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 →

The MIT Technology Review website has a nice article, “Cinegames” (Link), discussing the ever-increasing realism in videogames. That’s really no surprise to me considering I watch those developments like a hawk. Even so, it’s a good article worth reading.

Meanwhile, now former-Sony Online Entertainment videogame guru, Raph Koster, has posted an entry, “Company-sanctioned RMT hits single-player games” (Link), discussing RMT (Real Money Trade) coming to a videogame on an XBox 360 near you. What’s most interesting to me are the comments. For some reason plenty of people seem to think consumers won’t spend a couple bucks for a virtual product. I think they’re wrong. I think the ones making those comments are mostly old-time gamers used to getting free mods. I also think that they’ve not been watching the mod community wither under the weight of increasingly realistic games. I’ve discussed that issue before, so I won’t go into it again now. Let’s just wait and see what happens.

I get a kick out of seeing “new” products that I’ve either seen concepts of years ago or actually designed at some point in my career. The recent wrist-mounted computer is one such product (the new Eurotech concept – Link; my old concept – reLink). Now here’s another, the Magellan Roadmate navigation system which looks to me like my 2nd year ID student concept from 1992-93:

That’s some old design there. Back then the project was all about exploring the *amazing* new technology of CD’s! Well, it was new to our professors.
Continue reading →

A couple of days ago I read a post over on Mashable (Link) about a new application getting ready to launch into beta. If you design products for a living – and especially if you’re designing/selling niche products – this might be of interest. It’s called MyPicklist (yes, another “My*”). From the development blog (Link):

An Ad-Creation tool that will allow members to create various sized banner ads that promote highlighted products from your picklist. We are positiong this as a google Ad-Sense alternative. Most people with blogs don’t make that much from those google ads and with this ad tool it will allow bloggers to create revenue from themselves by voicing their product recommendations to their readers.

The more I think about this, the more potential I see in it. Continue reading →