Negative Approach

Opening up video game pitches and gameplay design

Dave Rosenberg — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 03:45:00 GMT

James Goddard, CEO and founder of game studio CrunchTime Games, Inc., and professor of game development at University of Advancing Technology recently published the documents that got his game Shred Nebula the greenlight from Microsoft for the Xbox platform.

GameCareerGuide has his pitch paper and a manuscript required by Microsoft ...

Video game violence is a bad influence, but Facebook groups may be worse

Dave Rosenberg — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 02:04:00 GMT

In the past I've lobbied for the Wii to become the violent video game platform of choice, and in the process heard comments suggesting that video game violence was a problem for kids.

I'm here to admit that it's probably true that violent video games are bad ...

Taking my Mule hat off and starting something new

Dave Rosenberg — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 19:10:00 GMT

It's a big day today. After two and a half years I've decided to transition out of my operating role at MuleSource and will be devoting my full time efforts to a new company I have been working on. It's clear that I am a glutton for ...

For game consoles, an $8 billion Net target

Dave Rosenberg — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 10:34:00 GMT

Internet-connected game consoles will generate $8 billion in revenue for the Big Three companies through online content and services in 2013, according to a report released Thursday by research firm Parks Associates.

Clearly, console games aren't going away in the next five years. And if $8 billion in revenue can be generated just through services, then they are unlikely to go away for a much longer period of time.

I wrote previously that a more-likely scenario than the death of the console is one in which the console can play games of all types, including those that are browser-based or require a download installation.

In another post on video game "megatrends," I noted that Internet connectivity is key to extending the commercial lifespan of games and also provides monetization methods beyond sale of the actual games. "The ability to download new content or play against others online extends the lifespan and the potential audiences," I wrote. ...

Windows XP remains dominant in Japan

Dave Rosenberg — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 19:45:00 GMT

XP still dominates Japan

(Credit: What Japan Thinks)

Vista launched in Japan just over 19 months ago. Coincidentally, I was in Tokyo at the time and wrote about the launch on my old blog where I noted a serious advertising blitz (along with every electronic store breaking the release date ...

Web-oriented architecture and the rise of pragmatic SOA

Dave Rosenberg — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 18:17:00 GMT

Web-oriented architecture (WOA), a descriptive term for a subset of service- oriented architecture (SOA), has recently arisen as the next buzz-phrase to help further confuse the IT architect.

WOA is simply a way of implementing SOA by creating services that are RESTful resources, allowing any service or data to be accessed with a URI. (REST, by the way, stands for representational state transfer. And URI is short for uniform resource identifier.)

For many scenarios, this method dramatically simplifies things over the traditional WS-* approach. WOA resources are stateless and self-descriptive. Additionally, building SOA across intra-enterprise and in-the-cloud services becomes much easier with WOA.

As defined by Gartner's Nick Gall (thanks to Rob Eamon for the pointer):
Long version: WOA is an architectural style that is a substyle of SOA based on the architecture of the www with the following additional constraints: globally linked, decentralized, and uniform intermediary processing of application state via self-describing messages.

Shorthand version: WOA = SOA + WWW + REST

To be clear, the WOA approach is not ideal for every scenario. As with any architectural style, there are trade-offs. Any application that requires a real-time, event-based action or response, for example, can't be easily built in the WOA way (at least without crippling the system with constant polling). For the enterprise architecture with any level of complexity, no one approach will fit all needs.

Add in the inevitable enterprise mix of legacy applications, existing investments in SOAP-style SOA, and point-to-point integration infrastructure, and it becomes clear that the true pure-play WOA will be all but nonexistent.

...

Google Chrome and the fear of Zunezilla

Dave Rosenberg — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 19:09:00 GMT

The buzz around Google's "Chrome" browser is unreal. I'm not sure if it's because we are so starved for innovation or because we really are just living in Google's world at this point.

Over at WSJ, Walt Mossberg cuts through much of the hype:

Chrome is ...

Oracle buys ClearApp, appears intent on owning everything

Dave Rosenberg — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 18:12:00 GMT

The last time I spoke to an Oracle bigwig they told me that the only way for them to continue to grow at such a furious pace was to buy companies that had meaningful revenue--upwards of $300 million is what it takes to move the needle even a little bit ...

$34.5 million spent on Facebook virtual goods?

Dave Rosenberg — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 16:44:00 GMT

Jeremy Liew of Lightspeed Venture Partners appears to have cracked the code on how much money Facebook is making from its sales of virtual goods.

The short answer: based on different calculations, between $28,500,000 and $43,500,000 in annual Facebook gift sales, with an average of about $...

Alfresco provides further proof that open source is mainstream

Dave Rosenberg — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 16:02:00 GMT

Alfresco has been on a roll lately. Word on the street is that Alfresco just nailed another quarter (That's eight straight quarters of growth and hitting its plan). This week Alfresco came out with some other cool news that I was forced pry out of of Matt Asay, as we both try to not shill for our own companies.

First, Alfresco and Adobe announced an extension of their previously announced partnership around Adobe Livecycle, with Alfresco now at the heart of Adobe's Acrobat.com document service. Acrobat.com combines the ability to create PDFs, share documents, host files, integrate web conferencing, and work with Adobe's web-based word processing system, Buzzword. It's a pretty cool service, and great that Alfresco is the core repository for it all.

Second, Alfresco got tipped by The 451 Group as the primary (I would say the only) competitor to Microsoft's ubiquitous SharePoint product:

Alfresco is ahead of the ECM pack with its SharePoint integration, says Kathleen Reidy, senior analyst at research firm The 451 Group. The most compelling short-term news is that they have that Office-level integration, Reidy says. That makes it a lot more viable for IT management to say, 'We're going to pull out the SharePoint Server or complement the SharePoint Server with Alfresco.'
...