In a New Merger, Evidence of How Much the Gaming World Has Changed

From The New York Times - As recently as three years ago, if you told a top game industry executive that your favorite genre was online PC games, you would almost invariably provoke a reaction akin to telling a television mogul that your favorite shows explain the migration patterns of obscure African fauna. In other words, you would get the verbal equivalent of a condescending pat on the head — “Oh, that’s nice” — while the executive looked around for someone with something more relevant to say.

And if you had dared suggest that an online fantasy game made by some guys in Orange County, Calif., would become a worldwide phenomenon by attracting more players in China than in the United States, you would have been laughed out of the room.

After all, it was not that long ago that cooperative online games were an afterthought in much of the business, an often-derided pimple on the behemoth that was the industry’s main focus: consoles like the Sony PlayStation 2 and the original Microsoft Xbox. The conventional wisdom was that only hard-core nerds would play online and that the big money was in pumping out sequel after sequel of barely distinguishable console sports games and flashy shoot-’em-up fare. | Read full article

Activision’s Chief Looks for Gaming’s Next Moves

From The New York Times - Guitar Hero III, a video game sweeping the nation like a Top 40 tune, lets players strum along on a toy plastic guitar to rock songs played on a television screen. It is attracting a wide audience: children, teenagers, 40-somethings, even the elderly.

But not the chief executive of Activision, its publisher.

“Someone asked me the other day what my favorite song is,” said Robert A. Kotick, who is 44 and not much of a game player. “I couldn’t think of one.”

Mr. Kotick will certainly have his hands full with other things. On Sunday, Activision announced that it would join forces with the Vivendi Games unit of Vivendi Universal, creating a company that will vie with Electronic Arts to be the largest video game publisher in the world. | Read full article

Web Research Drives More Real-World Purchases

From The New York Times - E-commerce purchases are expected to grow a healthy but unspectacular 17 to 20 percent this holiday season over last year’s. But the Web’s influence over what people buy could be growing even faster.

ShopLocal, a Chicago-based firm that helps retailers use their sites to drive in-store sales, says that purchases researched online but made offline, in physical stores, are booming.

The company helps retailers like Home Depot, Best Buy and Target bring their advertising catalogs and circulars to their Web sites. For the last two years, ShopLocal has been measuring Internet-influenced purchases through a combination of surveys and measuring traffic to Web pages with coupons and other discounts that can only be used offline. | Read full article

Mobile Web: So Close Yet So Far

From The New York Times - ON the surface, the mobile Web is a happening place. There’s the iPhone in all its glory. More than 30 companies have signed up for the Open Handset Alliance from Google, which aims to bring the wide-open development environment of the Internet to mobile devices. Nokia, which owns nearly 40 percent of the world market for cellphones, is snapping up Web technology companies and has made an eye-popping $8.1 billion bid for Navteq, a digital mapping service. There are also the requisite start-ups chasing the market.

It all looks good, but the wireless communications business smacks of a soap opera, with disaster lurking like your next dropped call.

In 2000, the wireless application protocol was supposed to bring the Internet to the cellphone. Our hero turned out to be a flash in the pan. That was attributed to a lack of high-speed cellular data networks, so a frenzied and costly effort to build third-generation, or 3G, networks ensued. But at a recent conference, 3G was called “a failure” by Caroline Gabriel, an analyst at Rethink Research. She said data would make up only 12 percent of average revenue per user in 2007, far below the expected 50 percent. (The 12 percent figure does not include text messaging, but you don’t need a 3G network to send a text message.) | Read full article

Webisodes of ‘Lost’: Model Deal for Writers?

From The New York Times - On the picket lines, striking television and film writers adamantly claim that studios are refusing to pay for the use of writers’ scripts on the Internet.

But ABC Studios is doing just that. Over the next three months fans of the hit show “Lost” can go to ABC.com to view weekly episodes of “Lost: Missing Pieces,” a series of new two- to three-minute shorts that reveal background information and previously undisclosed details about the stranded inhabitants of the show’s mysterious island.

The “Missing Pieces” episodes were produced under an agreement with the writers’ union that provides for much of what the writers say the studios have been refusing to offer. | Read full article

Microsoft’s Plan to Be King of All Media

From The New York Times - In November 1994, I had breakfast with Nathan Myhrvold, then the chief technology officer of Microsoft. He talked about how the soon-to-be-introduced MSN online service would best America Online. Central to his thinking was that MSN would give publishers a higher percentage of the per-minute fee for using the service. This would draw more content and thus more users to Microsoft and allow it to earn a smaller fee on a larger block of minutes.

This strategy was misguided for so many reasons. Most notably, the open standard of the Internet allowed publishers to reach out directly to users, without MSN or AOL as the tollbooth. | Read full article

NBC brings Web series "Quarterlife" to TV network

From Yahoo - NBC on Friday said it will begin airing the highly touted Web series "Quarterlife" on its television network early next year, making the program the first to originate online and then move to a major U.S. broadcaster.

The deal with "Quarterlife" creators Marshall Herskovitz and Ed Zwick, Emmy-winning producers of shows "thirtysomething" and "My So-Called Life," comes as a strike by screenwriters against Hollywood's studios nears the end of a second week. | Read full article

In Korea, a Boot Camp Cure for Web Obsession

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From The New York Times - MOKCHEON, South Korea — The compound — part boot camp, part rehab center — resembles programs around the world for troubled youths. Drill instructors drive young men through military-style obstacle courses, counselors lead group sessions, and there are even therapeutic workshops on pottery and drumming.

But these young people are not battling alcohol or drugs. Rather, they have severe cases of what many in this country believe is a new and potentially deadly addiction: cyberspace.

They come here, to the Jump Up Internet Rescue School, the first camp of its kind in South Korea and possibly the world, to be cured. | Read full story

Is Wikipedia Planning a Facebook Competitor?

From Center Networks - Matthew Buckland out of South Africa has an interesting recap of a presentation by Jimmy Wales last evening. In his recap, Matthew wonders if Wales is planning a competitor to Facebook based on the slides that were shown. The slides were supposed to be about a new search product but Buckland saw it another way. He notes, "the screenshot that Wales briefly showed the audience looked very much like a Facebook profile page, than a search page. In fact it looked pretty much identical to a Facebook profile page. Could this mean Wales is developing a social networking, Facebook competitor too? Could it be some kind of search/social networking hybrid?"

With Wikipedia in the Top 10 of all trafficked sites and most likely larger than Facebook worldwide, a social network by Wikipedia could prove a serious competitor. Built on top of the network already in place on Wikipedia. | Read full article

Beatles Catalog to Finally Go Digital in ’08

From The New York Times - Clues to when the Beatles’ catalog would finally arrive online have been trickling out in bits and pieces for the past year. Now, Paul McCartney tells Billboard that he’s “pretty sure” the band’s music would go digital in 2008. Still, he didn’t offer a hint as to what part of 2008 the music would be accessible on the internet. McCartney attributed the holdup to contractual red-tape in part, as well as the desire to time the release just right: “The whole thing is primed, ready to go—there’s just maybe one little sticking point left, and I think it’s being cleared up as we speak, so it shouldn’t be too long. It’s down to fine-tuning...” | Read full story