DotA was not at all novice friendly and I do believe DotA 2 has done a lot to reduce the barrier of entry.
The UI is simply amazing at this point and all matchmaking based games should really look at DotA 2 before designing their UI, it is simply that good (in my opnion).
The valuation of a company is irrelevant to my definition of a startup. I think Facebook is still a startup because it's still in the process of rapidly scaling and transforming itself.
When it slows down and settles into long term strategy it will cease to meet my definition. It's starting to do that now.
Impressive revenue and great profit margin! Hopefully they will be able to keep this up for 2012. It is worth noting the jump in employees (28 to 224) - I kinda wonder if they will be able to manage them all, with such a sharp increase.
Comparing to Mojang (Minecraft) Rivio have done very well, both having a huge jump in revenue from one year to the next:
$78.8m in Revenue for Mojang and $9.5m in profit before taxes. Quite the magnitude of difference in terms of profit rate, 12.07% for Mojang vs 64% Rovio.
To me, Mojang's margins just don't pass the sniff test. It seems they should be much higher. I assume they have done whatever accounting tricks possible to reduce their profit (I'm not suggesting anything untoward, mind).
I agree, the margins are just too low. They are expanding and such things cost money but they are still only something like 13-15 employees at the moment but still have bad margins.
I would expect at least double the margin for a company with low distribution costs and reasonably low development costs - compared to other studios anyway.
As I'm not aware of the differences between Swedish and US ideas of companies, what is the concept of a privately held company versus a publicly traded company in Sweden? If the comparison holds, are the annual reports of privately held companies public information in Sweden as well?
Mojang is privately held but they submit an annual report to the tax authority and once OK'ed by them in the public domain so it can be requested from the authority. There are several companies that log all registered companies and their annual reports and publish them (For a fee to get a pdf of the report) online so it is not directly public per say.
It is also worth noting that privately held companies don't have as extravagant annual reports as the publicly traded ones, just plain boring reports but the essential information is the same.
Personally I like the system for it satisfies my curiosity and I don't see any reason why a company should be able to hide their broader financials - I want the ability to check their solvency before using their services for example.
Anyone could access, at least part, of my personal tax records as well as my grades from High school (and Uni I believe). All in all it is very hard to be anonymous in Sweden if someone bothers to look around.
As a Swede I am used to always being able to pay with my card; Heading to the bar? No need to withdraw cash. Grabbing a taxi home late at night? No need to worry if you have enough cash, they accept cards.
To add to this is that electronic transfer of money to both businesses and private citizens is quick and easy. If you transfer within the same bank it is instant and takes up to a day, depending on the hour, to transfer between banks.
As a Swede, I always bring cash. Heading to the bar? Already have cash in the wallet. Grabbing a taxi home late at night? No need to worry that I don't have enough cash on me.
Store temporarily only accept cash due to some error? Replace panic with nonexistent queue.
Regardless of whether you always pay cash or always pay with a card and regardless of whether you value privacy or not - you should always, in my opnion, have some cash with you. That has served me well and I've never in my life regretted having too much cash on me. The day I get robbed the cash I have on me is the least of my worries, if anything having an empty wallet might be provoking to someone that just tried to rob you (or a lot of money might get him (or her) greedy and ask for more, you never know).
Note to self: Get rid of (and remember) the CCV code on the card and destroy the magnet stripe on my card. Anything not working with the chip isn't worth the hassle nor worth the trust of using a card (that might sound strange for some but in Sweden the use of the magnet stripe is quite rare).
As a swede I never have cash on me anymore. But when I lived in Tokyo, the situation was reversed: low crime levels, high prices and nowhere to use a card, all contributed to me walking around with on average about $500 on any given day. That was a decade ago, though.
All grocery stores around me use a sealed cash system. I've been more often stuck behind people wanting to pay with cash when the cash scanner breaks down compared to the card machine being down.
While you have a point about carrying cash I just have an irrational dislike towards change. The damn coins are heavy, close to worthless much of the time and overall annoying.
And I have barely ever encountered a situation where the card machine is broken,at least not in recent years but it can of course happen.
'Removing' the CCV and magnetic stripe is actually a good idea - Wouldn't trust most (Swedish) places that don't use the chip to read the card data.
Cash is faster, I have better control over my money (but that's just because of how I'm handling them, YMMV), and the privacy part doesn't hurt - That's more of a principle than anything else, I really feel that we must have a anonymous way for payments AND that the anonymous method must not in any way be suspected of foul play just for using it. That is the first "danger" that will come, that people get so accustomed to cards that the day someone wants to pay a packet of gum with cash you get suspicious - that is something that I will truly dislike. And given the current development I see no reason as to why that won't be the case in the semi-near future.
Also, cash is much safer. That everything that is needed to take money for me is written on a card that I have to pick out for every purchase is beyond lunacy. And people actually have stomach to say that post-it notes with your password is bad (it is, but in perspective)...
So part of why I mostly use cash is of principle, cards are just so insecure. It's not that I'm afraid I'll get in trouble but part is principle and the other part is that I have no idea if my "secret" number is revealed to the wrong person. 8 months later I'll potentially be denied a purchase because the card is empty...
I do however use my card from time to time, but mostly cash. And so far the benefits of using cash are actually greater than that of a card in my eyes - so even without the benefit of security and privacy I'd still use cash.
My Uncle who was in the Merchant Marine always used to keep a decoy wallet with expired cards and a tiny amount of cash so that if he got mugged/pick pocketed he would not lose much,
As a Swede, I can't recall the last time I used cash in a normal commercial context - that is, not dealing directly with another private citizen - since I turned 18 and got my debit card 13 years ago. I can't recall the last time I used the magnetic strip either. It's all chip for me, and it's free of charge barring the 25 SEK (~2.5 EUR) per month the bank asks me for my complete account setup.
MM so your the annoying person who isn't organized enough to bring cash and causes long queues at the bar or coffee shop when I am buying my morning coffee and paper at the train station.
The more you use your card the more chance of getting skimmed using cash for small purchases is a way of reducing your attack surface.
To me it's common decency to not be negligent and I deeply dislike the opinion that "the bank will cover it".
For starters it's irresponsible, secondly the cost goes back to the banks customers anyway. But also, one day the bank will say no. You didn't do what we expect of you, we will not give you anything.
This is not that uncommon and if it happens you might loose a lot (although to keep good faith and keep people using the cards the banks usually go to great lengths to cover up that fraud ever happens and they usually repay losses of their customers, but I seriously do not get why anyone would be willing to take that risk - even the hassle of having to get in touch with your bank and temporarily be out on a lot of money etc. is enough to avoid that risk).
Not to mention that I don't feel like "it's okay, the bank took care of it" is okay. The bad guys got away with it and that is never okay.
There is also the risk that they steal small amounts from you and you don't realize it. This won't happen if you check your statements but I don't always and there are enough small charges for me not to notice if I was charged a small amount extra every month.
No really, the card readers are damn quick these days so it hardly takes much longer than paying with cash but I admit that it takes slightly longer. I would argue that most people pay their morning coffee with card in Sweden.
I have used my card all over the world, for small and large purchases, and have yet to get it skimmed - lucky I guess.
But another aspect of increased card use is that tax fraud becomes harder for the businesses as I believe the logging of card transactions are quite a lot harder to hide from the tax authority so I do see that as a positive thing.
At my medium sized local station around 2k people catch trains within 45 mins every morning so cash is much much faster and allows a greater through put of transactions.
Insanity.
I would never in my life willingly give up any of my passwords, to anyone. Especially not something that contains so much private information as Facebook. Sure, Facebook themselves may share some of that information, or all if asked by a court but generally speaking it is somewhat safe.
Want my Facebook password? No thank you, I will go somewhere else.
I like the idea of DDG but it is quite frankly of little use to me. For most English terms it works reasonably well but for other languages such my mother tongue, Swedish, it is more or less useless. I found most results to be close to useless but I have not used DDG to a great degree because of this issue.
I rather take relevant results results in multiple languages while being logged than less relevant results without being logged.
Ah, that might be a improvement but then the questions becomes, how does the English results become affected by me changing it to Swedish?
To be fair I do most of my searches in English and therefore it might cause irrelevant results again. Changing back and forth depending on what language I am search for is hardly ideal.
Will have a look to see how it affects my searches.
Gifts are no longer taxes in Sweden but it is likely that the tax authority will regard it as income (Or bonus) and they will pay 50-56% taxes on the lot. Quite tricky but I assume Mojang has good accountants that will work it out!
Yeah, it should get caught somehow otherwise companies would just gift their employees every month ;-)
So I suspect gifting would still be tax inefficient, since he'd have paid taxes on the dividend and then employees would pay tax on the gift.. whereas skipping the dividend and just getting bonuses could cut out one whole layer of tax.
There's no tax on gifts in Sweden, and the dividend tax is 30%, compared to 50% or so on salaries. So if the IRS doesn't consider it a compensation for work (which they will, of course) gifting the dividends would mean less tax.
The UI is simply amazing at this point and all matchmaking based games should really look at DotA 2 before designing their UI, it is simply that good (in my opnion).