Category: Uncategorized

As far as my wife is concerned, our PlayStation 2 is a device whose sole purpose is to play Katamari Damacy, a wonderfully whimsical Japanese video game that's almost impossible to describe and incredibly addictive.

Unfortunately, most of the other PlayStation offerings aren't like Katamari. They're about racing, sports, adventuring and fighting, and they're meant for the more serious gamer who wants to spend tens, hundreds or even thousands of hours on matches or missions. Go to any video game store or rental place and see if you can find what are being called “casual games” — videogames that you can play and complete in session lasting an hour, a half-hour or even ten minutes, most of which don't have any violence, such as Tetris, Bejeweled or one of my favorites, Bust-a-Move (a.k.a. Puzzle Bobble).

Both the XBox 360 and the upcoming PlayStation 3 are aimed at the serious gamer — typically male, single and having plenty of time to spend an increasing number of hours “grinding” on games whose virtual worlds are expanding. Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas gave us a miniature state with facsimiles of Los Angeles, San Francisco and Las Vegas with lots of backwoods and desert — it can take twenty minutes of real time or more just to get from one end of the map to the other. Just Cause makes you a sort of Che Guevara character and offers 21 missions and 12,000 square kilometers of banana republic to explore, and still the reviews say the gameplay is “too short”. The game vendors' message is clear: If you're not hardcore, we've got nuthin' for you.

The Economist has an interesting piece on Nintendo's strategy with their upcoming Wii: they're going after the gamers and Microsoft and Sony have chosen to ignore. They're applying the lessons from their popular Nintendo DS (at the June 2006 RailsConf, which had a number of the thought leaders in new-school web development in attendance, the DS was the second-most popular machine there, just behind Mac notebooks and ahead of Wintel laptops) to the console and capture a market segment made up of non-gamers and casual gamers. Rather than emphasizing features like new graphics engines and processor cores, Nintendo are focusing on simplified controls, games that appeal to women and casual gamers and non-game functions such as weather and other information channels. As the article puts it:

As it sets out to broaden the gaming population, Nintendo is not
fighting against Sony and Microsoft, says [Nintendo president] Mr Iwata. Its real enemy is
the indifference that many people still feel towards gaming. Of course,
says Mr Iwata, he would be happy if Nintendo became the leading
console-maker again as a result of its new approach. But a victory over
Sony and Microsoft in a shrinking market, he says, would not be a
victory at all.

Link

Six Apart, the developers of Movable Type and hosts of TypePad and LiveJournal, have launched Vox, their social networking thing.

Vox is a social network like Facebook, Friendster, or MySpace, except with much finer-grained privacy controls over who can see what, and with a fully-functional blogging engine at the core. Even though Vox users will be able to share their photos and media playlists with one another like on MySpace, it would seem that it's destined to be a place where people actually get to know one another

In anticipation for this event, we asked all of you guys to share what aspect you most appreciate or like about Vox. The answers were varied and personal (just like Vox members) but there was one aspect that really shines: the Vox community. Even though Vox is primarily focused on allowing you to share your life with the people you already know and care about – and, more importantly, care about you — during the past months of the beta/preview real friendships have developed

Marshall Kirkpatrick at TechCrunch points out another two things Vox has going for it: easy customization through dozens of visually-pleasing templates, and tastefully unobtrusive advertising.

Privacy tools, pleasing aesthetics, and low-key advertising. Vox is like the anti-MySpace.

Link

Technorati Tags: Vox, Six Apart, MySpace, social networking, blogging

Robert Scoble writes that although the Zune has an advantage in software extensibility — it's easier to update Zune software and there's a chance an update could give it some PDA and GameBoy-esque functionality…

But, for now, I’d stick with an iPod. Microsoft hasn’t given us a
killer feature yet that is easily demonstratable for why we should buy
a Zune instead of an iPod.

I agree with Scoble's assessment: Zune's WiFi-based song-sharing and XBox integration just don't have enough “oomph” to be considered killer features, it lacks a distinctive conversation-maker like iPod's white earbuds, nor does it have those little UI features for which Apple is famous.

There's also an issue that doesn't show up on features list comparisons: the iPod is just plain cool. While Microsoft's “consumer” offerings make you feel as if you're eating the table scraps of the people they love most, their “enterprise” customers, Apple products are like “Vince” from the HBO television series Entourage — the cool friend, who by letting you in his posse, makes you cool by association.

Here's an observation from the recent Ajax Experience conference. Although the conference organizers could've chosen to go with a more “cost-effective” MP3 player to include in the swag bag given to every attendee, they went with the iPod Shuffle. They held a number of raffles throughout the conference and a big trivia game at the end, and although they could've saved some money and handed out cheaper players, the prizes were iPod Nanos and iPod Videos. The vendors in the exhibit hall did the same: their prizes were also Nanos and Videos. There wasn't a non-Apple MP3 or video player offered as a prize, because it wouldn't have fit in with the high-end feel that they were going for with this conference.

That's why the iPod is still the Wonder Glove Monkey.

At last, we have proof that Jason Calacanis is using some kind of mind-reading technology capable of penetrating the protective-but-jaunty tinfoil chapeaus that George and I wear: he's stolen yet another one of our ideas and given it away as his own — for free — at his Blog Business Summit keynote.

Since he's already made off with our super-seekrit plan for becoming big-time blogosphere stars, we might as well give them away ourselves — or better yet, steal Tris Hussey's coverage on Calacanis' session at the Tucows Blog. Here it is — our five-step program for becoming an A-lister, as stolen from our brains by Jason “That Dirty Plagiarist” Calacanis:

1. Go to Techmeme.
2. Blog something intelligent about the top story of the day.
3. Link to and mention all the people who have said something intelligent.
4. Repeat for 30 days.
5. Go to a couple of conferences a month.

Calacanis, whom we're thinking of referring to as “Plagiarismo”, also stole our favorite thing to say to those people at blogging conferences who whine about their inability to break into the A-list or even the B-list. Here it is, courtesy of the blog Pro PR

Blogging is the biggest meritocracy in the world. It’s not broken. You don’t rank? It’s because you suck.

…

How well you do is up to you. It really is obnoxious to look at the space and say it’s broken because you’re not doing well. If you want to succeed, do a better job.

Here are some choice places to see coverage of Calacanis' keynote, which apparently features ideas that he didn't steal from us. Mind you, he might've stolen them from other people…

• Anecdotes from Jason Calacanis on Weblogs Inc. and blogging (Tucows Blog)
• Jason Calacanis: From Weblogs to Netscape (Blog Business Summit)
• Why I Disagree with Jason Calacanis about Blogger Junkets and Pay Per Post (Blog Business Summit)
• BBS: Jason Calacanis (Pro PR)
• Jason Calacanis Keynote at Blog Business Summit (ConversionRater.com)

Wouldn't it have been nice if you could've participated in the blogging hype about Snakes on a Plane while actually on a plane? Should another opportunity like that arise, you'll be able to jump on the bandwagon thanks to The Definitive Guide to Airline and WiFi and Internet Access, which lists the airlines and flights on which you can get online (for varying values of “online”).

The list isn't as useful as one might hope. There are only two brands of online access offered by airlines: Connexion By Boeing, which will be discontinued at the end of 2006 and OnAir, which currently offers a limited subset of services and typically works through the seat-back video screen rather than your own laptop.

In this article, I continue with my look at the dot-com-bubble-esque swag and prizes being given away by the organizers and vendors at the Ajax Experience conference. If you haven't seen part 1 in this series, it's here.

Helmi

Helmi, who bill themselves as “the only open source Ajax-based RIA development platform” were giving away the fanciest pens at the conference. The Helmi pens house a green LED, which gives off an eerie glow through their transparent barrels.

Google

Also present in the exhibit hall were Google, whose booth was
essentially a recruiting booth. Instead of literature about their APIs
or developer-centric events like the Summer of Code, they had half a
dozen different pamphlets about job opportunities for Java back-end
coders, UI and rich internet application developers and
researchers.

Swag-wise, these were their offerings:

• Google gum: Haven't tried it yet.
• Google pen: This one was pretty popular.
• Google key fob: Optimizes searches for your house keys.
• Google post-it notes: Handy for reminders, comes with subtle recruiting ad.
• Google notepad: With lenticular cover that shows a different image depending on your viewing angle.

I asked if they were giving away the heated toilet seats for which their offices are now famous. They would've come handy in the Boston Westin Waterfront's aggressively air-conditioned conference rooms.

Apparently, if you asked really nicely, the folks at the Google booth had some of their coveted long- and short-sleeved t-shirts to give away as well.

[Cross-posted to the Tucows Blog.]

Back during the days of the dot-com bubble, the quality and quantity of swag available at conferences was nothing short of amazing; I'd often have to buy a cheap duffel bag in order to haul the promotional booty, which I then gave as gifts to my co-workers. Here at the Ajax Experience, I'm feeling deja vu — while the “exhibit hall” outside the sessions is occupied by only a handful of vendors, the swag and prizes available from both them and the conference organizers is impressive.

One big surprise is AOL's table. Ever since The September That Never Ended, AOL has had a pretty bad rep among the developer set. In the meantime, other “portal” players — Google, MSN and Yahoo! as well as portal-like entities such as Amazon and eBay — have been boosting both traffic and developer love by becoming programmable by providing APIs, through which specialized sites and mash-ups can be built. What, you might ask, is AOL doing here?

It turns out that they're here to woo the developer community and promote their developer site, dev.aol.com and their APIs and encouraging developers to use AOL services for their mash-ups. They've been surprising a lot of developers (myself included) by opening their pitch with “Did you know that MapQuest is an AOL property?”

They realize that they're late to the party, so they've gone to some trouble to make sure that their swag is good. They've created a series of “mash-up” t-shirts, like the “Geek” one I'm showing in the photo below:

There are 6 shirts in the set. They're called “mash-up” shirts because you and your friends can wear different ones and rearrange yourselves — that's the “mash-up” — to form cute nerdy catchphrases. They've been very popular; people have been lining up for them here. Here's the set:

Some of these shirts may seem weird out of context: “Garden” will make people think you're into horticulture, and wearing the “unwalled”  may convince people that you're either homeless or have poor impulse control.

Also on their table: USB cable extension cords, developer-friendly stickers (I found the Unix-hacker-friendly chmod 777 aol sticker amusing), quick reference sheets and a postcard announcing a contest for the best mash-up using AOL APIs. They've also included an AOL-branded sprial-bound notebook in the knapsack given to every attendee (I'll cover the knapsack's contents in a later entry).

AOL's going to have a long, tough climb towards respectability, but they seem to be working hard at it.

[Cross-posted to the Tucows Blog.]