software as well.

Not too long ago, we would sit down at the start of a project and write down everything we were going to do. We would plot out the bugs we were going to fix, the features we were going to add and how much time each step would take. We would spend weeks or months creating documents and charts filled with details. The final schedule would be meticulous in detail and brimming with confidence.

And then the van would crash into a ditch just outside of Indianapolis.

I’ll get into the hows and whys of that particular phenomenon in another blog, but first, I wanted to touch on how we do scheduling at RadBlue.

At the start of each development cycle, we have a short list of issues that we want to tackle. All of these issues relate to our goal of making our products better for our customers.

Then, we get in the car and start driving.

Going into a development cycle, we know that the journey is never going to be a straight shot. In fact, we know we aren’t going to get to the original destination. Our customers are great at voicing their opinions – on both the current products and on sneak previews of the work in-progress. And all of that input helps steer the car.

Our development process is a fluid one. We are constantly revising the schedule and feature set based on the latest information. Sometimes the input changes our direction by a few degrees. And sometimes the input completely changes our direction. Sometimes we head toward Disneyland, but end up at Disney World.

For a small, agile company like us, this is the best possible way to respond to the needs of our customers. It allows us to focus on what is needed and deliver it in a timely manner.

It’s probably the worst possible way to pilot a family to the ocean. But it’s a great way to build software.

But I am getting ahead of myself.

In 1990 I had a startup software company that I loved. It was called Frontline Software Technology. Now, Frontline was, by just about every conceivable business measure, a sad little enterprise. We were very small, we had a very small venue stream and we mostly got taken advantage of by everybody we dealt with. But that’s not what we were about.

Everyday, when we got up, we thought about our customers. We actually cared what they did with our software, what they thought about our software and what they thought about us. We realized pretty quickly that if even one of them walked away from us, we were doomed. So we bent over backwards, everyday, to keep them.

We added features on a daily basis, we shipped out new versions each day if need be (this was before the Internet), we dialed into their systems to debug problems. We worked with our customers to understand what they were doing when our software let them down. We knew our customers by name, memorized most of their telephone numbers, we knew what they did in their jobs because we talked so often. Each day was exciting because we were in the trenches delivering value to our customers.

And we were happy.

Fast forward nine years. Our little four person startup had morphed into a 150-person behemoth. We had a whole floor in a Chicago high-rise, we had outposts in London and Paris, we had sales reps spanning the globe. We had 40+ programmers, we had 24×7 support, we had three levels of management, we had HR and lawyers and all of that. And, oh yeah, our customers. Our customer base comprised the biggest telecom players in the world, both old and new.

And I was unhappy.

We no longer cared about the customer. They didn’t figure into the equation. Once you had spent your whole day dealing with the beast that was the organization, you had no time or incentive to even think about the customer. We existed because we existed, a perpetual motion machine, a mobius strip of human motivations.

I had started out as a programmer, moved to VP of engineering, went back to programming and then got out to do R&D. But just watching those last two years, as the customer faded further and further away from the daily conversation, became too much. We had gotten so far away from the Frontline days that I couldn’t take it anymore.

So on Thanksgiving, 1999, I exchanged my C++ compiler for an exercise bike and waited for the inevitable hammer that was the end of the dot-com era.

I’ve gone over all of this old ground for a reason. In my next post, I’ll tell you what it took for me to pick up my compiler again, and why I won’t be putting it down anytime soon.

–Marty