ɔimoɈɒ

Michael Kanellos has the dirt.

He tells us that Apple will come out with a new phone and tells us that it will fail.

This has got to be some sort of record. A product, that a company has not acknowledged it is developing, will fail, based on projections from a journalist on properties the company has not claimed, actions from Apple that have not been revealed and just sheer conjecture. This is headline-grabbing at it’s best.

“So when consumers get to that counter at CompUSA, they will debate buying the Apple phone, and even hold it up for a look. But when they whip out the credit card, they’ll probably opt for a Motorola.”

This is why technology journalists should probably be tagged with some sort of indelible dye. And a radio transmitter. So that the rest of us can acknowledge they are living in their little Walter Mitty lives.

He’s not alone of course. There was an article last week claiming that the iPhone had run into trademark troubles because the name “iPhone” is owned by a Canadian company. Are these people shrinkwrapped?

It hasn’t been named, hinted, announced, press released and doesn’t exist so far outside of the fevered imaginations of headline writers in the technology industry.

Fucking idiots.

Nicholas Carr asks what is the ecological cost of Second Life.

“…the average citizen of Brazil consumes 1,884 kWh, which, given the fact that my avatar estimate was rough and conservative, means that your average Second Life avatar consumes about as much electricity as your average Brazilian.”

Of course, this isn’t the whole story. The average human in the developed countries consumes about 6 times as much energy.

Yes, James, I’m ragging on Second Life. I’m being extremist on my views. I do see some point in it – but more from the point of view of replacing MySpace and Bebo rather than replacing the web.

I see the value in it being a persistent virtual world. Why not have an entire island dedicated to “Halo” for example. Complete with Banshees and Ghosts. And ready-made suits. And of course guns.

Why not have an entire island dedicated to Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. Complete with Elf and Halfling suits? Swords and rings.

And yes, why not a Hogwarts?

Second Life, to me, adds a visible element to online gaming. Without the trappings of World of Warcraft, it’s more about narrative fiction than fighting for points.

I’d like to see Bladerunner done SL-style. Or maybe Brazil.

Intel has developed what it calls the “ClassMate PC” it intends to sell for $400 per unit in response to the $150 OLPC and will be evaluating it in Brazil.

The ultraportable will house:

The ultraportable will house an (unspecified) Intel Celeron M processor, 7-inch 800 x 480 LCD, 256MB of DDR2 RAM, 1GB of NAND goodness, and a 6-cell Li-ion battery.

It’ll likely run an embedded version of Windows. The OLPC will have much the same hardware but will run Linux. Steve Jobs had offered Mac OS X free of charge for use in the laptop, but according to Seymour Papert, a professor emeritus at MIT who is one of the initiative’s founders, the designers want an operating system that can be tinkered with: “We declined because it’s not open source.” Therefore Linux was chosen.

It’s annoying though, considering Apple did this in 1997 – a decade ago!

Imagine what they could do now?

James makes me feel like less of a freak geek with this entry today about browsing habits of the general public:

“Which goes to prove that people will interrupt what they’re doing and invoke the all-seeing Google when they come across something that piques their interest. Either the PC is always-on in the background or it’s not an hindrance to boot it up. The sit back and sit forward media can and do complement each other. And the transition can happen in a flash.”

I’ll be honest, I have been ridiculed before for having my laptop beside me when watching a film. But it’s because I like to be able to look up the actors if I recognise them or just query any bit of data that comes along through the traditional media. I dont see it as wrong and the only way it could be better is if every TV had a Nintendo-DS-type screen thing going on.

Yay, I’m normal!!!!

The Seattle Times writes:“Imagine this. One of the world’s most powerful monopolies puts 10,000 people to work for five years to create one new product. And nobody is really sure if anyone wants it. How’s that for a gamble?”

And what a great effort it is. Turns out it’s still vulnerable to MyDoom and Netsky. Brilliant work there guys. Probably $10 billlion dollars spent, at least 2 years late and it’s still vulnerable to 2-year-old Windows malware!

“Ballmer says Microsoft tried to innovate too much. So the company reorganized and tried to placate impatient consumers by shipping Service Pack 2 for Windows XP then rebooted the whole Vista effort in mid-2004. It’s hard to imagine exactly how much Microsoft flushed down the toilet.”

Ballmer’s only half right. The whole shebang was developed by marketeers and executives using Flash/Director to emulate what should happen long before an engineer wrote a line of code.

They didn’t try to innovate too much. That’s doing a disservice to their legions of dedicated engineers who were told to create real magic out of smoke and mirrors.

I hope every software company takes note.

Damien’s Fluffy Links brings us 7 Viral Marketing Tips.

Now, we could digest each of these lessons individually and see how to apply them to our everyday business, or we could just enjoy the various Youtube videos and not worry about the messages involved.

Hmm, time-wastingly-good. Yummy!

On the Ogle Earth blog (about Google Earth), they write:

“3D is the next big thing for computers — even operating systems are going 3D — and I think that this trend will facilitate new ways of navigating.”

which echoes what James was saying in the comments for the last post on Virtual Virtual Offices.

The difference is that hyping Second Life as a way for consumers to get into 3D interfaces is completely unnecessary. Consumers have been investigating 3D interfaces since DOOM in 1993. The difference is:

Second Life	Doom in 1993
Flying	Running
Adverts	Flying flaming skulls
Sex	BFG 9000
eCommerce	Haha fragged you sucka!
Designer Clothing	Heavy Metal Music
Interaction	Gameplay
2006	1993

Things have come a long way since 1993 granted, but the basics are the same.

Now, I’m not saying that Second life is a complete waste of time. I was considering using it for game sessions of my main hobby where I think that the flying could really add to a story.

But it’s not going to help people experience new and exciting ways to interact with their computers. At the moment on the desktop we interact with our computers using a single virtual finger – the mouse pointer – if we had a system that used **gasp** TWO MOUSE POINTERS….we would end up with a much more realistic way to interact.

This shows heaps more potential…video embedded here

Okay, there’s heaps less sex…and no advertising…..so far…

Okay….so onw of the guys came up to me and asked me if I’d heard of something called “Second Life”.

I sighed. Deeply and with the ennui of someone who reads a lot of blog feeds.

So what is it?

Well, it’s the SIMs with more sex. And advertising. I mean it’s like Las Vegas or something.

Second Life developers are now pulling in more than US$10 million in revenues a year and unsurprisingly it’s filling up with advertising.

Ian Betteridge talks about Second Life Spam:

“It’s been a while since I was on the mainland, and I’d forgotten how horrific that some areas of it are. Apart from the small package of land that was occupied by a tiny office for “CNO Partners” there were rotating ads for just all the usual suspects, and it looked like a nightmare vision of completely untalented, unregulated ad-splurge.“

Nicole Simon discussed the difference between Americanocentric media and European media when discussing Second Life.

“Most american articles rarely mention that there is something in Second Life which has to do with Sex whereas the German articles most correctly state that there is also a lot of sex involved. Cheap sex to be precise.”

On GigaOM, Wagner James Au talks about Virtual Sweatshops (which afflicts World of Warcraft as well as Second Life.

“In Second Life, a Hollywood production company is outsourcing its Second Life projects to its Vietnamese branch, where highly-skilled workers can create professional 3D environments for a fraction of the cost, were it done here. It’s easy to see how the Chinese farmers of Warcraft might evolve into the blue collar workers of the 3D Internet.”

Paints a pretty nasty picture eh? Ian Betteridge closes with “If Linden Labs thinks it has a problem with self-replicating objects now, wait until it starts getting the attention of the kinds of people who’ve had years of experience constructing spam-mailing botnets.”

My personal opinion. A waste of time.

But if you’re looking for that sort of thing, then go right ahead.