Marketing

Iron Chef video game coming to the Nintendo Wii and DS

Iron Chef America: Supreme Cuisine lets players square off in Kitchen Stadium and battle through a series of fast-paced and intense culinary challenges. Each victory advances players closer to a final showdown that will determine who will reign supreme as the next Iron Chef America.

I hope the bonus rounds let you battle it out with the real Iron Chefs. Give me Hiroyuki Sakai and Rokusaburo Michiba any day over these Iron Chef America guys. And don't forget floor reporter Shinichiro Ohta shouting out "Fukui-san!" every few minutes.

I've written in the past about why the … Read more

The best-selling video games of 2008 (so far)

A new alliance of organizations that monitor video game sales has released the Top Global Markets Report, the first in a new series of monthly tallies detailing video game software sales across the U.S., U.K., and Japan.

Grand Theft Auto IV--6,293,000 units sold (despite the fact that the game was only released in late April in the U.S. and U.K. and has yet to hit the Japanese market) Super Smash Bros. Brawl--5,433,000 units sold Mario Kart Wii--4,697,000 units sold Wii Fit--3,604,000 units sold Guitar Hero III--3,475,000 units sold

That's 23,502,000 units sold just for the top five games in the U.S., U.K., and Japan only.

Statistically speaking, I would be interested in just how many of these games are purchased by repeat buyers and what the demographics are associated with each leading game.

The video game business thrives on hits, with a huge catalog of less important titles that help to augment sales and provide alternatives to the big hitters. But in general it's safe to say the market is expanding, and that interactive games such as those on the Wii, as well as Guitar Hero, are clearly hitting a stride.… Read more

Build your own Cloud with the Eucalyptus open source project

Following up on some previous thoughts on how open source will underlay the Cloud, I spoke today with Rich Wolski, Associate Professor at UCSB who is Project Director for the Eucalyptus open source Cloud computing project.

Eucalyptus started out in the research labs at UCSB about a year ago but the coding. It's part of an NSF funded project called V-Grads. The goal of V-Grads is to create a software infrastrucure that gives Grid and grid-like programs a uniform execution target regardless of how the resources are managed.

Every year the Eucalyptus team demos how the applications are managed … Read more

Free-to-play, ad-supported games the winners?

Nvidia Vice President and PC Gaming Alliance Chief Technology Officer Roy Taylor thinks that video game companies are missing out on future revenue growth.

"The West needs to recognize that the free-to-play model is the future, before it's too late," Taylor said, citing the massive growth of gaming across Asia.

I wrote recently about a report stating that the PC gaming market generated $10.7 billion worldwide during 2007. Half of that came from Asia, where, according to Taylor, "the free-to-play microtransaction and ad-supported model has found huge success." But it seems that outside of … Read more

Why is Spotlight using 98% of my MacBook Air CPU?

UPDATED: August 19, 2008 7:42pm

Problem solved. It was a hanging process that got triggered when I installed a new VPN client. The weird thing was it could only be killed via the command line and didn't show up in the Activity Monitor

This MacBook Air goes from decent, to bad, to terrible, back to decent and now into the ridiculous.

Even when running zero applications there are pieces of Apple software that are doing very strange things. The latest issue is that Spotlight is somehow using 98% of my CPU horsepower and the total percentage used is … Read more

What happens when you need to switch cloud providers?

The lack of standards for virtual machines presents a very significant problem for users.

Depending on how you've deployed your applications, you either have portability or you don't. Generally speaking you will be stuck (for better or worse) with your VM image vendor, assuming you had a choice in the first place.

I spoke to John Pozadzides, chief marketing officer of LayeredTech, a hosting provider that has deployed a lot of grid-oriented infrastructure.

My main question for Pozadzides: what happens if I want to move my stuff?

Unfortunately there is no clear answer. It all depends on the … Read more

Elastra on Eucalyptus open source Cloud software--apparently I misunderstood

Elastra's Stuart Charlton responded to my earlier rant about Eucalyptus. It's possible that I was way off on my interpretation and it's also possible that Elastra didn't do all right things in their efforts (like notify the companies they cited.) I will chalk it up to a poor written press release.

We were announcing that we've enabled the Elastra Cloud Server to interoperate with the Eucalyptus project and are opening up a limited beta program for those who have deployed a test Eucalyptus environment and would like to use our cloud server to provision and … Read more

Selling support for open source projects that you don't own or contribute to

I saw a press release this morning from a company called Elastra who announced support for the Eucalyptus open source project.

Eucalyptus --Elastic Utility Computing Architecture for Linking Your Programs To Useful Systems - is an open-source software infrastructure for implementing "cloud computing" on clusters.

ELASTRA Corporation, the leading provider of software for configuring, deploying and managing complete application systems in public and private compute clouds, today announced Elastra Cloud Server support for the Eucalyptus platform.

Eucalyptus is very cool and makes some of the Cloud hype real. But like other open source projects it looks like there are people who are not the developers attempting to monetize the product.

Of course, this is totally OK under the terms of the BSD license and near as I can tell the project is still largely an academic undertaking out of UC Santa Barbara. I just can't understand why Elastra wouldn't at least tell the Eucalyptus team that they were going to do a press release about supporting their product. At a minimum they could have linked to the project site.

I was a little hesitant to jump into this morass, but I think it's clear that open source will power the Cloud. Those who develop the software can decide how to license and monetize, but we should be aware of the implications of consuming open source in the Cloud and how the software may/may not be supported, licensed and warrantied.

This reminds me a lot of a past issue of Rod Johnson vs. OpenLogic. I have to think that Rod wouldn't be too thrilled about Elastra either. … Read more

Gadget lust: Dell Inspiron 910 shipping with Ubuntu Linux

Word on the street is Dell will release a new Inspiron 910 sub-notebook (I prefer the term 'laptot') on August 22 shipping with Ubuntu Linux. Further leakage from Gizmodo says that the machine will be $299.

I've written in the past about how sub-notebooks are a great opportunity for Linux on the desktop. There is no need to run Windows (or MacOS for that matter) when you are using the machine primarily for browser-based applications.

I've been running Ubuntu on a Thinkpad X300 for the last 2 weeks and while it's still a bit too geeky, the … Read more