Ken’s Blog

It seems everyone’s on the wagon for this one. From the PBS’s NewsHour to the WSJ, there are reports and news tidbits about commercial property ventures on the verge of collapse.

I just saw this little bit on the WSJ about a large apartment complex in NY that has a year of money left to pay a huge debt that was used to finance its purchase not too long ago. Just this time around it’s less about bad loans and more about bad forecasts and judgment in general.

This quote from the NewsHour piece says it all: “the market was full of such optimism that rents would keep increasing and office buildings would stay fully leased.” Of course, because all markets go up all the time…

Granted the deal was done in early 2007 so everyone was on the same bandwagon seeing dollar signs and thinking the economy would keep going up. But, at the same time, you had others already looking at the overinflated residential market with worry. I can’t remember the guy but Jon Stewart interviewed someone who was quoted (there was a video so we’ve got proof!) as saying the market is going to tank. Meanwhile, the guy interviewing him scoffed at the idea. Great job.

The big problem with commercial real estate is the relative size of the transactions. There may be fewer buildings versus single-family homes out there but your typical home doesn’t sell for a hundred million dollars.

Time will tell of course but I’d hate to see another dip in the emotional economy–dictated by fears and whims–bring the current progress, however shaky, crashing down.

kn

TechCrunch talked up a Finnish startup called Ball-It which is trying to push a new wireless controller that will be breaking TVs and other furniture in your living room in the near future.

The controller contains sensors to sense just about any movement and even squeezes and passes it to the console or computer. The demo on CrunchGear looks pretty cool (you can sort of skip the first half if you want).

Outside of being a largely direct competitor to the Wii controller (Microsoft? Sony? You listening? You’d better get in there quick!), I think the best parts of it are the fact that it’s smaller (it’s the size of a friggin golf ball!) and wireless (i.e. none of this bullshit IR that requires you to point a part of the controller at the screen all the time). It can really free things up when it comes to the more “active” gaming experience.

Of course, the downside is that–just like the Wii-mote–it will be limited a bit in terms of gaming experiences. Even in the demo, you can see that the movements in the real world tend to be jittery when translated to the computer (note the basketball as the guy’s talking flails around like a loose electron). That might be a calibration or sensitivity issue but it’s still a potential issue game devs will have to deal with.

And while the Wii has plenty of games that use the Wii-mote they aren’t always that good. Shooter games have the issue of accuracy (I can never seem to get the console to realize where it should think my controller is aimed at when I look down its length) and sword fighting requires big movements.

Still, if you checked out that video you’d see how well the controller worked for running and jumping (though I think there was a bit of a delay on the jump which can be annoying). It’ll be interesting to see who picks it up and how well it will penetrate. As the days of the PlayStation seem numbered in my mind (it’s not like it’s going to disappear…it’s just not the hot platform anymore and if my game library is a judge of it, I’ve got a 10:1 ratio of XBox360 games over PS3 games…for a reason), this is really Microsoft’s ball to play (pun intended).

If MS can license that sucker and figure out how to attach, include or incorporate the controller’s technology into its console bundles, it can finally take a chunk (a potentially huge chunk) out of Nintendo’s new-found success. Of course, if Nintendo can get it first, they can further solidify their place in the market but it won’t be quite as revolutionary. It would just be a downsizing of the controllers–and would make people look even funnier as they play with the controller in their pockets when someone walks in.

The tech has been around for a while–it was profiled almost a year ago here–so you’ve got to wonder if it’s just a funding thing or if it’s because they had trouble figuring out how to leverage the tech properly.

I guess we’ll see. I’m sure the main console players have heard about it by now. Time will tell if they pick up on it and grab it before it’s too late. If they don’t then Ball-It might have to go the route of the obscure controllers like the PS Eye, the Novint Falcon, and the NeuroSky which are all trying to carve out some sort of niche in a market that doesn’t require them for anything.

kn

TechCrunch’s reporting that OnLive managed to put together a series C round of funding to add on to their previous $16.5 million in funding. Looks like some large companies are hedging their bets a bit. You’ve got AT&T (likely for cable/television distribution), Warner Bros (movie and television as well), and  Autodesk (previously mentioned to be interested in the idea of cloud distributed 3D CAD).

If I had to guess, you’re looking at a $30-50 million round, given the players and how late the round is. So, you’re looking at enough to get ramped up for expansion (also, given the players) into other areas. The thing is, will they lose focus and end up spinning their wheels as competitors grab market share in the games market?

I still can’t help but think all this is doing is funding the build out of the on-demand gaming industry without any guarantee of success for OnLive itself. Plus, they’ve lit a spark. Outside of direct competitors trying to mimic their model, you’re going to see Microsoft putting some of that $9.5 billion (per year) in R&D funding to figure out how to repurpose the Xbox into a similar device…except it’ll have a hard disk and CPU to handle other stuff off-line (for instance, how’s about 160GB of cache space to speed things up even more?).

We’ll see…it’s six months until GDC 2010 and 9 months until E3. I’m guessing they’ll announce something by one of those events if they’re really on to something. If they don’t, then you’ve got to wonder if they aren’t taking a tangent they shouldn’t be.

kn

Looks like the OnLive Open Beta is upon us. Now, we’ll see how well this service will hold up over a more unpredictable and widespread Internet.

I still think this is a shaky idea at best, at least here in the US. Sure, people will love not having to upgrade a PC or deal with shelling out $60 for a game they’ll play for a month or two but I think people still like to hold on to certain games (so maybe this becomes a great way to demo games). In other words, you won’t eliminate the need for consoles in homes but you might create a sort of “pre-market” for games.

The tricky part might be the competition…they’re competing against the console makers themselves (game devs will make more money selling to individual gamers than to a single company that buys a bulk batch of licenses) as well as anyone else in the living room that wants to own the game market in some way (cable operators, InstantAction and other online services, and Microsoft and Apple with their home TV systems).

And, of course, there’s the whole issue with lag. Broadband is fast but for many it’s not consistent which will suck for FPS and racing games which already cause a lot of frustration when lag strikes.

kn

So, you’d have to be under a rock to not have heard that Disney bought Marvel Entertainment for $4 billion dollars. It’s everywhere.

The best part is just how rocky the road was for Marvel over the last decade. Back in 1996, a power play by Ronald Perelman and Carl Icahn tossed the company into bankruptcy and even after it emerged from Chapter 11, it was still unsure what the company would do to stay alive.

Then around 2000 Avi Arad comes along and pushes to get X-Men (2000) and Spiderman (2002) made into movies. Okay, technically Blade (1998) was first but while it did well, it wasn’t the blockbuster that Spider man was. Millions of dollars are made (mostly for the studios) and Marvel was suddenly on the map again.

Mr. Arad pushed even further in recent years to create a film division in Marvel that self-produced the films so Marvel could retain more of the revenue. Iron Man and the Incredible Hulk (not the Ang Lee one) were the first of those to come out in 2008.

Lo and behold, 10 years after emerging from Chapter 11 into the blinding light of a world that wrote them off for naught, Marvel just got sold for billions. Not millions, billions.

The potential was there but it took a handful of people to see the potential and make it happen (like they couldn’t have made those same blockbusters before they went bankrupt…someone was blind back then).

Now, the question is, will Disney ruin it? So far Disney’s run with Pixar post-acquisition produced Up which has done well (2nd only to Finding Nemo)…but that’s largely due to (I’m sure) the fact that John Lassiter is the Chief Creative Officer at Disney (you gotta think despite the politics within Disney it’s something of a vindication that he’s such a high ranking player in an organization that fired him for wanting to make the types of movies that made Pixar such a success).

Time will tell. Mr. Arad has moved on from Marvel but had retained ties. If he’s not around, will Marvel (or rather Disney) drop the ball? They’ve got some momentum (if they screw up the Avengers series or some of the coming sequels, they’re idiots and deserve to wither within the Disney organization).

kn

So, Windows 7 is RTM now. And presales are running rampant. I hate to say it but I haven’t had a chance to preview it (yes, I downloaded an RC or two but I hadn’t had the time to setup a VM to test it on). Maybe now’s a good time to do so!

Vista was a complete mess. There was no reason to upgrade to it unless you were an uber hard-core gamer (like a friend of mine) and really really wanted DirectX 10 support. Well, after watching said friend run into wall after wall (mostly driver incompatibility walls), I sat back with my XP install and continued to enjoy everything Windows XP had to offer…like a stable platform to be productive on.

Will Windows 7 be the anti-Vista and actually bring more people like me back into the Microsoft OS upgrade loop again?  Maybe. The biggest single hurdle for me (beyond having to deal with the annoyance of reinstalling everything again) is whether or not all my XP apps and games will install and run just as smoothly (if not smoother) on Windows 7 as they did on XP.

I guess we’ll know in a couple weeks…though, despite not knowing, I do have an outstanding pre-order with Amazon.

kn

Not surprisingly, someone else has decided to throw their hat into the hosted gaming service arena along side OnLive’s. Gamasutra’s reporting that said competitor’s got a name, Gaikai. Better still, David Perry, the person behind Gaikai, is boasting that his service doesn’t require all the proprietary crap OnLive’s service has.

At least that means there’s going to be some competition in this market, which I love. Now, OnLive’s got a reason to continue to improve the service (though I suspect they’ll spend more time and effort on landing publishers before Gaikai does rather than spend on R&D).

I think Gaikai might be better positioned, though, since I think they’ll make a killing in Korea, China and Japan. A new PC used to be (and probably still is) the equivalent of a year’s salary in Korea…thus the reason LAN centers are the hub of gaming activity there. With this, they could shell out for an older PC and still keep up with the newer requirements of modern games…or better yet, play the games on their smartphones which I expect the Japanese to be doing already.

The bigger question will be if console makers will give in to these services. It’ll hurt their console sales. Though their business model’s all about game sales they’re still manufacturing those consoles and still measure penetration based on sales of those consoles. Besides, Microsoft and Sony both want to own that last leg (from the ISP to your home)  since it’s the most important leg when it comes to exposure and services. If Sony can advertise the hell out of their BluRay’s on your home entertainment center made by them, they’ll be a lot happier than having you use OnLive of Gaikai to just stream your entertainment (yup, don’t forget, if they can stream games, they can stream movies and TV eventually) to your home.

The next couple years will be very telling for this market. We’ll see…

kn

Ahh, my love-hate relationship with Whale Wars begins anew. Instead of flooding the main blog thread, I’m moving it here.

kn

Got mine:

http://www.new.facebook.com/kennakai

How about you?

The Om part of GigaOm recently posted an article about the news and information we get, especially from sites like Facebook and Twitter, refering to a “river of news” metaphor. The metaphor might be accurate but the idea that “Overload isn’t a problem anymore since we have no choice but to acknowledge that we can’t wade through all this information” is just wrong.

I don’t know about you but as much as I like the people I’ve added on Facebook or Twitter (or else I wouldn’t have added them), I can’t say that the majority of what people who are actually active on those sites post is of any relevancy to me. Maybe I’m in the minority here but I can’t imagine that everyone out there gets 9 out of 10 posts that are of any interest at all to them.

Just looking at the replies and ILTs (I Like This) you usually see one or two (or none) showing any interest in a particular link, news article, video clip, what have you. Sure, once in a while, there’ll be something controversial or really funny (in a stupid way of course) but that’s like a life preserver floating down the Amazon.

That statement about overload is ultimately just highlighting a human trait that would make Freud proud: humans can adapt to information overload. But, this isn’t necessarily a positive thing. Just like the general population gets desensitized to crime when they watch the evening news report on crime constantly, we switch into ignore mode. We take that deluge of information coming at us like water from a fire hose and just divert most of it off to the side. That’s not dealing, that’s apathy. It becomes random luck that you’ll discover something interesting or it’ll be up to the Facebook junkies to be the ones to spread the word.

What we really need is something akin to that tag cloud functionality that you see everywhere. News items, etc. bubble up some how based on popularity or relevance. Instead of a big long list of noise, maybe you get a much shorter list showing the most popular (based on a threshold you set or just a relative one) or most liked (like those sites where a discussion thread falls below a threshold and disappears from the page unless you expose it) tidbits with the option to dig deeper if you care. Combine this with an algorithm based on your actions/preferences (if you tend to click on political news items those might bubble up), and you’ve got yourself a way of managing the deluge.

This sort of  “smart” information culling has been talked about for the better part of a decade or more (at least as long as the Web’s been large enough for people to realize it was needed) but few if any solutions really exist out there. Everyone’s put a piece of it together but no one’s combined it all into a single interface for information. New sites just put the most recent and maybe have a box or callout with the most popular but imagine a page where the news will look different for you versus the other guy…even better, imagine that it’s a news site you’ve never visited before. You could have a roaming profile that people tap with basic rolled up statistics that can be interpreted into a profile for that site’s content.

Now, if only this blog entry would show up in all the right places so it can happen.

kn