Joi Ito has an excellent post specifically regarding the game industry but generally about business (and design) titled “Talking to the game execs” (Link). Here’s a couple of excerpts:

The sense that I got yesterday was that the gaming industry was basically the same mass production and mass distribution content industry machine that Hollywood movies and television are. And… while there are certain companies and individuals who are bridging the gap between the gaming industry and the Internet, the gaming industry is making the same mistakes that the content guys have been making since the beginning of networked computers. They ALWAYS over-estimate the importance of the content and vastly underestimate the desire of users/people to communicate with each other and share.
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I’ve been keeping tabs on a couple of conversations. One, as indicated by the above video, is a discussion on the Core77 design forum (Link) centered around the association of a “design superstar”, Karim Rashid, with what is, in my opinion, an arguably defective product. The other is the disgust being vented on Treehugger (Link) and Inhabitat (Link) over a BusinessWeek “advertorial” by (Design) Continuum’s CEO, Gianfranco Zaccai, that uses P&G’s Swiffer as an example of a “green” product. From “innovation and design” hype to “we do Green, too” showboating. Here we go again.

All I have to say is that someone should get the Industrial Design profession some gauze, bandages and a pair of crutches for all the feet getting shot.

Nice interview with John Maeda over on Wired (Link). I particularly liked this exchange because he’s saying the same thing I’ve been saying elsewhere:

Maeda: Yeah, I think the process is simple: Just put Steve Jobs in charge of your company. Seriously. Look at all the consumer electronics companies. They want to make an iPod, but they don’t know how. That’s because people who make objects function on the object-based model. Like if I’m at Sony or some big company, when I make something big and heavy and I sell a lot of them, people get psyched. Because the manager says, Oh wow, that’s big and heavy and you sold lots of them. That’s great. But if you’re making software, even if you ship a million of it, no one really cares because they really can’t see it. That is, unless the management recognizes the value of the intangibles.
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I wanted to make sure to call attention to an entry on the O’Reilly blog having to do with providing computing services to rural communities. The post, “SMS Servers Replacing PCs in India” (Link), reminded me a little of some previous efforts to create network computers in the mid-90’s. From the entry:

The SMS servers are being used to power an MSR project designed to test replacing PCs with SMS servers in the village of Warana (map). Mobile phones are used by farmers to access their data. In their system mobile phones become the client and SMS is used to communicate with the server.
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The above video is from the forthcoming videogame “Ship Simulator 2007”. It looks to me more like an excellent opportunity to throw some yacht designs into a beautiful simulation. And if developer VSTEP provides an SDK, I’ll probably do just that once the game is released.
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