Book Review: the Master Switch

Tim Wu's The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires is one of my favorite books of the past several years. It is a deeply insightful and ultimately important work, and should be on everyone's reading list, especially those in any part of the computing, communications or entertainment industry.

More on why I feel so strongly about it in a second, but first, since a picture is worth a thousand words:

I can't think of a book I've dog-eared this much since I was in school. There were a ton of points I wanted to mark and reference in future talks or articles.

In The Master Switch, Wu takes a look at the history of the telephone, film, radio, broadcast television, and cable television industries, to show how all of them exemplify The Cycle. The Cycle being that between an open period following the invention of a new information medium, and the closed period that follows as a few economic giants gain control over that medium. His presentation of these histories is as entertaining as it is educational, and I found myself glued to the page.

This is not strictly a historical text though. All of these case histories serve both to define the rules by which the cycle occurs, and also to warn of its costs to societies, and to innovation.

He then goes on to look at the last great information empire battle: The battle for the Internet. As Wu puts asks it, "Which is mightier: the radicalism of the Internet, or the inevitability of The Cycle?"

Those of us raised in recent times, and on the openness of the Internet and in the era of Google, Microsoft and Amazon, may take it for granted that the open horizontal platforms inevitably win. However, as Wu shows in the cycle, the vertically integrated conglomerates and the owners of infrastructure are remarkably resilient in their ability to tame those that would rock their boat. Also, he shows us that often enough, those that free prisoners from one market are soon tempted to forge chains of their own. Apple of course being a great example here.

If anything, the first line of defense this book offers us is education. An ability to recognize the elements of the cycle at work should be important for all of us. Secondly, Wu offers a prescription for a "constitutional solution". This is meant not in the sense that he'd have us modify the US constitution, but rather that a balance of powers could be struck between members, with sufficient but not over-reaching regulation from bodies such as the DOJ and FCC.

If there's one downside to the book - and it's a small one in an otherwise masterful work - its that the work is extremely US-centric. Some reference is made to Europe, and there is the occasional mention of PRC, but that's it. I would have thought it worth a lengthy discussion about how, for example, the entertainment industries are using international copyright treaties to entrench their favorite policies in foreign countries' laws, and then in turn to use that as precedent to influence US law.

This minor complaint aside, this is a must read work for our day and age.

DICE 2011 in short

I'm back from DICE 2011 and recovering from intense brain-filling and long nights of inebriated schmoozing. As always, it's a high-caliber attendee list, so the quality of sessions and conversations is generally pretty good, and this year was no exception.

I'll post some longer thoughts when I get the time, but some quick notes to start:

Favorite Sessions:

• Mark Cerny's talk: Summarized here, but that summary leaves out many of the astute observations Mark made. I had a converstation that evening with him about his comment on genre diversity ("genre diversity is the canary in the coalmine as to a segments health"), as I thought he was going to point to the heavy focus on shooters today, but instead he feels we are very healthy. Myself, I'm still not sure. Anyhow, when/if they post this session, it's a must view.
• Bing Gordon's talk: I twittered that it was "a big bumbling disjointed spew of savvy insights." In other words, classic Bing, and well worth watching. Summary here.
• Richard Garriott's talk: Little to do with games, but very compelling story about his trip into space. That guy is hardcore!
• Jane McGonigal's talk: Same ideas as in her book, which I'm partway through reading, but still compelling. her talk is also on slideshare.

Other highlights:

• Fave Jay Moore comment fron the IAAwards: "Activision, every title you guys put out makes more money than anything from anyone else and STILL no one wants to work with you!"
• Fave moment from a talk: Garriott's showing of a video of Carmack's latest rocket, taking off, going up 2 miles, hovering, descending, and landing less than 10 cm from where it took off. Clip:

• Bing Gordon's lifetime achievement award acceptance speech, delivered as a poem. It formed an excellent 20+year follow on to the "Can a Computer Make You Cry?" ad copy (<-- read that ad copy first if you've never seen it). I hope the video is posted somewhere, but in the meantime, here's the poem in it's entirety:

The Golden Age of Gaming
Can a computer make you cry?
How many cool things can you ship before you die?
How many best friends have been made on your development teams?
Is anything better than creating a new “language of dreams”.

If it’s in the game, it’s in the game;
So what’s in your personal hall of fame?
Are you like Daisycutter, a fire-balling wizard?
Will Disneyworld ever again be as much fun as Blizzard?

Where’d that truck come from? We transformed John Madden
Into football fanatics’ equivalent of Tinkerbell plus Aladdin.
Now that Mario and Cityville have proven to be bigger than Titanic,
Which is your game of the year, what’s your golden mechanic?

We remember the 80’s, when games were geeky, uncool.
We were the high potential kids bored with teachers, and lectures and school.
We turned Dr J into a software artist, ended “Dinkety Dink Dink,”
And when the going got tough, we took the Bard out for a drink.

25 years later, we’re an overnight success;
Boys tout their COD scores to girls, and impress.
Guild management skills get you promoted to VP,
And Phorthor pays you to play his account, if you’re at UBC.
Virtual goods and freemium have become investable, magic words
We remember when Bill Budge was the only game-making non-nerd.
Pogo-type badges are imitated these days in enterprise,
Xbox Live achievements are used in online universities, Best Buys.

FIFA camera angles are adopted in televised sports,
And Gameface avatars are showing up in all sorts
Of websites. Sims relationship ratings are the new arithmetic teachers,
Gamification is on the Fortune 500’s must-have features.

We have innovated with more ethics than those damn Wall Street banks:
With Diablo skill trees, Ocarinas of Time, C&C stealth tanks,
Battlefield commanders, Kart bananas, and Hedgehog’s gold rings.
These are a few of my favorite things.

Hey, maybe Night Trap was just a little too smarmy,
And some people were offended by America’s Army.
But we are teaching productivity, how to commit to a mission,
And the high art of Tolkien has been surpassed by Cataclysm.

You have created the new literature, a Moveable Feast,
As rich as Moby Dick, more relevant than War and Peace.
You’ve made plastic cool again, with Nerf guns and guitars;
And taught a generation of speed freaks how to outrun cop cars.

We were all once young prodigies, in need of feedback and interaction,
Now we are self-taught pre-ship marketing and revenue traction.
We’ve grown up with the business, become our own mothers and fathers,
But we still share the initial dream that “We See Farther.”

Today, our mutual industry is undergoing a bit of re-framing,
But recognize this: we’re in the golden age of gaming.
It’s because of Sid Meier, Will Wright, Brian Reynolds, Mark Skaggs, Neil Young, Miyamoto, too,
That our nieces and nephews no longer have to get a “Clue.”

We have more power than Mubarak, so we shouldn’t abuse it.
Our goal is to “make software worthy of the minds that use it.”
Keep inventing cool! There are so many creative challenges still unmet.
And, as this Lifetime Achievement dude protests, “We’re not dead yet.”

Ps Thanks for the honor, now I’d better get off,
Because there’s an after-party with Dean Takahashi dressed as Lara Croft.

Book Review: 1776

Maybe all you Americans learn this stuff in school while we Canadians are learning about fur trappers and maple syrup production, but I wasn't familiar with a lot of the details of the American Revolution. Certainly not the details of the tumultuous year of 1776, portrayed in nail-biting detail in David McCullough's book.

Not being familiar with the details of Washington's first year of the revolution, I had no idea just how precariously close the American's came to losing. The fact that they survived the year to go on fighting the British was a combination of several strokes of brilliant strategy, blind luck, and severe underestimation on the part of their enemy.

There are many lessons about leadership (good and bad) to be taken from both sides, but the main thing you'll get out of the book is a vivid sense of just how difficult the logistics must have been and how hard the conditions under which they fought. (e.g. To think that ten thousand men, stationed only a few hundred yards from their enemy, could in the course of one night pack up and sneak off without detection, boggles the mind)

If you like military history and stories of epic struggle, 1776 definitely meets the bill.

Predictions for 2011

At almost three weeks into the new year, I suppose its getting on the late side for "2011 predictions" posts. That said, I'd made some notes to author such a post, and the recent CES trip I did helped crystallize this thinking.

I think these types of posts are healthy to do for two reasons. The first is humility. I'll surely be wrong on a number of these and so when I look back on them in early 2012, I can be reminded of just how off base I was (and thus generally am!). Secondly these assertions can start conversations. Ones in which I hope you, esteemed reader, will partake.

Lets first dispense with the usual stuff you are hearing around the internet: There will be lots of smartphones (duh), tablets will take over everything (they won't, but they'll be a big category), TVs will get thinner (would they get thicker?), etc. A lot of these things you can take for granted as true or false, either believing vendor claims or not. The more interesting things come in thinking about implications and general trends that result thereof.

So that said, here are a few that come to mind.

1. "Bespoke Design" and "Devices of Emotional Attachment"

For years now, the PC industry has wondered why it is that its machines can't hold a candle to Apple's when it comes to design. I think that the consumer electronics industry as a whole has come to terms with this. In the past few years they have been copying Apple (e.g. remember when everything went "white plastic"?), but this isn't the answer. The answer is in designing things that people care about. Either because they embody something they stand for, allow them to state their place in a tribe, or recall an era for which they have affection. Examples include Google's Chrome laptop (logo-free minimalist bespoke look), Fuji's retro looking camera, or similar examples from Leica or Olympus. Combine this with things like falling manufacturing costs and a premium that people will pay for this kind of design, and there's opportunity for many small hardware niches (e.g. laptop vendor that does build-to-order chassis based on custom materials).

2. "Appstore Fatigue" and the coming competition over connected commerce

(This is a big one on which I'll do a lengthier post in the coming weeks)

In a quick - by no means comprehensive - survey of products at CES, I counted no less than twenty "appstores" across a variety of phones, tablets, PCs, Netbooks, TVs and settop boxes. With the improved capabilities that apps bring to devices, and of course the revenue stream it brings to the vendors, it's not surprising that so many device vendors are doing just this. However, I believe it's unsustainable at current rate/scale. It will have fallout in a number of ways:

• “AppStore Fatigue”: Consumers are not likely to trust (or want to bother) maintaining an ongoing commercial relationship with every device they own, though it appears that every device is going to ask for one. Consumers are going to forgo some in favor of others. Those appstores that fail to resonate with users are going to become ghost towns of sorts. Users being assaulted with yet-another-appstore will suffer ‘AppStore Fatigue’, not wanting to fire up yet another appstore credit-card entry. Those launching appstores will have to think about how to incite that customer in the door. I’d imagine we’ll see lots of “Comes bundled with $50 worth of AppStoreBux” types of offers. Similarly, developers will be faced with a huge choice of channels. Even with lightweight click-to-accept agreements, most will not have the bandwidth to launch on every service and customize for services/devices. This is playing out exactly as the PC Download Casual market did in 05-06 when I worked at MS. As it did then, it will lead to lowest-common-denominator development, a rise of distributor/aggregators, and developer focus on the 1-2 leading platforms leaving others to wither.
• "Competition over Connected Commerce". Again, I'll address this in longer post, but the short version is this: A large part of determining who will win here will be dependant on which vendor walks the line best between (a) giving developers tools to innovate in commerce (light up new business models, create new pricing models, develop external direct commercial relationships with customers) and (b) presenting the end user with something that they can still understand, navigate, and trust. Consider that developers on the AppStore are lighting up new hybrid business models daily or weekly, while Xbox took several *YEARS* to light up a F2P/item-sales model in ONE game. This is going to be the front on which the most exciting innovation is going to take place.

3. Stereo 3D will reach a point of "undeniable lack of success"

Fall 2010 didn't see the furious adoption of Stereo3D that the more bullish were predicting. At CES this year, plenty of vendors were still hawking it, but (a) with less enthusiasm, and (b) as only one of several things they were showing, not the main attraction. My belief is that by end of year, it will be evident that Stereo3D is a niche at best, and likely a small one at that. Vendors will blame the glasses, but this is a red herring. The real issues are more fundamental, and I beleive insurmountable:

• There are fundamental physiological issues with Stereo3D at close distances that make it fatiguing at close distances. This isn't an issue in the cinema where the focal and convergence points are near-identical but becomes and issue at close range. Headmounted displays are extremely uncomfortable. TVs and PCs for extended periods, YMMV.
• Authoring 3D Content costs money. The model Hollyowod is pushing is predicated on a long-term-sustained premium over the whole content waterfall. While theater goers are paying the premium for ticket prices, it's not at the level they'd like and it's not clear that cable, blue- ray, etc, will be able to command a premium at the same level.

The two things that Stereo3D has in its corner are home-theater enthusiasts and sports (gaming enthusiasts are mice nuts in comparison) . I'm not in the camp that beleives these two niches are enough to evade a collapse, but who knows.

4. 3D printing, on the other hand, is about to take off

Several sub-$2k printers, several startup services allowing printing of your own designs (Ponoko, Shapeways, Figureprints) or offer boutique products for sale. Feels on the cusp of something big, though what exactly I'm not sure. Print your own board game pieces? design your own jewelery? Maybe Alice will figure it out for us! There's certainly some overlap with #5:

5. Gaming's Virtual & physical worlds meet

There were a number of toy manufacturers around CES this year, and some of them are doing interesting work in melding physical toys/games with the virtual. There was of course a first step in this direction with toys like WebKinz, BarbieGirls, and BuildABear, but this was only a commercial link, using physical toy as proxy/token for the games cost of entry. What we are seeing now are things like Mattel’s Rock’em Sock’em robots having a complimentary augmented reality game, SphereO a remote controlled robot ball that you drive via smartphone; and ARDrone, a remote controlled helicopter that you pilot with your iphone while simultaneously playing augmented reality games (e.g. 2 real-world copters, but the ‘bullets’ and ‘rockets’ are in virtual space). Also, I got a chance to play Sifteo, a tactile game platform made up of physical cubes that react to how to you move/tilt/connect them. I think all of these are indications of an interesting trend melding the virtual and real worlds. The uber-smart Frank Lantz once said “we think of games as something you put into computers, but this is wrong. Computers are something we put into games”. I think this captures the essense of this trend – that we’re finding ways for technology to pervade and enhance all aspects of play, on and off the screen (which includes things like Nike+, etc)

6. Apple has a gaming platform.

Well, they have two of course. The iPad and the iPhone. What I mean though, is that this posturing (part BS'ing, part wishful thinking) from game console manufacturers about iPhone not really competing with the DS/PSP (it does) and iPad not competing with high-end consoles (they do for share of wallet) is no longer going to fly. Market data will emerge that proves that Apple's platforms are taking gamer money out of the pocket of traditional game platform manufacturers.

7. The Post-PC-Era will officially arrive.

Classify it how you will; Smartphone & tablet growth outpacing PCs, or more people connecting to the Internet on non-PC devices, or any other metric, it will be clear that it's no longer a PC world. This will have all kinds of implications for people developing games content. HTML5 (and

related tech that often is thrown into that bucket) will become increasingly important, cross-platform services will become attractive for gamers, and we'll see the emergence of #8

8. Brands-as-Memes.

This proliferation of app-enabled platforms will lead, I think, to another interesting phenomena. It will be hard and expensive for large-budget games, outside of their core market, to get onto enough platforms to rise above the noise of the collective conciousness. On the other hand, smaller titles, being able to appear across iPhone, iPad, Facebook, consoles and PC, will - when they 'hit' - spread across the cultural landscape like wildfire. Red Dead Redemption made tons of cash, but its got to be a little bit frustrating to work on a $100M AAA blockbuster thats supposed to be the biggest thing in gaming, only to turn on the TV and see that everything from SNL skits to Jay Leno monologues are talking about Farmville and Angry Birds. When Angry Birds gets this level of virality, its no longer just a brand, it's a meme.

9. E-reader apps & services will see an explosion of innovation

The first wave of e-reader devices, apps and services have been too focused (a) on improving their supply chain and costs, and (b) too focused on emulating paper, not on surpassing it. The device war is going to be waged on a number of fronts (Kindle will stick e-ink, but they'd better add a touch interface), but for 2011 its going to be Kindle loyalists and the iPad juggernaut, with some niche-serving tablets in peleton further back. On the software front though, there is room for a ton of innovation. Trying win customers over, people will build social networks or latch onto existing ones, and then layer on features for book clubs, shared annotations, circle-of-trust recommendations, book lending/sharing, gifting, treasure-hunt games, and of course acheivement systems. Lots of magazines and newspapers trying their hand at different interpretations of what their content should look and function like on digital platforms. HTML5 will make it easier and cheaper to produce high quality typography and layout and to make it portable. There's also a ton of work to do to make text more readable on screens.

It took us a few thousand years to get paper to where it is today. YOu didn't think we were done with e-readers upon reaching the iPad, did you?

Some people to watch in this space: Craig Mod, James Bridle, Bill Hill, Copia (who have the right idea, and whose feature set will likely be copied by Amazon and/or Apple)

10. Cracks in gaming's walled gardens.

Consoles are walled gardens. Platforms like Apple's are as well, but less so. As I wrote about a while back, as consoles are tempted - or demanded by their partners or customers - to reach out into the broader Internet to leverage the benefits of other services and platforms, they'll start to lose some degree of control on their platforms. The recent Steam/PS3 headline is a prime example.

And now, FIVE more bonus predictions!

11. HTML5 begets real apps: Real, viable competitors to Office, Visio, Photoshop, etc, etc.

12. Android consolidation. Such a mess right now there has to be some consolidation in device UI and form and application distribution or the app landscape will be bleak.

13. Games market analysts will struggle to segment an amorphous landscape. They used to segment handheld differently than phones, differently than console, retail vs digital, etc. Things like iPad blur all those lines. It'll be hard to make sense of the market.

14. No 'official' Kinect for PC. Some are predicting it. I just don't see it happening. It was so hard to bring Live to the PC, and not particularly successful, that I can't see them overcoming all the calibration/usage issues, nor the high demand for it materializing.

15. Tablets as producer platform: People are framing tablets as 'consumption-only' devices because largely today they are. However, people will innovate on the platform and turn them into production/editing platforms, and we'll see them take off for real in many niches as PC replacements, not compliments.

That's it! Let loose the commentary on this broad-reaching food for thought!

Book Review: We, Robot

A while back, I reviewed Mark Stephen Meadow's book Tea Time with Terrorists. Since that time, I got to spend a couple days hanging out with him in Mexico, and he sent me a copy of his latest work, We, Robot to check out.

Needless to say, they are pretty different books in terms of subject matter. If there's a common thread though, its that when the author sets out to understand something, he goes out and finds people who know, where ever they might be.

We, Robot is a rather unique look at our progress in robotics. The book looks at a number of famous Sci-fi robots, from The Jetson's Rosie to the Terminator T-1000 to Avatar's avatars. He then compares them to progress of different projects in the robotics world, asking how close we've come to the original sci-fi vision, and of what differs, why.

It's a fun tour of some of the field's better poster-bot/children, and the interviews with some of their creators are quite interesting.

The real gold for me though, was in some of the conjecture and philosophizing that Meadows does in considering implications of robotics near future. This is especially true when looking at the borders between hardware and software which he sees little distinction. I'm of the same school of thought, but it's surprising how many people deem them completely different.

For example, when considering the implications of privacy and giving one's personal information up to 'trusted' parties, he asks us to consider whether we'd accept a "Rosie"-like robot from Google, provided for free, if in exchange we understood that it would mill about the house in spare time, learning about our personal habits and behavior and such. Is this really so different than G-mail? Really, it's not, when you think about it.

There are a lot of great nuggets of food for thought along these lines. I found myself dog-earing the corners of a lot of pages with the intent of going back to think about more deeply.

At this year's CES, I saw a surprising number of toys and gadgets blurring the lines between digital and physical worlds. Robots will be one of the conduits between those spaces sooner than we think. This book is a good tour of both the state of the art, as well as a tour of some of the unanswered questions.

We, Robot: Skywalker's Hand, Blade Runners, Iron Man, Slutbots, and How Fiction Became Fact

Professional Whuffie anyone?

Yesterday I posted a review of Super Sad True Love Story, the social network sci-fi setting of which includes people real-time ranking one another in a process called "FAC'ing".

Then today Techcrunch posted about CubeDuel. Think of it as the bastard child of LinkedIn and HotOrNot. Social ranking of your professional network based on who would like to work with whom.

Don't tell me you aren't heading there right now...

Oh sure, it's all fun and games right now, but how long before employers are looking and saying "how'd this guy rank among former peers and coworkers?"

They say truth is stranger than fiction, in this case it's just neck and neck.

Book Review: Super Sad True Love Story

Seeing as how it is mid-January, it's probably too early to call my fave book of 2011, but Super Sad True Love Story is certainly going to rank high on the list.

The book is a romantic tragedy, set amid near-future distopian sci-fi which it uses as heavy satire about current-day American decline and materialism. 'Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom" + "Little Brother" + later Adrian Mole volumes, perhaps. It is to Facebook & Amazon what Halting State was to MMOs and Virtual Worlds.

The love story at it's heart is, as the name implies, sad. However, what I really loved about this book was the commentary on social networking & whuffie, materialism, information control and willful ignorance. One of those pictures of the future close enough to be plausible, and thus disturbing and frightening.

Super Sad True Love Story: A Novel

Book Review: The Assault on Reason

We started the audiobook version of the 2008 Al Gore book, The Assault on Reason, on the way back from our recent ski trip. I finished it up on the work commute.

At a high level, the book is about the threat to democracy that comes from an ill-informed citizenry, making the point that we are currently under such a threat. The book covers a number of topics at length, including the growing influence of television vs print over the past few decades, misinformation about global warming, and the implications of the fight over net neutrality.

The bulk of the text is spent on a lengthy and detailed skewering of the Bush-Cheney administration and their many transgressions. These Gore goes into at lengthy and with many detailed fact-based accusations.

Though they are no longer in office, many of their policies are still in place and thus the book is still applicable. As well, the book goes into much detail about the delicate balance between our three branches of government. For me as a non-native, this was educational.

While a little dated, the ideas in the book are still very relevant and applicable.

The Assault on Reason

Great overview of the 'Gamification' landscape

Pawned. Gamification and Its Discontents

View more presentations from Sebastian Deterding.

Twitter-abstinence experiment over

A couple years ago, when all the intertubers got all hot and bothered over the next wave of technical hullaballoo, namely Twitter, I decided to try an experiment and sit out one round of technology.

Well, it's been long enough and here I am: @kimpall.

Did I learn anything from the experiment?

• It's not the end of the world to be off the grid, or at least off the latest medium/tech. In fact, plenty of young, tech-savvy, innovative people are not on Twitter or Facebook, and yet they manage to thrive. Imagine that, twittees!
• Twitter, like Facebook, can be a serious timewaster and ADD magnet, if you let it (at least it seems that way)
• On the other hand, it seems a killer app at conferences
• While I don't need to be abreast of every meme to the very minute, it does seem like there's a lack of reliability of the more relevant memes leaping off of Twitter and onto the less ephemeral blogosphere. Some do, some don't.

So, I'm on it, but I will aim to have some goals while using it. I'll try to keep time-wasters to a medium (try...)

Privy among ghosts

photo.JPG, originally uploaded by Kim Pallister.

My Intrapreneurship talk from 2010 IGDA Leadership Forum

2010 in Books

Having sync'd my book reviews from my trip, here's a summary of what I read this year. I hit my goal of 30 books, up from 25 last year (though 8 were audiobooks if you count those differently). I'm hoping my new iPad will help me get up to a more ambitious 36 for 2011 (Half-way done two already).

Taking a cue from Jason, I'm grouping by topic area. Links are to my review posts, which in turn have links to the Amazon pages. One asterisk for recommended books, two for highly recommended. YMMV.

Business

• Starbucked
• Free (*)
• The Big Lie (*)
• Ten Rules for Strategic Innovators (**)
• Secrets of the Moneylab (**)
• The Black Swan
• Intrapreneurship in Action
• The Big Short (**)

Politics/History

• Invention of Air (**)
• Audacity of Hope
• Nickel and Dimed
• Tea Time with Terrorists (**)

Culture

• Japanese Schoolgirl Confidential (*)
• The Art Detective (*)
• Don't Get Too Comfortable

Technology

• Dot Font
• EPub Straight to the Point
• Fundamentals of Typography (**)
• HTML5: designing rich internet apps
• Dive into HTML5 (*)
• Screen Future (*)

Science

• Universe in a nutshell
• Our Days Are Numbered

Fiction

• Makers (**)
• For The Win (*)
• The White Tiger
• Boneshaker

Self Improvement

• Body For Life

Graphic Novels

• Media Meltdown (** - for kids)
• Fables Vol 1

Book Review: Secrets of the Moneylab

This book surprised me and is probably one of my favorites of the year, at least as it is really timely for our industry, as I'll soon explain.

Technology companies generally have laboratories in which they do research & experimentation. Game developers often do so as well. Perhaps not formally in R&D labs (though some of the larger publishers have them), but certainly doing experiments for new rendering techniques, AI models, physics experiments, etc.

For all this though, it's surprising how little science is put into the business side of the business. Things like pricing, to pick one example, are often done using some gut-feel starting point and by following competition.

Kay-Yut Chen, author of Secrets of the Moneylab, runs a lab at Hewlett Packard. He is also an economist. The lab he runs does research on behavioral economics and it's application in the tech industry. The book runs through experiments they did on consumer pricing, marketing, supply chain management, and much more. Also, they look at a number of different experiments from different industries.

Why is this so timely?

Consider the point made by Neal Young of NGMoco at his GDC2010 keynote, where he said that for the first time in the games industry, the business model is in the hands of the game designers. Add to that the fact that digital distribution channels and competing appstores will mean that developers have the opportunity to try many different experiments as they bring their games to market on different platforms (Something Dave Edery at Spry Fox has been doing).

Success on these emerging platforms is going to come from people's ability to put some science into the business side of their business, and this book provides an excellent start to getting your head around that kind of thinking.

Secrets of the Moneylab: How Behavioral Economics Can Improve Your Business

[note: I'm post-dating a couple of these posts as I didn't have a chance to sync them while I was travelling, and I like to track by when I read the book]

Book Review: Japanese Schoolgirl Confidential

After reading Brian Ashcraft's great book on the Japanese arcade gaming scene, I figured I'd like his next book on Japanese schoolgirl culture. It didn't disappoint.

Japanese Schoolgirl Confidential is a pretty deep dive on a number of different aspects of what can only be called a phenomena: The idolization, monetization, and 'fetishization' of the Japanese schoolgirl look and surrounding culture.

Ashcraft and his co-author (also his wife) Shoko Ueda take the reader through the history of the uniforms, idol worship, schoolgirls in films and games, as well as how different aspects of business (fashion and telecom in particular) have changed behavior to target the schoolgirl demographic.

Some of the book (e.g. the history of the uniforms) were more depth than I needed, but other parts were really enlightening. The sections on the evolution of cell phone texting, the fashion industry's capitalization of the schoolgirl market, and schoolgirls in video games were probably the most useful, and therefore recommended, sections for those in the technology and/or gaming industries.

Japanese Schoolgirl Confidential: How Teenage Girls Made a Nation Cool

[note: I'm post-dating a couple of these posts as I didn't have a chance to sync them while I was travelling, and I like to track by when I read the book]

Book Review: Don't Get Too Comfortable

I picked this one up as an audio book for our recent ski-trip, looking for some different stuff that my wife and I would both enjoy. Enjoyed it somewhat, but I'm not putting it at the top of any lists.

It's a set of sarcastic, humorous, "queenish" rant-like essays on a wide variety of subjects, from his experience on one of the last Concorde flights to attending a soft-core porn shoot at a tropical resort. Good for some laughs, but I did feel like sometimes his lashing out at the over-indulgent was itself a bit over-indulgent.

Don't Get Too Comfortable: The Indignities of Coach Class, The Torments of Low Thread Count, The Never- Ending Quest for Artisanal Olive Oil, and Other First World Problems

[note: I'm post-dating a couple of these posts as I didn't have a chance to sync them while I was travelling, and I like to track by when I read the book]

Dara O Briain Live at the Apollo - i love videogames ( 09/12/2010 )

This will be one of those youtube clips everyone in the industry links to.

Recommended iPad apps?

I have it on good authority that Mr Claus may be depositing an iPad under the tree for me on Xmas morn.

When I get it, I have one day to get it set up before taking it on a ski trip for a few days. I'm hoping the blogosphere can save me some trial and error on a number of different app needs. So, chime in to the comments if you can help.

1. Best Feedreader? (Would like it to sync feeds between PC/iPad/iPhone, allow offline viewing, set refresh frequency, etc. I've used RSSBandit and others in the past. Currently using IE8 because I like the Outlook integration, but I'm guessing it's not an option on iPad)
2. Best eReader app? (Would like it to have top-notch typography, support for EPUB and other formats, bonus for PDF support, should be able to keep multiple bookmarks support for annotations and the like)
3. Best document-sync apps? (I'm thinking of apps to let me view and/or edit Word & Powerpoint files off my PC)
4. Best sketching/drawing app? (keeping in mind I'll have a stylus)
5. Best notetaking/sketching/brainstorming app? (e.g. Onenote equivalent)
6. Best GPS app?
7. Best Browser? (Is the stock one sufficient?)
8. Best Wikipedia client? (I use Wikiamo on iPhone - is there something better?)
9. Best magazines/news site apps?
10. Best cookbook-type apps?
11. Best Twitter client/aggregator? (Yes, my opt-out experiment is over and I'll become a Twit in the new year)
12. finally, recommendations on best stylus?

Thanks, y'all!

Good blog on dog-fooding Chrome OS Laptop

My friend and former co-blogger & co-worker Vlad Cole has started a new blog where he's documenting 99 days of moving to an all-cloud model and using a Chrome OS laptop.

Vlad used to blog for Joystick, and we jointly worked on VGVC.net for a year. He's tech savvy, and definitely a guy that walks his talk, so it'll be a good experiment to follow:

99 Days in the Cloud

Hi-end facial mocap in Rockstar's LA Noire

The video below has a nice example of how we're likely to see high end game titles evolve over the next couple years.

With performance more or less tapped out on current gen consoles, which are going to have to live on a few more years, those studios looking to out-gun their competition will increasingly do so by dialing up the spend on the authoring side.

The runtime rendering being done here doesn't look like anything that far beyond what we're seeing in other titles. However, the content authoring - combining a high-end mocap rig with recognizable actors and whats likely to be TONS of dialog - is clearly going to be a huge cost increase.

Red Dead Redemption was rumored to cost north of $100M, and LA Noire looks like it could easily climb north of there.

(And yes, the uncanny valley runs way deep)

Word 2010 Declaration of Independence

This is the first Microsoft ad I've seen in a long time that I've liked. Funny, but totally gets the point across. Bravo.

The boy who cried 'advergame'

So, back in 2006, Microsoft did a deal with Burger King to do 3 BK-branded titles and distribute them with value meals at a nominal fee ($3.99). The fee aside, these were essentially free advertising-subsidized game titles for the console.

The three titles were met with lukewarm acceptance (Sneak King got a 54 on Metacritic, Big Bumpin a 63, Pocket Bike Racers a 54), with a nod of the head to the $3.99 price point.

Then Yaris came out, and was deservedly panned. A 17 on MC, which, well, you have to really try to score that low don't you.

Later, another ad-supported title, Doritos Dash of Destruction, came out and scored a 53, and yes, wasn't a very good game.

Then in the past week, two more Doritos-sponsored games were released on Xbox Live Arcade. "Harms Way", and "Doritos Crash Course". How did they do on meta-critic?

No one has rated either one? Really? Not one critic review? Not one user review? Really?

Is it possible that people have become so soured on sponsored titles that they just assume they are crap?

Here's the thing too. I played Crash Course a while last night... and it's pretty good. Kind of a Trials-HD meets Ninja Warrior using player avatars. Definitely better than a lot of games I've paid $10 for. Proof that the ad-supported model can work on console.

If only people don't assume that they get what they pay for.

Book Review: Boneshaker

I've been doing a lot of non-fic reading as of late, and so with a long flight giving me a reading opportunity (I spoke at GDC China in Shanghai last week), I picked up Boneshaker for the flight.

It's about as boilerplate Steampunk as you can get. Dirigibles, steam-powered machines, much leather/rubber/tinplate clothing, clockwork, gas masks and goggles. Add in a healthy dose of zombies in 19th century Seattle, a mad scientist, post-apocalyptic societies and a handful of air-pirates, well, how can you lose?

Thrilling page-turner. Definitely recommended.

Boneshaker

Typography porn

I got pointers to a couple music videos doing some really nice kinetic typography. In the future all the examples here should be possible to do using HTML5 & related tech. (Would be a cool to see someone tack a crack at doing a Chrome Experiment at implementing the Shopvac video below in realtime).

Justice's DVNO:

Jonathan Coulton's Shopvac:

Book Review: Screen Future

Brian David Johnson is a fellow Intellite, though he works in group pretty distant from mine, we both have future-forecasting type roles.

At a meeting he held up at Pax, he gave me a copy of his book, Screen Future, and I just got done reading it on a flight this evening.

The book is a look at ways in which TV (and to a degree, screen-hosted entertainment overall) is being shaped by technology and the shift to the Internet.

While it's got numerous flaws, the book does deliver in painting some pictures of future usages and the possible directions different players may opt to take.

First, the negatives:

• The book has numerous typos, grammatical, and technical/terminology errors. I'm not sure who proofed it, but being an Intel Press book I'd expect them to do a better job especially on the latter of these.
• There are places where Brian opts to "go deep" on how something might work, but stays at a high level powerpoint-ish description that hand-waves around a lot of the how, and so it's not clear these pieces actually add any value. (i.e. Just saying "assume this all works" is no less valuable than the approach of "you'd have to have Box A talk to Box B using a protocol - assume that just works".
• While some of the book talks about business models and business issues, the book is way too limited in this respect. Also, it doesn't talk about issues around intellectual property rights and how they will have impact (e.g. DMCA's impact on innovation).

Now that said, the positives:

• Brian has lined up some REALLY good interviews with folks in the book, from around the globe. Henry Jenkins, Stephen Conroy (Australian Senator revamping their broadband and broadcast policies), Amy Reinhard (Director of Strategic Planning at Paramount), and numerous others. Some of the riffing these folks do around the topic are alone worth the price of admission.*
• The book has a global perspective - and is not just US-only like other views on the entertainment business tend to be
• Despite my complaint about the under-served business discussion, the book does attempt to cross technical, business, and cultural boundaries, not just treating it as a technical subject.

* On a note about the different views: I found it funny that the otherwise awesome discussion with Reinhard kind of concluded that they had no idea how this would play out and how users might use some of this stuff; it was a nice contrast to the Conroy interview, in which he said when faced with the same problem, that they just went to Korea and studied how they've done it because they are years ahead of the western world. I thought this was a nice little example of how US folk tend to assume that we are leading here, rather than being humble enough to assume that maybe others are ahead.

So, some minor flaws, but good thought provoking read on the future of television.

Screen Future: The Future of Entertainment, Computing and the Devices We Love

Great talk on future of publishing (+ a great speaking tip)

Craig Mod, who wrote a couple really awesome pieces on the future of book publishing on the iPad, and whom I linked to in a couple previous posts, and who I recently coincidentally ended up driving across the Mexican desert with (a long story), has a video up of talk he gave at a conference called 'the Do Lectures'.

First off, it's a great talk about the future of publishing, ebooks, and how the Internet is democratizing and changing publishing itself.

But second, if you are a fan of presentation techniques, watch it through to the end. Craig wraps the talk by calling out about ten of the audience members by name and giving them specific challenges on what THEY should be doing. From the talk, I'm going to assume that many of them he just met in the previous day or two at the conference, and (a) he makes his point that ANYONE can be a publisher, and (b) it absolutely connects that he's taken his audience seriously, so much that he can call them out by name and state what they are working on. So powerful!

Several good reads this week around the web

A few good finds this week to read over your morning coffee, or over turkey hangover:

• Tim Berners-Lee (inventer of The Web) in Scientific American: Long Live the Web: A Call for Continued Open Standards and Neutrality. A lengthy dissertation on open standards vs walled gardens, Net Neutrality, and Electronic Human Rights. Much of it covers known problem, but it's good to see them called out so eloquently.
• iReaderReview has a piece examining What Impact are Kindle Exclusives Having. There are some parallels with games here. In a crowded market like books (or, say, small downloadable games), does having an exclusive on even a significant number of titles make any difference for the platform's appeal.
• Gamasutra has a good piece up on Console Hardware Trends in the Bundle Era. I find the title a bit misleading, and would rather label it "Hey Guys, how goes the mid-life booster rocket?". Title aside, though it's interesting. The table of 360 HW sales by month is interesting, showing 2010 to be a banner year thus far, and that was BEFORE the Kinect and its bundles launched.
• Good CNET piece on Netflix's Secret Sauce for Acquiring Content. Good lessons here on being a good partner.

Go read! Discuss!

Book Review: Nickel and Dimed

I had Nickel and Dimed one on my 'to read' list for a long time, after Adam originally recommended it to me. It's an illuminating, if somewhat depressing read.

The author spent a year doing a stint of low-wage jobs in a number of cities around the country, trying to see if she could support herself on a minimum wage job. She spents time working as a waitress, a cleaning lady, a Walmart clerk, and a number of other positions, sometimes working two jobs while also apartment hunting or dealing with other administrivia.

What she finds isn't surprising; that people earning the minimum 'living wage' in this country can get by, barely, often by leaning on friends and family to share rent and the like, and that any moderate expense (e.g. a medical one, or a car repair, or first/last months rent on a new place) can start a snowball effect toward homelessness pretty quickly.

What's maybe more illuminating (not in the sense that we didn't know, but that it shone light on what we like to keep in the dark), is that it's not that the so-called working poor are lazy or stupid. Rather, they are subject to a system that bleeds its poorest dry. The flipside to the rich-get-richer is of course that the poor get poorer.

Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America

Book Review: The Art Detective

I picked this up on a whim when my eye happened upon it at the local library.

The Art Detective: Fakes, Frauds, and Finds and the Search for Lost Treasures is a pretty entertaining read. It's written by Philip Mould, an art historian/collector/appraiser who is also known for his appearances on Antiques Roadshow.

In the Art Detective, he takes the reader into the world of 'found' paintings, specifically works of grand masters that have been recovered after years either missing or lying in unknown obscurity. The work that goes into researching their histories, verifying their authenticity, and in restoring their damages (e.g. from things like later 'artists' having painted a newer and more fashionable hat on them). He does this by picking a handful of the more colorful finds from his career (not all were his finds) and bringing us behind the scenes of the process that can sometimes drag out for months.

Mould is somewhat long winded and a touch pretentious in his narration, but it can be comical if taken with a pinch of salt. The background on the processes used to recover these works is quite fascinating.

Book Review: Intrapreneurship in Action

This was one of a number of books I referenced in a talk I gave at the IGDA Leadership Forum last week.

The author, Gifford Pinchot , was the one who initially coined the "intrapreneurship" term back in the late seventies in an earlier work. Intrapreneuring in Action is a pretty good book on the subject, though I much preferred Ten Rules for Strategic Innovators.

The book breaks down both requirements for successful intrapreneuring, as well as methods for leaders to build more entrepreneurial culture within their organizations. In both of these the book can be a very fast read as his approach is very structured, to the point of section headers basically containing the core idea most of the time. I found that only some pieces benefitted me if I read through them in depth.

Where I found it falls a little short is that the real-world cases cited are extremely non-specific. Unlike Ten Rules, it doesn't name names. Not that I doubt the cases are real, but they jump off the page far less and aren't as easy to understand without the very specific context of real company and product names.

This negative aside, it's still a good read and has a good structured approach to either taking on an intrapreneurial initiative or shaping your company to being more ready for such initiatives.

Beautiful definition of common usage of "HTML5"

I've been talking to a lot of folks about HTML5 recently, and always find myself struggling with the conversations actually including areas that aren't technically part of the HTML5 spec but are referred to in the same sentence 90% of the time.

So today someone pointed me at Brad Neuberg's CodingInParadise blog and this fantastic post that both provides a definition of the general sense in which the term HTML5 is generally used, as well as a proposed set of specific definitions for different layers of the onion peeling.

Here's the short version.

"Everything that is in the formal W3C HTML5 spec; everything that used to be in there but was broken out for various reasons; sibling and related technologies and developments like CSS3, SVG, EcmaScript 5, etc.; and experimental explorations that are pushing the boundaries."

Read the post to get the rest.

Book Review: Dive Into HTML5

Dive Into HTML5 is a free e-book by Google's Mark Pilgrim. I read it before the HTML5 book I recently reviewed, and found Pilgrim's to be much better.

Pilgrim has a lengthier book,HTML5: Up and Running, in dead-tree format that is available on Amazon. I haven't yet checked that one out.

I found Dive Into HTML5 to be useful for a few reasons. It's relatively brief. It deals practically with the issues of building scalable code for a range of browsers/platforms with variable HTML5 support (i.e. rather than providing a switch statement for IE/Chrome/Firefox like some folk do, he deals different methods for testing for feature support in a way that will scale across browsers).

Finally, Pilgrim gives enough background to understand some of the 'why' on certain eccentricities as well as the 'how' on how to use them. For example, there are some details on local storage that include background on loose guidelines provided by the spec, as well as how much storage is made available and cases in which you may find it unavailable.

If you are looking for a quick read to get up to speed, it's a great place to start. (One downside is that it would have been nice if he'd made an offline version available as a e-book or PDF.

Book Review: HTML5:Designing Rich Internet Applications

This was the second of a couple books I've read on HTML5. The other review is coming next.

HTML5: Designing Rich Internet Applications was pretty disappointing. The book contains numerous typos and grammatical errors than an editor should have caught, and these seem to be the main complaints of other negative reviews on Amazon. I could have easily looked past these if they were the only flaws with the book. Instead, I think these were just the most superficial signs of a book hastily written to get in front of a trend.

More serious errors include poorly documented code samples, poorly written code samples, and an awkward correlation between the code and the text.

Even more frustrating still, there are sections where the focus and page-count are misspent (e.g. a section on HTML5's video playing capabilities contains numerous pages on how to author a video from a PPT presentation (and btw, why would anyone do this?) an convert it from one format to another).

Other sections woefully underserve some of the more interesting topics. e.g. the section on HTML5 canvas is minimal at best, and when it gets to doing animations on the canvas, the author just points to a the CAKE javascript library and says 'use this'. (In a later example in the book, the author actually does some animation in his own javascript, but doesn't explain his use of it, indicating that maybe he learned this along the way and it again points to the inconsistent editing?). Another example is the section on local storage, which is used in a code sample, but with no documentation on limits of size on storage, how it can/can't be used, how it might vary from one device implementation to the next, etc.

Finally, there are several places where rather than focusing on HTML5 exclusively, the author is cobbling together bits of Ajax, CSS, etc, and it's not clear to the reader what's coming from where.

I don't recommend the book. The next one I'm writing up is a better read. that review coming soon...

Game Dev Story: A Niche market is you!

Game Dev Story is a fun little iphone sim about running a games studio. I found a lot of developer friends talking about how enamored they are with it.

I found it ironic that I saw Facebook contacts raving about it the same day I saw an announcement that there are now 300,000 apps on the iTunes store.

At that point, iPhone devs constitute an interesting niche market, and selling them this game is kind of our industry's version of shovels-to-miners.

As an aside: Hey Apple! Pro-tip: When you have that number of apps, this is no longer a positive number for your marketing pitch. You are essentially telling devs the store is overcrowded, and your consumers that they may have trouble finding what they want. At this point "lots" will do as a tag line.

Why aspiring XBLA devs should buy Comic Jumper

Comic Jumper is a lot of fun. It's a testimony to it's quality that I'm playing it through to the end despite the fact that I normally am not a run-n-gun platformer fan.

Anyhow, developers thinking of doing console downloadable titles should consider it required reading for two reasons:

1) Because Twisted Pixel are just a great bunch of guys that everyone should support.

2) Because among the bonus materials unlocked during the game are videos and artwork that were used as part of the pitch material to land their deal with MS.

The quality of the pitch trailer and supporting materials are pretty high, especially considering that these guys had *already shipped* a title (The Maw) with XBLA before pitching the game. This should give aspiring XBLA devs an idea of the expected level of quality to compete for console vendor interest.

Book Review: The Fundamentals of Typography

As I've mentioned in a few recent posts, I've been spending some time thinking about e-readers, and reading up on things like typography and the ebook format. Anyhow, while the last typography book that I read was interesting, it wasn't the soup-to-nuts book on "all things typographical" I needed.

What I was looking for, as it turns out, was The Fundamentals of Typography, by Gavin Ambrose and Paul Harris.

This is a very wide-ranging look at type. The authors touch on everything from the history of written communication to adaptation of type to computer screens, from the structure of character sets to the layout of pages, etc. All of this presented in a way that is accessible, and not so deep as to overwhelm. To top it off, the book is beautifully laid out.

My only critique - and it's small given how nice the rest of the book is - is that their treatment of the subject of type on computer screens is very short. I'd have liked them to go into detail on TrueType fonts and how they are rasterized, how font hinting is done, issues with anti-aliasing, etc.

Apart from this one downside, this is an excellent primer for anyone to refresh/acquire a good working knowledge of typography.

Spry Fox releases game on Kindle!

Dave Edery's finally able to talk about one of his hush-hush projects: Games for the Kindle.

Their studio, Spry Fox, has released their first game for the Kindle, Triple Town, as part of what appears to be a very quiet soft launch of their game catalog for the device.

Dave's got a post up on the subject and how it fits his blue-ocean strategy that he's been talking about for a while.

Amazon certainly has a lot of catch up to do in getting an app store up, and they are heading into crowded territory as many devices are also getting app stores into play. Additionally, the Kindle seems somewhat hobbled as an interactive application platform (e-ink, UI, etc)

On the other hand, as David points out, Amazon has a large installed base of users with a propensity to spend money, and a trusted commercial relationship with those users. Those things alone certainly make those blue ocean waters look inviting.

If you are a Kindle owner, check out Triple Town.

Book Review: The Black Swan

While travelling this week I finished Nassim Teleb's The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, and I give it a rating of... well... so-so.

I do so not because it lacks any good ideas - this is not the case - but because of two things.

First, the author writes with such contempt for, well, most of humanity it would seem, and with such an arrogance, that I found myself wavering between being amused and being annoyed. At times it just distracted from the book's content.

Secondly, while the book's central premise is sound, and there are a few discussions about how it can be applied, it really is a 'one idea book'. As well, like many 'one idea' books (Chris Anderson's The Long Tail and Free come to mind), the author stretches the idea a bit too far and to too many areas. e.g. Why did MS beat Apple in the early days of the PC? luck certainly played a role but to say it's the ENTIRE reason is a bit of a stretch).

On the plus side, the idea is sound. The central premise is that people fall prey to two things:

(1) They under-estimate the risk of 'black swans' - unforeseen events that disprove models and rules governing a market or force us to reexamine fundamental assumptions, and (2) that when these events occur, they can be massively larger that we anticipate.

There are many illustrative examples in the book, and many more come to mind. Models of real estate prices prior to the recent downturn; understanding of what the phone market looked like before iPhone shipped (how many planners at Motorola had that plotted on their curves? Likely none!), etc.

The author doesn't suggest that because we can't plan/forecast that we then just throw our hands up and do nothing. Rather, he suggests that we always examine fundamental assumptions, understand that models are built on simplified models, and always attempt to quantify the risk if a black swan occurs.

As someone that does silicon requirements forecasting for a living I found the book to be both useful and disheartening. Disheartening in that I can think of so many occasions that our fundamental assumptions turn out to be wrong (by 'we' I mean the entire industry), but useful in that it's given me food for thought about how to account for the unknown. To ask not just "what should our plans be?", but ask "what's the worst case if they are wrong?"

So, if after reading my warnings earlier in this review, the book still sounds interesting, then give it a go. Once you sift past the ego and the contempt, there are some useful bits there.

(Note, several people commented that the author's prior book Fooled by Randomness, is better. I haven't yet read it, but thought I'd pass that along)

KZero Virtual World dataporn

Raph points us to Kzero (a market research company looking at virtual worlds) and their awesome data visualization of the growth of virtual worlds. I'm a sucker for data porn, and this shows up the worlds split by age demographic, size, and launch date.

Would love to have this as a poster, but for now, here it is in pieces (note that some of these are from last year - guess you have to pay them to get the whole, er, pie.

Book Review: The White Tiger

One part dark comedy, one part Slumdog Millionaire, The White Tiger is a story of an poor Indian boy whose opportunism-cloaked-in-entrepreneurism lets him ascend the social order - to a point - from which further ascension requires a much darker undertaking.

Very entertaining and funny, but with page-gripping parts. A very palpable painting of Indian life as modern progress has thrown the caste system and social order into great disarray.

Ideo on the future of the book

Futurist concept demo on ebook ideas. Touches on some of the ideas I discussed a while back.

The Future of the Book. from IDEO on Vimeo.

Book Review: EPUB Straight to the Point

In a previous post, I mentioned how I've been spending some thinking about ebooks and digital readers. As well, I've been reading a bunch about typography and things having to do with print on screens.

One of the books I picked up was EPUB Straight to the Point: Creating ebooks for the Apple iPad and other ereaders, which was recommended by several blogs of experts in the segment, largely because I think it's on only texts in this space that covers Ebooks on the iPad in depth.

Overall the book was too easy for me, though it might be acceptable for non-technical types. There was too much time on step-by-step instructions on how to replace fields in the XML source files, etc, but again, some people may want exactly that.

On the plus side, the author has tested most of the e-Reader devices out there right now, talking about limitations of each one. Some of these are device related, but most have to do with how the implementers of the devices made different assumptions and trade-offs when interpreting the still-wet EPUB standard.

Other than the comment about it being too easy, my only other complaint is this: while the author spends a fair amount of time on making EPUB books 'device proof' between device implementations, she doesn't spend any time making the books 'future proof'. That is, thinking about how they'll display/work on future devices. For example she suggests not using images whose resolution exceeds those of the display, but then those books may one day be displayed on higher resolution screens.

Other than this, it's a recommended book for less technical folk looking to publish or understand EPUB books.

5 Reasons Apple could beat Facebook, and 5 Reasons They Won't

[In the interest of trying to do some better crystal ball gazing, I'm trying a new approach to posts where I try to put some rigor into both sides of an argument. I'll tag these as "TechWafflin"]

After Apple's announcement of Ping at their recent love-fest, a number of pundits were quick to claim a war was brewing where Jobs would take on Facebook. Others were equally quick to claim that this wasn't the case, or that if it was Apple would fail.

The most commonly cited reason for the pro-FB sentiment was "Facebook is too big to be beat" (due to critical mass, revenue, momentum, ecosystem, etc). It burns me when people take this position. Yes, Facebook has these advantages, but saying that FB can't be beat is ridiculous. How many times have we heard someone was too big to beat only to have them, well, be beat? AOL, Yahoo, Everquest, Myspace, IBM... people used to say this about General Motors, and years later they needed a taxpayer funded defibrillator.

Anyhow, the fatalist attitude aside, Facebook's momentum and entrenchment are indeed a factor. My previous thinking was that they'd be beat by an entrant quietly addressing a niche with a better product and growing up from under them.

However, the Apple entry got me thinking and I beleive they have a few factors that mean they in fact could take on Facebook and give them a run for their money. Here are five reasons I think that's the case.

5 Reasons Apple could beat Facebook

1. http://www.kimpallister.com/2009/09/its-complicated-or-beating-facebook.html: Apple has ~150M iTunes users and can piggyback a social network into that installed base with an iTunes update. Also, they could offer any number of incentives to connect with friends.
2. The relationship Apple has with those 150M people is already a trusted and trained relationship with a tie to content people care about (music, movies, games...). Another way to think about this is that the majority of those 150M people have asked Apple to keep their credit card numbers on file.
3. The iTunes economy may be bigger than the Facebook economy. Not sure about ad revenue on both side, but one way people should be looking at #1 above is asking ($150 iTunes users * Avg User Yearly iTunes Spend) > (500M FB users * Avg User Yearly FB Spend).
4. Apple has a warchest of $40B. Yes, FB has real revenue and it's estimated to be as high as $2B for 2010, but at the same time, Apple made in excess of that number every two weeks through the last quarter.
5. Apple has a better relationship and level of interest with the developer community. Neither platform has been perfect, but Apple's been improving their policies over time, where FB's recent gaffs seem to show developer satisfaction is pretty low on their list.

OK, now taking the other side...

Again, most people cite Facebook momentum. A factor, but not a given. Top most argument for me is that Apple seem to be doing fine screwing this up for themselves before FB need bother respond. Anyhow, here are five reasons Apple won't topple FB:

1. Ping is shop-centric instead of user-centric. Too much thinking around "how can people help other people BUY", not just "how can people connect and share".
2. Not considering FB's shortcomings: It seems Apple's being a bit lazy, and is launching Ping as nothing more than "its a SN, connected to iTunes". They don't have to look far to find a list of things they could actually do BETTER than FB. Better privacy policy, developer platform or policy, relationship control, or as I've talked about, tracking relationships as nouns rather than adjectives.
3. Arrogance. Just as FB's arrogance could be their downfall, Apple's arrogance could be their guarantee of failure. Saying things like "Privacy is easy", are a clear indicator that they either don't take it seriously or haven't thought about it. Allowing users to view, grok, control, and evolve the exposure of information and content over their entire network is a really hard problem that is not going to get easier.
4. Closed Ecosystem mentality (vs open). It's on their software, their devices and adding features as they see fit. As opposed to a liberal policy embracing 3rd party platform vendors to accelerate your platforms development.
5. Fragmented effort from Apple. To me it seems that simultaneously launching Ping while also launching Game Center is indicative of a fragmented strategy at best, or a complete lack of one at worst. Ideally (for them anyway) Apple would have a SN for their iTunes platform, and then all activity over your SN could be tapped by their music services, game services, etc. Instead we have two different systems?

Looking at the latter list, it doesn't bode well for Apple's attempt. Still Zuckerberg would do well to adopt Andy Grove's mantra, "Only the Paranoid Survive". Apple is a well-armed, credible contender that has bellied up to the bar - it's now just a question of whether it came in looking for a fight.

Great analysis of a Kickstartr-funded project

Craig Mod (whom I recently had the pleasure of traversing the Mexican desert with - but that's another story) posted a great write up of his (successful) efforts to use Kickstartr to raise money to fund a print run of his book.

The analysis he does of Kickstartr funding tier levels, time periods, etc, make it well worth the read. I've ordered a copy of the book. It looks beautiful. Cloth-bound in a silk-screened cover.

It's as equally applicable to game-funding efforts as it is to book publishing. (i.e. Indies reading this should be thinking 'collectors-edition boxes!'.