Interesting entry over on EarlyStageVC discussing Vast (Link). I’ve heard plenty of talk surrounding Vast, but had never taken the time to really grok it. This entry remedies that. Here’s some excerpts:

Vast.com looks like a classic classifieds site, but it is not. It is not a data aggregator. It is a data disseminator. It is a hub targeted to the developer community to enable the mashup of structured data in a reusable form.
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As a result, the data are Vast – millions of cars, millions of jobs, and millions of profiles, with more categories of objects to come.

This is the true long tail of listings. The user benefit is obvious — find the exceptional value. Like the old joke — why is it always that you find something in the last place you look? — the exceptional value is always in the long tail.

Continue reading →

Well, this isn’t entirely surprising, I guess. BBC News reports (Link) that Lionhead Studios, and with it videogame hall-of-famer to be, Peter Molyneux, have been acquired by Microsoft. From the beeb:

Microsoft has snapped up one of the UK’s leading figures from the world of video games, Peter Molyneux.

The veteran game maker is best known for inventing the god game genre, where players control all that happens.

The purchase of Mr Molyneux’s Lionhead Studios is part of Microsoft’s efforts to secure exclusive titles for its new console, the Xbox 360.

Microsoft already has an impressive stable of studios Continue reading →

Seems like there’s increasing discussion concerning the market for virtual goods. The latest article I’ve stumbled across is Wired’s “Micropayments Drive Asian Games” (Link). From the article:

Some of the most popular games in Asia are given away for free and charge no subscription dues, but collect micropayments for custom avatars and other items. Social networking is a key feature of the games, and it turns out players are quick to fork over yen and yuan to tweak their appearance to their liking.

This sort of thing is neither new nor surprising and I’ve discussed it with some frequency on this blog. Continue reading →

Via the Smart Mobs blog comes word of an article in the Sydney Morning Herald (Link) reporting that Chinese authorities have upheld a ruling supporting the real money value of virtual property. From the SMH article:

A court in Guangzhou, the provincial capital of China’s southern province of Guangdong, dismissed an appeal by Yan Yifan, 20, found guilty of selling stolen passwords and online equipment from 30 players of the online historical quest game, “Da Xihua Xiyou,” last year.
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More and more virtual property disputes are being brought before China’s courts, prompting calls from intellectual property rights lawyers for more strongly defined virtual property laws, the China Daily reported.

Meanwhile, in the background over on the Second Life forum Continue reading →

WorldChanging has a nice post, “Pop Goes the Cell Phone” (Link), that I very much enjoyed reading. For all the industrial designers out there (*raises hand*) who have submitted product designs for competition with fanciful creative writing explaining how the product entry was *cough* designed for recyclability, this one will interest you. Well, that is if you felt at all bad about the load of crap you tried to pass off as a sincere effort. Personally I don’t even know why the competitions bother to ask the question. It’s not as if industrial designers in general have any real control over how a corporation is going manufacture a product. Continue reading →