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“It’s a riff on the idea of opening up new markets,” joked Zimmerman, well-aware that he was speaking to a room packed with game developers keen on making titles that have commercial appeal. “People are looking for any kind of market for games they can find. So I thought, why stop at homo sapiens?”

The challenge, an annual GDC event hosted by GameLab CEO Eric Zimmerman, and a session that always plays to an energized, standing-room-only audience, traditionally pits three well-known designers against each other to come up with a concept for a game that meets some unusual criteria.

And while Brathwaite’s concept for an alternate-reality game called OneHundredDogs.com nearly carried the day, it was Meretzky’s marching bacteria that was judged the audience’s favorite.

All in all, the Game Design Challenge was a huge hit, as always. Afterward, I spoke with someone I know who had attended a session in an adjacent room. He said he was disappointed not to have been able to be in the Game Design Challenge room.

Never fear, though. You won’t have to worry that going into a GameStop might expose you to life-threatening creatures: the challenge is just to come up with the game’s concept, not to build an actual title.

And that’s because, he joked, you could sell the bacteria to the biotech industry.

“That’s one fat pile of loot just waiting for the right publisher to tap into it,” he said of Bac Attack. “The game that makes germ warfare available to the whole family. The game that puts the fun back in fungicide. The first massively micro-player game.”

In past years, themes have been games about love; games based on the poetry of Emily Dickinson; and games that could win the Nobel Peace Prize. This year’s challenge, “The inter-species game,” was to create a fleshed-out idea for a game that could be played cooperatively by both humans and members of another species.

He added that there’s a secondary game design benefit from working with bacteria.

(Credit:
Daniel Terdiman/CNET News.com)

So the goal, she said, was to build a player base in each city that would then require cooperation amongst all the players in that town.

The real benefit of the game, though, he added, is that as the bacteria multiply, there’s room for monetizing the bacteria beyond just selling the game itself.

Unfortunately for last year’s winner Pajitnov, his concept for Dolphin Ride, a game that would have people riding dolphins in a complex paintball battle, didn’t fare so well with the crowd.

With a somewhat sad face, he said that while listening to his own session, he kept hearing the raucous cheers from the design challenge, and that only made him more frustrated not to have been able to be there.

SAN FRANCISCO–Get ready for toxic microbes to come packaged in a video game SKU.

So, he explained, Bac Attack is centered around a new input/output device called the “Tray Station,” which projects microwaves onto a Petri dish.

As each new task is completed, players would move up the chain, getting invites from each succeeding numbered dog, all the while building a massive social network amongst the players.

“Because of the beauty of natural selection,” Meretzsky said, “the bacteria that survive next time level up.”

I loved this concept, but to be honest, I was a little confused by the end game. And I think others might have been too. That may ultimately have been why Brathwaite’s concept wasn’t the winner. Or, possibly, I was the only one confused, which wouldn’t be entirely surprising since most of the people in the room were game designers.

This would continue until players get to dog 92, which would start the third phase of the game, a “massively cooperative” phase.

The second phase would be “dog fifty-one,” she said.

Here, more tasks would be presented, and players would have to work together with those in other cities, all in the hopes of getting invites from a mysterious “Dog 52.”

(Credit:
Daniel Terdiman/CNET News.com)

The Petri dish becomes the field of play, he explained, and the idea is that light projected onto it is intended to stimulate the bacteria.

The challenge featured the previous year’s winner, Tetris creator Alexey Pajitnov; Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and Leather Goddesses of Phobos designer Meretzky; and Brenda Brathwaite, designer of games like Playboy: The Mansion and the Wizardry series.

The game would feature dog and human challenges in 50 cities around the world. She wasn’t entirely clear on what those challenges would be, but the idea is that in each of the 50 cities, contestants would vie to represent that locale as one of the “50 dogs.”

Longtime and much-revered designer Steve Meretzsky’s Bac Attack, a game that pits man’s strategic ingenuity against the march of armies of bacteria, was the winner of Thursday’s Game Design Challenge at the Game Developers Conference here.

But what led him to microbes was the idea that he could reach a potential market of “5 million million trillion bacteria…Now there’s a target demographic worth shooting for.”

‘Bac Attack’ tasks players with holding off a marauding army of microbes.

At the Game Design Challenge at the Game Developers Conference, legendary designer Steve Meretzsky won with his concept for ‘Bac Attack,’ a ‘massively micro-player game.’

But that’s not because the crowd didn’t express its affection for the Tetris creator. He may have gotten the warmest welcome from the room. But his game was probably the least well-conceived and there was no favoritism.

He also considered doing something with squirrels, since “they like to collect things, and we like to collect things. So I thought I could train them to be Chinese gold farmers.”

“The Tray Station reads those moving bacteria colonies as armies on the march,” he said. “After an hour, either your defenses have held, or (the bacteria) have emerged victorious and you lose.”

For her part, Brathwaite’s second-place game design, OneHundredDogs.com, was what she described as “an interspecies Facebook (alternate-reality game).”

Meretzky began his presentation–each contestant takes 10 minutes or so to showcase his or her design–by discussing other possibilities for a game for both humans and animals. He said he considered something based on a classic English fox hunt–which comes with the possibility for in-game advertising.

(Credit:
MA Recordings)

Krushevo

“Ghatam,” by the Antenna Repairmen is a rather unique percussion record. The trio uses handmade ceramic percussion instruments designed by sculptor Stephen Freedman. The range of styles runs from frenetic to atmospheric. A Ghatam is literally a clay water jug used as a hand drum in South Indian music, and the tactile quality of the ceramic instruments, their varied textures and resonances makes for a unique and thoroughly mesmerizing sound experience.

MA Recordings is a one-man show. Todd Garfinkle is MA Recordings’ sole producer, recording and editing engineer. He also handles the label’s art direction, which is spectacular. MA is a trans-cultural jazz and classical label, and Garfinkle has been crisscrossing the globe recording music since 1988.

Vlatko Stefanovski & Miroslav Tadic’s “Krushevo” is one of my favorite MA CDs. These two guitarists’ speed and virtuosity has been compared to John McLaughlin/Paco De Lucia’s duets, and the MA’s exquisite recording techniques put you inside the Macedonium Monument, in Krushevo, Macedonia (that’s an interior view of the Monument on the CD cover). The sound is utterly natural with a terrific sense of presence.

Garfinkle discovered Formatia Valea Mare playing in the Paris subway, and immediately made plans to record what would become “Departe De Casa.” The band members all come from the same town in Moldava, which is called, of course, Valea Mare. While in Romania, they played weddings, births and funerals. The Formatia Valea Mare project was recorded in one of France’s oldest and most beautiful Gothic Cathedrals, built in the 15th century. To me the large band’s music lives somewhere between gypsy and oddly enough, klezmer; most of the tunes are played at breakneck speed. It’s truly awesome music.

Departe De Casa

Ghatam

(Credit:
MA Recordings)

Garfinkle always tries to record in large, acoustically interesting classical concert halls, churches and galleries. “MA” is a Japanese pronunciation of the Chinese character which means “space” or “interval,” and Garfinkle believes these acoustic spaces are an intrinsic part of the not only the sound, but also the music. Capturing that sense of being there, in the same acoustic space as the musicians, is what makes MA Recordings so special (most conventional recordings add digital reverberation to simulate acoustic space). To achieve that goal Garfinkle’s uses a pair very high quality omnidirectional microphones and customized recording equipment, some of which was designed specifically for MA.

(Credit:
MA Recordings)

The proposal outlined in the interview Griffin gave Portfolio.com suggested that ISP fees could create a $20 billion pool that would go to artists and copyright holders. Consumers would have the option of paying the fee or submitting themselves to advertising.

The controversy over whether an internet service provider should charge for music is once again coming to a boil.

“We are in the earliest stages of what is a dynamic conversation about licensing opportunities in the global digital marketplace,” Griffin said in a statement issued by Warner Music on Friday. “It would be unfortunate if a creative and fruitful dialogue were sidetracked by a rush to judgment about what was simply my own illustrative example of one of many concepts I have in this space.”

He could be a digital-music genius for all I know. But Warner Music should have been smarter in broaching the subject of ISP fees than to allow Griffin to casually toss out ideas in print if–as he said in his e-mail–this is only one of “many concepts” the label is considering.

“There’s a lot of experimentation in the marketplace right now and that’s ultimately a good thing for the industry and for fans,” said Mitch Bainwol, chairman and CEO of the Recording Industry Association of America. “It’s important to note that all of the many ideas being floated out there involve voluntary payment systems, and not a government-imposed compulsory license. This would be the marketplace at work.”

We won’t know if the public will embrace an all-you-can-eat music service from the ISPs until the music industry presents a formal plan, one that will hopefully be coolly and carefully analyzed.

Pundits, music-industry insiders and members of the public are bashing Warner Music Group exec Jim Griffin after he acknowledged in a interview that he is working on a plan to collect music fees from consumers via their ISP bills.

The labels have finally embraced open MP3s and struck deals to offer ad-supported music (albeit only in a streaming version) with social networks Imeem and Last.fm.

But there’s plenty of prejudice and Griffin should know this. The reality is music fans are distrustful of record companies. They resent talk about charges being quietly tucked into their monthly bills.

I haven’t seen backlash like this since rocker Trent Reznor told me in an interview two months ago that an ISP tax might be a good idea. It didn’t matter to some that Reznor also made a seemingly conflicting statement in the same interview when he said perhaps music should be given away for free.

Bundling subscription fees into ISP bills on a voluntary basis may prove to be a bad idea. At this point, nothing is certain so shouldn’t every proposal at least be explored?

“All stakeholders stand to benefit from the kind of process that results from the willingness to consider a variety of raw concepts without prejudice,” Griffin said in the e-mail.

“It would be unfortunate if a creative and fruitful dialogue were sidetracked by a rush to judgment.” –Jim Griffin, Warner Music Group

This kind of off-the-cuff musing was enough to make Reznor a target of widespread criticism. Nobody seemed to care that the leader of the band, Nine Inch Nails, was a digital-music innovator and had long called on the record industry to improve its treatment of fans. What happens is that people hear the word “tax” and objective analysis goes out the window. People condemn and vilify. Out comes the torches and pitchforks.

Griffin could have hardly done more to stoke paranoia than to attempt to sell his plan with comments such as this: “Music will feel free,” Griffin told the magazine (the italics are mine).

Warner Music now has a firestorm on its hands and few are trying to assess the idea dispassionately. That’s too bad because the label, like its top three competitors; Universal Music Group, Sony BMG Music Entertainment and the EMI Group have appeared to be headed in the right direction of late. They’ve been experimenting with models and ideas they flat out rejected not long ago.

Nearly two weeks after our Q&A appeared, Reznor disavowed his statements about the ISP tax. Griffin now appears to be tip-toeing away from some of his comments.

The proposal was made on Friday evening and Yahoo! was given less than 24 hours to accept the proposal, the fundamental terms of which Microsoft and Mr. Icahn made clear they were unwilling to negotiate. After reviewing the proposal with its legal and financial advisers, Yahoo!’s Board of Directors determined that accepting the proposal is not in the best interests of its stockholders.

•  The proposal calls for Yahoo! to sell its industry-leading algorithmic search business and its related strategic and valuable intellectual property portfolio for no incremental consideration; and

Significantly, the Board believes Microsoft and Mr. Icahn are overstating the value their search and restructuring proposal would deliver to Yahoo! stockholders and are substantially understating the risks. Yahoo! noted that a transaction that would separate the Company’s search and display businesses is an undertaking of great complexity. While the Board acknowledges that the current proposal contains a number of improvements over Microsoft’s earlier proposal, the Yahoo! Board’s conclusion that the current proposal is not in the best interests of stockholders is based on a number of factors, including:

1. Yahoo!’s existing business plus its recently signed commercial agreement with Google has superior financial value and less complexity and risk than the Microsoft/Icahn proposal.

2. The Microsoft/Icahn proposal would preclude a potential sale of all of Yahoo! for a full and fair price, including a control premium.

Yahoo!’s Board points out that a transaction to acquire the whole company would be much more straightforward and involve far less risk than the new proposal or any similar alternative. The Board believes a whole company transaction could be negotiated and executed prior to August 1st. In rejecting the Microsoft/Icahn proposal, Yahoo! not only repeated its offer to sell the entire Company to Microsoft for at least $33 per share, but also offered to negotiate an improved search only transaction. Microsoft rejected both offers.

The Board’s rejection of the proposal was based on a number of factors, including the following:

Yahoo! Inc., a leading global Internet company, confirmed today that it has rejected a joint proposal from Microsoft Corporation and Carl Icahn for a complex restructuring of Yahoo! that would include the acquisition of Yahoo!’s search business by Microsoft.

•  Many of the components of the headline value that Mr. Icahn and Microsoft put forward, such as the spin-off of the Yahoo!’s Asian assets and the return of cash to stockholders, are steps that could be taken by Yahoo! on its own and the Board continues to evaluate these options.

Late Saturday, Yahoo issued a statement regarding a joint-proposal Microsoft and investor activist Carl Icahn released. Here is a copy of the statement:

Ironically, Carl Icahn, who jointly with Microsoft developed and presented this proposal, had previously urged Yahoo! not to sell its search business to Microsoft. Specifically, in an interview on CNBC’s Fast Money program, on June 4, 2008, Mr. Icahn said, “… it’s crazy for this company now to do this alternative deal and give the store away, because obviously, an alternative deal is a poison pill because once you’ve done an alternative deal and given the search to Microsoft, you don’t need Microsoft to buy you anymore. So, that would be a poison pill….”

Mr. Bostock continued, “After negotiating among themselves without the involvement of Yahoo!, Carl Icahn and Microsoft presented us with a ‘take it or leave it’ proposal under which we would be required to restructure the Company, hand over to Microsoft Yahoo!’s valuable search business and to Carl Icahn the rest of the Company, giving us less than 24 hours to respond. It is ludicrous to think that our Board could accept such a proposal. While this type of erratic and unpredictable behavior is consistent with what we have come to expect from Microsoft, we will not be bludgeoned into a transaction that is not in the best interests of our stockholders.”

•  The revenue guarantees suggested, which are conditional and subject to reduction, are well below the search revenue that the Company is expected to generate on its own and in association with its announced commercial agreement with Google. That agreement alone is estimated to generate $250 to $450 million of incremental cash flow for the first twelve months following implementation, while allowing Yahoo! to remain a principal in paid search;

Mr. Bostock concluded, “Microsoft and Mr. Icahn are trying to dismantle the Company and deliver our search business to Microsoft on terms that would be disadvantageous to Yahoo! stockholders. We are prepared to let our stockholders, not Microsoft and Carl Icahn, decide what is in their best interests and we look forward to the upcoming vote.”

•  Microsoft/Icahn’s proposed Traffic Acquisition Costs rates are below market;

Roy Bostock, Chairman of Yahoo! said, “This odd and opportunistic alliance of Microsoft and Carl Icahn has anything but the interests of Yahoo!’s stockholders in mind. Clearly, Microsoft, having failed to advance in search, is aligning with the short-term objectives of Mr. Icahn to coerce Yahoo! into selling its core strategic search assets on terms that are highly advantageous to Microsoft, but disadvantageous to Yahoo! stockholders. Yahoo’s Board of Directors will not allow that to happen. Yahoo!’s Board remains open to any transaction that delivers full value to our stockholders - we just do not believe such a transaction should be dictated by Microsoft and a single short-term investor.”

Mr. Bostock also noted that Microsoft’s position that it would not deal with, or otherwise engage with, Yahoo!’s management to reach agreement on this proposal or to implement it, is completely absurd and irresponsible given the complexity of the deal - one that requires the removal of half of Yahoo!’s business from Yahoo! and then the integration of it into Microsoft.

3. The major component of the overall value per share asserted by Microsoft/Icahn would be in Yahoo!’s remaining non-search businesses which would be overseen by Mr. Icahn’s slate of directors, which has virtually no working knowledge of Yahoo!’s businesses.

•  The success of the remaining Company is critically dependent on Microsoft’s ability to effectively monetize search;

4. The Microsoft/Icahn proposal would require the immediate replacement of the current Board and removal of the top management team at Yahoo!. The Yahoo! Board believes these moves would destabilize Yahoo! for the up to the one year it would take to gain regulatory approval for this deal.

IBM shouldn’t fall into Microsoft’s errors. Microsoft couldn’t extend Exchange to enable real collaboration because Exchange is a crumbling dinosaur of an architecture. So it invented Sharepoint. The same is likely true of Domino/Lotus Notes. So start afresh.

I spend most of my day in email or in my browser. I only use Microsoft Office when I absolutely must. It’s not that I don’t like Office - it’s fine. But this isn’t how I work anymore. I work in messaging. IBM, according to the article above, sees collaboration as something you do around fixed assets like documents. This is one way to collaborate, but it’s not the way that most of us think about collaboration.

IBM has been exceptionally active in various open-source projects. Why not commit an army of developers to Mozilla to improve Thunderbird? Make Mozilla’s Thunderbird the “standard” platform upon which all these other IBM collaborative programs run….This is bread-and-butter strategy for IBM (witness Linux and Apache). It should do the same with Mozilla.

A much better route would be to a) extend from
Microsoft Office (though this is fraught with problems because Microsoft controls the platform) or b) shift the battle to new terrain that Microsoft doesn’t own, as Google has.

Yahoo!, meanwhile, has a massive opportunity with Zimbra. Email should be the center of the new enterprise software universe. Research in Motion apparently gets this. Yahoo! could become the hub for enterprise software, newly defined. Zimbra is the key to that strategy, but would probably need to open up further (as in source) in order to become a full community standard.

Anyway, IBM’s strategy of giving away Symphony in order to provide a platform upon which to build is not going to work. Microsoft Office is too well-entrenched. The way to undermine Microsoft is through the web (social networking, web services, etc.) and through email.

The gesture is intended to take away money from Microsoft - probably a losing cause going head-to-head on Microsoft’s territory - but also to provide a platform upon which to sell IBM’s collaboration software. This second strategy has a better chance of success, but would be much better off it didn’t first require enterprises to adopt Lotus Symphony because, quite frankly, they won’t.

commentary

IBM is now giving away its Lotus Symphony product for free. Not “free” as in open source, but rather as in “Please take since people won’t pay for it,” as only a few hundred thousand downloads have been registered since September 2007.

Rather, for most of us, collaboration is an extension of communication.

If I were a betting man, I’d lay my money on email as the disruptive platform that IBM should build upon, and I don’t mean it’s widely used by hugely clunky Domino/Lotus Notes combo. I mean Zimbra or Mozilla’s new email push.

On Tuesday, Munster released a research note in which he estimates that Apple’s U.S. consumer market share for Macs stands at 21 percent, while its worldwide share is about 10 percent. He comes to this conclusion by using numbers released by market research firm IDC, which found that Apple’s worldwide share of the PC market grew from 2.4 percent to 2.9 percent between 2006 and 2007. He notes that 70 percent of the global PC market is enterprise computing, a sandbox in which Apple doesn’t often play, so the 21 percent refers just to the consumer business in the U.S.

After Monday’s forecast in which he foretold Apple moving 45 million iPhones during 2009, Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster is back with another aggressive estimate.

Shipments of Macs, like this new MacBook Pro, were up 60 percent in February, according to NPD.

Munster also gathered data from Dell.com, HP.com, Lenovo.com, and more and concluded that though Macs are often knocked for being outrageously expensive compared with their Windows-running counterparts, the average Apple desktop is 16 percent pricier and notebooks 9 percent more expensive.

(Credit:
Apple)

These are just estimates, but it does appear Apple is at least off to an impressive start this year. NPD, which tracks retail sales only, also found evidence of notable growth for Apple’s computer business in the month of February. NPD estimated that overall
Mac shipments were up 60 percent, compared with the rest of the PC industry, which grew at a 9 percent clip.

But O’Reilly also recognized that just making money on Web 2.0 or acknowledging the transformative powers of the Internet is insufficient. He challenged the audience of several thousand attendees to have big goals, such as making governments responsive to citizens and building a global immune system through Internet-based efforts. It’s not always about the money or augmenting human intelligence.

(Credit:
Dan Farber/CNET News.com)

Web 2.0 evangelist Tim O'Reilly addresses the crowd at the Web 2.0 Expo.

The paradox is that applications built on open, decentralized networks are leading to new concentrations of power (Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc.), he said. He advocated building in an interoperability layer to reduce the harmful effects of having a few companies with enormous power and leverage.

“The Internet is becoming the global platform for everything,” he said, and it will make everyone in the world smarter. “It’s an amazing revolution in human augmentation akin to literacy or the formation of cities,” he continued. “It’s a huge change in the way the world works.”

We are entering the world of ambient computing, he proclaimed, as everything is wired into the Internet. “We are in a soup of computing. Web 2.0 is all around us,” O’Reilly said. He got nods from the crowd of the converted, who were busy Twittering, Facebooking, blogging, and SMSing, practicing continuous partial attention.

From the high-level view of the Internet revolution year, O’Reilly telescoped down to the exhibit floor, which is populated by more enterprise players, such as IBM and Oracle, than the previous year. It’s a sign that Web 2.0, with technologies such as wikis, blogs, tags, social networks, and collective intelligence, is maturing.

However, the maturing of Web 2.0 and cloud computing, the move to the Internet as a platform, has problems, O’Reilly noted. The market values centralization and consolidation. It values big winners who can dominate a market. O’Reilly cautioned that this situation could lead us back to the world of large, centralized players like Oracle and Microsoft, which could stifle innovation and openness.

SAN FRANCISCO–Tim O’Reilly kicked off the keynote sessions at the Web 2.0 Expo here, pacing the stage and evangelizing the power of the Internet.

There is real money to be made by developing Web 2.0 products for enterprises. Harnessing collective intelligence can lead to the promised land of profits. (O’Reilly’s company recently started an enterprise consulting practice to take advantage of the trend, and he also shamelessly touted Wesabe, one of his investments, in his remarks.)

So, the Internet is important and revolutionary, and harvesting collective intelligence is core to Web 2.0 and a way to make more money, according to the pied piper of Web 2.0.

“The longer we wait, the value will disappear,” Jenson said.

But he also made it clear that the company’s wallet will have only $2 billion in it to offer Take-Two for a short time.

Riccitiello talked a little bit about the timing of the actual offer, saying he and Take-Two Chairman Strauss Zelnick had had discussions about a potential merger, but that in January, Take-Two rejected EA’s interest.

I’m not usually one to get up for something happening at 5 a.m. PT, but in the case of this morning’s Electronic Arts conference call to discuss its proposed $2 billion takeover bid of Take-Two Interactive Software, I made an exception.

On February 19, EA upped its bid to the current $26 a share.

That certainly makes sense, since that game, the first major follow-up to Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, one of the best-selling console games of all time, is very likely to be a huge financial success.

Riccitiello did make one comment as to the timing of the acquisition offer that, on its face, would suggest that EA’s interest in Take-Two, publishers of the hugely popular Grand Theft Auto franchise, was not strictly based on the need to maintain the No. 1 position.

Fair enough.

He echoed Riccitiello in saying EA and Take-Two had had conversations for about a year, and that in January, Take-Two said it would decline to negotiate a deal.

If true, that would be an interesting piece of information.

That’s because I assumed that EA might provide some new piece of information that would materially enhance details of the game maker’s Sunday bid announcement.

“We actually think this is a depreciating asset from this point forward,” Riccitiello said, alluding to the theory that once GTA IV is published, Take-Two will have to get by on the sales of its weaker games and that EA won’t be there to rescue it if Take-Two doesn’t play ball.

He pointed out that he had been in discussions with Take-Two management last year and that he had been interested in making a deal like this happen as early as last spring but decided to wait to make any kind of offer until the completion of the EA reorganization it announced last June, in which it split the company into four distinct labels: The Sims, EA Sports, EA Games, and EA Casual Entertainment.

Jenson added that on February 6, EA made a formal proposal of $25 a share, which Take-Two officially rejected on February 15.

Electronic Arts’ conference call explained just a bit more about its takeover bid for Take-Two Interactive Software, maker of the Grand Theft Auto game franchise.

Most notably, though, EA did not address the question I was most curious about: the necessity of making some big acquisition to maintain its top-dog spot in the video game-publishing industry after Vivendi’s announced mammoth purchase of Activision in December.

(Credit:
Take-Two’s Rockstar Games division)

EA’s chief financial officer, Warren Jenson, also gave a little more specific insight into the timing of EA’s actual acquisition bid.

In reality, the EA conference call, which lasted nearly an hour, was largely a rehashing of the information the company published in its Sunday press release, accentuated by some more detail on the financial aspects of the deal–in particular the $26 a share it is offering Take-Two shareholders–as well as some thoughts by EA’s CEO, John Riccitiello, on timing.

And in fact, one of the most interesting things Riccitiello said on the call had a lot to do with the specific tenor of the content in the GTA franchise.

And while all the questions asked on the call were by financial analysts interested more in the bottom-line reasoning for the takeover bid, I was a little surprised that none asked the Activision question. I would have asked it myself, but reporters are never allowed–in my experience–to ask questions on this kind of conference call.

“The Activision-Vivendi transaction provides some competitive incentive
for EA to add scale and bolster its product portfolio,” Colin Sebastian, a video game industry analyst with Lazard Capital Markets, said in an e-mail to me shortly after the EA call, “though it also appears in this case that EA and Take-Two had discussions long before the Activision announcement.”

Riccitiello expanded on that thought a little later in the call.

“We…wanted to give a wide berth to GTA,” Riccitiello said. “We didn’t want, in any way, shape, or form, to get in the way…We wanted to see it come out on time so we get our shot at it.”

The EA chief executive also said he wanted to make sure, in his company’s timing of its Take-Two bid, that it didn’t mess with the creative process surrounding Take-Two’s most valuable asset, the forthcoming Grand Theft Auto IV, which is scheduled to ship April 29.

My mistake.

“It is our intention to make this a friendly deal,” Jenson said. “Our next step is to sit down with Take-Two’s management and get a deal done.”

The deal would “advance us particularly in our (market) segment shares,” Riccitiello said at one point in the call. “We’re notably (unpositioned) in M-rated content. This (would) give us the best M-rated content” in the business.

Those games are rated “M” by the Entertainment Software Rating Board, meaning that they are limited to being sold to those ages 17 and older. Never mind the “Hot Coffee” scandal of 2005, in which Take-Two was accused of hiding sexual content in its code, which ultimately made the game “AO,” or adults-only.

As with the company’s text-based mobile ads, the Google image ads are displayed on the basis of keywords that appear on Web sites that people visit with their mobile phones, Google said Wednesday.

(Credit:
Google)

Google works to identify fraudulent or accidental clicks and doesn’t charge for what it deems to be invalid clicks.

Mobile devices are a new frontier for the Internet in general and for the advertising business that Google and many others are building atop it. The mobile Web has been hobbled by tiny screens, slow and unreliable connections, and carriers’ data-access fees, but a new era is arriving.

Google offers a variety of small display ad sizes.

Google’s mobile image ads are similar to those appearing on ordinary Web sites, Google said, but are smaller and are limited to one per page. Advertisers will pay only when users click on an ad, as with the company’s text ads that appear next to search ads. Google requires only one ad per page, and the ads must link to mobile-specific Web pages.

During last week’s conference call to discuss quarterly financial results, Google co-founder Sergey Brin was bullish about the opportunity to bring advertising to the mobile Web.

Apple’s
iPhone has shown what’s possible. Increasingly widespread Wi-Fi makes it possible to bypass mobile-phone network operators. And initiatives such as Intel’s Mobile Internet Device and Google’s Android could lead to a new generation of devices.

“The mobile ads work very well,” Brin said. “There’s nothing to dissuade me it would be any worse than traditional desktop search.”

Google is expanding its advertising business into a new domain: graphical ads that appear on mobile devices.

This pay-per-click model is popular among advertisers who want to match expenses to active expressions of interest in their ads, though “click fraud” can mean some of that activity is bogus.

The Drobo storage device has always intrigued me as a backup server that is smarter and more flexible than the RAID box you would typically cobble together with an old PC. But without network ability it seemed like half a product: powerful storage logic shackled to lame connectivity. That’s largely been fixed with the launch of DroboShare, a companion piece for the Drobo server that allows it to be network-attached.

The DroboShare mounted under a Drobo storage device

(Credit: Data Robotics Inc.)

DroboShare is a pricey add-on at $199, but it has gigabit Ethernet and is compatible with NTFS, HFS+, EXT3, and FAT32 file architectures, the last a nice addition we lamented the absence of in our original review. Support for a maximum 8TB capacity can be accomplished today by using two separate Drobo units loaded with four 1TB drives each and connecting both to a single DroboShare.

DroboShare is almost there. For the price, it should have pre-n Wi-Fi built in, as well. I mean come on, this is basically a gigabit NIC, USB 2.0 chip and a little firmware to translate four drive formats. That ain’t $200. And it should have a more elegant way to connect to the Drobo than a USB jumper cable. But like Apple, Sonos, and B&O, the Drobo folks are trying to harvest a cult, not a value-aware consumer.

If you are sophisticated enough to appreciate the qualities of Drobo architecture you should also crave networked storage, so I imagine DroboShare will be a hit. For now, my home-built RAID boxes are working very well.