Hard to believe that China’s gaming companies rake in 30 percent of the world’s gaming revenue. But that is the claim of James Liu, COO of the Oak Pacific Interactive, a private Chinese Internet company.
Liu says the country’s slice should amount to between $4.5 billion and $5 billion this year.
Perhaps the market’s size is not a surprise considering the country has 1.3 billion residents, or about a fifth of the world’s total.
But there is more to it. Chinese apparently love to play. Some Chinese games have 1 million concurrent online users at peak periods, Liu said at the Social Gaming Summit in San Francisco.
Oak has games with hundreds of thousands of concurrent users, he added.
With that kind of online volume, there are obvious opportunities for gaming companies. That may even extend to Western companies with the right market approach.
Twitter is a social phenomenon. But as a business, it hasn’t yet earned a passing grade.
Twitter-linked game 140 Mafia is making money on the social Web site
Until now. In the past several weeks, two online games have launched with links to the micro-blogging site. Followers say at least one has begun making money – with the potential to make substantially more.
“Revenue is being generated from Twitter,” declares Jason Bailey, CEO of the Super Rewards, the provider of a virtual currency for games.
That’s because the games – Spymaster and 140 Mafia – are attracting users and, in the case of 140 Mafia, using Super Rewards’ virtual currency to let players pay for extra features, such as weapons, casinos or cars.
Bailey declines to say how much 140 Mafia is making. But some insiders suggest the take could amount to more than $25,000 a month in a short while.
“True commerce,” says Bailey
Both games make use of Twitter’s real time communications stream by posting updates of a player’s game activities on the Twitter network.
Thousands of people are already playing 140 Mafia. Bailey projects the game could attract 500,000 players in a couple of months.
While game play is unlikely to turn Twitter into board market place, it is an interesting first step to finding financially benefit from the social-networking craze.
HP Photosmart Premium with TouchSmart Web: an all-in-one printer glued to an iPod touch, with a capacitive touchscreen and an App Store!
It’s been a very very long time since I was exciting about using a printer. A bit like using an uninterruptible power supply or a backup system!
But with it’s latest all-in one printer/scanner/fax, H-P makes printing cool again.
The Photosmart Premium with TouchSmart Web (with the money H-P spends in marketing, it could have easily found a more shorter and sexier name!) uses the same printing engine than the currently shipping Photosmart Premium C8180 – a Wi-Fi/Bluetooth multi-function printer which it will be replacing – but with an iPod touch-like capacitive touchscreen instead of the current smaller screen and series of buttons, and combined with H-P’s Apps Studio; yet another applications store.
H-P takes a page from the iPhone playbook and starts an Apps Store for printers
And just as with the iPhone, Palm Pre, etc., it will soon be possible to download apps for your printer!
At the launch event earlier today hosted at Al Gore’s Current TV studios in San Francisco, H-P showed apps from USA Today, Google, Fandango, Coupons.com, DreamWorks Animation, Nickelodeon, Web Sudoku, Weathernews as well as the company’s online site Snapfish.
With these apps, you’ll be able to customize, choose, print… daily news, maps, coupons, coloring pages, movie tickets, recipes, personal calendars and more – all at the touch of a finger.
Under the hood, the Web printer is running Linux with Nokia’s Qt application and graphical-user interface framework.
The Photosmart Premium with TouchSmart Web will be available in the U.S. in September for $399 (the current Photosmart Premium, model C8180, is being discounted at less than $250 on Amazon.com) and next year for the rest of the world.
Here’s an excerpt of our exclusive interview with product marketing manager Ravikiran Adusumilli, going into more details on the printer capabilities (Wi-Fi setup, touchscreen, micro-transactions, auto-duplex printing…) that took 1.5 years to get to market:
The lack of power and space is nixing the expansion of existing centers and slowing the construction of new centers at a time when demand for the facilities is outpacing supply. IT managers face few inviting options.
The lack of power (including for cooling systems) is constraining data center expansion and construction.
Because data centers don’t require a lot of manual labor, adding staff doesn’t solve the problem.
Instead, the biggest source of operational efficiency comes from power use. Already centers in the U.S. use in excess of 61.4 billion kilowatt hours of electricity a year, or more than the automobile industry.
By 2011, this should double, making data centers the nation’s top commercial consumer of power, ahead of metals production.
Between 40 percent and 60 percent of the power use goes toward cooling,. That makes Core4 Systems’ introduction Monday of a more efficient liquid-cooled air conditioning offering all the more interesting.
The Napa company claims its system is significantly more efficient than those in the market and saved its first customer, Sonic.net, 72 percent of its cooling costs.
Core4 is talking to additional potential customers, including Apple and IBM, and claims a system for a small corporate data center costs between $5 million and $7 million.
For reasons stated above, the company could find itself in the right place at the right time. Offering a green-tech contribution to energy efficiency, it could play a role in the fight against global warming.
I couldn’t help but draw immediate parallels between Oracle’s new 100 Days of Innovation marketing campaign and Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s fictional novel, One Hundred Years Of Solitude.
The masterful book plays off the insular nature of Latin American colonial culture to chronicle the early history of a small, isolated village, cut off from the broad currents of humanity coursing through the rest of the civilized world.
Oracle’s labs leave me with the same feeling. They are deeply private in nature, cut off from outsiders and left to their own devices, until a product is released to the world, sometimes before its time.
According to AMR Research, Oracle’s 100 Days of Innovation campaign will kick off on July 1. It will tout the software company’s developmental skills – and counter the impression that Oracle can only acquire innovation.
Oracle takes exception to claims software innovation comes from small companies
On July 1, the company also will unveil Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g.
AMR points out how the campaign creates an interesting counterpoint to a June blog post from AMR’s Chief Research Officer Bruce Richardson. Richardson argues that software innovation comes from small companies, not massive software houses such as Oracle. Oracle executives bristled when they read it.
“Call me cynical, but I believe today’s large vendors are more interested in commoditization than innovation,” Richardson write. “Ideally, they want to be able to sell a generic version that will appeal to customers across dozens of verticals, hundreds of countries, and tens of thousands of customers. For them, true breakthrough innovation doesn’t scale.”
It is an interesting point well worth a debate. Perhaps the first leg of that debate will take place even as we hear about 100 Days of Innovation.
Of course cloud computing promises to save businesses money.
But its simplicity and ease of use also may spawn an unprecedented increase in business experimentation.
Cloud computing will also face IT with decentralization and less control
This compelling thesis comes from analyst Charles Burns, a research vice president at Saugatuck Technology, and it just might prove itself out.
With cloud’s lower cost, “you can afford to have a lot of (project) failures” without the bottom line suffering, Burns said Thursday at Navigating the Cloud, a discussion sponsored by IBM.
Burns argues that cloud computing is likely to change every company’s business – dismissing the deep-seated debate around the veracity and historical roots of the emerging computing scheme.
He calls cloud computing pragmatic, whether or not it is a follow-on to the autocratic computing structure of the mainframe era.
In a sense, it doesn’t matter. It can save companies money, shorten the development time of new applications, allow small business to better meet Sarbanes-Oxley requirements and shift capital expenses to operating expenses with software as a service.
Its ease of use is still evolving (there are no standards in place for interoperability so every cloud implementation is different.) But as simplicity improves, business department experimentation will take place on the cheap, says Burns.
At first this will seem like a threat to IT managers fearing a loss of control. But they too will see a bright light.
Overtime, they will be able to shift staff from server and disk array maintenance to high-level business support.
That should make everyone happy. But don’t hold your breath. Standards are nowhere in sight and the ease of use necessary for widespread experimentation is a work in progress.
Vendors love to talk about a converged storage network. But a unified infrastructure with Ethernet at its core is still a distant reality.
The goal behind such an infrastructure is to both save money with less expensive Ethernet switches and achieve improved speeds with 10-gigabit Ethernet ports.
Fibre Channel Over Ethernet is being deployed only five feet into a network
But data center owners don’t appear to see an immediate need to spend the money in an era of tight IT budgets. And they don’t want to give up the familiar security and manageability of fibre channel.
Fibre channel over Ethernet technology was developed as the first step toward this networking conversion by companies such as Cisco Systems and Brocade Communications Systems. But even it is proving something of a half step.
According to Dave Stevens, CTO of Brocade, it is being deployed only at the perimeter of the network and not at the core. Data traffic from a server travels on a fibre channel over Ethernet pipe for about five feet until it reaches the first network access point, where it is split back into Ethernet and fibre channel, he says.
“It is changing the landscape for the first five feet” of the network, Stevens said at a Brocade Tech Day.
Oh well, back to the drawing board! The long sought convergence may take a new generation of network managers.
With Bing, Microsoft argues it is not only creating yet another search engine, but also helping users “accomplishing their tasks,” like buying a plane ticket or shop.
40% of users queries go unanswered
To do so, the computer giant’s latest “decision” engine employs semantic technologies to both try to make sense of the content of Web pages and the users’ queries.
“We use the term semantic technologies in a more loosely fashion than some would,” said Mark Johnson, Microsoft’s Senior Program Manager for Bing (and formerly at startup Powerset acquired by Microsoft) speaking this week at the Semantic Technology Conference in San Jose, Calif.
For Johnson, vertical search is what really matters for users, not a series of blue links or search results spit out by the search engine.
Microsoft plans to expand the number of verticals (to perhaps around a dozen) that it now offers with Bing (travel, shoping, news, maps).
Follows a video excerpt of our conversation with Johnson at the Semantic Technology Conference:
Logitech Vid is a very simple Internet video calling software which does not connects to more advanced clients such as Skype, AIM...
Just when I thought that the Internet video calling market was already over-crowded with Skype, Gtalk, AIM, Yahoo Messenger, iChat, etc… Logitech came out today with yet another one.
But unlike all the other ones mentioned above, Logitech’s Vid targets a “non-techie” crowd with a really simple set-up and easy to use interface. It’s also based on a person’s email address, and not on an obscure username.
Vid is free for all owners of the Fremont, Calif.-company webcams, as well as their friends that receive an invite. Otherwise, you’ll have to buy a Logitech webcam after the 30-days free trial period.
The video quality is quite good and because Vid is SIP-based, there’s nothing that technically would prevent from connecting it to some of the other Internet video calling clients. But that won’t happen anytime soon as it would defy the purpose of Vid’s simplicity.
Follows is a video excerpt of our conversation with Logitech’s director of product marketing for Webcams, Andrew Heymann, introducing Vid:
Just over a week ago, Gam Dias stumbled upon the unexpected when he checked into a Chicago Hyatt: a room with a view.
In fact, the vice president of product management at software maker Overtone of San Francisco was so impressed he Tweeted his good fortune.
Gam Dias says Hyatt responded to his Tweet
A short while later a message came in reply – from Hyatt – asking if there was anything else the hotel could do. Apparently, Hyatt had been monitoring micro-blog site Twitter and responding when its name was mentioned.
Dias said he was impressed with the efficiency the hotel’s operation. But he said Hyatt is not alone in mining the wealth of customer data on social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook.
Social networking represents a challenge for companies. Many don’t have the resources or know-how to fully monitor, process and respond to the millions of posts generated every day by the hoards of people frequenting the sites.
But perhaps they should consider allocating them, says Dias, whose company offers systems for culling data from consumer-generated postings.
Among his corporate customers are two of the nation’s most prominent: Wal-Mart Stores and Microsoft.
Wal-Mart uses Overtone technology to help customers find items in online catalogs and to route consumers with problems to staffers who can help.
Microsoft keeps close tabs on what people say about its products online and uses the information to improve its software.
“There is a huge amount of feedback that comes in,”Dias said Tuesday at the Semantic Tech Conference in San Jose.
Can anyone @IBM fix the WiFi network at #IOD11 ? It's been terrible for the past 2 days and everybody I talked just can't stand it anymore 3 months ago
Posted by Mark Boslet 
