Don't miss the ATEC Showcase Saturday night @ 7. We'll have a sneak preview of our island in Second Life. Thanks to Russell, Christi, Steve, and Jeff for their tireless work! We'll have a full opening next month.
posted by Dean Terry at 8:00 PM
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posted by Dean Terry at 1:10 AM
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Would some people rather watch two guys watch a sitcom on YouTube than watch the sitcom itself? Sure looks like it. Check out the stats.
posted by Dean Terry at 10:18 PM
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posted by Dean Terry at 9:34 PM
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Right now this tide shift isn't a smooth thing. In fact, it's a fight. That fight is between independence and dependence; between liberty and slavery; between free markets and your-choice-of-silo; between what you want to do and what Apple or Microsoft or Intel or Real or Google will let you do.
It's a fight between those who value music, artwork, video and writing, and those who wish to reduce all those goods to the container cargo they call "content".
It's a fight that has the The Net and its founding values on one side. On the other side is an unholy alliance between the "content" industries, Consumer Electronics and the carriers who still think the Internet is about delivering industrial goods in packeted forms to our TVs, desktops and MP3 players.
It's a fight between two overlapping circles in a Venn diagram. The larger circle is The Net: an open noncommercial environment that supports countless commercial markets, including the one for Consumer Electronics goods. The smaller circle is the unholy alliance that thinks its circle is bigger.
The Net will win, because its circle is actually the world on which the smaller circle resides--whether or not the smaller circle likes that fact.
Our job, among many others, is to break up and otherwise thwart that unholy alliance
posted by Dean Terry at 12:27 PM
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posted by Dean Terry at 11:25 AM
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posted by Dean Terry at 7:25 PM
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Nice piece from David Carr on how a video chat trumped "Lost"
Anecdotally, I can say that our family ends up finding the remote less often. Tally up all the bereft fathers video-chatting with college-age daughters, bored teenagers making videos for other bored teenagers and geeks mashing up existing content to hilarious effect, and there is ferocious, idiosyncratic competition for consumers’ attention.
The threat isn’t new media displacing old media as much as personalization. Media has become something people make, forward, link and program.
Newspapers felt the pain of technological disruption first, when people had dial-up modems capable of transmitting modest, largely text-based data. As fatter pipes developed, music performed a jailbreak, leaving behind a maimed industry. And now, with the number of ever-faster connections spreading and the advent of the Flash player, television seems positioned as roadkill, with great big movie files soon to fall after that.
Time to Shift. Time To Time Shift. Time is Shifting...
posted by Dean Terry at 4:50 PM
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Here's your shot. We talk a lot around here about the next step in online worlds. Well here's a VC (venture capitalist) who is looking for pitches:
The Next Massively Entertaining Idea
The Investor: Bill Gurley, general partner, Benchmark Capital
What he's backed: Linden Lab, Shopping.com, Zillow.com
What he wants now: The next massively multiplayer online hit, whether it's built around a core game like World of Warcraft or a virtual community like Neopets. "Anything," Gurley says, "where people are entertained massively together." Benchmark has placed some big bets in the MMO sector, including Linden Lab, maker of Second Life, and Sulake, which runs Habbo Hotel, a game site geared for teens. "I think we're far from finished in this space," Gurley says. "There is a lot of room for new ideas going after different areas of interest."
Gurley will not hazard a guess on what demographic could be ripe for the next MMO hit. "These things are like catching lightning in a bottle," he says. "There's an element of game design and social curiosity that you have to get just right."
What he'll invest: $5 million for a working game or site that shows MMO growth potential. "It's so hard to predict what will take off," Gurley says, "that it's easier to pay more for something that's further along."
Send your pitch to: bgurley@benchmark.com
This is no joke folks - there's huge opportunity in this space!
posted by Dean Terry at 5:55 PM
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posted by Dean Terry at 1:48 PM
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The main factors affecting Internet use are age and broadband access, said the report, entitled "European Media Consumption Consumer Survey 2006".
So for example France, which has the highest rates of broadband household access, also registers the highest average hours spent online whereas Germany ranks lowest in both cases.
But Germany has the highest weekly TV consumption time at 14 hours due to widespread availability of free-to-air multi-channel TV.
The Internet has overtaken newspapers and magazines as Europeans' main source of news and feature-type information, according to a new study.
posted by Dean Terry at 11:32 AM
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STEPHEN KENNY remembers being in high spirits one evening after imbibing “one martini or maybe three ” on his way home from work. He was in such a good mood, in fact, that he decided to get his girlfriend a present.
“I logged on to this luxury jewelry Web site and I bought her a pair of $1,500 earrings — or what I thought were $1,500 earrings,” said Mr. Kenny, who works at an intellectual property law firm in Burlington, Vt. “Maybe my vision was blurred or I just missed a decimal point, but they turned out to be $15,000.”
posted by Dean Terry at 7:34 PM
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posted by Dean Terry at 10:58 AM
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posted by Dean Terry at 5:41 PM
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Machinima has made it's way into prime-time!
I was watching the season premere of South Park tonight, and this time, the boys were playing World of Warcraft. About half of the show was shot using the game engine. And they did a great job of it. The voices were sincing up quite well with the avatars within the game. None of the videos have popped up on the web yet, since the episode just aired, but I found a video that has been hiding in the Blizzard website promoting the episode.
posted by Dean Terry at 2:35 PM
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posted by Dean Terry at 10:23 PM
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After 3 hours of xml and CSS I came up with this: itchypants.blogspot.com. Guess what, the most amazing thing happened last night. My friend and I were playing last night on a server and this guy was on... I got into the chopper with him and he tried doing the glitch that I posted 20 minutes prior. He crashed and was unsuccessful. I told him where he saw that glitch and he needs to go to itchypants.blogspot.com to learn how to do it and he said he saw it on ITCHYPANTS on youtube.com. ...
We told him that we were itchypants and he was shocked as we were. We couldn't believe that we ran into someone who knew who we were. He told us that we were celebs on youtube.com for BF2 that the explanations help. He was also telling me how funny some parts were and that we were awesome. hahah My friend and I were completely in shock that we ran into someone who knew who we were and actually appreciated what we do.
I think that woke my friend up because now he wants access to the blog so he could add stuff to it too. hahaha. You might be right about the whole celeb thing. I never thought it would actually work.
I have over 9000 views on youtube and only 155 on my blog. The first reason why I redesigned my blog is that I read that a redesign will help traffic. Second reason is that I didn't like the crappy templates they had. I want to somehow bring the viewers to my blog so on this last video I slapped my logo and site on a title screen on the video so if anyone links it they will see the blog. Do you know of any Gaming Blogs?
posted by Dean Terry at 8:29 AM
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posted by Dean Terry at 6:14 PM
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posted by Dean Terry at 9:19 AM
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posted by Dean Terry at 1:52 PM
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