Harrison: Browsers hold key to industry’s future | Game Development | News by Develop

As far as technology predictions go, this one is pretty obvious, but worth reading nonetheless:

“The gathering storm that I’m talking about is about the technology that is going to go into a web browser that is going to power very rich, very impressive gameplay.”

“Somebody is going to win. Somebody is going to deliver console level 3D graphics, video and audio into a web browser. That will be the tipping point for the evolution of our industry that will accelerate what we can do in a browser, and I think will create the next generation platform for games.”

The bloke making the prediction used to work for Sony, and was partly to blame for the craptacular launch of the PS3 in Europe.

But all that aside, this is an exciting vision of the future; no more consoles or beige boxes, games accessible through any web browser,  all data stored in the cloud. Google, Microsoft, Apple and Mozilla all have reasons to be cheerful.

And indeed, as do any fledging games developers out there.

Official Google Blog: $5 million to encourage innovation in digital journalism

Google lives up to the “don’t be evil” mantra, bigtime:

Journalism is fundamental to a functioning democracy. So as media organizations globally continue to broaden their presence online, we’re eager to play our part on the technology side—experimenting with new ways of presenting news online; providing tools like Google Maps and YouTube Direct to make websites more engaging for readers; and investing heavily in our digital platforms to enable publishers to generate more revenue.

But while we’re mostly focused on working with news organizations to develop better products for users, we also believe it’s crucial to encourage innovation at the grassroots level. That’s why we’re giving $5 million in grants to non-profit organizations that are working to develop new approaches to journalism in the digital age. Our aim is to benefit news publishers of all sizes.

The sums involved are paltry, but it’s a solid start. And it might encourage a third, credible space between blogging and journalism proper. It’s kind of embarrassing to think that Perez Hilton or Matt Drudge are the very best that the internets have to offer.

Op-Ed Contributor - Google's Earth - NYTimes.com

William Gibson, author of Neuromancer and Pattern Recognition, draws an eerie parallel:

Science fiction never imagined Google, but it certainly imagined computers that would advise us what to do. HAL 9000, in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” will forever come to mind, his advice, we assume, eminently reliable — before his malfunction. But HAL was a discrete entity, a genie in a bottle, something we imagined owning or being assigned. Google is a distributed entity, a two-way membrane, a game-changing tool on the order of the equally handy flint hand ax, with which we chop our way through the very densest thickets of information. Google is all of those things, and a very large and powerful corporation to boot.

Cross-reference the above with a skit from The Onion: Google Opt Out Feature Lets Users Protect Privacy By Moving To Remote Village.

Google kills Wave - but the concept is here to stay | Technology | guardian.co.uk

See, like, this doesn’t come as a surprise:

Google has announced it is ending development on Wave, the cross-platform communication tool it launched with much fanfare at its I/O developer conference in May 2009.

The reason it failed is pretty simple: no-one could figure out the point of it. Was it a collaborative tool? A real-time communication hub? A digital scrapbook? Google totally failed to explain what it was for and how best to use it. 

Equally staggering about the whole episode is this:

Co-founder Sergey Brin was convinced to support the Wave concept by a Google development team in Australia. “When they came and proposed this idea they said, ‘We want to do something new and revolutionary, but we’re not even going to tell you what it is. And we want to go back to Australia, hire a bunch of people and just work on it.’ ,” Brin told the Guardian shortly after Wave’s launch. “That was a crazy proposal. But, having seen their success with Maps, I felt that it actually was pretty reasonable.”

The top brass commissioned the project completely sight unseen. Incredible. No wonder they couldn’t market the thing; they didn’t know what it was for either. Is that a sign of visionary genius or utter insanity?

Of course, the line being trotted out that Google Wave “was ahead of its time” will probably hold true. Hindsight is always in twenty-twenty vision, after all. But its failure proves that not even the mighty Google can avoid slipping on a banana skin every now and then.

BBC News - Google Pac-Man eats up work time

When Google put the Pac-Man game on its home page, it gobbled up almost five million hours of work-time:

The statistics on how many people played and for how long were gathered by software firm Rescue Time. It makes time-tracking software that keeps an eye on what workers do and where they go online.

On a typical day, it suggests, most people conduct about 22 searches on the Google page, each one lasting about 11 seconds.

Putting Pac-Man on the page boosted that time by an average of about 36 seconds, the firm said based on the browsing habits of 11,000 Rescue Time users.

Extrapolating this up across the 504 million unique users who visit the main Google page day-to-day, this represents an increase of 4.8 million hours - equal to about 549 years.

In dollar terms, assuming people are paid $25 (£17.50) an hour, this equates to about $120m in lost productivity, the firm said.

Great, more ammunition for the anti-games lobby. Play it for yourself here.