Facebook is a potential competitor down the line. They definitely have a big enough userbase. They already have a Marketplace and they have a growing database of user's credit card numbers (from when users buy virtual gifts). They could charge auction fees, but seem pretty content getting most of their revenue from ads, so they could easily undercut ebay's costs by only charging their own bank fees for accepting credit cards.
Of course there are many things to consider when running an auction site, but a determined Facebook could get there after a few iterations.
Getting a Blackberry decreased time I spent "at work" and improved my personal life.
My Blackberry is set up so it only beeps if the CEO sends me something, and it vibrates and the LED flashes only when something is sent directly to me. It takes me only a couple of minutes to respond to something that could save someone else hours of time (especially at our offshore Vietnam office), and if it takes more than a few minutes, it must be something important that I should be told, anyway.
That's in contrast to how it was before when I had my laptop on the dinner table and sometimes the bedroom. I had to check it just to see if there was something urgent (which could take several minutes), whereas now it takes me a few seconds to look at my Blackberry for the red flashing LED.
It automatically shuts off during my normal sleeping hours. It's also my alarm clock, and it's actually good to start the day by reading my e-mail so I know what kind of fires I need to put out when I reach the office.
In addition, it reminds me of Outlook appointments, I can surf the web, instant message, and even update my Facebook.
I would encourage managers to get a Blackberry and can even encourage superiors to justify the purchase as "cheap overtime" when really it should save you time if you're already staying extra hours at the office or you're already taking work home with you. I got the Blackberry 8830 model (with GPS) from Sprint, and it's great.
The Grapple Fruits company has something to cheer about when they get purple apples. Now if only they could genetically engineer their flavor instead of just ingeniously soaking their apples in artificial grape flavoring.
Don't worry. We just need a few more reports in the media of people losing their jobs and getting physically assaulted and maybe one or two really gruesome cases of cannabalism.
Once there was a time when it was fairly acceptable to hitchhike, but it only took a few horror stories (urban legends?) and now there are very few hitchhikers or people willing to pick up hitchhikers.
We just need a "MySpace Killer" and then we'll find some equilibrium in this phenomenon.
Lucas Films should have just paid for the kid and his parents a weekend at the Skywalker ranch and given him a canned tour of the operations and maybe some extra memorabilia--something nice enough so his friends would be jealous of him. It would have been great cheap publicity, and the kid might feel glad that his video got him the popularity that allowed him the opportunity for the tour.
I'm not sure if you're asking about newsgroups or e-mail lists. This isn't a replacement for newsgroups. If it's an e-mail from a list, it's treated just as any other e-mail message. In an e-mail thread, you'll typically see all the replies at the bottom of the e-mail, and that would be retained exactly as well.
In both situations, you have to be online to retrieve the mail from the server. The element that stops spam, as I have written, is the ability to mark a message as spam. It will still go through to the first few individuals who download the message(s). Because the message must be retained on the server to be viewed, the server software will be able to recognize many flags from the same individual account (or possibly IP address) and remove all those messages from the server before they can be viewed. Removing the message before it can be viewed severely limits the efficacy of a spammer.
The increase in bandwidth is negligible. You still download the same amount when you get the actual message, the extra amount is simply an envelope that would reside on your own e-mail server. It would be just a few dozen bytes.
In terms of extra time, you could configure your e-mail client to automatically download the messages if you can trust all the senders or are filtering using a whitelist. It would be only more time if your senders are using slower servers than your current e-mail server. It would actually take less time if their servers were faster. There would be an extra overhead time to establish a connection, but it also wouldn't be much. In extreme cases where a user is downloading thousands of messages at once, it would be better to configure his server to automatically download the messages upon receiving notification of a new message and from that point, it would function identically to the old system (This is unnecessary for the average user).
"Whereas with my current server, the mail lands up directly in my inbox, all sorted and filtered for my reading pleasure."
If this is true, then you should share your knowledge about e-mail filters. If everyone had the same situation as you, SPAM would not be an issue at all. I personally don't believe there can be an intelligent enough filter to ever filter out 100% spam and 0% desired e-mails. My solution doesn't have a 100% effictive rate, but it's still higher than most filters' successes.
Also, keep in mind that my solution will allow other people to stop spam/virii for you. In the case other people flag a sender's mail as spam, the sender's server will delete all those messages, send a message to the recipients' servers that the message was deleted, and get rid of the message before you even log on. This means that you won't even know that spam was sent to you in the first place. Of course, all this is configurable to the user's preferences.
I hope that answers your questions. Don't confuse this with a method to stop spam in newsgroups.
Storing messages for a long time should be fairly insignifcant and is a variable that should be completely customizable by the server based on its capabilities. I'm sure big players (gmail, hotmail) have the space to save forever. Independent servers most likely would have less mail to save.
If you send the e-mail to 5 recipients at a single domain, under the current system, 5 downloads will happen from the recipient client to the sender server. Under the old system, (in the best case if they're all at the same domain) the file transfers once from the sender server to the recipient server and then 5 times from the recipient client to the recipient server (6 times total). I see your point, though, that there is more bandwidth going out of the sender's server, but that's sort of the point. In every common mail system, the cost is put on the sender (USPS, UPS, FedEx). I think it's better off that the sender has to make sure it can support the bandwidth for sending a big file X times instead of having the recipient server have that responsibility.
Another interesting bonus is that if the message remains on the server, the sender can easily make corrections to his e-mail. The sender will also automatically get read receipts of his mail.
We should change the way e-mail works from the ground up. Currently, the sender's server will send the message to the recipient server where it waits until the client downloads the message. Instead of this, an interesting idea would be to have the sender server HOLD the e-mail message and simply send a notice to the recipient's server that a message awaits. When the client connects, depending on his software configuration, he will download the message from the sender's server or click on a link to go download the message from the sender's server.
What does this accomplish? We add the ability to flag messages as spam or virii. Depending on the sender's server's configuration, if a message gets too many flags, it will block the message from being downloaded in the future. Here's an example of this in action. Spammer sends out 100 messages for V1agR@. The 1st, 5th, and 7th readers are dilligent and mark the message as spam. The server's threshold is 3 warnings and then deletes the message. The message never gets to recipients 8 to 100. The user's account is suspended, and the spammer becomes drastically less effective.
There are other positive side effects to this scheme. Internally, my company will send out big files to one another. Instead of always using a server share, some people e-mail these big files to multiple recipients. If one person e-mails a 20MB file to 10 people, that'll be 200MB of consumed space for the recipients' servers. In a sender-hosted e-mail system, it will still just be 20MB.
Drawbacks to this scheme? Let's say the spammer sets up his own e-mail server and sends out spam from that. Recipients flag it, but the sender's server is configured to ignore the flags. If this were to happen, the spam is still not as effective because the recipient only wlil get a notification that mail exists. The notification would probably be limited to something like 128 characters of text for a subject. The sender's address can't be as easily spoofed because it still must be able to resolve to the sender's server. And better yet, if the ISP is cooperative, reports of this type of abuse to the ISP could lead to the ISP taking legal/criminal actions against violators of their Terms of Service. If the sender wants their message sent, they need to keep their server connected to the ISP, thus making it a lot easier to physically trackdown. If the ISP doesn't care, then we simply add the ISP to a blacklist.
Another side effect is that now the recipient needs to rely on both his e-mail server and the sender's server to be online to get a message, but this should be trivial. Also the server must retain the message for long enough time for the recipient to download the message. This should also be trivial, and in my opinion, it's better to put the onus on the sender instead of the recipient. For example, if the recipient goes on vacation for a few days and comes back to find his mailbox quota is full and he lost a lot of messages, it is quite annoying, and this proposed solution will not have that problem.
The biggest drawback is that this is a fairly major overhaul to the e-mail system. It would probably have to be done in phases where there is one phase that most servers support both types of e-mail protocols. I think it's worth the effort.
You're correct that games that try to be console games will fail for current cell phones. As for a game that provides you with 10 hours of gameplay for $10, that's not a bad deal.
Is Tetris worth a lot of money? It is if you figure out how many people worldwide have a cell-phone, how many of them play video games on it, how many of them are willing to pay a few dollars for it, and how many of them like Tetris. Each filter brings the number smaller, but you're starting with an enormous base. Worth $700M? Maybe not, but that's drastically oversimplifying the equation if you think EA only bought Tetris and Bejeweled.
I work for a mobile games company. I will tell you that the market is not a mirage.
It's completely unsubstantiated to say that people in this industry are people who could not cut it in the console/PC world. Tell that to:
* Trip Hawkins (a founder of EA)
* John Carmack (from Quake fame)
* All the major publishers who release mobile games along with console counterparts (THQ, Electronic Arts, Ubisoft, etc).
* All the major publishers who are re-releasing their famous console games (Konami, Capcom, Namco, etc).
Successful people in the console/PC games market are looking for the best ways to get into the mobile games market evidenced, of course, by EA's huge buyout of Jamdat.
Even giving thought that mobile games are limited to being bad versions of the console counterparts is plain wrong. Look at Yahoo Mobile Games. Yahoo Games has an unbelievably large gaming market that has no interest in playing console games. Many of them (who have computers) also have cell phones, and play those games as time fillers at home would play the same games as time fillers on a bus ride.
I can't stand it when people think of something as a potential "bubble" so they think it's something from which to stay away. There was a dot-com bubble, but the Internet is still here and a growing market. The mobile application industry may be a bubble in the sense that there are some uneducated investors throwing money at half-baked developers, but that does not mean that there are no developers with solid business models and evidence of growing revenue. It is impossible to ignore the numbers. 193 million mobile handsets sold in the US alone in 2004 with a $345 million gaming market. This is doubled from the previous year.
I will say that the industry will change many times in the next few years. Executives at major console publishers will have to learn to change their expectations in capabilities ("Why can't we make Need for Speed Underground on a device with 243 kB of RAM?"). Designers will have to come up with ideas to take advantage of networking/GPS capabilities unique to mobile. Independent developers will all die out without huge venture capital, big-name licenses, or big-name publishers to get carriers to put their games in their catalogs. The industry will think of better ways to sell games instead of "Pay me $5.99 for this game that you may only play once because it sucks," you'll see more of, "Thanks for buying the *INSERT NEXT BIG TOM CRUISE MOVIE* DVD/Theatre ticket, here is your link to download the mobile game! I hope you play it and other people see you playing it and give us more publicity for the movie!" Or in better networking environments, you'll see exactly what Flash game portals do and offer games for free if you look at an advertisement for 3 seconds.
Anyone who thinks the industry is limited has not enough exposure to the industry or is not imaginative enough.
Publicly shame the person who installs adware. You may say that the average user does not know when he is installing adware/spyware, but if he is shamed enough for accidentally doing so, he would be one of the many to demand that software companies do not bundle ad/spyware into their programs, and companies are more likely to listen to the masses (when the masses are more than a bunch of techies). Don't take this solution seriously, but it's probably true.
1) John installs spyware.
2) The program or IT person that cleans it off his computer send his name to a governing office.
3) Office plants a big sign in John's yard that says "I installed Spyware when I was downloading Baywatch pictures."
4) Neighbor sees it. Laughs. Worries about his own yard.
5) Everyone will be scared to install software without a professional. Any company that promotes adware/spyware won't stand a chance.
Although the company is working on further miniaturization, the battery has proven to be a formidable obstacle.
Sure, it's an obstacle for size. Maybe that will be overcome. How about the obstacle about charging the battery? If this device is to prevent unforeseen runaways, that means either charging it when you know your pet cannot run away, or rotating it out with a 2nd copy while the 1st recharges. Constantly having to recharge this device is going to be what kills this product, unless you train your dog to do it himself (I don't think kinetic motion will cut it).
Sturdy and slobber-resistant, the PetCell isn't just for dogs. PetsMobility's parent company, On4 Communications, is simultaneously rolling out models for kids, the elderly and outdoor sports fanatics who enjoy snowboarding and kayaking.
Every time I've seen any heat-sensitive color changing technology used (Hot Wheels, Hypercolor T-Shirts, G.I. Joes, etc) the range of color always diminishes over time. Has this kink been worked out yet?
I'd be more interested for the glass in the cars to change tint in heat or brightness like some types of eye glasses do. I haven't seen this yet, but maybe it exists already.
I use IM for work and for personal reasons. This is what I think would make a good IM client:
* Message history (with timestamp, search, export) * Tabbed IM windows (with shortcut key to cycle through them based on groups) * Customizable sounds for every event (and option to toggle individual event sounds) * Blinking taskbar notification for new messages * Customizable auto-responders * Offline messages (+ online message failure notification) * File transfer capability (+ drag & drop functionality into the window) * Status modes (Online, Offline, Busy, Idle, Not Available, Invisible) * Users IDs are their e-mail addresses * Aliases for yourself (for user search) * Aliases for your contacts (to overwrite the display on your list) * User groups to organize the user list (collapsable) * Broadcast message to group * Block users list (ignores all data from these users) * Safe users list (allows unlimited message size, file transfers, does not check for message flooding) * Permit/Do not permit your id to be added to a user's list * Multiple user discussions (pseudo-chat rooms) * Unintrusive pop-up alerts with message contents (So I don't have to switch windows to read short replies) * Profiles (just a simple.plan to post information like contact details if you wish) * Contact lists and preferences stored server-side * Operable on a LAN when WAN is unavailable (at least a core subset functionality, possibly with local server software) * Guaranteed message synchronization (message order displayed in window is always the same for all users) * Basic text formatting (color, bold, italicized, etc) * "Contact is typing..." message * Start on OS start, connect on network presence options * Alerts for defined users signing on/signing off
Add-ons/Extras: * Direct-Connection (real-time typing update, server-independent) * Video/Audio chat * Desktop sharing * Mobile device interactivity * Emoticons * Customizable Skins * Integration with Contact Databases such as Outlook * Open API (to build bots and other creative ideas) * Strong Encryption * Networked application launching (for games)
We are a small US-based company with an offshores office in Vietnam. We use the Packet 8 VoIP service in the US, and I have learned that countries that have protective governments like Vietnam may disallow connections to VoIP IP addresses. Certain foreign ISPs might block all VoIP services. There are still some privately-owned ISPs that allow the traffic through, but who knows for how long they'll allow it. I'm not certain on the laws, but it probably is illegal to even use.
Let me give some perspective from a game developer who strictly develops mobile games for cell phones. Basically, developers have to make each game playable on as many cell phone models as possible if we want to reach the broadest market. That means usually we make a few versions of a single game (high-end, mid-range, and low-end) versions of the game, and those get ported to dozens (hundreds if you count language localization) versions. The games we make that get developed for Nokia Series 60 (high-end) can run on the N-Gage, but they could also probably run on a Nokia 6600, Nokia 6680, maybe Nokia 3650, etc. Thus, it's not utilizing N-Gage's advanced hardware. If we did, however, make a game that specifically utilized N-Gage's hardware, the game wouldn't run on any other devices and would be very unportable. N-Gage's market base is simply not large enough for that incentive. So, in a sense, it's circular: N-Gage has a small user-base, developers don't want to make games for it, there aren't attractive games for N-Gage, no one buys it. It will be much more likely to see Sony PSP eventually have phone features in conjunction with Sony Ericsson than to see a Nokia device adopt high-level gaming capabilities successfully.
On a related note, while Nokia and other phone manufacturers are trying to push the limits by introducing 3D hardware to their "normal" consumer phones, publishers are also pushing developers to come out with awesome break-through titles that rival PSP quality but still fail to realize the MOST BASIC CONCEPT of cell phone gaming. This is: Cell phone gamers like to play games that can be launched within seconds, played for minutes, repeated for months. Just as you develop the games for a lowest common denominator phone model, you also have to develop for the lowest common denominator user.
you could try just putting your post up as a big image. using some good image compression, the file might not be terribly big. just mix some normal text in there too, and then it requires a human (or some really super advanced algorithm) to manually censor the article.
to have advertisers convince program producers to "cleverly" work their products into the show. it's already being done on some sell-out shows, but it will be industry standard if advertisers can't put their commercials somewhere.
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Facebook is a potential competitor down the line. They definitely have a big enough userbase. They already have a Marketplace and they have a growing database of user's credit card numbers (from when users buy virtual gifts). They could charge auction fees, but seem pretty content getting most of their revenue from ads, so they could easily undercut ebay's costs by only charging their own bank fees for accepting credit cards.
Of course there are many things to consider when running an auction site, but a determined Facebook could get there after a few iterations.
Getting a Blackberry decreased time I spent "at work" and improved my personal life.
My Blackberry is set up so it only beeps if the CEO sends me something, and it vibrates and the LED flashes only when something is sent directly to me. It takes me only a couple of minutes to respond to something that could save someone else hours of time (especially at our offshore Vietnam office), and if it takes more than a few minutes, it must be something important that I should be told, anyway.
That's in contrast to how it was before when I had my laptop on the dinner table and sometimes the bedroom. I had to check it just to see if there was something urgent (which could take several minutes), whereas now it takes me a few seconds to look at my Blackberry for the red flashing LED.
It automatically shuts off during my normal sleeping hours. It's also my alarm clock, and it's actually good to start the day by reading my e-mail so I know what kind of fires I need to put out when I reach the office.
In addition, it reminds me of Outlook appointments, I can surf the web, instant message, and even update my Facebook.
I would encourage managers to get a Blackberry and can even encourage superiors to justify the purchase as "cheap overtime" when really it should save you time if you're already staying extra hours at the office or you're already taking work home with you. I got the Blackberry 8830 model (with GPS) from Sprint, and it's great.
The Grapple Fruits company has something to cheer about when they get purple apples. Now if only they could genetically engineer their flavor instead of just ingeniously soaking their apples in artificial grape flavoring.
Don't worry. We just need a few more reports in the media of people losing their jobs and getting physically assaulted and maybe one or two really gruesome cases of cannabalism.
Once there was a time when it was fairly acceptable to hitchhike, but it only took a few horror stories (urban legends?) and now there are very few hitchhikers or people willing to pick up hitchhikers.
We just need a "MySpace Killer" and then we'll find some equilibrium in this phenomenon.
Lucas Films should have just paid for the kid and his parents a weekend at the Skywalker ranch and given him a canned tour of the operations and maybe some extra memorabilia--something nice enough so his friends would be jealous of him. It would have been great cheap publicity, and the kid might feel glad that his video got him the popularity that allowed him the opportunity for the tour.
I'm not sure if you're asking about newsgroups or e-mail lists. This isn't a replacement for newsgroups. If it's an e-mail from a list, it's treated just as any other e-mail message. In an e-mail thread, you'll typically see all the replies at the bottom of the e-mail, and that would be retained exactly as well.
In both situations, you have to be online to retrieve the mail from the server. The element that stops spam, as I have written, is the ability to mark a message as spam. It will still go through to the first few individuals who download the message(s). Because the message must be retained on the server to be viewed, the server software will be able to recognize many flags from the same individual account (or possibly IP address) and remove all those messages from the server before they can be viewed. Removing the message before it can be viewed severely limits the efficacy of a spammer.
The increase in bandwidth is negligible. You still download the same amount when you get the actual message, the extra amount is simply an envelope that would reside on your own e-mail server. It would be just a few dozen bytes.
In terms of extra time, you could configure your e-mail client to automatically download the messages if you can trust all the senders or are filtering using a whitelist. It would be only more time if your senders are using slower servers than your current e-mail server. It would actually take less time if their servers were faster. There would be an extra overhead time to establish a connection, but it also wouldn't be much. In extreme cases where a user is downloading thousands of messages at once, it would be better to configure his server to automatically download the messages upon receiving notification of a new message and from that point, it would function identically to the old system (This is unnecessary for the average user).
"Whereas with my current server, the mail lands up directly in my inbox, all sorted and filtered for my reading pleasure."
If this is true, then you should share your knowledge about e-mail filters. If everyone had the same situation as you, SPAM would not be an issue at all. I personally don't believe there can be an intelligent enough filter to ever filter out 100% spam and 0% desired e-mails. My solution doesn't have a 100% effictive rate, but it's still higher than most filters' successes.
Also, keep in mind that my solution will allow other people to stop spam/virii for you. In the case other people flag a sender's mail as spam, the sender's server will delete all those messages, send a message to the recipients' servers that the message was deleted, and get rid of the message before you even log on. This means that you won't even know that spam was sent to you in the first place. Of course, all this is configurable to the user's preferences.
I hope that answers your questions. Don't confuse this with a method to stop spam in newsgroups.
Storing messages for a long time should be fairly insignifcant and is a variable that should be completely customizable by the server based on its capabilities. I'm sure big players (gmail, hotmail) have the space to save forever. Independent servers most likely would have less mail to save.
If you send the e-mail to 5 recipients at a single domain, under the current system, 5 downloads will happen from the recipient client to the sender server. Under the old system, (in the best case if they're all at the same domain) the file transfers once from the sender server to the recipient server and then 5 times from the recipient client to the recipient server (6 times total). I see your point, though, that there is more bandwidth going out of the sender's server, but that's sort of the point. In every common mail system, the cost is put on the sender (USPS, UPS, FedEx). I think it's better off that the sender has to make sure it can support the bandwidth for sending a big file X times instead of having the recipient server have that responsibility.
Another interesting bonus is that if the message remains on the server, the sender can easily make corrections to his e-mail. The sender will also automatically get read receipts of his mail.
I propose a better solution to the e-mail system.
We should change the way e-mail works from the ground up. Currently, the sender's server will send the message to the recipient server where it waits until the client downloads the message. Instead of this, an interesting idea would be to have the sender server HOLD the e-mail message and simply send a notice to the recipient's server that a message awaits. When the client connects, depending on his software configuration, he will download the message from the sender's server or click on a link to go download the message from the sender's server.
What does this accomplish? We add the ability to flag messages as spam or virii. Depending on the sender's server's configuration, if a message gets too many flags, it will block the message from being downloaded in the future. Here's an example of this in action. Spammer sends out 100 messages for V1agR@. The 1st, 5th, and 7th readers are dilligent and mark the message as spam. The server's threshold is 3 warnings and then deletes the message. The message never gets to recipients 8 to 100. The user's account is suspended, and the spammer becomes drastically less effective.
There are other positive side effects to this scheme. Internally, my company will send out big files to one another. Instead of always using a server share, some people e-mail these big files to multiple recipients. If one person e-mails a 20MB file to 10 people, that'll be 200MB of consumed space for the recipients' servers. In a sender-hosted e-mail system, it will still just be 20MB.
Drawbacks to this scheme? Let's say the spammer sets up his own e-mail server and sends out spam from that. Recipients flag it, but the sender's server is configured to ignore the flags. If this were to happen, the spam is still not as effective because the recipient only wlil get a notification that mail exists. The notification would probably be limited to something like 128 characters of text for a subject. The sender's address can't be as easily spoofed because it still must be able to resolve to the sender's server. And better yet, if the ISP is cooperative, reports of this type of abuse to the ISP could lead to the ISP taking legal/criminal actions against violators of their Terms of Service. If the sender wants their message sent, they need to keep their server connected to the ISP, thus making it a lot easier to physically trackdown. If the ISP doesn't care, then we simply add the ISP to a blacklist.
Another side effect is that now the recipient needs to rely on both his e-mail server and the sender's server to be online to get a message, but this should be trivial. Also the server must retain the message for long enough time for the recipient to download the message. This should also be trivial, and in my opinion, it's better to put the onus on the sender instead of the recipient. For example, if the recipient goes on vacation for a few days and comes back to find his mailbox quota is full and he lost a lot of messages, it is quite annoying, and this proposed solution will not have that problem.
The biggest drawback is that this is a fairly major overhaul to the e-mail system. It would probably have to be done in phases where there is one phase that most servers support both types of e-mail protocols. I think it's worth the effort.
You're correct that games that try to be console games will fail for current cell phones. As for a game that provides you with 10 hours of gameplay for $10, that's not a bad deal.
Is Tetris worth a lot of money? It is if you figure out how many people worldwide have a cell-phone, how many of them play video games on it, how many of them are willing to pay a few dollars for it, and how many of them like Tetris. Each filter brings the number smaller, but you're starting with an enormous base. Worth $700M? Maybe not, but that's drastically oversimplifying the equation if you think EA only bought Tetris and Bejeweled.
I work for a mobile games company. I will tell you that the market is not a mirage.
It's completely unsubstantiated to say that people in this industry are people who could not cut it in the console/PC world. Tell that to:
* Trip Hawkins (a founder of EA)
* John Carmack (from Quake fame)
* All the major publishers who release mobile games along with console counterparts (THQ, Electronic Arts, Ubisoft, etc).
* All the major publishers who are re-releasing their famous console games (Konami, Capcom, Namco, etc).
Successful people in the console/PC games market are looking for the best ways to get into the mobile games market evidenced, of course, by EA's huge buyout of Jamdat.
Even giving thought that mobile games are limited to being bad versions of the console counterparts is plain wrong. Look at Yahoo Mobile Games. Yahoo Games has an unbelievably large gaming market that has no interest in playing console games. Many of them (who have computers) also have cell phones, and play those games as time fillers at home would play the same games as time fillers on a bus ride.
I can't stand it when people think of something as a potential "bubble" so they think it's something from which to stay away. There was a dot-com bubble, but the Internet is still here and a growing market. The mobile application industry may be a bubble in the sense that there are some uneducated investors throwing money at half-baked developers, but that does not mean that there are no developers with solid business models and evidence of growing revenue. It is impossible to ignore the numbers. 193 million mobile handsets sold in the US alone in 2004 with a $345 million gaming market. This is doubled from the previous year.
I will say that the industry will change many times in the next few years. Executives at major console publishers will have to learn to change their expectations in capabilities ("Why can't we make Need for Speed Underground on a device with 243 kB of RAM?"). Designers will have to come up with ideas to take advantage of networking/GPS capabilities unique to mobile. Independent developers will all die out without huge venture capital, big-name licenses, or big-name publishers to get carriers to put their games in their catalogs. The industry will think of better ways to sell games instead of "Pay me $5.99 for this game that you may only play once because it sucks," you'll see more of, "Thanks for buying the *INSERT NEXT BIG TOM CRUISE MOVIE* DVD/Theatre ticket, here is your link to download the mobile game! I hope you play it and other people see you playing it and give us more publicity for the movie!" Or in better networking environments, you'll see exactly what Flash game portals do and offer games for free if you look at an advertisement for 3 seconds.
Anyone who thinks the industry is limited has not enough exposure to the industry or is not imaginative enough.
No video game will be a complete "warrior" training simulator until the video game can physically punch you in the face.
Publicly shame the person who installs adware. You may say that the average user does not know when he is installing adware/spyware, but if he is shamed enough for accidentally doing so, he would be one of the many to demand that software companies do not bundle ad/spyware into their programs, and companies are more likely to listen to the masses (when the masses are more than a bunch of techies). Don't take this solution seriously, but it's probably true.
1) John installs spyware.
2) The program or IT person that cleans it off his computer send his name to a governing office.
3) Office plants a big sign in John's yard that says "I installed Spyware when I was downloading Baywatch pictures."
4) Neighbor sees it. Laughs. Worries about his own yard.
5) Everyone will be scared to install software without a professional. Any company that promotes adware/spyware won't stand a chance.
Although the company is working on further miniaturization, the battery has proven to be a formidable obstacle.
Sure, it's an obstacle for size. Maybe that will be overcome. How about the obstacle about charging the battery? If this device is to prevent unforeseen runaways, that means either charging it when you know your pet cannot run away, or rotating it out with a 2nd copy while the 1st recharges. Constantly having to recharge this device is going to be what kills this product, unless you train your dog to do it himself (I don't think kinetic motion will cut it).
Sturdy and slobber-resistant, the PetCell isn't just for dogs. PetsMobility's parent company, On4 Communications, is simultaneously rolling out models for kids, the elderly and outdoor sports fanatics who enjoy snowboarding and kayaking.
Being slobber-resistant is also for whom?
Every time I've seen any heat-sensitive color changing technology used (Hot Wheels, Hypercolor T-Shirts, G.I. Joes, etc) the range of color always diminishes over time. Has this kink been worked out yet?
I'd be more interested for the glass in the cars to change tint in heat or brightness like some types of eye glasses do. I haven't seen this yet, but maybe it exists already.
I use IM for work and for personal reasons. This is what I think would make a good IM client:
.plan to post information like contact details if you wish)
* Message history (with timestamp, search, export)
* Tabbed IM windows (with shortcut key to cycle through them based on groups)
* Customizable sounds for every event (and option to toggle individual event sounds)
* Blinking taskbar notification for new messages
* Customizable auto-responders
* Offline messages (+ online message failure notification)
* File transfer capability (+ drag & drop functionality into the window)
* Status modes (Online, Offline, Busy, Idle, Not Available, Invisible)
* Users IDs are their e-mail addresses
* Aliases for yourself (for user search)
* Aliases for your contacts (to overwrite the display on your list)
* User groups to organize the user list (collapsable)
* Broadcast message to group
* Block users list (ignores all data from these users)
* Safe users list (allows unlimited message size, file transfers, does not check for message flooding)
* Permit/Do not permit your id to be added to a user's list
* Multiple user discussions (pseudo-chat rooms)
* Unintrusive pop-up alerts with message contents (So I don't have to switch windows to read short replies)
* Profiles (just a simple
* Contact lists and preferences stored server-side
* Operable on a LAN when WAN is unavailable (at least a core subset functionality, possibly with local server software)
* Guaranteed message synchronization (message order displayed in window is always the same for all users)
* Basic text formatting (color, bold, italicized, etc)
* "Contact is typing..." message
* Start on OS start, connect on network presence options
* Alerts for defined users signing on/signing off
Add-ons/Extras:
* Direct-Connection (real-time typing update, server-independent)
* Video/Audio chat
* Desktop sharing
* Mobile device interactivity
* Emoticons
* Customizable Skins
* Integration with Contact Databases such as Outlook
* Open API (to build bots and other creative ideas)
* Strong Encryption
* Networked application launching (for games)
We are a small US-based company with an offshores office in Vietnam. We use the Packet 8 VoIP service in the US, and I have learned that countries that have protective governments like Vietnam may disallow connections to VoIP IP addresses. Certain foreign ISPs might block all VoIP services. There are still some privately-owned ISPs that allow the traffic through, but who knows for how long they'll allow it. I'm not certain on the laws, but it probably is illegal to even use.
N-Gage can run Symbian OS games (C++) and it also has a JVM to run games written in J2ME.
Let me give some perspective from a game developer who strictly develops mobile games for cell phones. Basically, developers have to make each game playable on as many cell phone models as possible if we want to reach the broadest market. That means usually we make a few versions of a single game (high-end, mid-range, and low-end) versions of the game, and those get ported to dozens (hundreds if you count language localization) versions. The games we make that get developed for Nokia Series 60 (high-end) can run on the N-Gage, but they could also probably run on a Nokia 6600, Nokia 6680, maybe Nokia 3650, etc. Thus, it's not utilizing N-Gage's advanced hardware. If we did, however, make a game that specifically utilized N-Gage's hardware, the game wouldn't run on any other devices and would be very unportable. N-Gage's market base is simply not large enough for that incentive. So, in a sense, it's circular: N-Gage has a small user-base, developers don't want to make games for it, there aren't attractive games for N-Gage, no one buys it. It will be much more likely to see Sony PSP eventually have phone features in conjunction with Sony Ericsson than to see a Nokia device adopt high-level gaming capabilities successfully. On a related note, while Nokia and other phone manufacturers are trying to push the limits by introducing 3D hardware to their "normal" consumer phones, publishers are also pushing developers to come out with awesome break-through titles that rival PSP quality but still fail to realize the MOST BASIC CONCEPT of cell phone gaming. This is: Cell phone gamers like to play games that can be launched within seconds, played for minutes, repeated for months. Just as you develop the games for a lowest common denominator phone model, you also have to develop for the lowest common denominator user.
you could try just putting your post up as a big image. using some good image compression, the file might not be terribly big. just mix some normal text in there too, and then it requires a human (or some really super advanced algorithm) to manually censor the article.
to have advertisers convince program producers to "cleverly" work their products into the show. it's already being done on some sell-out shows, but it will be industry standard if advertisers can't put their commercials somewhere.