Subzero Blue

Video Game Advertising

The other day, I read this article about how video games are poised to become big businesses for advertisers, as more and more companies pay real money for virtual ads posted in the cyber-worlds created by gaming companies.

According to one of Yankee Group’s latest reports, it seems that advertisers are finding greater value and return on investment from in-game advertising.

The report estimated that advertisers spent approximately $56m placing ads in video games in 2005, up from $34m in 2004, and that the market shows no signs of slowing.

I’ve already seen a bunch of games that show in-game ads, and I too expect it will double and triple as advertisers try to stick their logos and offers in every available space in front of our eyes, both virtually and in reality.

I think this could make game design an even more lucrative business for companies, but they should at least be decent enough to lower the prices of the games. Shoving ads everywhere and still making us pay a high price for the games isn’t quite a good deal for us.

I also think that ads of this nature, if used, should be discreet, not splashed all over the place, and that they should certainly not affect game play or make it annoying.

For example, if in Grand Theft Auto, the character were to go into a KFC instead of a Cluckin’ Bell, or into a Gold’s Gym instead of Los Santos Gym, it wouldn’t affect the gameplay and could still be good advertising.

Nintendo Revolution Becomes Nintendo Wii

So, you’re Nintendo, a game console company that is betting everything on its new game console. You’re third in the world game console market, and you want to win some market share against the heavyweight champion, Sony’s Playstation, and the wannabe champion Microsoft’s Xbox.

You came up with a cool name for your console, Nintendo Revolution, and you got people pretty hyped about it and waiting to see what it turns out like.

And then what do you do in your marketing moment of genius?

You scrap the cool name that everyone has gotten used to and you replace it with some weird shitty name like “Wii”.
And what’s your explanation? “Pronounced ‘we’, the name emphasizes this console is for everyone. Wii can easily be remembered by people around the world, no matter what language they speak. No confusion. No need to abbreviate. Just Wii.”

Whatever…
I don’t know where they come up with dumb ideas like this from?

Convert People to Firefox and Win Money

A group of Firefox advocates from Massachusetts is offering website publishers and bloggers $1 for each Internet Explorer visitor to their sites they can convince to switch to the Mozilla Firefox browser.

This comes after Google’s recent $1 referral payout for people who install Firefox with the Google toolbar.

The four anti-Microsoft activists from Massachusetts have developed a series of free scripts that website owners can add to their sites that will detect whether visitors are running Internet Eplorer. Depending on the script, the website will either show a splash page telling them to switch to Firefox or it will put a big switch banner at the top of the page.

The group explains its actions in an open letter on their website.

“Firefox is one of the most important software applications in the world because it can play a big part in determining the future of the web. It is crucial that an open-source, standards-based web browser becomes the most popular browser, and Firefox has a shot at being that.”, they say.

Another interesting development in the life of Firefox. I wonder how much it will help in the spreading of Firefox and the demise of Internet Explorer.

Check their website: Explorer Destroyer.

Google Calendar

After several months of development and a bunch of rumours and screenshots being leaked, Google has finally released their new service Google Calendar.

Like most Google services, the Google Calendar has a nice, clean, uncluttered, straightforward interface. A small “mini-calendar” on the left side of the screen shows the current month, and a larger view to the right shows either the current day, week or month view, the “next 4 days,” or an “agenda,” which is a linear list of all of your scheduled events.

A cool feature for Gmail users will recognize events in mail messages and give you an opportunity to add the event to your Google Calendar.
There’s also a “remind me with Google Calendar” button that lets you add events from web sites that display the button with just a couple of clicks.

You’re also not limited to one single calendar. You can create multiple calendars for specific functions, for example one for family events, another for work, and well others for whatever you might need them for.

You can import your outlook or iCal calendars into Google Calendar, and well you can also export them back.

In the essence of sharing, which seems to be the hype on the web these days, you can also share your calendar with other people if you want to.

Of course, this being Google, search through your events is also included. You can search across your calendars, and of course refine your search with options like “what,” “who” “where,” “doesn’t have,” or a date range.

For an initial beta release, I think this is a really good service and pretty well done. I’ll be testing it a bit more before making the decision of switching to it or not.
I know this is being a bit too demanding, but I hope someone comes up with a little tool that can synchronize between Google Calendar and other offline calendar systems whether it be on a pc, laptop, pocket pc or other handheld device. That would make it perfect, as not everyone can be connected all the time, and it’s be good to be able to carry that info around with you.

Apple Boot Camp, Macs Do Windows Too

Ever since Apple machines started using intel processors, hackers have been working away to try and get Windows running on them. They did get to do that eventually.

But well it seems they didn’t really have to go through the whole fuss; Apple has launched a new piece of software called Boot Camp, which will allow people to dual boot Windows XP and OSX on their intel based Macs.

The software even includes Mac specific drivers for networking, graphics, audio, Airport wireless, and bluetooth (amongst other things).

Apple stock rose 8% to the news, and everyone is all excited about this news.

Personally, I think this is a smart move by Apple, opening up their machines to the masses who use Microsoft’s Windows and are tied into it for some reason or another.
Now those people will be able to make the switch and keep Windows for the few cases where they really need it.

Maybe it’s still early to predict, but this just might push up Apple’s market share a bit.

I also agree with Ahmad who thinks this could solve the problem of the unavailability of Microsoft Office for Apple’s OS, which is hampering adoption of the platform.

Anyway, this doesn’t mean Apple has gone all soft on Microsoft; in fact, their boot camp page takes a couple of cracks at Microsoft, like the following which is quite funny:

“Macs use an ultra-modern industry standard technology called EFI to handle booting. Sadly, Windows XP, and even the upcoming Vista, are stuck in the 1980s with old-fashioned BIOS. But with Boot Camp, the Mac can operate smoothly in both centuries.”

[More: Apple, TUAW]

PayPal Goes Mobile

PayPal has launched a new service called PayPal Mobile allowing purchases via cell phone text message.

From now on, consumers can look for its “Text 2 Buy” logo in magazines and newspapers or on TV, billboards, posters or Web sites. When they see the logo, they then key a product code into their cell phones.

The service will also allow people to send money to each other through text messages.

I’ve been hearing about how PayPal and others, like Google and its supposedly upcoming PayPal killer, have been working on this feature, and I think it’s a natural and practical development for them which is also quite simple to do technically.

Google Mars

After Google Earth and then Google Moon, now we’ve also got Google Mars.

Google Mars allows users to view the surface of the Red Planet either by a colour-coded altitude map, black and white photographs, or an infra-red map.

The maps used on Google Mars were made from images captured by Nasa probes Mars Odyssey and Mars Global Surveyor, both currently orbiting the planet.

The service was launched to mark the 151st anniversary of the birth of Percival Lowell, an astronomer who mapped and studied Mars in the 19th century.

Up next in the news: Martians sue Google over Mars mapping service, claiming it’s a threat to planet security!

Google Buys Writely

Confirming what I read on GigaOM a couple of days ago, it has been officially announced that Google has now bought Upstartle, the company behind the cool online word processor Writely, taking the search giant even deeper into Microsoft’s turf.

Writely is a web based, ajax enhanced application that lets users compose documents directly on the Web, collaborate on them with others and share them either privately or publicly. So with Google acquiring them, Google is going into direct competition with Microsoft Office Word, making it unnecessary to have an installed Word processor.

I’ve used Writely before, and in fact the blogging presentation we held in Zaghouan was mostly worked out through our collaboration on the document online through the site.
I personally think it’s a very neat tool and really well done.

It’s interesting how it seems that Google’s strategy, to strip away Microsoft’s stronghold on office productivity software, is by taking all these functionalities and making them available online.
We’re also hearing about new products like a calendar (CL2) and online drive (G:Drive) coming up soon.

But how successful would these really be?
I mean, other then the privacy concerns that everyone should have, especially after the US government subpoena to Google and the other search engines for their users’ search information, there is also the issue of having to always be connected, with a good connection too, to use and access all this stuff. This brings us to the issue of internet and broadband penetration and who the user base will mainly consist of.

Personally, I see this as being the way to go, as we become more and more connected, it’ll become more and more easy for our information to be accessible for us from anywhere we go, and at any time of the day.

Nuvvo, Free On-demand eLearning

I just found this really cool new online service called Nuvvo (pronounced like the French word “nouveau”, meaning new).

Nuvvo is a Learning Management System (LMS) powered by Savvica and designed for the individual instructor. It’s the first system of its kind to offer individual teachers, professors, tutors, and trainers their own Online Learning Portal from which to run courses and teach students.

“Whether you’re a K-12 teacher, a corporate trainer, a university professor, or an amateur who knows baseball cards inside out, Nuvvo can help you reach students all over the world”, says their website.

The courses you offer can be for free, but if you

CNNi Redesigns, Goes Clean

CNN International has launched a major overhaul of its on-screen presentation on February 5 in a move described as a “radical move away from the cluttered screens and heavy graphics that currently prevail in today’s rolling news and business networks.”

The network’s logo was repositioned to the left, network identity spots and music were revamped, fonts in the lower-third bars were changed, and full-screen information graphics got a new look. The colour scheme used on CNNI also underwent a revamp, with the channel adapting the internationally-recognised “alert” colour, yellow, for breaking news graphics.

The news ticker, which has run at the bottom of CNNI’s screen since September 11, 2001, was replaced with a new information bar that displays one complete sentence or story at a time.

Design firm Kemistry is behind the changes and says it cut back the font graphics to the length of words and sentences so that