Sony asks all Playstation 3 players to kindly go "Home" Thursday, March 08, 2007

Sony has launched a "me too" online community for its Playstation 3, accessed via the machine. Called "Home", the BBC has a report on it here.

Picture from BBC - trendy, social, gamers interacting inside "Home" - no, really

Gamers will be able to meet, chat and share content inside the 3D world, not to mention buy stuff for their avatar, in similar fashion to Second Life!

Sony said "This is not just about Sony brands and Sony games - it's a much wider network of connected spaces"

Connecting to other players is not new for gaming - multiplayers games are already well established and XBox 360 already allows players to connect online. Neither is the creation of an online persona with possessions. However, I understand that the ability for players to "create" stuff of their own in the environment is a new development (and revenue source for Sony!)

This is clearly one example of a "brand" experience to which people will undoubtedly connect, which I debated the other day. Moreover, this sort of mainstream headline with the associated revenues, will certainly attract the attention of other brands and accelerate the numbers hoping to emulate the model.

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Second Life to introduce virtual RFID tags Saturday, February 17, 2007

One of the presentations at Barcamplondon2 today was given by Jim Purbeck of Linden Labs who are the company behind Second Life ("SL"). He outlined plans that would overlay meta-data onto all the objects that existed within SL. This notion was described in the context of virtual RFID tags.

As such SL objects henceforth could be individually
and these objects would accumulate properties and data. This information would be publicly available both within SL and could be queried via APIs from outside. The notion about this was that ideas could be easily tried out, with feedback gathered by their developers and views also shared by a wider community.

More significantly, it was advanced that SL would provide an excellent testbed for examining whether RFIDs might add value in the real-world. For example, were they to be embedded into music CD jewel cases, then consumers might be able to both access extra data e.g. reviews, music samples. In addition, consumers might be able to contribute, albeit it was acknowledge that it doesn't work well in the example since leaving a comment on a CD in a single physical store didn't really make sense, since their comment was more widely targeted. But it might be a physical store RFID tag. Obviously it was hard to predict what the popular outcomes might be but that was the point.

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Guardian backs the BBC licence fee rise Sunday, January 14, 2007

Ian Forrestor has a post here that picks up on the Guardian endorsement of the BBC licence fee increase.

Back in May the BBC - Radio 1, actually - was prescient in launching a pop concert in the now-fashionable Second Life virtual world that attracted 6,000 people. The spin-off from the event is credited with tripling the number of SL participants and helping to change it from a geek's secret paradise into a mainstream phenomenon. Justin Bovington, chief executive of Rivers Run Red, the enterprising Soho company that employs 22 people to build projects in SL, reckons that only the BBC could have done that because private sector companies wouldn't have taken the risk.

Hmmmm. So an example of the value added by the BBC is its' endorsement/promotion of a American commercial enterprise has helped Second Life's commercial success.

A commercial broadcaster would have been paid for such a promotion, given the value its' brand brought to the party, but the BBC undoubtedly refused to take any fee, citing its need for independence etc. and not wishing to entangle itself commercially.

So we have broadcaster that can selectively bestow its' favours on companies (not even a UK firm in this example) and thereby allow those companies to benefit commercially, at UK licence payer expense. Does this make sense?

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