Power of Thought

It’s no secret that Apple Inc. has been on a hardware tear. In the last year alone, there has been a flurry of developments: The company branched into the mobile phone arena with the iPhone. It reinvented the mp3 player with the introduction of the iPod Touch. It worked its way into living rooms with an updated Apple TV.

But Apple is now exploring another hardware technology that has the potential to realign a multibillion dollar industry.

Apple has once again got an itch for gaming.

This isn’t necessarily a new frontier. Fans of the Cupertino-based company may recall how a Steve Jobs-less Apple entered the console gaming fray in 1996 with the troubled Pippin. At best, the Pippin ended up being a costly lesson. At worst, it served as a stinging footnote to the company’s strained relationship with gamers.

Fast forward to the present — the company has enjoyed a string of hardware and software hits and has disrupted the music and mobile phone industries soon after entering them. Today’s Apple certainly has the means to release another console, but let’s face it — a rehashed Pippin would be a huge gamble, considering the established relationships and competition represented by Sony’s PlayStation3, Microsoft’s Xbox 360, and the Nintendo Wii.

This doesn’t mean that Apple has abandoned ways to break into the gaming market with its desktop hardware. A beefed-up iMac offers an interesting possibility. Adding horsepower to the iMac line isn’t exactly new for Cupertino, but with an overclocked Intel CPU and an nVIDIA 8800M GTS under the hood, the new iMac could easily pass for a leading gaming rig — at least, if there were more developers creating games designed to run on it and OS X.

It seems much more likely that Jobs and Co. may be following a different path to gaming success — domination of the mobile gaming market.

A trademark extension filed last February with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office is one of the strategy’s biggest tells. The filing extends Apple’s trademark in regards to:

“Toys, games and playthings, namely, hand-held units for playing electronic games; hand-held units for playing video games; stand alone video game machines; electronic games other than those adapted for use with television receivers only; LCD game machines; electronic educational game machines; toys, namely battery-powered computer games.”

Skeptics could easily dismiss this as Apple casting a wide net for future expansion, but a swift call to action seems more likely. Not only are executives well aware of the strong interest in gaming among Mac users (and vendors), but also new conditions exist for gaming to be pushed to the forefront in the Apple hardware and software ecosystem. The faltering company behind the Pippin now dominates several hardware segments, which makes a huge difference in launching a new (and potentially related) product. The problems that the Pippin faced – such as the development and marketing costs associated with an unproven device – would be negated by a gaming platform tied into Apple’s market-dominating and innovative mobile devices.

And here’s the really sneaky part – the iPod Touch and the iPhone are already fully capable of playing games. Apple highlighted this home-court advantage with the recent release of the SDK for the iPhone/iPod Touch. By doing so, Apple let a community of eager third-party developers tackle designing games like “Spore” as well as casual games for its devices that utilize innovative features such as the multitouch screen and motion-sensing accelerometer. Along with all of the development tools necessary for building applications, developers will have the ability to upload and sell their creations through the iPhone App store (naturally, Apple will take a cut).

Consumers are already ga-ga over Apple’s mobile devices to begin with, so whether they should be re-imagined as gaming gadgets is more of a marketing issue. But with the developer community in a tizzy to create the next great Apple-friendly game, it’s only a matter of time before Cupertino announces that it’s ready to connect the dots. Don’t be too surprised if it ends up being Steve’s “one more thing” at next year’s Macworld.

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Electronic Arts’ new baby, EA-Land, is apparently not going ahead, with news coming down a few hours ago that this replacement for The Sims Online is going to be closing.

The Sims Online closed and merged into the new EA-Land world in February this year, but it appears that whatever targets EA management might have set for the project weren’t met, and it is now going to go away, closing around Midnight on the last day of July, this year.

Subscription billing for EA-Land terminates immediately. EA-Land will be free-to-play until closure. Currency purchases with Paypal are likewise closed.

Support will continue until closure (or until further notice, whichever comes first) and your EA-Land account/subscription may be terminated at any time.

EA is offering $15 off any game at the EA Store or three months of Club POGO subscription time (your choice) to paying subscribers. Those eligible subscribers will be emailed with the offer information within 30 days.

Luc, the prominent figure behind EA-Land, has posted a heartfelt and sorrowful message to EA-Land users. Reactions range from supportive to bitter, and all points in between.

On a number of occasions in the over the last couple of years, Second Life has seen influxes of new users from The Sims Online, and it is expected that it will receive more as a result of the pending closure. However, while Second Life is one of the best-fit virtual worlds for The Sims Online users, it isn’t a very close fit at all, and not many TSO refugees feel comfortable in Second Life’s open and unstructured environment.

Love EA-Land or hate it, it is sad to see it pass into history.

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MySpace thought it was all over when it secured the MySpace.co.uk domain in February this year. A decision by Nominet’s dispute resolution service handed over the address, which previously had been owned by a small UK ISP since 1997, two years before MySpace.com launched. But an appeals panel has today handed the domain back to Total Web Solutions (TWS), a company in Stockport, near Manchester.

The fact that Myspace.co.uk was originally used to offer email services and websites to subscribers meant TWS had insulated itself from an action for some time. But MySpace’s main argument to Nominet centred on the most recent use of the domain as a Pay Per Click website which sent MySpace.co.uk visitors to a parked page with advertisements for social networking websites including MySpace. MySpace Inc says the practice started in July 2005 when News Corp took it over, boosting its fame, but TWS claims it was “at least” before June 2005.

Secondly, at issue was whether parking the .co.uk domain had become “abusive” when the PPC ads changed because MySpace.com became well known. In the case of MySpace.co.uk, the ads on the parked domain did change to “reflect the fame of MySpace.com”, admitted TWS, “but that had happened automatically as a result of the algorithms used by parking company Sedo.” In other words, TWS fingered the firm servicing the ads. While MySpace Inc. argued that TWS should have exercised control over the content of the adverts, TWS said this did not constitute a “change of use”.

The three-person appeal panel said they were “reluctant to place any duty on a registrant, who has merely had the good fortune (or maybe ill fortune) to register a name in good faith…” so long as they don’t exploit the situation.

There appears to be no more steps that MySpace can take within the Nominet DRS arbitration process to challenge TWS’s right to hold onto the name. So it’s the end of the line - unless there is further action MySpace can take through the civil courts.

Total Web Solutions also claims that Nominet tried to “unfairly help” MySpace by at first denying the existence of emails sent between solicitors and MySpace which may have aided TWS’s case. The solicitor who represented Total Web Solution in the case, Jim Davies, is now standing for election to the Nominet board, as he believes it’s unwise to “operate the DRS (Domain Resolution Service) from within the company.” Davies has been involved in a number of the more high profile domain name disputes in the UK recently.

Total Web Solutions’ Managing director Paul Fallon issued a statement saying “We refused to be bullied by one of the largest media organisations in the world. This has been a very stressful case for a legitimate medium sized ISP to have to take on – but we had to defend our reputation and to stand up for what was right.”

Of course, the MySpace.co.uk domain is now effectively worthless since TWS would be ill-advised to do anything with it at all now. It is currently displaying a blank page. MySpace continues to use uk.myspace.com/. A MySpace spokesperson declined to comment.

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YouTube said today it has paid out more than $1 million to its user partners through its partner program. The figure came as part of an announcement that YouTube is expanding the program to users in Japan, Australia and Ireland (it was previously only available in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom).

YouTube doesn’t disclose how it splits its revenue, but we’ll make do with what scraps of numbers we have. The site currently lists 100 partners, though that also includes entities that we’d think would be designated as professional partners rather than “user partners,” such as Universal Music Group and CBS.

Break a Leg’s Yuri Baranovsky said he’d collected $1,600 for more than 2 million views on YouTube. So if that means $800 for a million views (which it doesn’t exactly, but just to get an idea), user partners have been responsible for 1.25 billion paid views so far.

Users complained after YouTube was bought for $1.65 billion by Google in October 2006 that they weren’t being rewarded for their own hard work to make the site what it was. So OK, this math is a little unfair, but if you divide that out, users have now earned about .06 percent the purchase price. Thanks a lot, Chad and Steve!

If you want more current numbers, Bear Stearns estimated that YouTube would pull in $90.2 million in domestic revenue and $13.8 million in international revenue this year, with the vast majority of that coming from banner ads displayed next to videos. YouTube partner videos are the only ones on the site for which YouTube shows overlay ads, which it says it tries to sell for a $20 CPM. Bear Stearns said it expected $22.6 million in overlay ad revenue domestically this year.

Revver, the OG video rev-share site, hit the $1 million-paid-to-users mark first, in September 2007. The site was later bought by LiveUniverse for about $5 million.

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Google will stop at nothing in its quest to index the world’s information. Last year it ate through 100 exabytes of data, but there’s still a lot that it can’t get access to. Known as the deep web (or hidden web, or invisibe web, etc.), it is estimated that the majority of online data is hidden safely from Google’s prying eyes — private intranets, unlinked pages, some non-textual content, and until today dynamic content returned via form input was all inaccessible to the search engine. Google today announced that its Googlebot web crawler would begin to fill out HTML forms and crawl the results.

“For text boxes, our computers automatically choose words from the site that has the form; for select menus, check boxes, and radio buttons on the form, we choose from among the values of the HTML. Having chosen the values for each input, we generate and then try to crawl URLs that correspond to a possible query a user may have made,” explained Jayant Madhavan and Alon Halevy in a blog post. “If we ascertain that the web page resulting from our query is valid, interesting, and includes content not in our index, we may include it in our index much as we would include any other web page.”

Google, which says that the crawling of dynamic form results doesn’t affect the “crawling, ranking, or selection of other web pages in any significant way,” also assured webmasters today that their enhanced crawl would respect robots.txt as usual. Any form forbidden in robots.txt won’t be crawled.

It is estimated that the deep web is several orders of magnitude larger than the regular, public world wide web. While there is some content that Google will never — and should never — get its hands on, by crawling form results Google is now peering just a little bit deeper into the Internet. As Matt Cutts points out, this is less about indexing search results (something Google has generally not liked to do) and more about finding new links that are only available via dynamically created pages.

It should be noted that Google is only crawling GET forms (i.e., forms used to retrieve dynamic content, such as search results) and not POST forms. That’s mildly disappointing as we were looking forward to befriending Googlebot on MySpace…

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