Many thanks to Chris Hunkele for the pics and video’s from the grand opening!

If you live in Phoenix or Scottsdale you like saw the news that Microsoft has opened it’s first (new) Microsoft Store in the Scottsdale Fashion Square mall and from the looks of things, it was a huge hit. With a few hundred people milling around the store itself Chris explained a bit more about the setting:

… what you didn’t see were the 5 mall cops and 7 Scottsdale police officers monitoring the outside of the store where fabric lane dividers stretched down the hall.

I’ve been inside Fashion Square enough times to know that “down the hall” like means “22 miles”… or there abouts… it’s a long mall.

The “store” idea was actually something Microsoft tried back in 1999 (before Apple) with the “microsoftSF” store – back when Microsoft thought DirectX was awesome and APIs were a good way to market beige colored desktops. That idea didn’t pan out and Microsoft focused on tech for about 8 years before deciding it had to become “cool” again — like Apple.

Fast forward 10 ass-sore years later and now that Microsoft has finally gotten the company lined up behind the Xbox-leading vision of developing and delivering trendy “cool-tech”. The timing was perfect to try the store idea again and there is plenty for Microsoft to be eager to show off.

The overall vibe of the store is exactly what it should be: “Here’s cool tech we have had a hand in, go ahead and play with it”.

Whether it was laptops, netbooks, Xbox 360s hooked to a wall full of LCD TVs:

or the molestation-thrilled Microsoft Surface – which had a very solid showing – Microsoft had every sexy product out and ready for show.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Yes this idea sounds familiar, but it works when you have something that can attract a crowd of onlookers and gadget-lovers. Besides the customer support angle, Microsoft has never offered anything compelling enough to structure a store’s existence around; now they do.

For the longest time Microsoft was a software-only company and you can’t launch a store to show off… what… Exchange Server 2010 and Outlook? Even trying to establish deals with exclusive vendors 10 years ago to decide which Microsoft-blessed hardware would go into such a store would be just as boring, there was nothing flashy to show off… just a big green Start button and an Explorer view that now had a web browser in it. As for hardware, everything was black and boxy — what was compelling about that?

To get consumers to stop and peek in, you need glitz and ‘window appeal’ — give customers something they want to walk in and put their hands all over (Surface).

The only reason Apple pulled off the “store” idea in recent history is because they were offering solutions of sexy hardware and sexy software. If Apple had only nailed the sexy hardware, but ran say Windows XP — I doubt the stores would have lasted. But they managed to provide a refined hardware and software experience that you couldn’t get anywhere else and then mixed in the support and developed a really compelling reason to peek your head in the Apple store’s door as you walked by: “Oh, I want to ask about a bluetooth headset for my iPod”.

Enter the Xbox 360, Windows 7, Microsoft Surface, Zune HD, Windows Mobile 6.5 and mobile/tablet touch-screen devices and a slew of other 1-off items and you suddenly have the makings of a store that’s fun to walk into and play around with until you’re ready to buy something. It’s basically Gymboree for adults — not saying that if Microsoft put a huge pool of balls in there I wouldn’t jump in… just that Surface and Xbox 360 with motion control are just as fun for adults.

If you go walking by the Microsoft store and on a 150″ plasma (yes they have one) you see someone playing Halo Reach on one wall and then see someone throwing paint on a dog on another wall of LCDs with Project Natal, I’m going to bet you’ll walk in — and maybe ask a question or two — and maybe walk out with a new mouse, maybe a Zune HD (Zune 2) and high hopes for an Xbox 360 for Christmas.

Brilliant

You throw some decent customer support on top of that, and next time your laptop tells you that it cannot install the driver for your digital camera, you throw that shit in your car and roll down to the Microsoft Store and ask them what’s going on — as opposed to calling India and talking to Rajesh* about reformatting your AOL internet.

* No offense intended, Rajesh is a hell of a guy and great at backgammon.

Update #1: Thanks to Dave Bullock for the heads up that you can actually get your RROD’ed Xbox 360’s fixed at the new Microsoft Store. Basic repairs can be done in-house, like faulty power connectors, but more common repairs (like heat-sync failing and typical RROD causes) the console will still need to be shipped out, however, Microsoft will ship you a replacement console immediately after the store has taken it into custody and you don’t need to wait those extra days for Microsoft to confirm receipt of it.

Update #2: Chris has done a technical analysis the likes of CSI and we are pretty sure Bill Gates doesn’t work at the new store… or at least he does and he was having a bad hair day:

Videos

You can scroll through the playlist of videos from the Grand Opening below.

Pictures

Saw this on TwitPic, it’s the United States superimposed on top of the land-mass that is Antarctica and holy-hell, I honestly didn’t realize it was so big.

I’ve always identified myself as a “scientific person”. I have a Computer Science degree (virtual high-five to Laurence Hartje), I’ve been obsessed with computers and technical gadgetry since I was 10 (virtual high-five to Grant Gochnauer) and I glommed onto software development at the age of 12 and have loved it ever since. I pretty much always assumed that I was a walking robot — with a sense of humor.

My dad is very precision-minded… if he sets out to do something, he draws it up, plans it out and executes it a step at a time. That sounds like me, I like planning, I like execution, I like precision — so I pretty much have always assumed I was a “technical guy”, a “logical shitbag” as it were, until 3 days ago.

I noticed that when I go through bouts of no programming or I have nothing worth-while to work on, I actually get depressed. It’s really subtle, and I was never able to pinpoint it until recently. I also cannot just start “coding” anything and suddenly be happy, there has to be a purpose to what I’m doing and the purpose, 9 times out of 10, has to be building something that will help people. I can’t just build a porn downloader or a hilarious cat-picture-shuffler, it’s got to be something really useful that makes a person go “Goddamn, this is awesome…”

We had lunch the other day with some good friends, she’s one of the leading psychologists in Tucson and we got to talking about what our passions were. When I mentioned that I had some inkling that it might be “… programming” and how that “made no sense to me”, she jumped in with:

Oh no, it’s very common for technical people to be very creative… programming is your artistic outlet. Some people play the piano or paint to get their artistic energy out — you program.

Seriously? I’m artistic?

… ok I guess I can see it, I do have the following personality traits:

• I love flexible rules, gray areas
• I hate rigid unmovable/absolute things
• I like flexible people, creativity, humor
• I love opportunities around every corner, excitement
• Myers-Briggs says I’m an ENFJ
• … if time allows it, I love treating code as art, it’s so much prettier that way

Hmmm, ok those sound a lot like personality traits that a 1st year art student would have. I guess I am artistic.

One of the best things I’ve done in the recent past was to take a detailed Myers-Briggs test and learn what my personality type is and more about my personality type. My triggers, things that motivate me, things that de-motivate me and so on.

Prior to this I was struggling with feeling motivated to wake up in the morning, but afterward I had a better understanding exactly as to “why” I was feeling this way. Most all of it had to do with lack of opportunities, I was getting too set in a pattern that was turning into my day-in-day-out life and that was killing me inside slowly. I found different ways to inject some excitement into my life to combat that without needing to uproot the family and move to Guam… which was plan B.

I’d recommend anyone feeling a general sense of milase or depression to do the same — if for no other reason than just to learn a bit more about themselves. You might find something that speaks to you instantly and let you know what it is you have to change to make your life better for you.

So in closing, if you are a technical person, you might be a closet artist too… if you are, don’t discredit how happy coding might make you. If you are currently dying a slow death programming at a big company on nothing that interests you or feeds your soul, try and start a side project to get your brain flowing again. You need to take this seriously if this is really what feeds your soul.

Not wanting to get out of bed in the morning is probably the worst feeling in the world for us creative types.

(Click Image to Enlarge)

This absolutely fascinates me… what you see above is a world map from Eastern Telegraph from 1901 showing the break-down of the companies world-wide wiring networks.

You think of what we have today, and I’m still impressed that ships can spool out and drop down enough cable, long enough, to run wires across the Pacific and Atlanta… forget that, this shit is from 108 years ago!

Nevermind that they had to manufacturer copper runs of wire thick enough to withstand years of life underwater, but also spools big enough to run around the globe… oh yea, then don’t forget the ships big enough to troll out to the middle of the ocean and drop it down without sinking under the weight of the wire or letting the tail of wire in the water pull the boat around.

Did I mention they also didn’t have sonar to tell them where underwater rifts and canyons were to avoid dropping line down a bottomless trench?

It is absolutely amazing how advanced we were back then… we sure have come a long way, but around the time we discovered electricity the stage of mankind went from this relatively slow-paced growth to a sprint into realms of things that were previously not possible.

Sometimes I find history fascinating.

At least in terms of consumer spending, retail video games were more popular than DVD and Blu-ray discs in 2008, according to an international research group.

Games accounted for 53 percent of entertainment software spending worldwide, Media Control GfK International said. These figures do not include movie or game rentals.

The momentum is clearly in video games’ direction, growing 20 percent to $32 billion in worldwide sales last year. Movies slipped 6 percent to $29 billion on the decreasing popularity of DVD. Though Blu-ray sales increased, DVD sales dropped, a trend that echoes similar findings in the U.S.

This speaks directly to the point we were making a few months ago about how controlling the future of entertainment starts with the game consoles.

That article ended up sparking two pretty interesting conversations for me. One was with long-time friend Todd Swarthout, an economist at Georgia State University and a separate conversaion with Sonny Bunch from the Washington Times and author of “Sabotaging the Sony Playstation 3 market?“.

My primary argument is that in 10+ years, games will represent the majority (or almost-majority) of entertainment, and with the growing functionality in our consoles, the primary console makers (Microsoft and Sony) will control your entertainment experience as well as the DLC market in that regard.

For the first time last year we saw games trump movies in entertainment sales and interest by shoppers. This represents a huge shift in focus by consumers but also points to just how much the up-and-coming tween consumers of last year will become the primary consumers of the next decade — and what they are interested in are games.

Both Sonny and Todd, independently, made the assertion that:

• ISPs are not going to sit idly by and allow Sony/Microsoft to dominate their bandwidth with movies and games that they get no piece of.
• Cable companies have more penetration than game consoles, they will fight this market with addition set-top-box functionality.

I tend to believe the first argument as a possible sticking point — we saw it with the Net Neutrality debacle that Google waited to settle before finally rolling out their HD support on YouTube; could you have imagine how expensive YouTube would have become for Google if the Bush Administration had knocked down Net Neutrality and let AT&T/Comcast have their way with additional traffic fees?

I have less faith in the cable companies being able to unify and deliver a consolidated/feature-packed device or service like the game consoles are providing. I do see them locking game consoles out of certain functional areas like PVR functionality for TV signals — but then I would just fully expect the game companies to route around this exactly as Apple has done with it’s own service (iTunes) and product (Apple TV).

As internet service continues to move more towards a required functional public service, I see the likely hood of the game companies, that already have strong Hollywood ties and DLC functionality, to continue to push forward dominating this entertainment experience in your home.

Imagine if Microsoft buys Netflix this year? Maybe it wouldn’t seem so far-fetched anymore.

As a long-time customer of Amazon and general lover of the company (both for buying, selling and computing platform), I was recently posting a slew of things to the Amazon Marketplace (a damn-easy way to sell things you have, by finding the listing in Amazon, and clicking “Sells Yours Here” on the product page) and noticed a new service called “Easysell” provided by Amazon.

It appears that the service is officially called Fulfillment by Amazon and seems to be a damn interesting (labor-intensive for Amazon) way to sell your goods through Amazon.

When using Amazon Marketplace, Amazon already takes a reasonable percentage of your sale if the item sells — there is no fee for posting (you hear that eBay?). Once the item sells, the user pays you via Amazon Payments and it’s up to you to go package up the item and ship it to them.

What’s interesting about Fulfillment by Amazon is that in this model, they go one step further… you actually send your item to Amazon, list it, and then just sit back and wait for Amazon to sell and ship the item for you. I’m sure the percentage they take is higher given their overhead, but if you have an unholy amount of items to sell and don’t want to deal with it… you can box all that shit up and send it to Amazon and let them sell it for you.

It seems to be a hell of a service, but I can imagine Amazon has to walk a fine line between keeping the service charges just high enough that not everyone and their mother uses the service then they have a labor problem with incoming items getting backlogged. But they also have to keep the service charges just low enough that the service gets used and they get a clear understand of what kind of market is available here to them.

The amount of infrastructure that Amazon has had to build up over the years relating to order fulfillment has got to be incredible, the idea that they are leveraging it for individual use like this is really brilliant. It’s really not too different from the Amazon Web Services computing platforms they provide — I fully expected Google to beat everyone to that punch, but out of the clear blue the world’s largest e-tailer did it… maybe they are making another first-move here in the melding of online and offline worlds before another company like Wal-Mart steps in and tries it.

Keep up the innovating Amazon!

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Isn’t that sort of how it starts in that movie too?

Ok that first bit was mostly sarcastic, but if you are interested in this kind of stuff, and the increasing trend recently of “lights in the sky” sightings has you intrigued, Google for “2012” and if you have the time, this video is pretty interesting. It’s a bit long, and some parts of it seem “way out there”, but if you can just keep watching there are fascinating bits and pieces and theories tucked throughout.

Thoughts? Comments? Does everyone welcome our new alien overlords?

We’ll explain, but first some perspective…

PC Gaming Alive and Well

This continues to support our rant against the “PC Gaming is Dead” claim that console vendors and publishers have been making for years as a way of trending people to more closed/controlled platforms that provide larger margins and easier access to streamlined payments.

You continue to see console publishers say that PC gaming is dead or that they will “analyze the market” to see if it makes sense to release a Triple-A title to the PC. You even have some folks spouting useless drivel, like Epic’s Cliff Bleszinski stating that Gears of War 2 will not be released on the PC like Gears 1 was.

Besides Bleszinski being unqualified to make that claim (I think Mark Rein, Michael Capps or their head of business development are more qualified to make these statements), Gears of War 2 opened to record sales that will move a number of Xbox 360 consoles this holiday season; exactly what Microsoft wanted. Once that revenue stream trickles down and Gears 2 is done moving consoles of course Microsoft will go back to Epic for a PC release that will follow up and push Vista/Windows 7 sales come Fall of ‘09 – I’ll eat $1000 if I’m wrong.

Do you remember this was exactly what was said with Gears of War 1? There was “no PC release”, then low and behold as we approached Fall, a surprise announcement with exclusive content and hand waving. There are no technical hurdles to bringing Gears of War 2 to the PC, if Microsoft has a strategic angle for pushing Windows on the PC market, they will use Gears 2 as the tool to do it with. Remember Halo? Was that even a game or just a marketing tool?

If Microsoft’s play is to push Xbox 360 in replacement of desktop gaming completely, then they won’t renew the Epic contract to bring Gears 2 to the PC – this has nothing to do with what Epic wants or what Bleszinski wants. If Microsoft approaches them with $75 million and some residual agreement on sales for a PC version of Gears of War 2, guess what we’ll see in a few months? A PC release of Gears of War 2.

I’ll make the claim now that we will absolutely see Gears of War 2 on the PC come Fall ‘09, again, with bits and pieces of exclusive content and likely some sort of Windows 7 tie-in; either a newer Games for Windows that works or a DX 11 highlight.

The console/media center platform is not a forgone conclusion yet, and Microsoft would be jumping the gun if they tried to push it as such this early. That being said, Windows 7, assuming it’s not a disaster, will likely be the last big OS-centric push we see from Microsoft. Assuming it’s a success, we will see a service-push by Microsoft after Windows 7 is sufficiently rolled out.

It’s All About Control

The battle between Console and PC gaming markets has nothing to do with gaming… games are just the stepping stone for what is coming.

When the Nintendo set out and sold millions of units, companies took notice; but the technology wasn’t there to do more than just games. When the PS2 sold 10s of millions of units world wide, everyone took notice; and we suddenly had a machine that sort of had the power to do more than just games… that’s when “next gen” consoles launched and the picture became much clearer.

Suddenly we had PS3s and Xbox 360s with the capabilities of computers, but out of the box support for a single, vendor locked-in publishing and delivery channel. This is any vendors dream come true: controlling the choke point for digital distribution to millions of customers; a channel that publishers will pay you handsomely to get inside and sell through and on the receiving end consumers will pay you again to receive it.

Enter PSN and Xbox Live

These are the cash cows… games, and gaming machines are the edge of the funnel, the “teaser” to get you buying a console, hooking it up and using it… feeling comfortable with it.

At some point you will begin navigating through the menus and see a movie you want to watch, a TV show you enjoy, a graphics pack you think looks cute or an Arcade Game you loved… and you’ll buy it.

You’ll buy it and you’ll notice how easy the process was. Once your credit card information is typed in, it’s a 1-click endeavor to buy more content through this channel.

It gets easier and easier with each release, adding value to your life, money in Microsoft’s and Sony’s pocket, and providing a completely new audience to publishers to sell directly to; you cannot stock an icon pack or PSN theme on a store shelf. You cannot sell bonus levels of Gears of War 2 in a store using a boxed copy. You cannot sell new clothes for your Playstation Home avatar at EB Games… there are going to be new products to new customers that didn’t exist previously.

{smartads}

The PC Gaming Market slows down the adoption of these distribution and sales channels. It’s the original digital platform and therefor a bit sloppy; there are a lot of different ways to do the same thing.

Do you use Steam? What about Greenhouse? What about Direct2Drive? What about <insert the 10 other services>?

These services all compete, chopping the PC digital delivery and sales channels into tiny pieces. In addition to that, some publishers are hesitant about delivering different kinds of digital media on the PC (e.g. movies and music) where as on the consoles it’s more straight forward along with a smaller threat of piracy. Publishers prefer this because there are less choices to make (PSN or Xbox Live?) and the platform-providers prefer it obviously because they have funneled business away from the fragmented PC market into 1 of 2 pots… of which they get probably somewhere around 30-50% of everything that transpires inside that pot.

The console is a much easier value proposition for content publishers and much more profitable for the channel owners (Sony and Microsoft) – that is why they have been claiming that PC gaming is dying for years, that is why there are lagged releases of games on the PC or some not done at all, that is why all these big companies want to move the consoles forward. It isn’t about games, it’s about what comes after games.

If It’s Not About Games, What is It?

Movies, Music, TV Shows, Voice Chat, Communication, Synchronization, Socialization… these are all the next steps for consoles.

The next replacement for Facebook will be on the consoles, the next replacement for Skype will be on the consoles, the next replacement for TiVo or your cable DVR will be on the consoles, synchronization with your events, tasks, friends, families, favorite shows… will all be on consoles.

The primary way for people to watch movies will be renting them over their console, the primary way to watch TV will be over your console. Your stereo will be your console. Your NAS will be your console. You’ll share pictures easily across family members by all syncing your consoles… services like Flickr and SmugMug will be hosting hubs for the content that is delivered on these consoles. Much like we saw NetFlix just do with Xbox Live Experience update and their new streaming service. NetFlix is the backing storage for this stream services, just as SmugMug will be in the future for pictures… I doubt those websites will directly do much business, but they will become critical members of the console content provider family.

This is the future that will become more defined in 5-8 years and a reality in 10. The goal is to funnel everything, all your activity down to what used to be a game device, but is now a “media center” for all forms of entertainment and socialization.

Sony jumped the gun with Home, but their 10-year vision is actually a good one… it just doesn’t make any sense now because the lifestyle and infrastructure isn’t there for Home to seem interesting. It is sort of like Valve releasing their Steam service (clearly a success now) back in 1990 when everyone was on dialup… it just wouldn’t have made sense and no one would use it because the infrastructure/life style of digital downloads wasn’t there to support it.

You can also see Microsoft’s version of this move towards “everything on the entertainment console” with Xbox Live Experience… it’s still more of a classic Xbox Live experience than it is a Sony Home/Second Life/Facebook experience, but you see the colors starting to bleed through.

At the point that these companies finally get all our entertainment activities from one box, controlled by one vendor, getting paid by the publishers to push their content through those channels, and us consuming that content with micropayments, then it finally becomes comes clear why these companies want the PC entertainment (right now referred to as “PC Gaming”) market to die… it’s to wild, it’s not predictable enough and not controllable enough; that translates directly into less revenue, which is what they want to avoid.

A good case study of this is again, with NetFlix. Before the Xbox Live Experience update with integrated NetFlix Streaming, Microsoft didn’t see a dime from NetFlix for their “Watch it Now” instant streaming service, but now they do because NetFlix has seen the value in cross-promoting their service (and their original business plan) on the gaming entertainment consoles. At some point Queue management will find their way onto Xbox Live (and likely PSN) and the reason to visit the NetFlix site disappears… effectively making NetFlix nothing more than a content provider; almost like a higher-level version of Amazon’s S3 service.

Conclusion

So PC Gaming is not dead, but big publishers and platform developers want it to die and will slowly widdle it down to nothing. Triple-A titles will continue to be pushed to consoles, and big money will continue to move consoles towards a ubiquitous “entertainment and communication center” experience.

What will spring up on the PC are brand new opportunities for indie developers to step up to the plate and redefine how PC gaming looks. Unfortunately TV and Movies are on such a heavy lock-down by big name publishers that I doubt reinvention of the PC as a powerful entertainment platform that rivals the consoles is not likely to happen in the longer term. There is content to be had however, with the advent of YouTube and other media services like it, those may play a part in what of PC entertainment looks like in the future.

So next time someone says “PC Gaming is dying”, you can say “Nope, it’s just changing”. Just follow the money-potential to see where it’s likely headed.

Thanks Edge-Online!

My hope is that the FCC is given the support of the government to step and in and regulate communications effectively without worry that said telcos can simply pull some strings and have them silenced as we saw happen under the Bush administration.

A University of Maryland study of 30 years worth of national data confirmed that watching television may provide temporary pleasure, but lead to long-term depression while socializing with friends and reading lead to longer term happiness.

The study also found a direct correlation between watching TV and times of economic crisis (e.g. now), with many people turning towards TV for temporary relief and quick bits of pleasure in the form of a sitcom, movie or constant flow of news.

Another interesting self-defeating detail that the study uncovered was that unhappy people tended to find TV more enjoyable than happy people; clarifying the problem that unhappy people are mostly unhappy due to the amount of TV they watch, but found it to be more enjoyable… prompting them to watch more of it.

I think the net-net of this study, if you zoom out to the 10,000 ft view of the situation… is that people who stay inside their comfort zones and rarely ever wander out of them, are categorically unhappier than people that are constantly changing the scenery, trying new things and spending time socializing or learning (reading).

Common sense would tell us this is the difference between a couch potato and someone that would be described as “outgoing” or “loving life”; I’m not too surprised here, I know very few couch potatoes that ever do anything out of the ordinary and they usually have plenty to complain about and very little they think is fantastic.

Thanks PhysOrg!

In addition to the Democratic address, Obama is also establishing a Q&A session answered by Whitehouse officials working to put a face on the government and shorten the gap between “Government” and “The People”. These Q&A sessions will also be video taped and posted on YouTube/Change.gov for interested parties to following; providing a single, accessible location for information out of the Whitehouse.

This move is being most closely compared to Roosevelt’s “fireside chats” which were direct radio broadcasts to the public. Many feel that the Obama campaign has discovered how best to effectively leverage the sharing-based technology platform that services like YouTube, Facebook, etc. now provide and permanently changed Presidential strategies going forward.

As an interested on-looker waiting to see what the next steps are, all I can say is that I’m happy… very happy with this announcements.

Thanks Washington Post!

Thanks to Patrick Norton for the heads up on this: Just a year after it was unveiled, the Toyota iQ (super-compact) car won the Japanese Car of the Year award.

The iQ is a super-compact car targetted directly at the Smart Car fortwo market, offering a similarly sized car that is designed to seat 4 people instead of 2. The iQ’s ultra-compact design offers fuel economy in the form of almost 60 MPG, while obvious concessions are made with regards to engine performance:

• 998 cc 3 cylinder
• 67 bhp (50 kW/68 PS)
• 67 lb·ft (91 N·m) at 4800 rpm
• 0-100 km/h 14.1 seconds.

The car was designed from the ground up to use the newest in “miniturization technologies” to keep everything in the car small, tucked away and compact which still maintaining the highest in safety ratings. The iQ currently enjoys the Euro NCAP’s 5-star safety rating.

Some of the design decisions that allowed the car to stay compact are as follows:

• Newly designed differential allows the iQ to keep the wheels at the extreme corners of the car with very short overhang.
• A flat fuel tank that rides right under the floor
• Heater and AC unit have been shrunk, allowing front-seating to be moved forward, closer to the windshield.
• Read-window air bags have been added to address rear-seated passengers being much closer to the rear window now

The car is set to launch in the UK in January of 2009 with a £10,000 price tag (roughly $14,800 today), an excellent starting point for such an economic car IMO (last time I checked the Smart fortwo was hovering in the $22-24,000 range, which I thought was rediculous for a golf cart).

Thanks to Laurence Hartje for sending this in, looks like Barack Obama is an iChat-loving, Mac-using, BlackBerry-addicted president elect.

This puts my mind at rest a bit more knowing that our president-to-be understands and utilizes technology to get work done, as opposed to still being impressed with Fire and Water… not that they aren’t cool, I’m just saying…

Just got this news sent in from Todd Swarthout… he lives in Atlanta, about Phoenix getting ready for the Grand Opening of the Valley Metro light rail this December… here in Arizona… where I live (I didn’t even know about this).

Light Rail Pricing

• 1 ride $1.25
• All day pass $2.50
• 3 day pass $7.50
• 7 day pass $17.50
• 31 day pass $45

Senior, youth, disabled – Half-price on all fares listed above

Fare enforcement is done using a “proof of payment” system. You can basically be asked for proof of your ticket at any time. You may not be asked and could get lucky, but we’d encourage you to support the development of public transit… it’ll make everyone’s lives easier in the long run.

Train Service Schedule

• Weekdays
  • Service Starts at 4:40am
  • Service Ends at 11:00pm
  • Every 10 mins from 6:00am to 7:00pm
  • Every 20 mins outside that time block
• Weekends
  • Service Starts at 5:00am
  • Service Ends at 11:00pm
  • Every 15 mins from 6:00am to 7:00pm
  • Every 20 mins outside that time block

Travel Times

• Entire 20-miles: 57 mins
• Downtown Phoenix to Downtown Tempe: 23 mins
• Downtown Tempe to Downtown Mesa: 15 mins
• Downtown Mesa to Downtown Phoenix: 37 mins
• Chris-Town Mall to ASU Tempe Campus: 42 mins
• Chris-Town Mall to Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport: 32 mins
• Downtown Phoenix to Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport: 14 mins

Check out the full list of stations where you can get picked up/dropped off to see if light rail is in your area (you probably would have noticed it already I suppose). At launch there are 28 stations covering the 20-mile run.

Coverage Map

Right now the light rail system cuts right through down-town, with future plans out to 2012 to expand to particular areas, you can get an idea of what is covered now as well as future expansion planned by checking out their map here:

(Click to Enlarge)

Kevin Mahaffey sent in a 1-off but damn interesting find by New York high school students Kate Stoeckle and Louisa Strauss: 25% of sushi you buy is not what you ordered (it’s usually something cheaper).

The NYT covered the story in which the girls got 60 different samples of sushi from around New York, then using “a simplified genetic fingerprinting technique” identified the actual fish found in the sushi. Some examples of the shenanigans that chefs are using to lower costs:

They found that one-fourth of the fish samples with identifiable DNA were mislabeled. A piece of sushi sold as the luxury treat white tuna turned out to be Mozambique tilapia, a much cheaper fish that is often raised by farming. Roe supposedly from flying fish was actually from smelt. Seven of nine samples that were called red snapper were mislabeled, and they turned out to be anything from Atlantic cod to Acadian redfish, an endangered species.

While not blowing the lid off of any underground fish-smuggling ring, it’s still an interesting bit of corruption that you might not realize is happening if you are a sushi eater.

I will guarantee you that the next time you sit down and want to pay $8 for a roll of some kind… you might think twice about it.

Our muscles-in-the-know, Grant Gochanuer, made it down to the Grant Part rally for the Obama Election Rally last night and snapped off some excellent shots. His full Flickr set is here. Here are some highlights:

For anyone that missed Obama’s acceptance speech, it was really a moving speech. A lot of nice things said… obviously action is louder than words so we’ll have to wait and see, but still nice to recap the struggles this country as been through and see a light of hope out there towards the end of the tunnel:

• Part 1 of 3
• Part 2 of 3
• Part 3 of 3

Update #1: Grant particularly liked the following two:

• Obama giving his acceptance speech
• Obama addressing crowd after winning

According to the data released by Microsoft’s gamerscore blog, Senator Barack Obama is the favorite among Xbox 360 owners in the race for the white house. The presidential hopeful and his running mate Joe Biden are leading the McCain/Palin camp by twenty percent.

While this doesn’t reflect all of America, I do believe that this is a strong sign of how important the youth vote is in this race. I’m also pleased that something has come out that should put an end to stereotypes linked to Xbox Live users.

Hit up the  gamerscore blog for more information, along with other unofficial poll data.

Well your gut reaction might be “who cares, how can they possibly police that?” As fate would have it, Chris Hunkele has pointed us at a few articles that discuss the elusive and state-secret “Magic TV detection vans” that drive around detecting unlicensed televisions when they are on.

This has come up in the UK news before, but always shot down and dismissed to redirect attention away from the effort. A citizen, under the Freedom of Information Act (aka the “You’ll Never See It Anyway” Act) has requested information about how the detection is being done, but was denied when it was felt that disclosure of how this process occurs would lessen the public’s perception of the top-secret operation that they aren’t suppose to know about anyway.

So… take that citizens. No you can’t know about our illegal human-animal generic engineering program because you’d get pissed off if you saw what we were making.

I probably would have taken a different approach on that one, but either way it’s nice to see other people in the world getting bent over the survellience-desk. God knows we need it, don’t want people watching TV… or reading… or talking on the phone in situations where we can’t keep an eye on them.

That’s dangerous.

Tom Robinson sent in a link to an interesting “general sampling” of the population as far as the presidential election goes, in the form of the AOL.com’s homepage presidential pole.

The results are in and it looks like John McCain dominated the poll oddly enough. Assuming that the Flash-based poll wasn’t hacked, I was initially surprised at the huge lean towards McCain by this crowd, but the more I thought about it, the more it made sense.

I had to think about: “What kind of people use AOL?”, it surely isn’t tech-savvy people or young folks… it’s usually an older crowd that got it pre-installed on their machine from Best Buy, Circuit City or some other big-box store and they didn’t know they had an alternative way to get online. I could imagine the older crowd finding a more comforting/familiar voice in McCain, but I’m still surprised at the complete blow out.

Then again… it’s not like AOL users have ever been the sharpest tools in the shed… (ohhhhh McCain-burn).

Thanks Silicon Alley Insider!

A few days ago we got an email to post a new World of Warcraft machinima movie seeing who gets “Pwned” in Azeroth (here it is by the way):

Click here to view the embedded video.

Then we saw over on G4TV that the Mercenaries 2 team is working fast-and-hard (that’s what she said) on getting a small patch out of Mercenaries 2: World in Flames that will add playable Sarah Palin and Barack Obama characters to the game:

As Ryan correctly pointed out over at Giant Bomb, there is something strange about having the leader of the free world and potential vice president running around levelling Venezuela.

I also thought the choice by the Pandemic team was interesting… not Obama and McCain, but Obama and Palin. Is McCain really irrelevant now after all, or was Pandemic just going for sex-appeal?

“Sounding good while playing Wii Music is… practically impossible”, as the reviewers from GameTrailers state. Even with that level of criticism, horrible control schemes and terrible sounding MIDI-based instruments (none of the tracks are originals), will Wii Music fail this holiday season? Michael Pachter thinks not.

The straight “kid/parent appeal” alone, Pachter estimates, is worth more than a good product; similar to what drove the Wii Fit to enviable sales numbers earlier this year. He also makes the assessment that game sites, usually whether they intend to or not, are implicitly geared towards the hardcore and will always rate something like Rock Band or Guitar Hero higher than a family-friendly Wii Music title.

We agree.

It’s still amusing to watch a game that we are convinced is garbage, outsell everything else around us. This ties directly into Howard Moskowitz’s work with the food industry in establishing that people’s collective idea of “perfect” cannot be distilled down into a single product; you must have options and multiple forms of “perfect” to succeed.

All Wii Music is, is a “perfect” music game for all the folks left unserviced by the Guitar Hero and Rock Bands of the world.

I found this to be an eye-opening realization for gaming and help explain why games like Portal and Gears of War are polar opposites and both sell a trillion copies.

Remember how we said that everything taking place during that time (and now) maps perfectly to the market crash of the 1930s? And how we mentioned that the long-term fallout from that market crash had nothing to do with revised laws that protected anyone, but instead a massive world-wide consolidation of banks into more powerful super-banking structures?

Guess what? It’s happening again…

The New York Times reports that after the $700 billion had been shoved through congress and approved, the money that is getting dolled out is not being used at all to re-initiate loans, but instead to offer banks incentives and the means to further consolidate themselves by buying up smaller banks.

During an internal call at JP Morgan Chase, a reporter had an opportunity to hear an execs answer to the question of “What the bank planned to do with the $25 billion it got from the govt” with regard to re-opening loans. The response was chilling to some and expected by others:

“Twenty-five billion dollars is obviously going to help the folks who are struggling more than Chase,” he began. “What we do think it will help us do is perhaps be a little bit more active on the acquisition side or opportunistic side for some banks who are still struggling. And I would not assume that we are done on the acquisition side just because of the Washington Mutual and Bear Stearns mergers. I think there are going to be some great opportunities for us to grow in this environment, and I think we have an opportunity to use that $25 billion in that way and obviously depending on whether recession turns into depression or what happens in the future, you know, we have that as a backstop.”

More specifically, the money will be used to keep the bank in a position to further consolidate if this depression turns into a recession and smaller banks can be had on the cheap.

Surprising? I’d encourage you to watch “How the Banking System Really Works” and Zeitgeist The Movie if you can still see straight afterwards.

The icing on the cake for the nay-sayers, is the tax-breaks that the government further issued for banks worth millions:

And, in an almost unnoticed move, it recently put in place a new tax break, worth billions to the banking industry, that has only one purpose: to encourage bank mergers. As a tax expert, Robert Willens, put it: “It couldn’t be clearer if they had taken out an ad.”

If this is catching you all off guard and seems completely insane that your friendly neighborhood bank could wield controlling power over a government to completely dictate it’s own terms and laws, even in the face of destroying people’s lives, you really should take the time to better familiarize yourself with the Fractional Reserve banking system we use in the US and now in the majority of the rest of the world.

The series of Banking System movies referenced above will introduce you to the idea and how it started back in the 1700 or 1800s and how we went from “gold in the vault” to “imaginary numbers in a computer that can be changed at will”. It sounds far-fetched when you only start from what you understand about your debit card, credit card or checkbook, but if you get a better grasp on how the system functions first you see a clear line that cuts through from the past to current day.

You also begin to understand how Banks control everything.

If that sounded overly dramatic or too out-of-this-world for you, check out Zeitgeist Addendum for a complete analysis of the financial system functioning in the world today.

This isn’t secret or clandestine stuff… it is just what is. This is how our world works, this is how banks function. They exist to consume and they have to. You may not see it at a micro level (your checking account and your pay checks) but at a macro level (looking at how entire countries economies are bolstered or destroyed depending on what the World Bank wants to happen in that country) it’s clear.

Even among my own friends and family I’ve noticed a change in attitudes towards gaming.  Those who use to think of gaming as something for kids or adults living in their parents basement have jumped on the Rock Band and Wii Sports bandwagon.  Because of this I was not surprised to see ars technica reporting that the average demographic of a gamer has change quite a bit over the last few years.

Ars technica points to a study by IGN Entertainment and Ipsos MediaCT that lists some really interesting statistics.

• 55 percent of gamers polled were married, 48 percent have kids, and new gamers – those who have started playing videogames in the past two years—are 32 years old on average
• More than 75 percent of videogamers play games with other people either online or in person
• More than 47 percent of people living in gaming households saying that videogames were a fun way to interact with other family members
• 37 percent of gamers said friends and family relied upon them to stay up-to-date about movies, TV shows and the latest entertainment news, compared to only 22 percent for nongamers
• 39 percent of gamers said that friends and family rely upon them to stay up-to-date about the latest technology
• In terms of hard dollars, the average gaming household income ($79,000) is notably higher than that of nongaming households ($54,000), but the value of the gamer as a marketing target can be seen in a variety of ways
• Gamers are 13 percent more likely to go out to a movie, 11 percent more likely to play sports, and 9 percent more likely to go out with friends than nongamers
• Gamers are twice as likely as nongamers to buy a product featuring new technology even if they are aware that there are still bugs
• Gamers are also twice as likely as nongamers to pay a premium for the newest technology on the market
• Gamers also consume media in different ways than nongamers, with hardcore gamers spending five more hours on the Internet, two more hours watching television and two more hours listening to music than nongamers per week
• Gamers are twice as likely to go out on dates as nongamers in a given month

So, if you’ve got friends or family who still look down on the ever growing gaming culture don’t give up hope.  Just give them another year or two and they could be joining you in being proud to be called a gamer.