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Game developers take note: the future of video games is all about casual, social games that women and grandparents like to play; think Facebook and the Wii. Hardcore games like Grand Theft Auto will still have a place in the industry; they will just move into a dark corner. So said Bernie Stolar, aka the “King of Content,” during a Keynote interview at a Microsoft-hosted event in Mt. View, CA last week during which a who’s who of the industry discussed the future of video game development.

Why should you believe Stolar? Because his impact in the video game industry is deep and far-reaching. His credentials include former Game Evangelist at Google, former CEO at Mattel Interactive, former President and COO of SEGA, and EVP at Sony for the launch of the Playstation. During the Keynote interview (with some big names—Activision/Blizzard, THQ, and Electronic Arts—in attendance), Bernie carved the headstone for the anticipated death of the hardcore game and couldn’t say enough about the future of casual gaming.

To secure a place in the future of game development, you need to make the games fun and ignore gender and age limitations. Social gaming has broadened the demographics away from the 18 to 35-year-old male. Game demographics are now 50 percent women in their late 30’s and 40’s and that does not include grandparents and grandchildren who are playing video games. This new game demographic are playing games on Facebook and bowling on the Wii (Reuters is reporting that 800,000 Wii’s were sold over the Thanksgiving weekend).

Facebook is now a viable gaming platform, as are all social networks. If a developer creates a multi-player (MP) Facebook game that connects to the iPhone, that game is almost guaranteed success. Take golf as an example of an iPhone/Facebook/MP game. For the game to work, players use the accelerometer on their iPhones to swing their clubs, they see their actions through Facebook, and they compete against other players online. Mobile games are going multi-player as well; if you develop it, they will come.

If developing mobile games isn’t your forte, then the future for you most likely includes Massive Multiplayer Online Games (MMOG), social communities, and cloud computing. In terms of developing games for the cloud, you need to remove the computing from the client and put it on the server, which allows for a much larger-scale community, easier updates, and simplified creation of new environments. Cloud gaming reduces retail and packaging costs, increases the life span of a game through easy updates, and allows for micro transactions.

Anne-Marie Roussel, Microsoft's Director of Strategic and Emerging Business, presented MS’s vision for the future of video games during the conference. Roussel mentioned that the third version of XNA is now available to the community and is geared towards developing games with a social community. She expressed the need to democratize video game development and the importance of nurturing a creative community. Microsoft boasts 12 million subscribers to its Xbox Live services, which they will continue to grow (think of Xbox Live growing from one station to a multitude of stations; just like how TV channels evolved).

Video gaming is a $30-37 billion business, and it’s not going away anytime soon. In the future, more and more independent game startups are likely to emerge, which is a great way for the big publishers to find new talent.

Developers, it’s time to get your social game on.

Social networking is about to take a new turn in the coming months. Yahoo! is in the process of releasing its Open Strategy with the goal of connecting more people in more ways than ever before.

There are more social networking sites on the web than any one person could use or keep up with. There’s Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, not to mention Netflix, eBay, or other sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, or Reddit, and that doesn’t even cover the various mail and address book services like Gmail, MSN, and Yahoo.

On the surface, Facebook and eBay do not appear to have anything in common, but they do: they both involve social activity on the web. But there’s nothing linking them together. If you want to tell your wife you outbid the competition for a brand new football-shaped lamp for the bedroom, you can’t tell her through eBay, you have to switch to your email and copy and paste links. Or let’s say you read about a movie you think your mom might enjoy. You can’t contact her directly through Netflix to make your recommendation. Once again, you have to open your email account.

Yahoo wants to change all that through a revolutionary transformation by breaking down barriers and unifying the web. Speaking of unification, did you realize that Yahoo sits on Google’s OpenSocial board, and they meet once a week?

Yahoo! is rolling out a platform approach for the web that combines online activities through a unified identity, connects users, and provides activity updates—all through an access layer—regardless of whether you and your friends are on Yahoo or not.

For this to work, the following must happen:

1. Developers like you need to create the applications.
2. Yahoo and the third-party sites need to approve the applications.
3. Users need to find and use the applications.
4. Most importantly, the users' friends must reciprocate.

To help developers meet the first requirement, Yahoo released YQL (Yahoo Query Language), which is basically the same as SQL except that it is extended to model and fit web services. This week, Yahoo is revealing more about the developer side of this social transformation.

Users already meet the third and fourth requirements all the time. For example, would you be on Facebook if your friends weren’t there? Would you have an e-mail program if you had no one to send e-mail to? So why wouldn't Yahoo's platform work?

For a glimpse of what is to come, download and install Instant Messenger Beta 9. This latest version has a bunch of new options. For example, if you use Blogger or Facebook, you can add a PingBox, which allows you to support an IM application. The thing works great. I installed it on a personal blog of mine this morning, asked a friend to test it, and the next thing I knew, he added it to his blog.

I could go on and on about this, but I’ll let Cody Simms’, Senior Director, Product Management for the Yahoo Open Strategy, blog do all the talking. There’s a presentation there to help developers get to work.

The 2008 Semantic Technologies conference wrapped up this week and I walked away with a feeling of (yawn) nothing much going on here. True, the conference did have a record-breaking 1000 attendees, and Oracle was a major sponsor, but where was IBM, where was Google? Yahoo was there in strength and had a few sessions. But from what I saw on the registration list, Google only sent a couple of scientists and IBM sent a small handful of researchers. This tells me that the majority of big players are keeping an eye on things but are not committing their front-line grunts to anything, at least not yet, and the conference is going on four years running now. In tech years, that’s like a 100 years.

I don’t think I’m the only one not getting it…

To paraphrase a few conversations I overheard in the hall, “They’re trying to link this language with this technology, but I don’t see why when you can do it easier with something else.”

To paraphrase a lunch conversation, “RDF is way too complicated. Only top scientists and A+ students are really working with it right now. There’s far too steep a learning curve for the average developer to pick this up and run with it.”

Even with a lack of Big Names and a reputation of being complex, the folks who did attend are calling for semantic technologies to reach critical mass. That’s putting the horse behind the cart. The industry needs to show functional applications that are easy to implement. If they can do that, then critical mass will follow. If you have to ask for critical mass, it won’t come, it has to come to you.

I heard a few challenges put out there for companies to start releasing applications, not just in theory, but in functionality. Hopefully, Radar Networks will do that with Twine in the Fall, and maybe MySpace might actually make some real announcements. But the real challenges, as I understand them, is to lower the learning curve and bring front-line developers into the fold.

Business computing today works largely on a flawed vision of reality. For example, consider an inventory-management application. The system holds a list of items in a database, such that:

• When items arrive at the store, the item counts are incremented with the number of items that get stocked.
• When an item gets sold, the system decrements the count for that item.
• When an item count falls to a specific pre-set level, the system marks that item for ordering, or possibly even orders more stock automatically.

But the system doesn't really know how many items the store has. It can't, because the items themselves have no connection to the computer. For example, the system can't—by itself—account for misplaced items or stolen items. The system is forced to rely on a human to give it that type of information.

All that's going to change, because one of the next big advances in computing is location-based computing, which uses one or more methods to let the computer know and track the exact location of objects or people.

Location-based computing, so far, has been primarily concerned with GPS information: geographic locations—positions—of roads, buildings, trucks, and, in some cases, people. Trucking companies, for example can attach a GPS system to their trucks, which can then wirelessly send their location back to company headquarters every second or so, letting the company track the actual position of the truck. If it stops, the company will know. If it gets lost, the company will know. If the driver speeds, or drives too slowly, or takes a detour to visit his family, the company will know.

Similar applications let you track individuals via their GPS-enabled cell phones, or indeed, any cell phone, because software can triangulate the position of a cell phone by the relative speed with which it responds to various cell phone tower signals. That's how the 911 emergency service can locate a cell phone caller.

GPS tracking is fine for large objects that move large distances outdoors, but it's not cheap. A GPS receiver is relatively large, and it's not well-suited for tracking objects that are indoors, where they don't have clear access to satellite signals or objects that move only small distances, such as items in a store, books in a library, or children in a school. Another technology, called Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), is better suited for tracking small objects. Several years ago, Walmart, in a rare lucid action that might actually benefit employees, customers, and the corporation, announced it would require all its Sam's Club suppliers to tag shipping pallets with RFID tags by 2010. At that time, RFID technology was in its infancy, tags were battery-powered, relatively large, and expensive.

Tagging pallets to trackmerchandise uses RFID at the macro level, but still doesn't help computers track individual objects—the goods after they're removed from the pallet. But we're about to see an explosion in location-based computing at the micro level. Newer generations of RFID tags are far smaller, have (mostly) dropped the battery and draw power from the tag reader's electrical signal, can hold more data, and are more reliable. You can easily buy tags today that are about the size of a grain of rice—but much smaller tags are in development; some are the size of a dust particle, almost invisible to the naked eye. 
RFID tags do cost money, but the price is coming down rapidly. Costs vary depending on the type of tag (powered or unpowered), how close a reader must be to read the tag, the amount of information the tag will hold, the tag's frequency, the tag's size, and of course, volume. Common unpowered tags currently cost between 7 and 15 cents per tag. They're already being used on some big-ticket items, particularly those that are small and easy to misplace or steal. Readers cost money as well, running from $100 to $750 or so, with the average reader probably running around $300. At these prices, the tags obviously aren't ready to be used to track inexpensive items. However, they're already reaching the price point where they're useful for tracking more expensive items, where keeping the item's location in sync with software is critical.

If you're already working with location-based computing technologies, let me know. If you're not, but you have ideas about how you plan to use location-based computing in your business or your applications, let me know that as well.