Wonderland

One for Tony & Paula

Mobile users in Norway can now watch TV on their phones, courtesy of the public broadcaster NRK.

For the moment it simply testing whether consumers will want and use TV on their phones. So far the feedback has been encouraging.

"In the first eight hours of launching, 2,000 clips were downloaded," said Bjarne Andre Myklebust, a spokesman for NRK. "Mobile networks are getting faster and better and by next year 80% of handsets will have a media player".

I luv the future.

Doom 3 / Half Life 2

BOTH scheduled for AUGUST. Effing fantastic.

MmMmMmmm.

I wuz robbed

... no, literally. My barclaycard has been on a shopping spree - without me. I got home to find a letter (OPEN, URGENT!) and in it, Barclaycard asking me politely if this was my spending and was I in Paris, which it wasn't and I'm not.

But what I want to know is, how come they didn't ask me this when I *was* in LA, or NYC, or Egypt (all since Feb this year)? The spending was 300 quid here, 13 quid there, 400 quid there... nothing horribly outrageous, no more than hotel bills or a flight ticket.

How did they know that this particular time it wasn't me? Creepy!

Amazing

Digital Healing is an article written by an american pediatric doctor. He describes his experience of young ward-bound patients, and online gaming:

Videogames have been used in hospitals since the late 1980’s, and have long since become a staple in the armory of the child-life specialist. Gaming itself is a type of education, albeit a highly abstract, extremely compelling one. It demands interaction, and in this sense is diametrically opposed to the unidirectional flow of information in a film or on a TV show.

He describes his idea of a HOPE network: a Hospital based, Online, Persistent/Pediatric Environment.

My experience in Templeton 4 simply confirmed a truth that we, as healthy, mature adults all know: hospitalized kids with ongoing illnesses are heroes. They themselves sometimes forget this. Perhaps laying the infrastructure for a HOPE network will do more than allow a few hours of fun for a group of children stricken with chronic diseases such as cystic fibrosis. Perhaps it will help rebuild self-esteem, and give back the dignity that an illness in the non-digital world inexplicably takes.

Googling doesn't come up with much on the HOPE network though. I wonder what happened with this..

It's always weird

..when you see things happen far more slowly than you would have expected. Adverts in videogames. I mean, racing games (with those trackside ads), football games (pitchside ads) ... city-based games (billboard ads).. the opportunity playground is so intensely rich you wonder why the advertisers haven't already exploited it to the full.

Anyway, so they're about to.

A drop in young male viewers of prime time television last summer was largely attributed to video games and shortly thereafter Activision signed a deal with Nielsen Entertainment to provide advertisers with better information on the effectiveness of advertising in games.

Assuming these ads will be some fixed, but some serverside (updating daily?), this should open up some interesting new avenues for play or retribution. McDonalds animated billboards? Shouldn't be too hard to hack and spraypaint, along the lines of graffiti the web...

Talking of Jennifer Government

.. in which there is the 'Mattel Barbie' school .. apparently there's an Entertainment Software Charity, and it's going to help build a UK School, and then it'll be able to

"select specialist subjects for the school - creating a showcase for the industry's contributions back to society."

Oh and Bliar is going to open EGN, which really relegates ECTS to the back row (actually, its lineup did that for it). Expect no ECTS next year, but with EGN looking as fun as it does, who cares?

XBox videoconferencing

The system is due to cost around the equivalent of UKP 35 when it arrives in Japan late this year - so about the same as a standard Xbox game. According to Microsoft, the prevalence of broadband in Japanese homes is the reason for Video Chat being launched there ahead of the USA and Europe.

This is my favourite bit though:

Five users can talk at once on the service, and the user can set up backgrounds or music for their conversations - or, interestingly, activate the vibration function on another user's joypad.

I have no words. And no comment on the size of the XBox controllers either. Fnar.

Grid computing comes to games

... meaning that in the not so far future, massively multiplayer really could be in the millions. And millions. National events, anyone?

More on the Butterfly.net (ho ho).

Abso fucking lutely

In response to the news that 321 Studios may have to file for bankruptcy for providing software that users a) want and b) should have the right to have (the ability to make a copy of a cd/dvd-based product for home backups), Brad sums it all up nicely.

This is how the game industry should attack piracy. Pro-active legislation to stifle innovation and restrict consumer rights goes against the foundation that the country is built upon. Instead, we catch and prosecute those who break the law.

321 Studios

Pixelblocks

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