Interestingly I was musing on this very subject earlier today, whilst browsing at my local DVD chain store. Carlo over at TechDirt has posted about the proprietary anture of the UMD, how it only works on one device, and that’s locked solely to the PSP for the same cost as a standard DVD.

My musings were brought about whilst looking at the Serenity DVD (which I already own), alongside it’s UMD version. Now, the DVD was a quite pleasant £14.99, which is about average for chart DVDs at this particular chain store. It had all the nice extra features that come with DVD releases (Outtakes, interviews and so on), whereas the UMD (which apparently doesn’t have special features) weighed in at £19.99.

So, for £5 extra in price, I get less content, and can view it in less places than I can the DVD.

So whilst I agree that proprietary formats are not the best idea, I think the primary reason for the failure of the UMD format is most assuredly price. Now, if they had them for sale at £9.99, then I’d probably start buying them. As it stands, if I have the choice of buying the DVD version or the UMD version, first choice will always be the DVD.

Technorati Tags: Sony PSP, PSP, UMD, DVD, Serenity

I’ve never been to Copenhagen. One of the wanted themes this year is identity management - who else is thinking of going?

Technorati Tags: reboot 8, identity management, identity

I recently posted about Robin Wilton being interviewed for the Story of Digital Identity, and a posted comment from Robin remined me that I never revisted that post and made comment on the actual interview.

At least not on this blog, although I did pass my comments back to Aldo Castañeda via email.

All in all I thoroughly enjoyed the interview. It was also interesting hearing a little about Robin’s background with Sun and the area he’s working in, and as always it was very interesting listening to his thoughts on digital identity.

A lot of the discussion was on the subject of User Centricity in digital identity, a concept I agree with in many ways. One of the key points made as well was the general lack of awareness of potential responsibility in terms of ‘ownership’ of digital identity, and as usual Robin made his points and explained his thoughts clearly and concisely, bringing in various real-world examples of problems with digital identity and the idea of personal responsibility for a person’s own digital identity.

So, if you haven’t already downloaded the interview, the you should do so now.

Dreamfall has gone gold!

And about time too. The Longest Journey has always been one of my favourite games (not just favourite adventure game) ever since I was given a preview copy way back when. I’d always hoped there’d be a sequel, so I’ve been eagerly awaiting the release of Dreamfall. Let’s hope it lives up to expectations!

Technorati Tags: Dreamfall, The Longest Journey, Dreamfall: The Longest Journey, Adventure Games, Games

Pre-pixelated clothing. Funnier than it sounds.
An Enlightening Paper on Identity Management.

I’ve been listening to Last.fm a lot recently, trying to find new music to listen to. So here’s some new suggestions for listening enjoyment:

Youjeen
Love Psychedelico (retro rock)
Melt Banana (noisecore)

Time to go spend some more money with CD Japan. It’s a real shame I can’t buy these via iTunes…

I’ve just seen that Robin Wilton has been interviewed for the Story of Digital Identity. I have a lot of respect for Robin and his thoughts on Identity, so I’m off to listen to this one.

Technorati Tags: Identity, Digital Identity, Story of Digital Identity

KPMG have released the results of a global survey into attitudes to mobile content. Well, they say ‘global’, but the survey was of 3,576 mobile phone users (which represents 0.0000549747696277206% of the world’s population…)

What’s interesting is one of the conclusions reached: That consumers are not willing to pay for premium content.

In all such sureys, analyst reports and polls, one clear thing stands out to me: The type of content being discussed is the type of content that can be obtained from other sources, in other forms, free of charge, and is almost entirely ‘passive’ content, content that is created once and provided to a wide range of customers in a passive way - download, browsing, alert etc.

What’s never discussed is the willingness of people to pay a premium for personalised content, a type of content of great interest to me as my company provides this kind of service. For example, our GTIP service provides a personalised response based on a customer query. It’s like customer support, but it’s for everyone’s products, not just one company’s product, and it’s about providing help to enjoy the product rather than support when the product breaks.

The relationship here is a one to one relationship between the content and the customer, not a one to many relationship. Each piece of content is created specifically for the customer, based on her query. At the same time the content is small, portable, quite often of great interest to the requester’s friends.

But the important thing is something that a lot of mobile compnay’s are starting to realise:It’s not about selling as much content as possible int he shrotest amount of time, it’s about retaining customers by providing them with what they want.

From a purely economic point of view it’s better to retain a customer who buys from you 2, or 5, or (in the case of one of my customers, more than 500 times) is more valuable than someone who buys something once and then moves on.

Technorati Tags: KPMG, Mobile Content, SMS, Premium Content, Premium SMS, Content, Celllphone, Cellphones

Gamespot have posted an article about a panel discussion held at the California Club on the 9th of February. The topic of discussion was The Era of Connected Gaming - An Inside Look At An Industry On Revolution and featured Lars Butler (ex EA), Laurent Detoc (Ubisoft), Raph Koster (Sony Online) and Peter Moore (Microsoft).

Reading the article and the points raised dragged me right back to 1998, when exactly the same things were said about online multiplayer gaming - by the players. However, in my view between 1999 and 2001 the biggest barrier to the success of online multiplayer gaming were Sony, Microsoft, Ubisoft and EA, all of whom saw no consumer demand for online games, or had no understanding of of them.

Years of discussions with games publishers resulted in nothing more than apathy, for the simple reason that the business model for games was based almost entirely on the first week or two’s sales after a game’s release. Once a game was sold there were no more revenues to be made, so there was no financial incentive for company’s to develop online or multiplayer games.

I have lost track of the number of really good multiplayer games that were less successful than they could have been, simply through poor implementation of multiplayer services. Some companies have managed to turn things around (with more or less success, depending on who you talk to), whilst others got out of the multiplayer market altogether for many years, before returning as a sevrice provider, buying in MMO’s from other markets for local release.

And all the while, FPS gaming has been growing as a spectator sport, with National and International tournaments, and fulltime players earning a fairly good wage along with sponsorships. It’ll be nice to see the large companies finally catching up (is this a repeated refrain?), and hopefully the focus will now be on producing multiplayer games that have consistent wuality over a period of time.

Technorati Tags: online games, multiplayer games, online gaming

I’m really not having much luck with my games machine/server at the moment. It worked fine for most of the weekend, but late today it decided to play up in the same way as before, acting like the hard drive was dying. A little investigation showed that the apparent culprit was one of the IDE cables (mostly found by jiggling the cable and listening to the drive spin up…), so it’s off to the local computer store to buy a new one tomorrow.

Still, the new hard drive and extra RAM have certainly made playing games a much pleasanter experience, meaning i don’t need to upgrade the processor or motherboard just yet.