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Japan and Korea are on the bandwagon as well, but it seems like it's just a great way to drain your batteries. Article on mobile TV

http://www.thefeature.com/article?articleid=101478

The link to the actual article on TheFeature was not included in the SlashDot, only one to another story that was referenced. The article that looks at the MGD-SIG is Towards a Methodology of Mobile Game Design

Your bald and unsupported statement is that a small player who has invented something will trip over other patents. (Note the "'ll" in your posting.)

I agree that this shouldn't have been universal (I'd say in my defence that it is a common rhetorical mode of English expression).

I doubt you can point to even two real-life examples of this happening.

A fair challenge, which I found much harder to answer than I had expected. Aside from the rather large and hairy case of the GSM licensing regime, Google didn't provide any quick answers. If I get a spare moment, I'll see if I can find some examples by more rigorous research.

PS - might be convinceable on this issue, but not impressed by some of the applications your firm is administering.

Nah, I just made that shit up!

I've seen this before. Star Trek TNG Episode 106 - "The Game". Sure it looks neat, but in reality it's an addictive mind control device meant to enslave humanity. Obviously this guy is already a slave to it.

Judging from the release date it must be the finished version of Duke Nukem Forever. After 100+ years of development it would be a hell of a game.

Episode Guide

Trip Hawkins tried to compete in the market with 3D0. No sucess, but I'm sure it taught him something about the console biz.
http://www.thefeature.com/article?articleid=100496

Steven Kent. Writer - here's his book:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0970475500/ qid%3D1015862334/sr%3D1-5/gamingageonli-20/002-162 5945-0001657

Greg Zeschuk. Bioware -- ring a bell? Bioware did the enormously successfull Neverwinter nights game. It's even got a Linux client, for heaven's sake.
http://nwn.bioware.com/downloads/linuxclient.html

Wouldn't it take hours to photocopy a full textbook? Surely it'd make more sense to do something useful with your time and buy it used somewhere..

It be better using a digital camera with a 1024x768 resolution and digital zoom. Then you can copy an entire A4 page in colour within 3 seconds. Most of the time, the reader is only interested in a a single chapter, as most of the information is available publicly.

This has become commonplace in Japan, called "digital shoplifting", where customers are going up to the magazine racks, photographing clothes, hairstyles, reviews, and sending the copies to their friends, rather than buying the magazine.

Hey let's not forget about MPEG4. The current implementations JUST take care of the "Advanced Simple profile". We have yet to see features such as B-frames (not available on AVIs), sprites (irregular shapes which move over background layers), texture mapping, and other things that haven't been implemented... YET.

Maybe in 10 years we'll come up with audio compression algorithms which could separate an actors' voice from the background music, and then sample the instruments from it and be able to store the notes as discrete data. (Something like MIDI on Steroids). Or maybe just sample the actors' voice pitch, and store his dialogues in some kind of speech format.

jrockways attitude to mobile phones reiterates a study done recently, and annecdotal evidence I recieve from my non-tech friends:

people want a mobile phone for....phone calls.

Desired additioanl functionality usually extends to somewhere to keep your contact list of phone numbers.

Have you backed up your mobile phone lately?

could it be that South Korea will be the home of the first million player MMORPG?

Um, you're being a bit of a defensive fanboy, because you aren't quite getting what mobile gaming is all about. It has nothing to do with the GBA or Nintedno.

It's not portable gaming - the GBA is current undisputed heavyweight, and the next wave will be either the DS or the PSP, no question - but rather it's about pervasive, connected gaming. In that field, things like the GO Game in the US are a lot closer to what we're talking about. Mobile gaming is mostly much bigger in Japan and is entirely cell-phone based, usually with an older crowd than the GBA scene. Check out Mogi as another interesting example.

Usually these are games on java-enabled phones. Nokia was really in a position to succeed here but they've made the error of going for the GBA market, as well as making egregious design errors in the first model. If they could wed the graphic power of the game-platform half of the N-Gage to the type of gaming represented by Mogi, they'd be in business.

Think I found this off Slashdot earlier, but since you asked...

Check this out:
Mogi: Second Generation Location-Based Gaming
Quick Snipage:
Mogi is a collecting game - "item hunt". The game provides a data-layer over the city of Tokyo. As you move through the city, if you check a map on your mobile phone screen, you'll see nearby items you can pick up and nearby players you can meet or trade with.

Since my offhanded joke on Janus got tagged as trolling, I'm trying to get my karma back.

This actually looks very interesting. Singles who play this game could put in a profile and the game could have them meet by telling them to seek "virtual" items.
Blind dating in a cyber reality superimposed upon this one..
Interesting... (I hope! I want my good karma back!!) >:)

There's a bit more info about the Nokia 7700 available on TheFeature as well.

The gain from a chip and antennae embedded on a chip isn't going to be that great. Intel's mainly doing it for internal purposes. If you want any sort of range, add-ons and accessories are the only way to go, and I foresee absolutely no change in that.

Well, not exactly. What they are working on is the capability to seamlessly integrate wifi (and other radio) functions into any chip without any added cost.

From this article:

Integrating radios into chips is more than just an engineering accomplishment. It has profound consequences for the devices and services that make use of those chips. The most obvious advantage is price. When the addition of wireless communications to a device adds negligible cost to the device, there's no reason not to do so. Eventually, predicts Kahn, "communications is going to become essentially free." Another advantage of building RF capabilities into CPUs is that wireless devices will have newfound smarts, because they will be able to take advantage of the computational power of the microprocessor. They will be able to sense and adapt to whatever wireless networks are within range. Such flexibility initially adds costs. If the goal is to build a radio that handles one frequency band and protocol, the best solution may be a hard-wired, special-purpose chip. Move to two radios, then three, and the advantage begins to dissipate. At some point, the flexible solution always wins. And not just because there isn't space in a handset for four radio chipsets. Volume is everything in chip production, because fabs and equipment represent the bulk of the costs. A chip that goes into 100 million devices may be cheaper than one built for only 10 million, even though it's more complex inside.

A friend of mine in Tokyo recently bought one of those cell phones that can take movies and snapshots and email them to someone (over the G2(?) 144kbps link). So I had the idea to set her up with a blog and use procmail and xmlrpc to autopost her cell phone media captures to her blog.

Next thing I know, this concept is a big deal and I find similar systems popping up all over the place.

It seems to be an up and coming meme, and I imagine that this nascent meme combined with 3G speeds could really turn into something exciting.

Unless they price these things really, really cheap, they're in line to get absolutely stomped by Symbian and Pocket PC 2002 Phone Edition.

Speaking of PPC2KPE, a review of the first device to market running it (codenamed Wallaby) can be found here. Now THAT's a device to drool over!

It's amazing how little press these systems have received so far, since it would take hundreds of well-placed terrestrial towers or thousands of miles of buried fiber to provide similar coverage and capacity.

Has people from Daimler-Chrysler in Germany controlling their prototype cars from the 'net already. In fact, they've already created a peer-to-peer networking system that allows drivers to exchange, for example, their insurance information automatically after an accident (assuming the thing isn't totaled. More on this from TheFeature. Carnegie Mellon has been looking into this for some time as well.

Justin Hall (of Gamers.com fame, among other things) predicted this would happen a while back, and offered up some insight into its ramifications. Imagine the whole (unwired) world taking part in a series of games that never really end, only evolving over time. The Internet introduced the concept to a large degree (Everquest, anyone?), but the mobile Internet makes this a truly personal experience. Pick just about anyone on the planet out for a match of Quake 3 Arena at wireless broadband speeds, or role-play with friends anytime anywhere. A whole new way of interacting with people is introduced, and over the next couple of decades it'll prove itself to everyone just how revolutionary the idea is.