Marketing

I was going to write something up about this announcement "Sun Microsystems and Intel Break Million-Messages-per Second Barrier for Thomson Reuters Market Data System" and relate it to how Twitter could leverage some design principles from financial services for scalability.

Then I clicked on the link to the Sun webpage for FinServ only to find out they had announced nearly the same exact thing two years ago.

A million-messages-per-second is still very impressive, but this is hardly news. Where is all the news about Sun's SOA, Cloud, or MySQL efforts?

UPDATED JULY 9, 2008: The fine folks … Read more

According to a recent survey, the Japanese hate the BlackBerry and love the iPhone. This Nikkei Business Publications chart reveals one possible reason: smartphones aren't generally used for business there.

iShare, which conducted the survey, also asked respondents if they "feel that the number of people carrying two mobile terminals will increase as a result of the expansion of the smartphone market."

Roughly 30 percent of all respondents said "Yes," while more than 10 percent said, "No, it will decrease" as consumers look to use one device for all of their mobile-computing needs. … Read more

Our Open Season podcast series continued with Episode 19 last week as we wallowed in my general inabilities and the fact that open source realities are starting to kick in for many people.

Topics: -Apache licensing and the inability to make money -Bill Gates' departure -Contest: Bill Gates or Kermit the Frog

We were also joined briefly by RMS, Bill Gates, Nick Carr and others. It was an all-star event.

UPDATED JULY 6, 2008, 7:30pm PST

Due to a version control issue I accidentally deleted the pointer to this list of 29 potential video game monetization methods from Jeremy Liew at Lightspeed VP Blog. This list originally appeared as a guest post on Jeremy's blog. I didn't realize it got botched when I hit publish. Apologies.

David Perry, Chief Creative Officer of Acclaim Games has identified 29 possible ways to monetize video games.

Potential Video Game Monetization Methods.

List ? 2008 David Perry. www.dperry.com

1. Retail (bricks & mortar), selling boxed product at places like EBGames, Gamestop or Virgin Megastore. This also includes mom & pop stores, hardcore specialist gamer shops, and online retailers like Amazon.com that ship the product to your door. The gap in this market is "same day" physical delivery of games too big to download or 1st party titles (basically combining online & bricks and mortar in one solution.) The future of this space is pre-paid cards as the consoles will (in the future) go online only, distributing everything directly to the consumer, so retail (to make it worth selling the hardware) will need a cut of the software sales. Hence prepaid cards. The Gamestop tactic of re-selling USED games (to avoid paying for new product) will finally be over. To drive users to retail, the making of special "enhanced" versions just for their retail chain is a common practice.

2. Digital Distribution (direct download, direct to consumer), like the Steam service from Valve Software, the PlayStation Store or Xbox Live Arcade from Microsoft. This also technically includes "unlocking" access to a game already on a service, like the faux install process on Facebook (however the player would have to pay to do this unlock.)

3. In-Game Advertising (either obvious billboards or branded items in the game world, or subtle product placement (certain clothing, sunglasses or vehicles like Gaia Online), or built into story elements (like the hero's girlfriend works for a Neutrogena). Companies like IGA, Massive, Game Jacket, Mochi Media, Google, VideoEgg etc.

4. Around-Game Advertising (basically making money from banner & skyscraper adverts that circle the gameplay window), this is common on flash game aggregator sites, they use services like Google, Commission Junction, personal affiliate deals etc. The revenue comes from CPM (cost per thousand views), CPC (cost per click), CPA (cost per acquisition of a player), CPP (cost for a "real" player who really plays for a certain time, or to a certain level.)… Read more

Join me and John Rowell from Opsource, Wednesday, July 9, 2008 9:00am PDT on a webinar discussing how the Cloud affects the Enterprise and vice-versa.

Learn about common concerns organizations face when incorporating SaaS applications into their growing enterprise architecture and how to make the transition from on-site to internet based applications.

Click here to register

As the cloud continues to emerge as a serious option, many people are starting to catch on that there are limits to what can be done outside that particular platform.

Right now there only a few options if you are a cloud or PaaS provider: 1. Cordon off virtual machines and use VM images (like Amazon.com or Joyent) 2. Allow development on some programming language (like Google App Engine) 3. Force users onto your platform (like Salesforce.com)

The applications that are built on top of a particular vendor's infrastructure are locked into that provider's way of … Read more

Your brain lies to you, says the NY Times in an Op-ed piece about the upcoming elections. For me, the article illuminates some of the implications of the social-media world where information flies at you from every direction. You don't know what's true or false and odds are you can't handle the volume of information in a manner that lets you process it effectively.

Basically you hear or learn something, the brain processes it multiple times and by the time its fully part of your brain you've forgotten where it came from.

This phenomenon, known as … Read more

Lately I am obsessed with video games, not so much in playing them but figuring how they work. It's kind of surprising that companies like Amazon and Google tell you how their entire infrastructures are built but as my fellow CNET blogger Don Reisinger points out, the gaming industry is shrouded in anonymity and secrecy.

It makes me think there is a huge opportunity for some kind of open source-esque video game console and game development. Gaming is a market dominated by 3-4 giant players just like how software was, and music has been. We've seen the effects … Read more

Over on the NY Times, David Pogue explains how he deals with the deluge of daily emails he receives.

Here are the questions he answers: A) How many wackos do you hear from in a day? B) How do you handle said wackos? C) Do you use elaborate file/folder systems? D) How much of your day is spent on replying to e-mails? E) How do you determine who gets a reply? F) How often do you check e-mail? G) What advice would you give to a public figure about what to watch out for if you publish your e-mail … Read more