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 Electronic Arts' recent $400 million purchase of Playfish, social games are all the rage in today's tech industry. That's no surprise: lightweight games on social networks (which people usually play while they're goofing off at work) and social games have attracted huge player numbers with the biggest titles boasting 20 million to 60 million regular players.
City of Eternals.
(Credit: Ohai)But here's the worst kept secret about the genre: most social games aren't very, well, fun. They offer limited interactivity, game play challenge, and graphics. Consequently, players aren't invested enough to spend much money on them, especially compared to "hard-core" massively multiplayer-online (MMO) games. Even with the better social games, average revenue per users is less than a $1 per person.
By contrast, millions of World of Warcraft players willingly pay $15 a month in subscription fees alone. But, what MMOs like WoW have in revenue, they lack in growth due to the high technical hurdles and subject matter. WoW seems to have tapped out at around 12 million players, far less than the largest social games. And while the sustained revenue is great, attracting new players remains a challenge.
Enter City of Eternals, a Web-based MMO with a modern vampire theme from a new start-up called Ohai. After a long conversation with company CEO Susan Wu, a pioneer in the online gaming and virtual goods space, there are a number of reasons I think Ohai has the potential to succeed in the sweet spot between social games and hard-core gamer MMOs, and why the shift to social connection could become gaming's next big thing.
Ease of play
The biggest game platform isn't the Nintendo Wii or the iPhone, it's Flash, a browser plug-in installed on more than 99 percent of the world's PCs. An estimated 200 million people already play casual Flash-based games.
And while most MMOs require a huge client install, Ohai CTO and game industry veteran Don Neufeld (Everquest II, PlanetSide), and his development team (Free Realms, Lord of the Rings Online, Star Wars Galaxies, Dungeons and Dragons Online) have re-engineered Flash into an MMO platform that pretty much anyone can play, without having to install additional software or hardware upgrades. As Wu put it, this means Ohai can build "Games for your aunt who plays FarmVille on Facebook and your cousin who can't play World of Warcraft on his school PC."
Deep social network integration
City of Eternals is fully integrated with Facebook and soon Twitter, but that doesn't mean the game is only playable within the social network. Players' Facebook profiles follow them into the vampire world, so whenever you're curious, you can click on a fellow vampire, and check their Facebook profile. This is the first time I've seen this feature in any MMO, and it brings in some new possibilities--making it much easier to socialize (and of course flirt) within the game. Wu told me City of Eternals' gender spread is 50-50 (extremely rare, compared with male-dominated MMOs), so I wouldn't be surprised if it became a major online hotspot for socializing. Especially since the game isn't about geeky elves and orcs, but far more popular vampires--see below.
Subject matter
The Twilight book series has sold more than 85 million copies worldwide; the Underworld movie franchise has brought in more than $300 million in theatrical sales; and TV's True Blood and Vampire Diaries both have huge cult followings. Vampires are obviously pervasive throughout popular culture, but there's yet to be a full-fledged vampire MMO.
Still in Alpha stage, Wu told me that players average 12 logins per day in the game, with an average session length of 5 to 6 minutes, fulfilling one of the company's goals of making a "bite-sized MMO."
City of Eternals is Ohai's first of many of what they call "MMOs for everyone." Of course, there's still a lot of unknown variables. The vampire craze may wane too soon, and as the Electronic Arts purchase suggests, the competition is huge. Maybe I'm crazy, but by next year, I think there's a good chance the most popular MMO on the market won't be World of Warcraft, but City of Eternals, or another game that crosses the boundaries between MMO and socialized gaming.
The cost benefits of virtualization are well-documented, allowing enterprises to significantly reduce the space and electrical power required to run data centers and streamline the management of an ever-growing number of servers.
Virtualization also provides means for expedient scalability. Given today's economic climate and cost-cutting mandates, it is not surprising that analyst firm Gartner recently predicted that 50 percent of workloads will run inside virtual machines by 2012.
What many organizations fail to understand, according to Amir Ben-Efraim, CEO of virtualization security provider Altor Networks, is that collapsing multiple servers into a single one with several virtual machines inside eliminates all firewall, intrusion detection, and other protections in existence. Physical security measures literally become "blind" to traffic between VMs, since they are no longer in the data path.
This echoes comments made by Gartner analyst Neil MacDonald, who wrote in a recent presentation titled "Securing the Next-Generation Virtual Data Center" (subscription required), that "most virtual machines you deploy will be less secure than the physical systems they replace," and that "virtualization will radically change how you secure and manage computing environments."
VMware recently launched a partner program to help ISVs develop solutions certified as "VMsafe." VMsafe provides API sharing through a secure container, enabling partner companies to access virtual environments. This virtual security technology provides fine-grained visibility over virtual-machine resources, including monitoring every aspect of the system with the ability to address previously undetectable viruses, rootkits, and malware before they can infect a system.
I spoke to Ben-Efraim to better understand the issues around VM security and for what users should be on the lookout. According to him, there are two common approaches that use existing methods to secure virtual-network traffic: using VLANs to separate and control communication between VMs; and taking software-based firewalls and running them as agents on each VM. Unfortunately, both of these approaches fall short.
VLAN segmentation extends the notion of LAN resource segmentation to include VMs. The approach essentially requires that VMs, which can naturally be grouped (i.e. by function or user base), be isolated from other VMs by use of virtual switches and routing (i.e. the human resources VLAN contains HR-serving VMs). However, VLAN segmentation is not a permanent solution to securing environments because of networking complexities, performance degradation, and security limitations of the approach, Ben-Efraim said.
... Read more
Most businesses seek competitive advantage through some kind of change. Whether they want to beat the competition to market with a new service or introduce new product categories, disruption is the norm.
The challenge in today's IT-centric world is that every one of those disruptions requires a software change, introducing the potential for downtime and lost revenue.
Change control and the associated risk mitigation is a big problem that every large organization faces. Last year, the London Stock Exchange crashed during a software change and was down for more than seven hours, costing traders millions, if not billions of dollars in lost business. This year we've had high profile outages at Salesforce.com, Twitter, and Amazon's EC2, among others, affecting tens of millions of people.
No company is immune to this type of risk and companies that want to stay on the leading edge need to embrace these changes in order to stay competitive.
Coverity, a software integrity firm perhaps best known for its SCAN project of open-source software sponsored by the Department of Homeland Security thinks it has the preventive medicine to help organizations avoid the inevitable errors, defects, and failures that software change can introduce.
The company's latest release, Coverity 5, promises to mitigate the business risk of software changes across an organization's entire software portfolio. It claims this is the first product that lets developers automatically map and identify how a single defect impacts multiple code bases, projects, and products. Through a unified defect management interface, it also can help organizations review, prioritize and triage their C/C++, Java and C# defects in a single work flow.
This approach lets an organization quickly answer five key questions of software change management:
- How do I find defects introduced by changes?
- How do I know the severity of new defects?
- How do I know the impact to my code, my projects, my products?
- How do I fix them fast?
- How do I know I fixed them?
Today, market opportunities are changing faster than businesses can deliver. When your organization changes software, how quickly can answer the five questions above?
The Tennessee Valley Authority is the nation's largest public power provider serving approximately 9 million consumers in seven southeastern states. The organization also happens to be a big supporter of open-source projects, including Hadoop, a tool designed for deep analysis and transformation of very large data sets.
Earlier this year, the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) announced that it open sourced its data system used to collect data from smart grid devices called Phasor measurement units (PMUs). The data collection system is known in the industry as a Super Phasor Data Concentrator (SuperPDC), which can be used to determine the health of a power grid.
The open-source version of the SuperPDC is now called the "OpenPDC." I spoke to both Ritchie Carroll (RC), the project's creator, and Josh Patterson (JP), the person responsible for introducing Hadoop to the project, to discuss what the OpenPDC is and why TVA turned to Hadoop in building the system.
What sort of data volumes are you working with?
RC: Currently there is around 20 TB of archived data, we expect this to grow quickly as a result of the SmartGrid stimulus funding which includes the addition of 850 phasor measurement devices. This may well grow the archive to half a Petabyte within the next few years.
How is this data currently captured and managed? Is any data discarded?
JP: Data is collected directly from field devices at 30 times per second. This data is then time-aligned and processed in real-time--all data gets captured into a binary data file as time-series data for mass processing by Hadoop.
RC: No data is currently discarded, if we get to the point of needing to discard data because of cost--this will be a decision based on weighed importance of collected data. It is likely the data around major events will never be deleted because it will always be valuable for future student researchers. There is also value in being able to go back in time and look for newly discovered event signatures to see how long they might have been occurring.
... Read moreMicrosoft released on Thursday a new position paper, "Privacy in the Cloud Computing Era: A Microsoft Perspective," that includes information about the remote storage and processing of personal information.
Privacy and security concerns continue to be a primary argument that cloud naysayers use against storing data and applications on the Internet. Big IT vendors and service providers like Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard will sooner or later be forced to take the cloud seriously or risk missing out on the whole next wave of IT consumption. And their large enterprise customers will expect them to offer cloud services with the appropriate levels of privacy and security measures in line with their business needs.
The interesting thing about this paper is that Microsoft takes surprisingly minimal responsibility for the data it will manage:
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(Credit:
IBM)
IBM on Wednesday announced a program designed to help educators and students pursue cloud-computing initiatives and better take advantage of collaboration technology in their studies.
The IBM Cloud Academy, announced at the Educause annual conference, includes a global roster of educational institutions as initial participants. Educause is a nonprofit association whose mission is to advance higher education by promoting the intelligent use of information technology.
IBM will provide the cloud-based infrastructure for the program, with some basic collaboration tools available at the outset. IBM's LotusLive service provides the basis for the new offering. Participants will immediately be able to do some very basic tactical functions on the new system:
- Create working groups on areas of interest to the education industry
- "Jam" on new innovations for clouds in education-related areas with IBM developers
- Work jointly on technical projects across institutions
- Share research findings and exchange new research ideas
Shared research across universities and other higher-learning institutions remains a vital part of technological innovation, but many programs don't have formal tool sets in place. Cloud services are a logical place to run these types of programs, especially as international groups need immediate access to data from their partners.
... Read more
Amazon Associates is the partner program the company uses as part of its affiliate advertising programs, allowing customers to make money advertising Amazon products.
Associates can now simply click a link in the toolbar to send a link (replete with sales-y text) to Twitter as part of their shopping and selling experience. Amazon gets a sale, Twitter gets traffic, and the associate gets revenue share. What could possibly go wrong?
Linking to Amazon or other online retailers is obviously nothing new, though Amazon has been particularly successful in using its link networks for both sales and to garner higher Google rankings for organic advertising.
This new program does introduce an issue related to link fraud, where spammers and scammers leverage URL-shortening services for spam links. Currently there is no way to verify that the link you click actually goes to Amazon. It's a bit surprising that it decided to use an URL-shortener that it doesn't own, though I suppose the network effect of the URLs helps perpetuate the life of the links.
There is also a risk of nondisclosure wherein in Twitter users attempt to push products that offer some kind of gain to them that they don't clearly state to you. While I understand the argument for disclosure on blogs and media in general, Twitter remains a playground for people to post whatever they want. I highly doubt all the celebrities with accounts would bother wasting their precious time if they weren't posting for their own gain.
Interestingly, there is no mention of whether Twitter is an Amazon Associate, suggesting that Twitter won't see any of the revenue share. I'd like to think that they cut a deal that gives them a piece of the pie, but to date we haven't seen Twitter monetize itself too effectively.
Twitter is quickly becoming the flash news vehicle for everything from news alerts to product placement. And based on a very quick review of my Bitly account, Twitter users just love to click on links. But, I still have to wonder if Twitter will ever get beyond its current role as a marketing tool?
