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stewie and underdog may try, but charlie brown takes the coke.

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filed under: cellphones

continue reading hp's ipaq 900 business communicator gets handled on video

a painter on open air

by harold goldberg

during the past few days, you've been privy to the fascinating, decades-ling history of trip hawkins from the man himself. during these interview sessions, i found that hawkins, a pioneer and innovator since the early days of gaming, is someone you just want to believe. said one major developer, ?if i was looking at a red building across the street, and trip said it was blue, he?d be able to make me believe it was blue.? now, hawkins is excited about games and social experiences on mole phones. he?s trying to innovate once again with digital chocolate. but the question remains, can mole gaming experiences be accepted by m audiences around the world? hawkins thinks it can happen, and he?s putting his heart and soul into making that bet happen each and every day.

hg: we?ve talked about how casual cell phone games can be made more creative and compelling by adding social elets to the experience. that?s fine. but when are mole games going to take off?

th: you know, that is a really interesting question. the mole market has evolved historically at a pace that conforms to what the carriers are willing and able to do. i think that pace is accelerating now, and there are other independent accelerators including things like wifi, the federal auction for a broader spectrum band, and the iphone. those are catalysts that will open up more opportunities for growth. but that?s the future.

hg: so what are you doing for us right now?

th: what we?re trying to do with the café series within the existing mole infrastructure is to bring those web 2.0 features over to the phones. we enable the viral spread by allowing the sending of sms messages and emails and allowing there to be free trials of games. we also allow for cross-promoting of one game to another. we actually are starting to have some very strong evidence that that works. as an ilration, one of the first operators that launched was 3 in italy. they did an mms marketing campaign. so the users got, via mms, to see some screenss of café. they were offered a link they could click to get a free trial: 50 percent of them did so, which is a very high trial rate. then, of those who tried it, more than 50 percent bought it.

hg: that makes sense because one of the problems with mole phone games is that the games are utterly difficult to find on the phone.

th: it?s a much better model than just waiting for the public to show up at the carrier deck and deciding to purchase something after reading one line of text. the idea of the carrier deck was, ok, we?re going to put up all these ring tones and games on these listings for the handset. and we?re just going to wait for the public to figure it out. clearly, the public is still waiting. the café series is bringing a next generation of thinking to the mole phone, including that all-important viral spread and community features. we continue to have major carriers feature the café games and we?ll have sweepstakes promotions as well.

hg: is the new nokia n-gage platform important to that mix?

th: they?re a little t of a next generation story themselves. we all know what happened the first time around with the n-gage. and there were many valuable lessons that were learned.

hg: what did you think of the original n-gage, the infamous taco-shaped phone?

th: it had higher performance technology than the typical mole phone. but the problem was it was an expensive phone. when you look at the price of it and you compare it at the time with other game systems in the same price range, it was not a good enough game system, either. then, of course, there were usality issues, including the fact that the games were really g. so they couldn?t be downloaded over the air. the typical n-gage game was 32 megabytes and the networks were all too slow at that time.

but they learned a lot, and put that knowledge to work on the new platform with many mole phones. if you look at where they are today, they?re selling at a clip of 50 million smart phones a year. and that number keeps going up. smart phones and smart phone capality as a function of moore?s law will continue to shrink into a feature phone form factor which will make them less bulky and cheaper. so you?ll find more of the public willing to carry one around. with the new n-gage and the iphone as well, there?s a certain appeal that helps to educate the market. so more people start figuring out that it?s there and say, i want to do that, too. hopefully, that will occur with games on the n-gage as well.

hg: are they really thinking about games in the right way this time?

th: they?re thinking of the phones as a software platform. and they?ll continue to work this into their handset roadmap, so you?ll get to a point where most of the handset will have the capalities to include great games. more and more customers will be moving up the food chain to get to that level of performance.

hg: do you think enhanced are important to mole gamers?

th: certain genres need more than others. what we?ve learned about the casual gamer is that simplicity and convenience are more important than the . one example of that is, if you?re running something in your browser, it may not be as powerful as if you downloaded a g, c++ coded file and installed it. but a lot of people don?t want to go through the hle of an installation. so clearly, if you have this larger and different audience of people that are looking for casual and social entertaint, they?re not as focused on whether they have the immersive of madden football, grand theft auto, second life or world of warcraft.

hg: it seems as though there will always be a nasty divide between e and casual gamers.

th: without any disrespect to those major brands and the audiences they can attract, they are tiny audiences compared to the m audiences something more casual. so you have all these wo playing casual games and chatting, making the experience almost the modern equivalent of a sewing bee. it?s like guys doing fantasy sports on the web. it?s far gger than madden, and it?s simpler, more accessible and more social. that?s been our direction from the beginning. the café series is sort of the first, full-grown expression of that, and the fact that nokia is on board is great.

hg: the café series is happening right now. what are you doing beyond that?

th: from there, we?re moving to more directly social services like avapeeps. you can make your own avatar, go on dates with other avatars and then have others get stories about what happened. so you can build the social life of your avatar. so it?s like a tomagotchi. we think that could be the next g thing.

http://www.digitalchocolate.com/

http://www.digitalchocolate.com/displayallapps.do

i don?t know what the victoria beckham is wearing at the cfda fashion awards but it looks like she’s got a dead animal on her chest. it?s a good thing we get to see some side action, because it?s the only saving grace with this fashionista. anyway, posh needs to dress up like she did in the old days and show off her freakish funbags again. that?s what made her famous and now she?s be pretty boring.

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pos: pacificcoastnews

here is a quick list of 10 cool things most people don’t know that the mac can do. nothing really fancy but still worth checking out if your a mac owner - you might learn a neat little feature.

top 10 things you forgot your mac can do [lifehacker.com]

i will admit, i was entirely ased upon reading this story from nick carr, who has a knack for writing pieces that get a lot of attention by baiting his hook with contrarian link chum. heck, he's really good at it, and i have a lot of respect for nick. so i'll take the bait.

his piece starts by conjuring hal, the famous ai which manipulates humans, then makes his case by citing his own "feeling" that google has changed his attention span to somehow prove that search and web browsing in general is making us stupid.

balderdash. what carr is really saying is this: people are not reading long narrative anymore, and that makes me and my pals sad. so let's blame the internet!

sounds an awful lot like the complaints we heard about tv making us stupid. did tv make us stupid? i dunno, ask steven johnson. i bet he has an opinion on this piece as well.

carr writes: "yet, for all that?s been written about the net, there?s been little consideration of how, exactly, it?s reprogramming us. the net?s intellectual ethic remains obscure."

so because nick hasn't up with a singular thesis as to what the "net's intellectual ethic" is, we must declare it's making us stupid, eh?

huh. he goes on to claim that google is, in essence, an industrial style factory driven by a philosophy that is mechanizing our collective intellect much like factory automation mechanized our collective workforce - in short, google is turn our minds into nothing more than collective cogs in some borg like hive mind. we're ed, and it's all google's fault.

puuuuuuuhhhhleezzze.

here's another quote: "the last thing these companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. it?s in their economic interest to drive us to distraction."

right. and that's why google encourages its workers to spend 20% of their time on pion projects. ok.

his conclusion: "as we to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence."

good lord. somehow carr seems to presume that there's simply nothing valuable occurring in our minds when we engage with the extraordinary new medium of the web. because we're starting to think in different ways, it must be bad. right? carr may believe that search and the internet make us stupid, but i will counter his personal, anecdote-driven conclusions with one of my own: when i am deep in search for knowledge on the web, jumping from link to link, reading deeply in one mot, skimming hundreds of links the next, when i am pulling back to formulate and reformulate queries and devouring new connections as quickly as google and the web can serve them up, when i am performing bricolage in real time over the course of hours, i am "feeling" my brain light up, i and "feeling" like i'm getting smarter. a lot smarter, and in a way that only a human can be smarter.

and i have a feeling i'm not alone. what do you guys think?