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Bill Gurley, General Partner, Benchmark Capital, says that massively multi-player online roleplaying games (MMORPGs) are an "insanely profitable business." Hear about a game in China that has 9 million active users, and how players are so fanatical in Korea, that the police have had to investigate the theft of in-world characters. Bill says MMORPGs are a business opportunity far beyond EverQuest.

Doug and Joel discuss extreme programming of which Joel has often been a critic. He makes his case for the importance of formal testing, particularly on large projects, and explains why, "customers don't know what they want." The Joel Test was one of his most-read essays. It's what job applicants should ask at the end of the interview to evaluate prospective employers.

We caught this gem by accident while testing our audio link to the O'Reilly Open Source Convention (2004). In one of the most entertaining presentations [clip] from OSCON 2004, Paul answers the questions, what motivates great hackers? [clip] What do they need to do their jobs? How do you recognize them? [clip] How do you get them to come and work for you? [clip] And how can you become one?

The most important things to pay attention to aren't always the most obvious. Tim O'Reilly takes a look at some of the deep trends underlying open source, and some of the cool projects and ideas that are keeping folks at O'Reilly up at night. He also presents some results from O'Reilly's recent market research efforts, combining information from book sales patterns with other indications of technology adoption and interest patterns.

Building a system that is capable of handling one billion transactions a day is easier than it sounds. That is Adam Bosworth's view and he should know because he works for a company that has managed to achieve this level of scale on a simple architecture based on commodity hardware and simple brute force algorithms. Adam covers a lot of ground in this presentation that focuses on the success of the web, the scalability of simplicity and the emergence of the information server.

Open source has crossed the chasm and is heading straight for the tornado. In this keynote address from the Open Source Business Conference 2005, Geoffrey Moore proposes a marriage between the capitalist community, which is inherently competitive, and the open source community, which supports voluntary collaboration and cooperation.

The Long Tail is a phrase coined by Chris Anderson, the Editor-in-Chief of Wired magazine, for the statistical distribution of sales observed by online businesses. In this talk he explores the economics of the long tail and shares his insight on the effects it might have on future business models. Chris discusses how distribution networks like Amazon, iTunes and Netflix have shown that the right side of the curve which forms millions of niches can be as big a market as the chart toppers.

Ride with Jason Fried of 37signals as he takes us through the lessons learned while building Basecamp, a hosted project management tool that is extremely popular among its thousands of users. Jason shares his experiences about what works and what doesn't in web development and how the unconventional methodologies followed by 37signals give it an edge. From the advantages of working as a team with members in different continents to getting the word about your product out effectively, Jason covers it all.

First timer to OSCON, Jonathan Schwartz discusses how competition is good for the industry while backing up his talk with proof. Arguing against former practices, we hear how General Motors, Yahoo! and the cell phone industry, among others, benefit using the opens source concept.

Roger McNamee's talk at this year's Software 2005 Conference should give you the confidence to keep going. He examines the new rules that need to be learned and followed in this era of the 'new normal' and shows how the problems faced both by companies and technology staff can be turned into golden opportunities.