Recently, I wrote a piece that got picked up in iMedia Connection, entitled “Innovative movie promotion in virtual worlds.”
The challenge of advertising in virtual worlds involves taking advantage of their unique features. Here’s how some film companies showcased their movies in one of these worlds.
a few weeks ago, my macbook air started having a problem with overheating and related craziness. thankfully, i had purchased the extended warranty. i always recommend that to people buying laptops - sometime after the first year and before the end of the third year, you’ll have some hardware problem. a friend recommended eserv, and they did the repairs quickly and efficiently. good stuff!
in the session yesterday, raph koster made an analogy of how quickly cell phones were developed and said that there were some virtual world technologies back in the late 70s and avatars already in 1985 and that in that frame of reference, virtual world adoption has been slow. but i don’t know if i agree, because cell phones took a long time to get developed and adopted, too. they existed in the 70s and had to overcome all of their technical challenges (battery life and size, range, towers, etc) and their business challenges (pricing that was affordable to people). probably virtual worlds just have to do all of these things first. there are parallels to almost all of these pieces in virtual worlds. for instance, the cell towers are like the infrastructure parallel to bandwidth. virtual worlds also need a network effect that helps bring the critical mass of users so that you go in because everyone else is in and you need to in order to get all the things you need to do done. the same happened for cell phones and was in fact actively encouraged through programs like fave 5 or in-network groups who all use the same carrier.
so in the end, i think it’s really about the same problem in a different environment and different implementation, and it will take time in virtual worlds as well.
vista sucks - we all know it.
i recently installed ubuntu on my home computer and am in the process of switching over. ubuntu works relatively well, but not perfect. the gui isn’t that great, and the drivers and restricted drivers are not that easy.
before i did that, though, i got a copy of mac os x and tried to install it, and it didn’t work for me. i got the os installed, but there were problems with drivers and other stuff.
and that is the problem: third-party drivers.
apple keeps things elite. in fact, i think that apple is more abusive of their “monopoly” than microsoft - they lock you in to their software AND their hardware.and the irony is, they could easily win right now if they just opened up driver publishing guides, api’s to plug things into the os, and start doing oem deals. tell me that smaller, efficient hardware manufacturers like averatec couldn’t produce a mac os laptop for cheaper than apple does itself. or tell me that people wouldn’t be willing to pay $50 more for a mac os-based dell laptop. it can’t be a windows exclusivity thing, since dell is already shipping ubuntu systems.
like i said, i like ubuntu ok so far, but i also consider myself a fairly knowledgeable computer user. and even i find that ubuntu still has a ways to go when it comes to usability. i would have gladly paid $100-$130 for a copy of mac os x that i could install on my hardware. vista just doesn’t work well enough to use.
and ironically, with more and more stuff moving to the cloud, all people really want out of a laptop these days is a stable os and good connectivity options. and vista can’t even deliver that.
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