NewsAn Update on Full Circle
Hi everyone, we’re a bit past the middle of the month, and it’s time for a brief update on Full Circle.
First, I want to thank those that have covered Full Circle so far. We’ve struggled to get media attention in this difficult startup environment. We believe much of this is due to our developer-focused launch, and we’re moving full steam ahead with tweaking and finalizing our consumer announcement.
Over the past couple of months, we’ve talked to hundreds, if not thousands of developers, gamers, and even non-gamers about Full Circle. It has been quite an experience, and we announced Full Circle like we did for that reason; so that we could quietly collect feedback and develop our product. We’re not fans of stealth mode, and this was a good balance.
I won’t take up your time going over every tweak that we’ve learned. But, I will give you a short list of some of the big things that we’re changing. First, a lot of non-gamers were excited about Full Circle, because we’re bridging a lot of worlds. Who says Boxee and Hulu can’t get along in the same box? We certainly think that they can. And, who says you can’t pull all that off with your old laptop? Full Circle has, after all, been all about combining the concepts of console and computer, so that makes sense too.
Developers, on the other hand, are reluctant to sign on to a console that suffers from Phantom Syndrome. That’s the term that we coined for it… basically, it’s the problem of offering a video game platform that reminds people of the Phantom Console. Now, we’ve worked hard to avoid this, by, well, actually showing folks the console in live demos. But, as noted up at the top… this is a difficult startup environment. Simply showing stuff working isn’t good enough right now.
As such, we’re going to chart out a path to what we announced initially. By underwriting development using a fusion of in-house and crowdsourcing, our initial goal is to master the home theater market, delivering a platform that fusions content sources together… so Pandora and FanCast, can play along with Boxee and Hulu. And, so that all the content on all your computers just follows you to your HDTV, naturally.
We haven’t forgotten about video games, quite the opposite. It’s the focus of Full Circle, and it will continue to be. What we’re doing, is making sure we get the foundation as solid as possible, before gaming goes on top. As we’ve said all along, we want to do this right.
So, in splitting the difference there, we said we would start selling dev kits by year’s end. We’ve decided to make dev kits a free thing. In order to do so, however, we’re going to be bumping the announcement back by a month, to December. This will allow us to gracefully spin off our Newsroom Network sites into a brand of their own, and then focus completely on Full Circle.
- Christopher Price, CEO
One final thing… we just finished trademarking the super-secret name for Full Circle (which, we can’t say enough at this point, is just a code name). Every single person we’ve told it to is in love with it, so we think that’s going to work from day one next month.
