Michael Schade, CEO at Fishlabs, reveals his smartphone anti-piracy strategies, talks about the iPhone adgame business, and discusses his plans as a GDC Europe "Gold Sponsor"

Michael Schade: In the beginning, the piracy rate of "Rally Master Pro" was shockingly high, indeed. When we launched "Galaxy on Fire 2" six months ago, it was about the same, but now we are "down" to 60% overall. Granted, this includes multiple devices that run the game legally as players can register up to five devices to their iTunes account; so the real piracy rate is lower than that. However, after working on the game for 14-plus months with an even bigger team, it is still frustrating to see the game cracked on the Web anddownloaded several hundred thousand times. But we are making good moneyon iOS, so we are quite happy nonetheless.

Nathan Day, chief scientist at SoftLayer Technologies, discusses the advantages of using cloud computing services, his new Referral Partner Program, and why GDC Europe is important even to a U.S.-based company

Nathan Day: Yes, game developers take advantage of the rapid deployment of CloudLayer Computing Instances (CCIs), but they also utilize many of our other services. The true approach they take is to utilize the hybrid computing model we've created. Our on-demand nature enables them to deploy cloud instances in a matter of minutes as well as dedicated hardware in a matter of hours. Developers also heavily rely upon many of our on-demand network services -- such as local and global load balancing, firewalls, and CDN. Each of these services can be ready for use within minutes with no long-term contracts. Our hybrid computing approach incorporates our entire product line providing customers with thousands of options.

Hein Beute, product manager at Xsens, explains 3-D motion tracking for game development, talks about how it was used in EA's "FIFA Soccer 2011," and unveils Xsens' upcoming GDC Europe workshop

Hein Beute: Xsens was started in 2000 by Casper Peeters and Per Slycke who were inspired by the possibilities of tiny sensors for measurement of human motions. The Xsens trackers contain inertial sensors; they sense the inertia of the object being measured. Gyroscopes and accelerometers, for example, are inertial sensors measuring, respectively, orientation and acceleration. We are using MEMS technology – Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems – in which the sensors are small mechanical devices driven by electricity. The same sensorscan be found in your smartphone or in the Wii controller. The Xsens MVN system contains 17 trackers to capture the motions of an actor.