Nintendo’s Wii

The Economist writes about Nintendo’s new game console:

Nintendo set out to reach beyond existing gamers and expand the market. This would involve simpler games that could be played for a few minutes at a time and would appeal to non-gamers or casual gamers (who play simple games on the web but would not dream of buying a console). They would be based on new, easy-to-use controls. And they would rely on real-life rather than escapist scenarios. This was not an entirely new approach: dancing games that use cameras or dance mats as controllers have proved popular in recent years. But Nintendo began to design entire games consoles around such ideas.
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he Wii is an attempt to apply the lessons of the DS to a fixed console that plugs into the television. Its key innovation is its wand-like controller, which resembles a simplified TV remote-control rather than the usual button-strewn joypad. Motion detectors translate the movement of the wand into on-screen action, making possible tennis, fishing and sword-fighting games. (Some games use an add-on controller held in the other hand.) The Wii can also display news and weather information from the internet, organised alongside the games as a series of channels. Old games from Nintendo’s back catalogue can be downloaded to draw in lapsed gamers.

Mobile TV

WSJ writes:

If you live in Japan or South Korea you’ve already been able to watch the country’s main channels on your cellphone for up to a year, and it seems you quite like it. But the rest of the world is a little behind the curve: The first commercial rollout in Europe was in Italy in June, while trials have been launched elsewhere in Asia in places such as Vietnam and Indonesia in recent months.
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Once we get used to having TV wherever we are, on a screen that fits in our pocket, other similar video services won’t be far behind, such as TV programs tailored to the small screen. And, as Junko Yoshida, a news editor for the electronics weekly newspaper EE Times, points out, the mobile-phone industry was surprised to find in one trial that it might not just be about portability, but privacy. “A lot of people loved the ‘personal’ aspect of mobile TV,” she says, “so that they not only watched it in their commute but they even took a mobile TV to their bed to watch.”

Engagament Metric

Robert Scoble writes:

Why should engagement matter to an advertiser?

Well, as an advertiser I want to talk to an audience wholl actually DO something. Yeah, Im hoping to get a sale.

Yesterday Buzz Bruggeman CEO of Active Words, was driving me around and told the story of when he was in USA Today. He got 32 downloads. When he got linked to by my blog? Got about 400.

My audience was (and is) a lot smaller than USA Today, but the engagement of the blog audience got his attention.

How could we measure audience engagement?

Innovation Report

Knowledge@Wharton has a special report: “As companies struggle to innovate in today’s competitive environment, they need to continually guard against adding to their “clutter” — the creeping impact of complexity on efficiency and cost-competitiveness. In this three-part special report, experts from Wharton and George Group Consulting discuss how management can approach this problem by thinking “ambidextrously” — that is, focusing on innovation and broad exploration while minimizing the impact of clutter on operational processes and costs. Also, in the accompanying podcast (with transcript), Mike McCallister, CEO of Humana, discusses balancing innovation and complexity in the health care industry with Wharton management professor Michael Useem and Stephen Wilson, engagement director in George Group’s Conquering Complexity practice.”

MySpace and Facebook Challenges

WSJ writes:

Ms. Thompson belongs to a fringe of Internet users now renouncing MySpace and other social-networking sites — not in spite of their popularity, but because of it. That highlights a dilemma facing News Corp.’s MySpace and Facebook Inc.: While it takes a critical mass of users to make these sites work, having too many users alienates some, especially when they attract an ever-growing cacophony of advertising and in some cases, spam.
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There’s no question, however, that MySpace’s recent popularity has brought with it a proliferation of spam that has annoyed some users. Many advertisers take advantage of the “friend request” function and send out requests that are really just advertisements. And programs have cropped up that can automatically send mass friend requests to MySpace users — in short, a new generation of email spam.

Mobile Value Shifting

MEX writes:

The combination of [the] trend with more powerful devices from handset manufacturers is empowering users to take more control of their mobile experience. Users who take this approach are making a clear statement: they want the mobile environment to reflect their lifestyles and existing application relationships, not the operators corporate strategy objectives.

Operators which still harbour ambitions of creating their own media franchises would do well to heed this message.

TECH TALK: Good Books: In Spite of the Gods

Let us move on from world history to a brief history of the New India. Our guide is Edward Luce, the former South Asia bureau chief of the Financial Times. Luces book is about the strange rise of modern India. The title is a bit weird at first glance: In Spite of the Gods. But if one looks past that, it is an insightful book about what has changed (and is changing) in India. Sometimes, those of us who are on the ground in India, cannot easily understand these changes. An outsiders perspective is what Luce brings in and does it very well.

Here is a brief about the book from Random House:

India remains a mystery to many Americans, even as it is poised to become the worlds third largest economy within a generation, outstripping Japan. It will surpass China in population by 2032 and will have more English speakers than the United States by 2050. In In Spite of the Gods, Edward Luce, a journalist who covered India for many years, makes brilliant sense of India and its rise to global power. Already a number-one bestseller in India, his book is sure to be acknowledged for years as the definitive introduction to modern India.

In Spite of the Gods illuminates a land of many contradictions. The booming tech sector we read so much about in the West, Luce points out, employs no more than one million of Indias 1.1 billion people. Only 35 million people, in fact, have formal enough jobs to pay taxes, while three-quarters of the country lives in extreme deprivation in Indias 600,000 villages. Yet amid all these extremes exists the worlds largest experiment in representative democracyand a largely successful one, despite bureaucracies riddled with horrifying corruption.

Luce shows that India is an economic rival to the U.S. in an entirely different sense than China is. There is nothing in India like the manufacturing capacity of China, despite the huge potential labor force. An inept system of public education leaves most Indians illiterate and unskilled. Yet at the other extreme, the middle class produces ten times as many engineering students a year as the United States. Notwithstanding its future as a major competitor in a globalized economy, American. leaders have been encouraging Indias rise, even welcoming it into the nuclear energy club, hoping to balance Chinas influence in Asia.

Early on in the book, Luce writes about the ultimate Indian fascination the village. He rips apart those who talk of trying to keep villages the way they are, and comes out in favour of urbanization. In an interview with The Hindu, he had this to say: There is a very strong and deeply rooted cultural romanticism about the village in India. It’s primarily upper caste urban people who are the keepers of the flame of this romanticism. I want India to develop and development means urbanisation. It is an inescapable fact. I don’t believe that urbanisation means liquidation of culture. France is 90 per cent urban. France is quintessentially French. India has a great urban civilisational heritage. It’s not as if India’s cradle of culture is purely the village. But partly because of the distortions of the colonial era and partly because and this is not an original point I’m making the villages are the least tainted and least interfered with by the colonial presence, the village became the repository in the freedom movement dialectic of Indian culture. That romanticism which I think is very conservative is still quite widespread. It is not stopping India urbanising but it’s making the urban experience far more callous and bloody than it could be. Urbanisation can be done well. It can be anticipated. Demographic trends can be projected and you can start putting infrastructure in place without having to be Japanese.

Reading this reminded me of my colleague, Atanu Dey, and his ideas about RISC (Rural Infrastructure and Services Commons). It was nice to see an echo in Luces thinking.

Next Week: Good Books (continued)

Metaverse

TCS Daily writes: “Forces are coalescing that will produce a shift comparable at least to the spread of broadband. This change will have enormous financial, cultural and political repercussions, and the most interesting aspect of the coming transformation is that it will not be some new and unexpected thing. Rather, the Web for many will become the cliched 3D virtual reality that has been so overused as a literary and cinematic devise that most of us have forgotten how compelling that vision was when it first appeared.”

Improving Presentations

David Rodgers provides some tips.

First off, and most importantly, the objective of your presentation is to in some way benefit your audience. Not you. You are not the primary focus of your presentation. Your audience is. If the audience wont like some component of your presentation, take it out. This does not mean take bad news out of a presentation, no one wants to hear that profits are down 75%, but it does mean remove the parts of the presentation that are bad.

Second, if someone can look at each slide of your presentation and get just as much out of it as if hed been in attendence, rework it. All of it. Find some better things to say or dont give a presentation.