Category: tech

Have It Your Way or the highway

nfsu2_burgerking.jpg

“You have to remember that EA is a marketing driven company,” writes an anonymous poster on DSLR who claims to have worked for Electronic Arts. “The marketing department has almost complete control over the process and finished product.”

This is quite evident in the new Need for Speed: Underground 2, EA’s latest, er, advertising vehicle. Racers drive past billboards hawking Campbell’s soup and Old Spice, and realistic facsimiles of Burger King and Best Buy franchises. A Cingular Wireless icon surgically welded to the GUI acts as the communications controls. The exquisitely detailed real-life Hondas, Toyotas and other real cars can collide head-on with brick walls and escape with nary a blemish – a kowtow to the automakers, who forbid their gas-powered creations to be shown as unsafe or imperfect in any way.

This is also the first time a major song artist will premiere a song in a videogame. That’s right, NFSU2’s menu screen will be the first worldwide debut of Snoop Dogg’s remix of The Door’s “Riders in the Storm”. Other top billing artists also feature, including Mudvayne and Chingy.

Underground 2 is not the first EA game to have advertising or EA Trax, but neither has a videogame comes this close to blurring the lines between entertainment and commercial. It is a grand experiment in making EA a mainstream media powerhouse that is as profit driven as possible.

However, you can hardly blame EA for putting advertising, sponsoring and licensing in the front seat; the Wall Street Journal states game developers now spend $10 million or more in building and marketing a triple-A title, and that money has to come from somewhere.

As games enter the mainstream, advertising seems inevitable. (Even live-from-the-Internet ads are being considered.) The trick is to design ads that do not break the immersive environment of the game.

As for the grand experiment, most gamers seem to be taking the Burger King-ified game in stride. But perhaps the Cingular icon was one step too far; as someone further in the thread raged, “It’s not like the billboards where at least you can say “well i’m in a city, there’s billboards. there’s a burger king”. but this damn logo on my windshield?”

In the D drive: Need for Speed: Underground 2 and Silent Hill 4: The Room Trial Version

The real last mile

Complaining your DSL will only sync at 2.4 Mbps when next door gets 2.6Mbps? Put things in perspective, you could have lived in Mink, Louisiana. The small community just got telephone service.

BellSouth Corp. spent $700,000 – or about $47,000 per phone – to extend about 30 miles of cable through thick forests to Mink, about 100 miles south of Shreveport. Phone customers around the state will cover the cost by paying a small monthly charge on their bills.

Entering the 20th century called for a party:

The community celebrated with a fish fry Monday – gathering at a church and dishing out catfish, okra, hushpuppies and slaw to about 100 residents, friends, public officials and others.

Well, this is Louisiana. And it wasn’t all fun and games:

“It wasn’t 15 minutes after that phone was in before a telemarketer called me,” [Mink resident] Edwards said.

Maybe they get a continental discount

Yes boys and girls, before the Internet, if you didn’t have rich friends with those then-$600 CD burners, you had to have an Asian connection. I personally remember Hong Kong’s warez bazaar called the Golden Arcade.

Boing Boing reports on crazy Chinese bootlegged DVDs, watching movies in China, and more. Those plucky Chinese manage to make even terrible movies into inadvertent moments of entertainment:

“The DVD cases are works of pirate art. They are all made in the same style from hard glossy cardboard. Cheaply made, but professionally graphically designed. They’re so uniform, you can tell they almost all come from one maker. What makes them art, though, are the mistakes: made by a genius dyslexican who flunked the TOEFL. English literacy here is almost zero.”

Gentlemen, start your engrish.

Drive by blog entry

In honour of the Detroit International Auto Show, which is wrapping up after an eventful week:

Autoblog A general purpose site for checking out the newest designs, and post comments about how you love Mopar and what’s with all those cheap faux wood interiors these days??

The Truth About Cars Frank yet eloquent car reviews. What other autojournalist would describe the Chrysler 300C alternatively as “stylish malevolence” and a “bad-ass gangsta-mobile”?

GM FastLane Blog General Motors entered the blogging scene this year, and their blog has already turned almost as many heads as the new Corvette. If they can keep up with the postings, answer comments from their fans and “keep it real”, this will be a great advertising coup for them.

Car Cost Canada For when you’re finally sitting down and buying a car, you can find out what is the lowest price possible.

Dieselstation – Fuel For Your Desktop And when you realize you can’t afford that car, just cut your losses and download wallpaper of your favourite gas-guzzler and look at it. And pretend you’re in it.

Screwball apps of Palm

CanalPDA’s top 10 weirdest Palm OS programs. Personally, I don’t find them that odd – when you give out a straightforward SDK to the public, you can expect a lot of creativity to come forth. People ended up writing simple little programs for fun, or to scratch a particular itch. I remember a little app that let a surfer track the high tide at his/her favourite beach.

Besides, I know Silverlotus use the Palm Mirror on her IIIxe (rest in peace), and Bomberman use PalmaSutra to, uh, demonstrate the capabilities of his new colour Palm IIIc.

Bill is wise. Bill is kind. Bill is benevolent.

“People forget that he is medically, biologically, a genius,” Microsoft codemonkey Michael enthuses in Douglas Coupland’s fictional Microserfs. “Not one um or ah from his mouth all lunch; no wasted brain energy. Truly an inspiration for us all.”

It is only fitting then, according to Microsoft Watch, Microsoft today released a FAQ on the man, the myth, the legend…Bill Gates.

In a three-page Word document, Gates amically chats about how luck had a major role in his success and the future of artificial intelligence, and urges young readers to not drop out of college like he did.

We are the kazaa generation

Does a Free Download Equal a Lost Sale? Nope, says two MBA profs from Harvard and UNC.

They found that Eminem’s “8 Mile” soundtrack was the second most popular among albums sold, and that his song, “Lose Yourself,” was the most popular among file sharers. It seems that downloading was more a symptom of an artist’s popularity in the record stores than a barrier to it. “Our best guess is that peer-to-peer networks in 2002 had no effect whatsoever on sales,” Professor Oberholzer-Gee said.

They concluded that maybe every 10 downloads equals 1 or 2 lost CD sales. Why? Because most people who downloaded for free wouldn’t have trudged into Best Buy for the $20 CD it was on anyway.

Open source studies

Analysts are paid to be objective. Admittedly, they have an abstract, from-orbit type of view on the industry, and most don’t even have technical backgrounds, but they do their best work when making fair judgement calls, above all else.

At ITAC Ontario’s seminar entitled “Open Source & Total Cost of Ownership”, Laura Koetzle of Forrester Research presented a well-balanced if comical view of her March 2004 study called “Is Linux more secure than Windows?” Self-deprecating at times, she listed several flaws the study had. For example, when pointing out that Windows received an eyebrow-raising security score of “100.00%”, she tacitly admitted that it is MS policy to say nothing about a security exploit until a patch – or a virus – appears.

“Feel free to throw muffins at me,” she jokingly said to the mostly IT administrator audience.

While there is great controversy in the methodology (read RedHat, SUSE, Debian and Mandrake’s counterpoints), her data rings true. She pointedly told IT staffers everywhere, regardless of what OS they have on their plate, to “eat your security vegetables”.

I maintained an open mind when Laura Didio, Yankee Group analyst, took the stand to present her TCO study discussed here on Quantified earlier. Sadly, she chose her time to lavish us with snippets of gossip on various executive clients, and how they supposedly confided her with their tales of Linux migration woe.

She even brought up Ballmer’s infamous Singapore strong-arming where he claimed a study concluded Linux violated hundreds of patents, an assertion that has been soundly debunked by the study’s author, Dan Ravicher.

I called her on the fact she curiously neglected to tell the audience that the surveys were distributed by Sunbelt Software, a Microsoft Certified Gold Partner, to its Windows customers. I was puzzled by this methodology, since it seemed like it was like walking into the Grand Ol’ Opry and asking who there liked to listen to the Bangles.

I tried to press on with questions, but the host got up and amicably suggested we continue the discussion in coffee break. We both smiled and nodded.

As Ms. Didio sat down, an IBM executive that was sitting behind me whispered, “Thank you for that!” and added, “She was incredibly biased.”

Two minutes later, I saw Ms. Didio walking out the door. Pity.

Analysts are paid to be objective. They do their best work when making fair judgement calls, above all else. When they stop becoming objective, they become useless.