Late last week it was reported that following Venezuela's lead in attempting to reduce "violent tendencies" in South American children, Brazilian Sen. Valdir Raupp has authored a bill that would make it a crime to make, import, or distribute "offensive" video games.
The goal of the bill is to "curb the manufacture, distribution, importation, distribution, trading, and custody, [and] storage of, the video games that affect the customs, traditions of the people, their worship, creeds, religions and symbols."
Where this ban, like many others, falls short is in assigning blame for societal ills to video games instead of dealing with larger social issues, including a lack of parental oversight. There are, no doubt, influences in Brazil that are different from the U.S., but video game ratings have proven to be an excellent example of an industry-wide standard that could easily be adopted internationally.
In a recent report, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) praised the video game industry for continuing "to have the strongest self-regulatory code" of all the entertainment sectors.
... Read moreinformation technology is expected to play an important part in the global economic recovery, according to a new survey released Wednesday.
Some 72 percent of business and information technology executives say their "organizations place greater value on the IT function today than they did before the economic crisis" and that they "view IT as an important part of their economic recovery efforts," according to Accenture's Global Survey on IT Investments.
This is not an unfamiliar sentiment and is one we've heard from United States CIO Vivek Kundra as he's attempted to use IT to kick start a variety of programs on the federal level that will set the pace for innovative new uses of technology across the globe.
The results of the Accenture survey are similar to last week's Goldman Sachs cautiously optimistic survey results that suggested IT spending would trend upward in 2010 and normalize to pre-recession levels with the majority of countries represented planning to increase investment selectively next year.
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Getting great publicity in the tech industry isn't as simple as following the right breadcrumbs. Based on feedback from some tech PR folks who I deal with at companies of varying sizes--publicly traded, VC-funded start-ups, and bootstrapped DIYers--here are five free tech industry PR resources that I would recommend. (If any tech PR folks out there have additional free resources they'd recommend, please comment.)
IT Memos
It can be incredibly painful to keep track of the thousands of tech events and speaking submission due dates each year. (Some--like RSA, Interop, CES, etc.--have lead times up to seven months in advance).
Keeping tabs on all the tech awards (like Webware 100, the Webbies, the Crunchies, etc.) and submission deadlines is no picnic either. And it's also dreadful to manually track "editorial calendars" (where tech publications often tip their hands on upcoming stories they are writing).
ITMemos is a free new e-mail alert from the team at IT Database that simply nudges subscribers about important upcoming opportunities in these areas. If you're not subscribed to this free alert, hundreds of tech PR people are finding out about/acting on these opportunities before you are, so GL.
(Disclosure: I am an advisor to IT Database.)
Help a Reporter Out
Many tech PR folks are familiar with the journalist/source-matching service called Profnet that used to charge an annual subscription fee leading a guy named Peter Shankman to do the end-around and start giving away the same service for free, while increasing the number of opportunities.
Sign up for the HARO newsletter and receive three daily digest e-mails that list out opportunities where reporters are searching for sources/comments for stories they are writing.
While "Tech" is just one section in the e-mail, and often you will open it without finding a relevant opportunity--it's totally worth it to subscribe for the times where you do come across a journalists' story that matches your company's tech category.
... Read moreAlthough it wasn't ratified until September, the 802.11n wireless networking standard has been around for quite some time. In fact, the seven-year journey to ratification officially involved more than 400 individuals ranging from equipment and silicon suppliers, service providers, systems integrators, consultant organizations, and academic institutions from more than 20 countries.
After reading that this de facto standard was now in fact an actual standard I asked Jay Botelho, director of product management at network monitoring and troubleshooting vendor WildPackets, if becoming a true standard means anything to the industry and the vendors that support it.
Q: What are the benefits of 802.11n?
Jay Botelho: The biggest benefit by far is more throughput--significantly more throughput--from a theoretical maximum of 54Mbps to 600Mbps with the right hardware configuration. It is this leap in throughput that makes applications like Voice over WLAN (VoWLAN) and even video over wireless feasible. It is also the reason why the claim is being made that 11n will drive more new installations to be wireless-only.
I wouldn't go so far as to say 11n is more viable than cable--each has its pros and cons. Cable (wired) handles unlimited users without effecting throughput, while wireless is shared - the more users the less throughput each one gets. On the other hand wireless is far less expensive and easier to deploy so this is a key benefit in new construction.
802.11n has been around forever it seems. Realistically, will ratification translate to a surge in deployments?
Botelho: Many enterprises held off with 11n upgrades (and therefore wireless upgrades in general) for fear that the ratified spec would be substantially different from the Draft2.0 spec (the one the Wi-Fi Alliance based its pre-ratification certification tests on). Now that this question is no longer an issue, and since there's probably some pent-up demand since wireless upgrades in general may have been put on hold, it is expected that there will be a surge in deployments. As an aside, there is very little difference between the Draft2.0 version and the ratified version.
As we move toward 2010, there is little question that mobile devices and smartphones will continue to have a huge impact on the market. Research firm Nielsen predicts that smartphones will dominate market share by the end of 2011, with the iPhone and Android-based phones taking the lead spots by a wide margin over traditional cell phones.
As devices mature, Wi-Fi connections become more ubiquitous, and 3G networks become more reliable, consumers will start looking for new ways to use their smartphones as replacements for other larger devices, such as PCs and TVs. One area that has been called out for growth is mobile video and TV, as well as streaming movies directly to a mobile device.
mSpot CEO and co-founder Daren Tsui made the case to me recently that full-length streaming movies will be important to consumers in 2010 because people want entertainment on the go and on demand. Research suggests that the adoption curve will be lead by young males 18- to 24-years-old and parents with young children looking to keep kids distracted.
Not surprisingly, mobile carriers are very supportive of mobile movies. According to Tsui, mSpot has been powering mobile movies on the Sprint wireless network for three years and is currently working with other carriers to bring the service to their user base. Realistically, carriers will always be happy about services they can offer and charge for, but the real question is if they could handle an influx of users sucking down huge amounts of bandwidth.
The obvious obstacle to be overcome is the strength of the data network. Streaming full-length movies to a phone is data-intensive, and therefore relies heavily on a strong, consistently reliable network. Assuming WiFi is available, this is a non-issue, but, as an example, AT&T's 3G network has struggled with the data usage of iPhone users and you can just imagine what will happen when millions of people start streaming movies.
Anecdotally, I can tell you that my wife and I bring an iPod Touch out with us to entertain my 2.5-year-old with various games and movies. Pocket-size mobile devices, iPod or otherwise, can be great learning tools as well as distractions when things are going sideways or when you just want to go to a restaurant and not chase a kid around. That said, my iPhone/AT&T network experience has been so spotty that I would likely opt to keep the content local, though in an ideal world new content could be downloaded in the background.
Assuming bandwidth is not an issue there are many possibilities for mobile content to take the place of traditional PCs or print media but in the near term mobile content will be only as good as its data connection.
Goldman Sachs' latest IT spending survey is out and it looks a tech-spending recovery is on the way for 2010. To a large extent, the data suggests not so much that spending is dramatically higher, but that it has normalized at pre-recessionary growth rates, rather than contracting as it has over the past several months.
Goldman is cautiously optimistic about 2010 spending, noting that much of it depends on the macro-economic environment driving more business spending. And while most areas will see growth counter to 2009's downward spiral, some areas such as off-shore development will feel significant retraction.
Regardless, the sentiments are positive and dramatically different than Goldman's report from November 2008 where IT spending was in a total death spiral. What a difference a year makes.
A few key points from the report:
- With recessionary buying cycle clearly through the trough, the remaining question centers on the pace of recovery for 2010.
- Infrastructure, application development, and systems integration remain top spending areas, especially as CIOs start to consider newer technologies such as virtualization and cloud computing.
- There is pent-up demand in hardware most notable, positive for storage and server/PC refresh.
- The appetite for offshore services appears to be below trend at current levels.
- HP, NetApp, CommVault, Red Hat, Riverbed, and Salesforce.com are notable names showing positive upward momentum in our latest survey.
In software, Red Hat and Salesforce.com showed strengthened results with VMware and Citrix remaining top of mind, which Goldman believes to be a good indication of internal and external cloud deployments gaining momentum.
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The Nintendo Wii remains a force to be reckoned with in the video game world and new survey statistics along with new revenue streams suggest that Nintendo has still has something up it's sleeve.
New survey data from Lottay, an online wish-list and gift giving site, shows that the Wii and its associated accessories will regain momentum during this year's holiday season.
The Wii and Wii-related gear were wished for twice as much as the Sony PS3 and Xbox 360 combined though 38 percent of people wanted something other than products--namely cash, and in one case, Satan (I assume for a visit, not as a full-time family member.)
And while a wish, or a request for a gift, is no guarantee that a product will actually sell, there is a dearth of exciting gifts for this holiday season, leaving room for the Wii and other less-new products to be successful.
Just a few weeks ago, Electronic Arts CEO John Riccitiello commented that the "Wii platform has been a little weaker than we had anticipated" but Nintendo of America's executive vice president of sales and marketing Cammie Dunaway was extremely positive about the current sales and the future growth.
But, the focus in the U.S. remains on selling more titles and accessories, not branching out into additional services such as we've seen with Microsoft's Xbox Live, which provides access to Facebook, Twitter, and Last.fm through the console.
Services supporting the Wii are much more sophisticated in Nintendo's home country of Japan, where the company previously launched an advertising program to turn family time into a commercial endeavor and a catering channel that lets users order food from a variety of vendors directly through the console, delivered directly to their front door.
This weekend Nintendo added to the Wii's variety of interactive offerings, with a paid video download service for Japan. "Theater no Ma" will offer a range of movies, anime and other paid content from providers including Walt Disney and Sesame Workshop.
Downloading rental content onto game consoles and set-top boxes has been common in the U.S for awhile, but the reason this service could prove meaningful in Japan is because Nintendo researchers previously found that 87 percent of Wii users use the console on the biggest screen in the house, which is still the one in the living room.
If smartphones aren't already helping us navigate the modern world, they are certainly on track to do so soon.
In Gartner's top 10 predictions for how consumers will use their mobile devices in the year 2012, location-based services landed the No. 2 position, just behind money transfer.
There aren't many surprises on the list, released Wednesday by the analyst firm, though I would have expected to see gaming enter the top 10 consumer applications for mobile devices within the next two years, especially considering the firm previously predicted that mobile gaming revenue would experience a compound annual growth rate of 10.2 percent between 2007 and 2011 with worldwide end-user spending reaching $6.3 billion in 2011.
Gartner's list is based on impact to consumers and industry players, with consideration of revenue, loyalty, business model, consumer value and estimated market penetration. Depending on where you focus geographically, I would imagine that the order of this list could change pretty dramatically. For instance, mobile money transfer is popular in Asia and emerging nations in Africa, but far less common in the United States.
As with any other list of analyst predictions, there are a huge number of variables that can affect trends from one year to the next. Money transfer and near-field communication services are applications that could function on any kind of mobile device, whereas browsing and advertising are likely more relevant to smartphones, which Gartner expects to account for 45.5 percent of all mobile phone sales in 2013, up from just over 9 percent in 2008.
Previously, Gartner projected mobile ad spending worldwide to grow 74 pecent in 2009 to $913.5 million, but not really accelerate until 2011, when advertisers are expected to boost mobile spending as part of an overall shift toward digital marketing channels. By 2013, the firm expects mobile ad spending to surpass $13 billion, with the Asia-Pacific region leading the way, followed by North America and Europe.
Gartner's top 10 consumer mobile applications for 2012:
- Money transfer
- Location-based services
- Mobile search
- Mobile browsing
- Mobile health monitoring
- Mobile payment
- Near-field communication services
- Mobile advertising
- Mobile instant messaging
- Mobile music
Research and consulting firm Tower Group predicted earlier this year that the number of people actively using mobile banking in the U.S. "will grow by more than five times by the end of 2013" representing a compound annual growth rate of 51.8 percent.
Gartner's complete list with accompanying analysis is available in the firm's newsroom.
I received a note from Andy Gilbertson, one of the developers behind Parallel Kingdom, a location-based mobile massively multiplayer (or MMO) game that uses your GPS location to place you in a virtual world atop the real world. The game seems like an obvious winner for the iPhone, but the team has been struggling to get it past Apple's app review policies.
Gilbertson's travails with the iPhone application acceptance process illustrates why Apple's gating of applications is a troubling reality for developers--and for consumers. And while it's understandable to have a gating mechanism in place, if Apple wants to remain at the top of the mobile application space, it so heavily dominates, the company needs to commit more resources to not just the application review process, but in communicating with developers. As of my last e-mail exchange with Gilbertson, Apple had not responded for more than six days. My call to App Store PR has gone unreturned for about 18 hours as of this post.
Apple's acceptance policies can be shockingly difficult to navigate, so much so that some have marveled at the fact that an ecosystem could build up at all.The fact that iPhone applications are written in Objective C, a previously uncommon programming language, is in and of itself a show-stopper for many developers, but that obviously hasn't stopped development.
Earlier today Ars Technica wrote about several prominent developer including Facebook's Joe Hewitt, Second Gear's Justin Williams, and longtime Mac software developer Rogue Amoeba, all of whom recently "decided that enough is enough" and that they would abandon iPhone development efforts. And while each cites different reasons, the underlying thread is that they've had enough of waiting for Apple to distribute their apps, an instantaneous effort on the Internet.
While restrictive or complex policies are unlikely to stop the iPhone juggernaut, they can be very painful reminders of what would happen if we regress 15 years to the unfortunate walled gardens of AOL. Tim O'Reilly reminded us of the risk of the closed Web recently, commenting that "anyone can put up a Web site, or launch a new Windows or Mac OS X or Linux application, without anyone's permission. But put an app onto the iPhone? That requires Apple's blessing."
It's unlikely that a few developers falling off of the iPhone train will have a dramatic effect on the growth of the market, but this kind of unhappiness can easily lead to a backlash. The big question is if another mobile platform can take the place of the iPhone.
Android has arguably the best chance, but it currently struggles due to immaturity of its own application ecosystem. Nonetheless, there is a huge revenue opportunity for an open-Web approach to mobile applications. It remains to be seen if Android can live up to the hype and not fall into the same trappings as the App Store. For all of Apple's sins in how they run that business, it's undeniable that it remains hugely successful.
With infrastructure services like Amazon EC2, Rackspace, and VMware making it easy to take advantage of the flexibility, portability, and reduced costs of cloud computing, it seems obvious to jump on the cloud bandwagon for new IT projects.
But, developers are generally left on their own to deal with the pain of deploying their apps to the cloud: configuring application servers, libraries, disk partitions, networking, clustering, service connections, and virtual private networks. After they get their app installed they also need to install management agents that run on top of the application layer.
If you really want to take advantage of the cloud and optimize return on investment, you'll want the on-boarding process to be easy and fast and you won't install that agent. Agent-based solutions are inherently inflexible. Deploying agent-based solutions in a cloud-based environment, which is, by definition, highly flexible, is often like trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. In agent-based solutions, hard-coded agents are installed on every machine to monitor the application. If a change to the application configuration occurs--such as the IT department adds a node or upgrades a component--the agents must be updated as well.
Each agent and management server must be configured separately with management and monitoring solutions generally not portable. When every change to an environment requires installation of multiple agents on each server and configuration of multiple management servers, it becomes a tall order to move an application from a traditional infrastructure to the cloud, or from one cloud infrastructure to another: private to public, public to hybrid, or hybrid to private.
How do you get around this so you can actually capitalize on the benefits of cloud computing? Go virtual. Move application management, including easy on-boarding, from above the application stack into the underlying virtual layer, along with the rest of the cloud infrastructure.
I was recently briefed by webappVM CEO Isaac Roth on how the company is pioneering this new approach. He said the virtual path allows you to actually realize all of the flexibility, portability, and reduced costs that come with the promise of cloud computing.
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