ugachaka :: Jacob was here

I just finished reading Game Over: Press Start to Continue: The Maturing of Mario by David Sheff and Andy Eddy awhile back. Since it had such a nice business slant, I posted my review over at my business blog at wannabeMogul.com–even though I really read the book because of my incredible urge as a childhood Nintendo fanboy.

If you haven’t read this book and want to learn more about the gaming industry, read it. I suggest checking Half.com or Amazon to try and pick up a used copy.

The book is a great read even if you aren’t a Nintendo fan.

The really interesting part of the book is how it sheds a light on what Microsoft might have been thinking when they launched the Xbox and how much Nintendo’s plan for the NES might have influenced that.

I have often pondered as Seth Godin did why more money isn’t saved by the consumer when they choose to make a purchase online rather than in a physical store.

When you purchase an item online rather than in a store, you could argue that you are saving the company the expense of stocking the item and hiring an employee to check you out and bag the item. If you are already covering the cost of shipping, shouldn’t there be more savings?

The same goes for online rentals. In reality, it’s just a file server spitting out the file to you, so why pay as much as you do a service like Blockbuster–or even Netflix–who stocks and distributes a physical copy of the media from a staffed distribution center? Even counting costs associated with producing and serving the file over the Internet and rights payments, Apple has to be making more money off each rental than Blockbuster.

Is Apple just trying to prevent a complete breakdown of the rental industry by pricing their rental service close to what is actually charged by Blockbuster or are they simply looking to make as much money as possible while they can?

It all started with a Kotaku post under “Rumor” that Jeff Gerstmann, longtime editor and game reviewer at Gamespot, had been fired because of pressure from Eidos, publisher of Kane & Lynch: Dead Men, after Gerstmann gave the game a 6.0/10. Eidos has a huge ad campaign running on Gamespot that had to be redirected from pointing to the review to pointing at the official Kane & Lynch site after word of the review score got out.

A Penny Arcade cartoon later, the Internet was full of gossip and no comments as everyone sought to get to the bottom of it all. The text review of the game was edited, and the video review disappeared under fishy circumstances.

Since then, there has been some moving and shaking, but nothing has been really determined. Gamers seem to be coming to a boil all over the Internet about this latest controversy because if indeed Gerstmann was fired mainly for not catering to the advertiser, it threatens game journalism’s integrity.

The most disturbing piece of the whole mystery comes from an anonymous commentator on Valleywag known as only “gamespot.” Kotaku summed up his several comments. Together, they paint the picture that Gamespot is becoming more and more advertiser-friendly and business-controlled with less editorial control. That’s not exactly what gamers want from their game review houses, so it is really getting people riled up now.

This whole situation is disgusting with each new bit of info popping out through the cracks. Enjoy your brand-building CNET family, you just pissed off your core readerbase. Have fun living that down. When you start wondering why your hits are plummeting into the crapper, just look back to this.

-Nikilii, commenter at Kotaku.com

My personal take on this whole situation is that there must be some hidden facts that we just don’t know yet about this situation. Even though the timing seems right if Gamespot was going to make a drastic move like this and get all the gamers upset–considering the big game push for the holidays is on a down swing–I don’t think that Gamespot would have overlooked the timing in relation to the Kane & Lynch fiasco. They would have had to realize that they should wait just a few weeks simply to offset any suspicious correlations.

Most journalistic institutions also understand the need to keep the business end of things away from the editorial side, and I wouldn’t jump to blame Gamespot of trying to combine the two until there was more hard evidence.

Rumor is that more will be heard officially on Tuesday.

Until then, gamers can only wait, argue and speculate over whether they should be suspicious of one of the major gaming hubs of the Web.

Google produced a little video showing off their new Android platform and what it can do.

I have to say it looks more impressive than my former Windows Mobile 5 device and smoother than the iPhone program transitions that I have seen on units that my friends own. Of course, this demo unit is probably a very high end piece of electronics, but still, it makes it look promising to hold out for this open source OS to hit mobile and make it all a little cleaner and “not evil” as is the Google way.

Considering the device is open source, the flexibility is bound to be endless, and I can’t wait to see what it will offer in order to take down the iPhone dominance since the iPhone hasn’t really opened up to third-party apps just yet.  Plus, the unit they demo plays Quake–nothing revolutionary to the smartphone market but a promising touch that maybe Google will pay some attention to making handheld gaming a more stable industry with Android.

Is it just me, or does that visual history in the Web browser remind you a lot of the iPhone/iTunes album view?

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FJHYqE0RDg&eurl=http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/11/13/i-for-one-welcome-our-android-overlords/[/youtube]

Twittervision. I am not sure where I came upon this link now…probably one of my various RSS feeds, digg surfs or podcasts. I just bookmarked it in Firefox at the time and have since come back to it two or three times to see what the latest developments are.

At first, it was just a cool way to visually see where all the public twitters were in real time. It makes Twitter–which for all its great attributes is a pretty bland site for decorative content–into a more visual experience. Then I noticed this link at the bottom that took me to the really cool feature–Flickrvision.

I can’t say that I have signed up and tried out the site myself. I am not a big photosharer on the Web more than just the occasional flickr album to share photos with friends. From the looks of it, it is a cool little system for sharing photos with friends and vicariously living in other locales.

I have played around with the RSS fees through the Google screensaver and wish there were more ways to take advantage of RSS feeds of photos. This app is a very nice addition to the mix.

Imagine journalistic coverage of the next Katrina or tsunami if this app is in existence. Rather than wait for news and sights on the Web, you could watch a flood of photos in real time to see what was happening and have them marked on the map. You could track the spread of a hurricane across the state through those members taking photos and uploading them.

If someone was truly ingenious, they could develop a way to place a snippet of this system of just one part of the map into a news story online instead of a photo. As the readers find the story, they could see updated shots of the lastest news story and get a greater, deeper feel for the story. The captions can even be added by actual citizens who are uploading the photo and could narrate the story as it happens. A really cutting-edge interactive news service should jump on this bandwagon. All that you would really need would be some kind of tagging system to categorize the feeds coming into your story.

Another possible use could be live photo feeds from actual soldiers in Iraq or other foreign engagements. Granted, the news wouldn’t really be able to get access to all of these photos, but the military could have some Metal Gear Solid kind of real-time mass army control going on if they could get some system like developed.

The app seems pretty heavy on my computer, which usually runs pretty well, but the photos right now are pretty weak as far as content–mostly just family albums and posed pictures that should be on cuteoverload.com. Nothing live and controversial. Just wait til the paparazzi gets a celebrity tracker like this put together. You could see where Paris and Britney Spears are doing simultaneously wherever they happen to be getting arrested around the globe.

Can’t wait to see what people could actually use this for in the event of the next worldwide news event.

As some of you may NOT realize, before Mark Cuban was famous for his moves on Dancing with the Stars, he was (and is) a sort of Internet celebrity. Not the YouTube kind. The kind that had a great idea and followed his intuition to walk away pre-Internet bust and go on to own the Dallas Mavericks (and make them awesome, by the way).

He recently posted up some older posts about his life pre-Internet fame and fortune, and although I have read his back story before, I found his take on everything extremely candid and inspirational.

The up and coming of Mark Cuban:

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

…and after you get through those, keep reading his Success and Motivation posts. Golden.

Makes me want to pursue my own ideas sooner rather than later.

Looks to be an interesting concept. There is even one contestant from Austin and multiple from Texas. Sad that the Internet has to suffer the plague of reality shows same as television now, but this one I might not actually mind. Episode 1.

In my travels around my RSS feeds in Google Reader, I stumbled upon a link to WebbAlert.

Apparently, outside of her usual gig on X-Play, Ms. Morgan Webb is also producing her own daily podcast of the latest in tech news. [Sneakily enough, her Wikipedia entry has already been updated to reflect her new podcast, which apparently began on August 2, 2007.] You can view the latest videos right on the WebbAlert site or subscribe to the podcast through email, iTunes or other readers.

Her coverage seems a little less consumer focussed than the already prevalent TeXtra Podshow hosted by Natali Del Conte. Natali tends to focus in on news pertaining to consumer projects and consumer tools online like Google’s online offerings, laptops and media players. Morgan seems to have more links from Red Herring and business-to-business news.

The video blog runs Monday through Thursday, and as the first episode explains, she wants this video podcast to catch people up who may have missed their daily dose of the blogosphere. The business focus probably will work for this topic because it will be the busier entrepreneur types that won’t be able to catch their daily dose of blogs and podcasts.

It sounds like a good idea. I am not hating on her for finding a new hobby outside of X-Play, but I was amazed to see her branching out. I hadn’t even heard about it until I suddenly just saw her online.

Catch the initial episode–dated August 2.

Recent studies picked up on digg show that the college campus is the hotbed of new business tech and entrepreneurship. More and more college kids are emerging from school with their first spot as CEO and a diploma or maybe not even a diploma.

The 30 under 30 special is the annual Who’s Who of young entrepreneurs list by Inc.com. This year’s highlighted the youth factor.

#27 Benjamin Sann started BestParking.com, giving you the info to find the cheapest place to park in major metro areas and is just 19

#10, 11, 12 The Cooks teenagers started up myYearbook.com to chase on Facebook and MySpace’s heels

#4 Sam Altman’s Loopt is used by Boost mobile to let users see where their friends are. Creepy to some but maybe the next daily convenience for the MySpace and Facebook generations. He just became old enough to drink a year ago.

#2 Sean Belnick supplies the Pentagon and Microsoft at age 20 with BizChair.com

#1 Ben Kaufman’s Mophie helps protect your iPod from getting scuffed and scratched in style with projections of making $5 million at age 20

One can’t help but be jealous…

Just as I finish up talking about the growing threat of Facebook to companies like Google, I also have to post on the hot water Google is currently facing on its own.

Google has become too big for its own good. As #1 in an industry, they are under fire in the same way Microsoft was a few years ago (and, to some extent, remains).

The problem always comes when you hit #1: the consumers begin to stop trusting you and your competitors look for ways to exploit or prosecute your large market share status. It is a very dangerous place to be.

Google is already coming under fire over acquisitions, privacy and slew of other issues. A company that could do no wrong now might be the devil in sheep’s clothing according to some. It is not a comfortable place for the company that once was the Internet’s little darling of search.

People want blood and are already looking towards the next killer app–which will kill Google. This killer might be coming sooner than people think with companies like Facebook around and threats from other Internet darlings like Wikipedia coming on the horizon.

It is painful to watch, but nothing proves the circle of life theory better than the rise and fall of consumer love with a tech company these days. Good luck, Google. I love your stuff, but you are going to need every business maneuver you got to survive the next couple of years without losing your #1 spot.