The outcome of the Myanmar uprising remains to be seen. But the visual immediacy of the government's brutality has been exponentially magnified by Myanmar's networked citizens.
As we argue about the marketing implications of mobility, and question whether 'consumers' will adopt this or that technology, we find in Myanmar a people fighting for their rights and their lives with the tools at their disposal. A kingdom historically hidden from the world by distance, ignorance or complacency is dragged to center stage by mobile phones, blogs and email. But it's not about the devices themselves - it's about that to which they connect: the web. The world. The visibility of Burmese atrocities stems from the advent of networked culture. The power of near-instantaneous global distribution of images, video, text. And ideas.
There are three billion mobile devices in the world now, projected to grow to 5 billion by 2010 - and the majority of growth is expected in "emerging markets". Some of those regions have been saddled with oppressive regimes. What will the influx of mass connectivity do to them?
Think on this one for a moment: Could we have ignored Darfur as long as we have if its people documented attacks by the Janjaweed and government troops with cameraphones?
"...if democratic forces do prevail over the military junta, the victory will owe something to today’s extraordinary communications networks.
If the junta ultimately prevails by force, the same technology will
have indelibly exposed its depravity to the civilized world.
...the regime
won’t be able to cut Myanmar off from the world. It will never be able
to confiscate every cell phone. And while it has shut down the
country’s Internet service providers, foreign companies and embassies
can stay on the Web via satellite.
Some of history’s greatest crimes against humanity, including the Holocaust and the Turkish genocide of Armenians, were committed in darkness. Whatever the Burmese junta does, it will have to do in the harsh light of international scrutiny. Myanmar’s
democracy movement has a precious ally – instant, speed-of-light
communications – that past victims of brutal dictatorships couldn’t
have dreamed of."
From distributed technology has emerged the phenomenon of connectivity - of network and networked culture.
In the world of instant global intimacy, it's a gunshot in Asia, not a butterfly flapping its wings, that can cause a hurricane around the world.
If you had any questions about the transformative power of interactive media, repressive governments no longer do - when they want to kill or crush their people, they are learning to start by killing the internet and mobile connections. On the heels of Ukraine's mobile powered Orange revolution, the SMS powered toppling of the government in Manila, and Uganda's recent reinstatement of SMS after contested elections were sealed up, this from the AP, re Myanmar:
...soldiers in Myanmar...Friday...went after the Internet and mobile phones that have proven so vital and powerful in documenting the dramatic confrontations.
Modern technology has become the generals' worst enemy.
Though the government has cut some phone landlines, it has had less success clamping down on mobile phones, [and] the immediacy has been vital in telling the world so it can act quickly as developments unfold
"The world doesn't know where Burma is. Now they see images about
the situation and want to know more." Aung Zaw said.
"Students use cell phones
to SMS each other to share information," he said, referring to text
messages activists use to organize demonstrations or inform one another
of the locations of soldiers. "The junta can't control the technology
totally, and it's a huge difference (if you can) deliver the
information fast."
From Penny brough (ad) clockwise, nick barham (planning director, shanghai), simon mcrudden (planner, london), stella manzano (planner, dm9, brazil), top of andy lindblad's head (planner, new york)
Got an interesting response to a previous post about Halo 3's $170,000,000 opening weekend, from CoDee:
"...while this was the biggest
entertainment launch in history (as measured by $$$), it was almost
entirely confined to males 18-34. I think the big $170MM number is
overstating it's actual cultural impact. The Xbox 360 is still the
exclusive turf of the hardcore. When is Microsoft (or the game
industry) going to have a hit that breaks out of this niche?"
CoDee, I'm glad you asked!
First, a trip down memory lane. From what dark root does the image of "male video gamers" spring?
"Gaming's Dark Ages" aka "Exclusive Turf of the Hardcore" aka "Kingdom of the Socially Inept"
In my fleeting personal memories of the lost time after "Spacewar"; eons before XBox 360, I am plagued by recurrent visions of socially awkward fat kids (let's call them collectively, "me") stuffing their pie holes with crap food, playing 'Space Invaders' and later, when graphics could handle it, Donkey Kong.
Soooo lifelike. You could smell the RAM burning. Only in fevered dreams (typically brought on by two liters of soda and a bag of nutter butters) could we imagine graphics surpassing these masterworks.
The Nation's collective image of "video gamers" was built on the backs of the folks who played them: pre-pubescent kids and Comp-Sci wunderkinds. This, then, is the beginning of the long held assumption that only wildly attractive men played video games.
Freedom at last from social isolation : Behold the Atari 2600!
A two liter bottle of Coke + a pack of Nutterbutters + a copy of ET:The extraterrestial = crazy delicious. Who needs to date?
PC Games for my Tandy Corp. Radio Shack TRS-80 (affectionately known as the "Trash-80") were sold on tapes. Audio cassettes in yellowing mylar bags. Back then, respectable pubs like the NYT couldn't be bothered with video games. Games, and computer gaming, epitomized 'Geek'. Specifically, revenge-of-the-nerds, Male geeks. A subculture, nothing more. Just keep walking, and don't make eye contact, and you'll get out of Castle Wolfenstein just fine.
As recently as 2005, eMarketer's "Videogames: Where to Now?"
reports still pegged US console ownership as 75% male, with 81% of those males 35 and
under. Men also held the edge (51% to 49%) over women in online
gaming. But the balance had already tipped. Unbeknownst to conventional wisdom, the keys to geek castle had already been stolen. A 2005 report by the Carnegie endowment noted that "of all videogame players who had played no more than one year, 62% were female."
Modern Days: Hardcore no more
When did gaming go mainstream? I don't know exactly - I'd been gaming since Christmas of 1973, when Dad brought home Pong. I'd been programming games since I got my first computer in 1978. And I am a geek. So it's a little blurry for me. Definitely after Zork. Sega Genesis? When Playstation came out? Or Gamecube? Or the Gameboy? When JC Herz published "Joystick Nation"?
In the modern era, one extremely lagging indicator could be when the New York Times launched "Game Theory", a bi-weekly game review by Charles Herold, featured in the 'Circuits' section in March 2000.
"...it cannot be
denied that there are people who will take greater pleasure in this
game than in any other entertainment this year.
And what will
make them happy, what will make their days joyful and give them long,
crazed nights of ecstatic bliss, what will make the purchase of Halo 3
the best thing they could possible do with their money, is this one
thrilling fact: Halo 3 is Halo 2 with somewhat better graphics!"
OK, he doesn't think it's the greatest thing since sliced bread. But he knows others do. In droves. This is culture he is reporting on, not simply a product.
And the WEBSITE! It's cool! And the kicker - to interact with the 'Halo3 interactive Game Guide', you have to download Silverlight. BRILLIANT! A bucket load of sugar helps the download medicine go down! I mean honestly - is the whole game just a trojan horse? how the hell else was Microsoft going to get us all to download Silverlight?? But I digress.
Back to a paraphrase of CoDee's original query -
Q. 'when will the gaming industry have a hit that breaks out of this niche?"
On April 13, 2007, eMarketer's report entitled "Gamer Demographic Spreads Out" had these tidbits:
Casual Gaming
700 MILLION casual games were downloaded in 2006. And who are 76% of all casual gamers? I'll give you a hint - it starts with 'W' and ends with "omen'. And that's "omen" as in portent. As in "watch this space grow from a projected $365MM space in 2006 to a projected $725MM in 2007, and to be a primary driver for years to come"
Consoles
Fine. We'll give them casual games, well and good. But Consoles? Only men have consoles, right? I'll give you a hint - it starts with 'W' and ends in 'rong'.
25% in 2005. 42% in 2007. What the HELL happened here? One thing was Wii, baby! According to Engadget on August 23rd, here's where console sales stood:
Knock Wii out of there, and you'd see female ownership drop - but by how much? Don't forget Carnegie noted back in 2005 that 62% of gamers that had played less than a year were women. BEFORE Wii came out. Interestingly, after the original announcement of the Wii, at E3, "a
loose online movement called 'Wii60' developed, promoting
dual-ownership of both Nintendo's and Microsoft's systems." Check it out for yourself at Wii60.com.
Above - Master Chief gets in touch with his feminine side?
Below - "Is that a Wii remote in your hand or are you just glad to see me?"
a Fine example of Wii Sports "Pass Along":
Mobile
Of 2,000 folks surveyed in a recent Parks Associates study of mobile gamers,
59% were women.
59%.
And 61% of those female players play mobile phone games for about one
to four hours every month. 58% say they play mobile
games for more than four hours each month.
I don't do that, and I'm a complete G -E-E-K.
I mean c'mon. Where do people find the time for this stuff, when they could be Twittering, or having sex with virtual genitals in Second Life? But I digress.
"Women are the foundation of the gaming market, and as an
industry, we need to cater to their preferences," said John Barrett,
director of research at Parks Associates.
So where does that leave us?
As defined by Wikipedia, "A game is a structured or semi-structured activity, usually undertaken for enjoyment and sometimes also used as an educational tool." Which would make it one of the original forms of interactive media.
Gaming IS mainstream. It's NOT exclusively male. Game culture is culture. It's also a HUGE category that defies categorization. It generates over 166,000,000 results on Google. I'm not even go to try to define it here - let it suffice to say 'Gaming' comprises a mind-blowing array of genres and delivery vehicles. Women dominate casual gaming and mobile gaming. Men have an edge in console ownership, but the gap has narrowed. Let's move on.
But is Halo 3 cultural impact being overstated?
Don't know yet. But maybe there's something in trying to draw an entertainment industry parallel. If we can agree films can be cultural events, then we have a place to start. By way of example, films like 'Toy Story' enter the collective consciousness and national and global culture. Who hasn't heard (or said) "To infinity, and beyond!"? So this is voodoo math, but if you've read this far, bear with me:
Halo 3 had $170,000,000 in sales. Divide by $60/title = 2,833,333 copies purchased.
I couldn't find any good numbers to support "pass-along" - loaning a friend a game - or multiplayer use (which people indicate is the true power of Halo 3), but based on personal experience (and some disturbing videos on YouTube) we could probably safely double the number above and consider them 'participants in the experience of Halo 3'. To be conservative, let's use an average of 1.5 - 1.9 people playing each game, for a total audience of between 4,250,000 - 5,500,000.
A film watched by that horde, in 2006 dollars, would generate opening weekend box office revenues from $27 - $36 Million. Comparing that to opening weekend box receipts from films, we find:
Armageddon @ $36MM
Robots @ $36MM
Minority Report @ $35MM
Gladiator @ $34MM
Lethal Weapon 4 @ $34MM
Blades of Glory @ $33MM
Rush Hour @ $33MM
Rounding out the bucket are titles that include Anchorman, Titanic, The Matrix, Terminator II, Elf, Saving Private Ryan, The Blair Witch Project, and...Toy Story.
Of course these films then went on to generate more ticket sales after opening weekend. But Halo 3 will continue to generate sales as well.
So bearing with this little exercise, how many of those films have you seen? how many scenes do your remember, or can reenact, with friends? how many films do you reference regularly? how many can you quote?
And you saw them, what, once? twice? If you saw "Anchorman" three times, you spent a cumulative viewtime of 4.7 hours (not including those HILARIOUS DVD EXTRAS!!).
It takes a practiced gamer 15 hours to complete Halo 2 (in 'heroic' mode). That's 15 hours of fearing for your virtual life at practically every moment. Are you an 'engaged viewer'? Hell yeah.
If 4.7 hours and community reinforcement embedded Anchorman into our culture, not to mention The Matrix, imagine the potential impact of Halo 3. Or impending titles like Hellgate London, or Will Wright's upcoming "Spore".
The 18-34 male demographic just got an M9HE-DP of Halo culture up the tail pipe - blown
audially, visually and physically into their systems. Halo 3 has been almost a religion, spawning fanatical followers (who condemn bad reviews - and reviewers!) and an intensely, mutually reinforcing community with a common language: 'john-117', 'Cortana', 'Forerunners', the 'Flood', etc. - these mean nothing to the uninitiated. When 'Scary Movie XV' makes a reference to the destruction of 'Reach' in Halo, will you miss it because you didn't play? Yep.
How crazy has gaming got? Very. Here's a VERY mild example:
Barcade in Brooklyn, NY, hosted a a "No pants allowed: The Underwear Arcade Video Game Gathering". Attended by men. And women. Want to see the photos? Check them out on Flickr. Not enough? Here's two below. Extra points if you recognize the W+K employee in the rainbow hat MC'ing the event.
Note mixed crowd below.
Gaming is for everyone. Gaming is fun again. Halo 3 - cultural? Just ask Wikipedia.
Wow. At Tokyo's 2007 Game Show (9/20 - 9/23), NTT DoCoMo displayed "Peking Olympic Mobile Games", the
official mobile phone game of next year's summer Olympics in Beijing.
In one of the game's events, you put the phone down on a table and pump
your arms like a sprinting runner. The phone's camera picks up your
movements and accelerates your onscreen running character accordingly.
Also featured prominently was Echochrome for PS3, due spring 2008, in which "a doll-like figure walks through
minimalist line drawings in which pathways become possible or
impossible depending on the angle from which the scene is viewed.
Echochrome codesigner Tatsuya Suzuki said the game was inspired in part
by the art of M.C. Escher, and Hirai singled it out as "a very simple
game, but...also very deep."
And of course, because its Japan, "the merchandise
area of the show included a stall selling pillows bearing life-size
images of fully clothed manga-style heroines whose grapefruit-sized
breasts protruded in firm, caressable 3-D."
[Read the full article, with more coverage of the Tokyo Game Show 2007 on Yomiuri.com]
I know we are trying to make tech sound cute and fuzzy, but could we please get some cool sounding names, like Quake, Rapture or Doom for a media sharing site?? Next up, Zingku. GREAT NAME. Because people can "Zing" media to each other, get it? Or to their "ku's". EEeeeesh.
And Google just bought 'em.
Zingku, a "mobile social network", could be an interesting GooMobility asset, and fits tit-for-tat against Nokia's Twango (acquisition) and MOSH (developer built) "mobile sharing community".
Both MOSH and Zingku claim as a differentiators that they were "designed from the mobile phone, outward", rather than being services ported from web to mobile (e.g., facebook mobile), though to be honest, I'm not sure users will catch that nuance.
"NBC Universal and Microsoft have teamed to turn advertising into
long-form content available online, via mobile devices and on a nightly
late-night show on the Ion Network.Soon the world will look at commercials in a whole new way. Firebrand
is turning the commercial break into a commercial destination. Choose
from among the world's best, searching, sending and shopping your
favorite brands," the website claims."
Just as soon as I can stop vomiting, I'll rush right over. As soon as I'm done watching all the same spots on YouTube.
Update: Aaron @ Firebrand has called me out on this and invited me to the Beta. I am willing to suspend disbelief and give it a shot.
The first 24 hours of Halo 3’s release = $170 million in sales...Halo 3 is now the biggest launch in entertainment history - bigger than
any Hollywood movie.
Mobility is redefining communication - and the ways we relate to each other and the world. Here's three things to draw your attention to on the global stage. Rather than bore you with crap technical info and market stats, these bits illustrate challenges and opportunities posed by mobility as a cultural, rather than technological phenomenon, and each reflect something deeply specific to their respective national socio-economic-cultural landscapes.
The first comes from China, a market in the midst of a mobile adoption explosion, where the party is meeting next month to choose its leadership free of popular input; second is Japan, a "mature" mobile market where ketai (mobile phone) penetration is almost 100%; and third comes India, where massive growth in mobile ownership is expected over the coming years, in spite of a consumer base with very limited cash resources to spend.
(above, Supergirl contestants, smiling in the face of cancellation)
Why? Why ban such juicy bits of brain-rotting goodness? "SuperGirls" was the all-girl Greater China equivalent of American Idol - prime time ratings divas perform and fans voted via SMS. Over 400 million people tuned in for the second season finale of SuperGirls, and the program broke all kinds of records spawning multiple copycat programs. So why did the government kill the show? Through the press, the government blames the shows 'quality' saying they are not "positive and healthy". Tom Doctoroff, JWT's Asia CEO suspects the motivation is purely a political defensive move: "any mass movement, even one
that's purely for entertainment purposes, is considered a threat to the party
and will be squelched before long", he stated.
In other words, the Chinese government is concerned that if people learn through SMS that 'voting' can have an impact, that sets a bad precedent in a country where you can't vote for your leaders.
Today's WSJ featured an article on a phenomenon that's been going on in Japan for a while - Full length novels, created line by 160 character line, and distributed via SMS.
"Young amateur writers in their teens and 20s have found a
convenient medium in which to loose their creative energies. For
readers, mostly teenage girls, the mobile novel, as the genre is called, is the latest form of entertainment on the go."
One 'real' author, Yuzuki Muroi, dismissed mobile novels as a cultural desert, a "string of
conversation and emotion, [with] almost no setting, scene, or
character development".
But the phenomenon is real enough that when books were printed due to fan requests/popular demand, one title, "Love Sky", sold over 1.3 MILLION COPIES and is being made into a film. And one author reportedly blew a blood vessel in her pinkie while furiously tapping out the latest installment of her narrative via mobile. Remember - fans receive these novels in up to 160 character chunks, including spaces and punctuation. Here's an example:
Kin Kon Kan Kon
The school bell rang
"Sigh. We're missing class"
She said with an annoyed expression.
[From "To Love You Again" - 104 characters with spaces]
Fire up your phones...and imagine if Dickens got paid by the character...
"India's legion of self-employed, which comprises half the workforce,
has benefited the most from India's mobile phone market, the world's
fastest growing.
"Maids, cooks, autorickshaw drivers and construction workers have bought mobile phones even on incomes as low as 100 dollars per month.
"It's no longer a status symbol. It is increasingly becoming a necessity like water and electricity," Arvind Singhal, the chairman of retail consulting firm KSA Technopak said.
"Landline networks are not very effective in many of these places. So, mobile phones are a big necessity in rural areas," Singhal said. "It's not an indicator of wealth any more. A mobile phone is now a tool that is likely to improve productivity dramatically."
Mobility is bigger than calls. It's transformative, enabling and empowering. As the emerging world leapfrogs past land lines and PC internet access straight to mobility, expect revolution. And be prepared to make room at the table. It's a tool, a toy, and in some cases, as critical to development and growth as electricity and water.
Amazon launching a DRM-free music store (though with only two of the four major labels) is interesting - you'll actually be able to buy off iTunes music for your player - and the pricing appears even lower than iTunes. This on the heels of the Starbucks/iTunes 50 million song promotion points to a pitched battle in the music space of who can move sales (and therefore inspire confidence from the labels)
More importantly, from Slashdot comes this pearl:
"In a bizarre move Aurora Technology the owners of the King of the World MMORPG has taken the unusual step of banning men who play women characters
but the ban itself does not stretch to women playing men. If you want
to play as a woman now in game you have to prove you are a women via
web cam. This is something that people ask for in many mmorpgs I myself
have seen people say people who play women in EVE online
as being some kind of degenerate but how long can a policy of
verification by web cam last since its so easy to get around it doesn't
seem to solve much and is an insult to many."
In an increasingly cluttered media landscape, brands stand as
lighthouses over seas of mediocrity. They mean something - and in
defining themselves and what they stand for, they help us define
ourselves.
"Consider that as our identities, data flows and allegiances
(can) become more fluid, refined and environmentally responsive given
the increasingly connected edge, long-term differentiation becomes less
a byproduct of A Big Idea (what you’re doing), or your technology or
distribution plays (how you’re doing it). Connected consumers will want
to know who you are and why you’re doing certain things (and keep
constant tabs on these indicators) to see if you’re worth their
affiliation.
In a sense, this is arguing for the primacy of
reliable narrators and powerful story (read: brand), even as it charts
the rapid decay of traditional branding approaches."
SMS, with its 160 character count limit, can be maddening for writers used to expressing thoughts with a little more room.
From textually.org [via USA Today via Gear Live], here's some folks pushing the narrative/creative envelope of what SMS can do to create true emotional connections through "micropublishing":
"A novel in which the entire narrative consists of mobile phone text messages,"The Last Messages tells the story of a fictitious
IT-executive in Finland...[who] travels throughout
Europe and India, keeping in touch with his friends and relatives through text messages.
His messages, and the replies — roughly 1,000 altogether — are listed in chronological order in the 332-page novel written by Finnish author Hannu Luntiala. The texts are rife with grammatical errors and abbreviations commonly used in regular SMS traffic."
Who are you, and who can you trust, when anyone can be anyone,
anywhere?
Reputation and Identity are two key issues that will help
shape the future of interactive media: We will cross the marketing/socio-cultural interactive Rubicon when
we personally manage a single unified identity, portable site to site
and experience to experience, and when we have access to our own
unified online reputation, whose sharing we control. These two combined will give weight, credibility and personal responsibility for the full spectrum of my interactive activity.
Attached is a video of a presentation delivered by Dick Hardt @ O'Reilly web conference entitiled "Idenity 2.0":
In 10 minutes, I came up with this non-exhaustive list of elements of my online personality. In each I was required to register or provide info so as to allow for creation of an account, or 'persistent presence'. For the most part, each exists independently from the others, and a change to one does not inform the others.
Facebook
MySpace
Twitter
Flickr
Dopplr
Second Life
XBox Live
Typepad
Google (gmail, groups, etc.)
Ning
eBay
Amazon
Yahoo (fantasy sports, email)
Nokia (nseries.com)
iMedia
Pandora
LastFM
LinkedIn
BMW motorcycles
Ad Age
Skype
AOL (IM)
iChat (yep, and .mac)
Jafrun (helmets)
iTunes
NetVibes
Each of these places has a bit of me. And, for the most part, I am "me" on them - no pseudonyms, pen names, what have you. So you can track me back to "me". Which can lead to problems, as people may choose to use your efforts for their own ends, as evidenced by these two bits recently run:
"if someone is angry, joking or drunk you could find yourself
“tweeting” something that is later picked up as absolute truth...it becomes true
because the statement can be sourced back to a name with credibility...[and] once you get quoted — very
few people are going to check back to see the context. Without context,
mole-hills become mountains pretty quickly."
[from textually.org]
TV ad points to a new form of negative campaigning in which
information is sourced to comments posted on the Internet instead of
news reports or public records. The Washington Post reports.
"Del. Timothy D. Hugo, a Republican state legislator from Fairfax
County has launched an attack ad on cable TV against his Democratic
opponent that features unidentified, unverified quotes from a blog.
This is one of the places where the old way of doing politics and
the new way is coming into conflict," said David Weinberger, a research
fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law
School.
... Karen S. Johnson-Cartee, a political science professor at the
University of Alabama who has written several books on negative
television ads, said Hugo's ad "means we have sunk to a new low. ... Most people, especially older Americans, are unfamiliar with the blogs," Johnson-Cartee said. "They have no way of testing the veracity of something posted on a blog."
I had the opportunity to speak with Jason Stoddard (left) and Ken Brady (right) of Centric yesterday on the topic of social networks/immersive worlds.
They described a pitched "War of the Virtual Worlds" going on - a battle to determine the owner of the defacto standard on which future virtual worlds will be built and coexist. If you are still trying to wrap your noodle around that one, try this: HTML was the standard that allowed countless unique websites to coexist and crosslink out there on the 'Wild and Wacky World Wide Wonderful Interweb (WWWWWI)'. A 3D immersive world standard that interfaces with web protocols could theoretically allow you to port your Second Life personality across facebook, World of Warcraft, you name it.
The next 6 months will be crazy, as these big three duke it out to set standards for 3D immersive worlds. Centric expects a clear winner to emerge within 18 months
They shared some anecdotes on "meta-brands" - that is, brands that have been created entirely in the virtual space and occupy categories that parallel real world product categories.
We focused primarily on 3D worlds that are PC accessible, but look for rock solid competition emerging from the game consoles - XBox Live and PS3's Home.
Get ready, Shanghai. John Milner is coming to bust some stuff up. Good man in PDX next two days, getting acclimated and drinking the W+K kool-aid. So refreshing.
This gets interesting - a possible app for Starbucks?
"up4 has created a handy little Facebook app
that lets you easily create casual events and meet up with friends
somewhere offline. With a scheduling calendar, you can pick the day and
approximate time for your meet up. Or you can click the “add” button to
go directly to the screen for manually entering your information. Say
what type of activity you’re “up for” and indicate a time and location.
Add any extra information you’d like, type in the names of Facebook
friends you’d like to notify, and post it to your up4 application
account. All of your events will show on your calendar, though there is
the option to see these in a list view as well. See what your friends
are up for, and decide if you’d like to join along. You can also leave
comments to hold discussions around individual events."
Today's NYT popped Barrick Gold, a Canadian mining company offering $10 million (could be canadian bucks, so knock off 30 percent)[I stand corrected!] for whoever can help them extract silver more efficiently from an argentinian mine. All the data about the mine, and the challenges they face, are posted at unlockthevalue.com. The president of Barrick, Greg Wilkins, says 'rather than limit the problem to a very small R&D staff, we have turned our R&D group into managers of research'.
This on the heels of another Canadian mining firm, 'Goldcorp', that hosted a similar online collaborative effort back in 2000 by posting geologic data for a 'poorly performing' gold mine in Ontario, asking help to determine best potential drilling sites. That group collaborative effort netted a production jump from 50,000 ounces of gold to 500,000 ounces per year.
Place your bets, folks! Quick quiz - which of the following IS NOT rumored to be a picture of the impending "Google G-Phone"? [answer at bottom]:
(a)
(b)
(c)
(d)
(e)
(f)
(g)
(h)
(i)
(j)
Interestingly, I heard yesterday Google may be introducing the much-rumored device NOT to compete with phone manufacturers per se, but with the pending '$100 laptop' project. With Nokia having re-christened phones as "multimedia computing devices", you can see why Google would be interested - Google-branded portable terminals to access the world's info? It's funny that a device that recast the telecom space may be including voice as an afterthought, not the prime driver.
[quiz answer: yep, a trick question - (b) is a TELEGRAPH, not a telephone! Good job, eagle eyed test takers!]
