Came across this visual representation of a person’s listening habits over time… very, very cool!

[Edit: fixed link to larger image.]

With thanks to Mark Terrano for pointing out on Facebook!

And for those of you who never saw the original Engineer’s Guide to Cats, well, it’s your lucky day!

Just wanted to share a more recent video demoing Natal. Last night Kudo went on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon and demoed the Breakout and Burnout demos. Not sure whether I'll be able to embed the Hulu video here, but you can go to the Joystiq article to see it as well.

Couple of things I'd point out of interest.

The first is that the technology works. Like all technologies there will always be areas to improve, but the simple fact that you can have different people jump in and out of the experience and instantly be able to play really illustrates the capabilities of the system. Keep an eye out for when Kudo says things like "it's got you now" and "put your hands to your side". That'll give you a sense of how quickly the system can adjust to a new body in view and begin skeletal tracking.

The second is that this is just the very tip of the iceberg with regards to motion controlled gaming. There's a lot of confusion out there about what capabilties Natal has versus the Wii Motion Plus, or Sony's new motion controller. Here's the key point: Natal can interact with your real world; the other controllers are limited to what data they can collect from fixed, onboard hardware. Put another way, Natal is watching the environment and feeding the system a boatload of motion and 3D space data. How you use that data is completely unconstrained. A first layer Microsoft Research enabled was that of skeletal tracking, which gives plenty of major hooks for titles to build games upon. In the future I fully expect that titles and developers will continue to surprise us as they use the data in new and innovative ways.

Finally, I know there's a decent amount of excitement and questions around the technology. I'll just say here that if you have a question, I probably can't answer it. ;) That's just the way it is right now... we'll be sharing a lot more on technology, pricing, experiences, timing, etc. in the future. So lots more to come!

... and now have the theme song from Mirror's Edge running through my head. Ah well.

Just wanted to do a quick post to see if anyone was still out there? Have gotten swamped with work the last few months, and am trying to figure out if I should keep investing time in this blog. Anyone find themselves up at night without my soothing words to lull you to sleep? ;)

Back soonish - hopefully with some thoughts on E3, Natal, and whatever else is top of mind....

I purchased Amazon’s Kindle 2 cover when I first got my Kindle. Wasn’t thrilled with having to purchase it, however, and didn’t like how the Kindle had no way to fasten to the back cover:

One other nit – although the new cover fasteners are appreciated, Amazon should really include a large piece of double-sided tape so you can stick the back of the Kindle to the rear cover. Without it, you often grab just the back cover, and not the Kindle, when closing the whole thing.

Anyway, it turns out there’s one other disadvantage to Amazon’s leather Kindle cover; malamute puppies are irresistibly drawn to them as excellent chew toys. The good news is that the Kindle survived with a couple of cute tooth dent marks on the edge – the cover, not so much. That led me to trying to find a cover that addressed all of my earlier issues and ideally wasn’t as tempting… and I found this Octovo cover.

It’s a simple, rigid sleeve made of a leatherlike substance with soft felt inside. You don’t open it – the Kindle simply slides in and sits snugly inside. I’ve found its perfect for just throwing into a shoulder bag – you don’t have to worry about scratching the screen. I’ve also found that I prefer to read the Kindle without any cover on it, so I can just slide it out whenever needed. Recommended.

Saw over on Evil Avatar a link to a Game Daily article that claims Sony’s Home is highly sticky and engaging. To quote:

"We've got 4 million users in PlayStation Home worldwide, and the average session in Home is about 55 minutes. And I challenge you to compare that to the amount of time people spend on websites where you're in and out very quickly. To have someone spend 55 minutes, that's more time than they spend watching and hour-long TV show where there's 21 minutes of commercials. It's a very sticky environment and it's very engaging.”

I love these sorts of quotes... you can always tease out more information than you think. For example, you'll note that there's nothing stating that those 4 M users of Home are actually current, active users… nor is there a definition of what a Home user is. Is it someone who has used Home within the last 30 days? Someone who used it just once? Etc.

This is all very similar to the vagueness around PSN accounts. These numbers are meaningless until you clearly define what an active user is. I'd read this announcement as saying that less than a fifth of PS3s sold have ever tried Home (assuming around 21 M PS3 sales WW). And I wouldn't be at all surprised that the average time for those people (who remember, may have only ever tried once!) was an hour or so. I spent at least that long just leaving my female avatar dancing away and watching guys hit on me. ;)

Anyway, back to your regularly scheduled programming. Looks like a rainy weekend ahead here in Seattle – a good time to curl up with the Kindle and catch up on my reading!

Came across a great blog post by a gentleman named Paul Graham a little while back. The article is entitled “Why TV Lost”, and is a great summary of the forces of change that the network has wrought upon traditional, one-way broadcast models. “Facebook killed TV” indeed.

I’ll quote a large snippet below, but definitely go read the entire article as the author continues to discuss how broadcast TV continues to wrestle with the problem… and is running out of time to change.

What decided the contest for computers? Four forces, three of which one could have predicted, and one that would have been harder to.

One predictable cause of victory is that the Internet is an open platform. Anyone can build whatever they want on it, and the market picks the winners. So innovation happens at hacker speeds instead of big company speeds.
The second is Moore's Law, which has worked its usual magic on Internet bandwidth.

The third reason computers won is piracy. Users prefer it not just because it's free, but because it's more convenient. Bittorrent and YouTube have already trained a new generation of viewers that the place to watch shows is on a computer screen.

The somewhat more surprising force was one specific type of innovation: social applications. The average teenage kid has a pretty much infinite capacity for talking to their friends. But they can't physically be with them all the time. When I was in high school the solution was the telephone. Now it's social networks, multiplayer games, and various messaging applications. The way you reach them all is through a computer. Which means every teenage kid (a) wants a computer with an Internet connection, (b) has an incentive to figure out how to use it, and (c) spends countless hours in front of it.

This was the most powerful force of all. This was what made everyone want computers. Nerds got computers because they liked them. Then gamers got them to play games on. But it was connecting to other people that got everyone else: that's what made even grandmas and 14 year old girls want computers.

After decades of running an IV drip right into their audience, people in the entertainment business had understandably come to think of them as rather passive. They thought they'd be able to dictate the way shows reached audiences. But they underestimated the force of their desire to connect with one another.

Facebook killed TV. That is wildly oversimplified, of course, but probably as close to the truth as you can get in three words.

I’ve always wanted a MAME cabinet. Unfortunately, I never had the time to build one myself. (For the uninitiated, MAME stands for Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator, software which emulates those classic arcade games many of us grew up with.)

Anyway, when I attended the last Penny Arcade Charity Auction I was lucky enough to bid on and win a MAME cabinet from Dream Authentics. They’ve been working away on it, and I just received some pictures that I thought I’d share. (Note that I went for the Kiocade cabinet simply because it wasn’t as deep as the other cabinets and can fit through the front door. Trust me, they’re huge!)

(Yes, shipping was included, thank god!)

I’ve had almost two weeks with my Kindle 2, and I’ve had friends and other coffee shop strangers asking me what I thought of it. After going through my spiel a few times, I figured it might be worth capturing my thoughts in one place.

The Good:

• I’ve rediscovered my love of reading, and have read significantly more since I got the Kindle. This may partially be due to “new toy” syndrome, but I have read three books on it in just the last week – and intend to continue.
• The Kindle’s e-ink screen is fantastic. The text resolution is sharp, and the contrast makes the text very legible and easy on the eyes. Anyone who struggles with the idea of reading a book on a “screen” really needs to try a Kindle hands-on before committing to an opinion. Trust me, the experience is very different than reading on a laptop screen.
• Another positive facet that’s rarely commented on is that the Kindle’s design and controls facilitate reading in different positions. The Kindle is basically a tablet with page advance buttons on either edge. Because of this I can hold it in either hand, lean it against a tea pot, or put it on top of the elliptical trainer and just read, without having to worry about flipping pages and perhaps breaking the spine of the book (which can happen when you place a paperback in a plastic book/magazine holder at the gym). I’ve found that the simple fact of not needing to keep a book’s pages spread open while reading is surprisingly compelling.
• The ability to continue reading a purchased book on the recently-released Kindle iphone application is handy. “Whispersync” (the functionality that synchronizes your book and your position within it) really makes it easy to read a couple of pages while killing fifteen minutes in line. However, it’s not perfect, which I’ll hit on in the next section.
• Bundled wireless access is handy, and the ability to browse, purchase, and instantly begin reading a new book is extremely well done and addictive. The ability to browse Wikipedia is appreciated as well.
• It’s a great conversation starter! I was tempted to put this in the “bad” column since it can get a tich annoying answering questions from random passers-by… but really, it’s been great seeing how many people are really interested in the device. Several stated they’d buy one after playing with mine. Of course, I live in Seattle, one of the most well-read cities in the US, so that may help. (I’d love to get access to Amazon’s internal sales data to see if there’s any correlation between literate cities and/or education and Kindle sales.)
  
  

The Bad:

• Newspaper pricing is too high. A subscription to the print New York Times is about $13 a week; the New York Times Kindle edition is about $13 a month. The problem is that the Kindle edition is simply bundling content that’s already available on the web for free – and unfortunately, it’s not even all of the content. Articles are missing, and charts and graphs simply don’t exist. That said, the experience of reading the actual text of the paper on the Kindle is good – I’m willing to pay a little for the ability to have the paper delivered to me each morning, and the slick navigation of the content. It’s just not $13 good. Make it $5 a month and they’d have a winner – as it is, I’ll be cancelling my trial subscription.
• Kindle currently charges you about $2 a month to send you blogs. Yes, blogs – like the ones you visit every day, including this one. I’m guessing the thinking is that you don’t need to manually surf over to the website on your Kindle, or that you don’t have a laptop, cell phone, RSS reader, or other device to read that content. Unfortunately that’s not the case for most people and this just feels like nickel and diming. I can justify paying a small amount for a high-quality, well-formatted newspaper such as the New York Times; I can’t justify paying for what is literally a repackaged RSS stream.
• Speaking of nickel and diming: the fact that Amazon no longer includes a cover with the purchase of their $360 device is offensive. No one buys a portable device like this without a cover, and as such the “real” price of the Kindle 2 was just bumped up by about $30. It’s a hidden tax, made all the more obvious by the fact that the first Kindle included a cover.
  One other nit – although the new cover fasteners are appreciated, Amazon should really include a large piece of double-sided tape so you can stick the back of the Kindle to the rear cover. Without it, you often grab just the back cover, and not the Kindle, when closing the whole thing.
• Kindle battery life isn’t quite where I’d like it to be. It’s great if you turn off the wireless – I’ve read that you can go almost two weeks in that case. Unfortunately, part of the allure of the Kindle is the ability to synchronize your reading across devices, shop for books, and (if you’ve chosen to subscribe to newspapers, blogs, or magazines), receive updates as they’re published. Unfortunately if you leave the wireless on you get about 3-4 days. That puts the device into the uncomfortable position of “I’d better plug it in each night so I always have enough power for the next couple of days and don’t run out.” You just don’t want to think about this sort of thing for a “book.”
• Whispersync doesn’t support any non-Amazon purchased books, nor newspapers, magazines, or blogs. It currently only supports Amazon-purchased (read DRMed) books. So if I choose to download a public domain, non-DRM version of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea to read on my Kindle, I can’t take advantage of the Kindle iphone application to read a few pages in line like I can other, purchased books. I can imagine a justification might be that Amazon doesn’t want to pay to send books that they don’t derive revenue from. If so, let me manually upload a book to Amazon from my desktop. I’d even be happy to manually put the book on all my Whispersync-enabled reading devices by hand – but let me use the feature!
• This is a minor, yet ironic, nit: the Kindle’s finish just absorbs newspaper ink. After reading the paper I had literal finger prints all over the device, and the texture is such that they’re quite hard to remove. Maybe this is self-solving at the rate newspapers are going out of business, but still worth noting.
  
  

The Ugly: 

• Simply put, Amazon purchased books are wrapped in a proprietary DRM format. The base book format Amazon uses is .MOBI (also known as .PRC); Amazon has added a proprietary layer of DRM to that .MOBI format to create their .AZW format. I have no problem purchasing content, but I expect to be able to use that content on future devices which may or may not be from Amazon. (This is also the same reason I refused to purchase music from iTunes until they went DRMless.) Your opinion may vary, but this is probably the most aggravating aspect of the Kindle that exists today.
  
  

Opportunities:

I’ll wrap up by noting some interesting opportunities I’d hope Amazon might consider in the future.

• Let users leverage the wireless aspect a bit more and enable free RSS feed deliveries. Sites such as Feedbooks.com and Kindlefeeder.com do this today, but it’s not as streamlined as it should be. Integrate this functionality into the existing Amazon website and you have a winner.
• Think about integrating with social network sites such as Good Reads.com. I love seeing what books my friends are reading and glean many reading ideas from their activity (and vice-versa).
• Work to improve newspaper capabilities. Add the ability to include charts, graphs, images, etc. Work to find a reasonable pricing model that fits the material being delivered (suggestion: $5-8 dollars a month for a high-quality newspaper such as the New York Times or Wall Street Journal). Related, think about larger versions of the Kindle that could better replicate the newspaper experience – a screen the size of a standard 8.5” x 11” piece of paper would be a great start. Color is also needed at some point (to display those charts/graphs as originally rendered).
  
  

So, enough yapping on my part. Overall, I love my Kindle, and highly recommend it to anyone who is curious. Just be careful that the DRMed book aspect doesn’t bite you when you don’t expect it. But if you’re willing to live with the limitations, it’s highly recommended.

You either get it or you don’t, but I died laughing. Thanks to Peter for the pointer!