EA Exploring Ad-based Games and Micro Payments

The BBC is reporting that Electronic Arts (EA) will release a free online version of it's Battlefield title later this year. In a statement, EA's Gerhard Florin said ""People want to play games in new ways, with easier access that is quick to the fun. With Battlefield Heroes, EA brings its first major franchise to North America and Europe with a new distribution model and pricing structure adapted to the evolving way that people play." Battlefield Heroes is geared for the masses with a more cartoon like feel and requires less horse power to play. Ben Cousins a senior producer with Dice the games developer told the BBC that ""We're removing all barriers to entry and we hope there is broader audience for the title. You will be able to play this game on grandma's laptop." For the gamers the Ads will not be intrusive, appearing not in game but on the website and on the front-end of the game. Players will be able to purchase items to customize their characters but will not be able to gain any advantage over other players through these purchases. It's a model that EA has been exploring in Asia and hopes to find success with in the North American and European markets. Seems to me that it's sort of the Wii philosophy of appealing to more players by making the games easier to play, according to the article "EA expected 95% of people who played the game never to spend any money."

U2 3D Better Than The Live Concert?

Eliot Van Buskirk author of Wired's Listening Post Blog appears to have been blown away by the Imax 3D concert U2 3D! "Chalk it up to the impossible camera angles, the breathtaking close-ups and panoramas, or the convincing nature of the latest 3-D technology, but I was really there: watching guitarist-keyboardist The Edge play a Fender Rhodes from a vantage point 4 feet above his head, seeing lead singer Bono's hand reach out to the crowd, and flying through a massive stadium lit up by thousands of cellphones waving in unison like a school of glowing sea creatures."

Now that's a review that makes you want to check it out in person! Not living near an Imax theater will make it tough to take this show in, but I'll be keeping an eye out for showings in other Provinces just in case business or pleasure takes me close enough to catch it.

Canadian Firms Desperate for IT Workers

The Globe and Mail is reporting that IT firms are feeling the results of the last bubble's affect as "enrolment at Canada's computer science faculties has tumbled as students and their parents soured on an industry that lost investors billions and shed so many jobs." A Conference Board of Canada commissioned study, to be released today, shows a need for as many as 58,000 IT professionals over the next year. This demand coupled with "a 36-per-cent to 64-per-cent drop in student numbers", depending on the region of the country, makes for a difficult time for recruiters. According to the article "Phil Sorgen, president of Microsoft Canada, says there simply are not enough graduates to meet demand. About 35,000 new information and communication technology jobs are created annually in Canada, however universities produce only enough graduates to fill about one out of every five of those spots, he says." Looks like a good year to be asking for a raise!

Pleasantly Pleased With Canon Selphy CP740

On Friday I received my new Canon Selphy CP740 photo printer in the mail. I'd not done the research that usually would have gone into a gadget purchase on my part. In this case, I was cashing in points from one of my many rewards programs and was pleased to find that I had enough for this device. The order went in and I'd thought little of it until receiving notification that a parcel had arrived.

The Selphy is a tiny device dwarfed by my HP Officejet 6210 All-in-One, it is capable of printing postcard size (4 x 6) 100 year prints in 16.8 million colors. It's very easy to load both the print cartridges and paper, and prints either via Direct Print which is very handy or USB. I love the prints! I'm not one to print photos normally, just post them online or e-mail them around, but since the printer was not really costing me I thought why not? The only knock on it that I can see after very limited use is the speed of printing, about a minute per print, but it's amusing to watch as it lays down the colors in separate passes. If you are old enough to remember the Polaroid cameras it's a little like watching those pictures come to life... I'm sure there are better photo printers available, but this little guy has found a spot on my desk!

Wired Exposes MySpace Flaw

According to a Wired.com blog post, MySpace has had a serious security flaw since at least October that was being exploited openly without reaction from the site until the news went mainstream. The bug allowed "voyeurs, hackers, entrepreneurs and lechers" to view private photo galleries and profiles to be viewed without permission. It was so well known in fact that websites such as MySpacePrivateProfile.com emerged that took advantage of the flaw and made it easy to peer inside the private postings of thousands of MySpace users. In a Threat Level Blog post, Kevin Poulsen writes "Barely 24 hours after my story hit the front door of Wired.com, MySpace has, without comment, closed the backdoor, and the websites that were exploiting it are no longer delivering private photos." The question then becomes did MySpace know about the bug all along? If this flaw was so well known that websites have been exploiting it for months why didn't MySpace fix it? Are the that oblivious to what was going on or where they quietly enjoying the extra page views? This will be interesting to follow.

First America's Army, Now The Right Stuff?

NASA has reportedly put out a Request for Information (RFI) for organizations interested in developing a platform for a Massively Multi player Online Game (MMO) aimed at students and would "simulate real Nasa engineering and science missions". According to the document "The MMO will foster career exploration opportunities in a much deeper way than reading alone would permit and at a fraction of the time and cost of an internship program." This is not the first time that a US agency has turned to such tactics, the US armed forces has produced and has maintained a first person shooter "America's Army" for a number of years as a recruiting tool and it is said to be "the most popular computer games in the world", of course it is a free download and of exceptional quality for a freebie. For NASA the MMO would not be it's first foray into virtual worlds as they maintain an Island in Second Life "where individuals and groups with an interest in the space programme can meet, share ideas and conduct experiments." The BBC has More here.

Facebook Asked to Remove Scrabulous

From the "I can't believe it's taken them this long" department comes the news that Hasbro and Mattel have reportedly asked Facebook to remove Scrabulous, an obvious rip-off of the popular boardgame, from its application directory. Scrabulous has a large following and, in true Facebook fashion, "Save Scrabulous"Facebook groups have been established in a effort to save the game. The largest having more than 30,000 members! According to Cnet, both sides of the debate are being tight lipped, so you can be sure that the lawyers are being kept busy. Why don't Hasbro / Mattel just buy out the company and take the half million users? I suppose that might set an ugly precedent...

Robot Art

This may be a little late, or a whole lot early, but it's fun to watch just the same. BoingBoing found this YouTube video of a robot performing a Nativity Play and I think it's worth passing along, even if the holidays are a fading memory now...

ISP Plans Trial of Pay-Per-Use High Speed Internet

Time Warner Cable Inc. announced yesterday that they were planning a trial to bill their High Speed Internet subscribers based on their amount of usage rather than the typical flat monthly fee. According to a Globe and Mail article, 5% of Time Warner's subscribers account for over 50% of network bandwidth usage and the pay-per-use model should only affect those users. It will be interesting to see how this unfolds; perhaps I'm over simplifying this but wouldn't the other 95% of the current subscribers expect to see their rates stay the same or decrease? I wonder how many Time Warner Cable subscribers will start jumping ship? It seems to me that whenever a company changes their revenue model it does not bode well for the consumer... their attempt at curbing the appetite of the 5% that are heavy users may come at the expense of their average subscriber. You can be sure that if they get away with this, others will be quick to follow.

Monkey Controls Robot With Mind

Researchers at Duke University in North Carolina and at the Computational Brain Project of the Japan Science and Technology have collaborated on a project that hopes to develop prosthetic limbs which people with disabilities might one day be able to control mentally. The folks at Duke have "attached electrodes to one of two rhesus monkeys to monitor their brain activities, recording the brain cell responses as the monkey walked on a treadmill at various speeds while simultaneously sensors on the monkey's legs tracked the movements." The signals are sent to a 1.55-metre-tall robot in a laboratory in Kyoto and as the monkey walked, so, too, did the robot. Sounds very promising! In fact the monkey was able to control the robot even after the treadmill they were walking on was stopped, using only visual queues of the robot. The CBC has the complete story.