SharkJumping

Pacific Poker Upgrades Software with Avatars

Leading poker provider Pacific Poker (an 888.com brand) today announced a new release of their poker software which enables users to choose their own avatars.  The options are quite limited by Meez standards, with only 15 default avatar choices, and even more limiting, the table always rotates so that your avatar is on the bottom, so that you look at the back of his/her head.

However, it's a big step forward as the large poker/gaming operators are starting to understand that giving regular (meaning non-hard core) users a personality at the table is a great way to encourage more mainstream players to join the service, and that you might even be able to sell or grant them visual upgrades in the future, such as unique clothing items or special animations.  It's one more way to create community and personality around a gaming/community service, which helps to drive up "barriers to exit" as competition emerges. 

The overall trend of giving users the increasing ability to personalize their game experience is accelerating, whether its making a Mii on the Nintendo Wii, modifying your avatar in Guitar Hero 3, or changing your character in EA's Tiger Woods Golf.   In fact, some of the console publishers have told me that modifying your character is now a top design criteria for certain types of upcoming games.  Of course, as this trend extends to web-based and Internet connected, handheld games, Meez will be a big part of it, both in our own games like Dance Floor Destroyer, and with 3rd party ones, so contact us if you're interested in partnering.

Kathleen Edwards Concert - When is it NOT OK to Record

My wife and I rarely get out to any type of live music these days due to the usual children issues, but our good friends Fred and Barbara invited us and another couple out to see Canadian singer Kathleen Edwards at the local specialty concert hall The Independent.  The short review is that she put on a GREAT concert, alternating between slower songs and rocking bigger songs, without too much conversation - the crowd loved it, she did an amazing show, the bar was easy to get to, and the acoustics were good -  you should definitely see Kathleen in concert if you like any aspect of Alt Country music.

However, the main irritation and inspiration for the blog is that some really tall guy fought his way in front of our little group in order to hold up a pretty sophisticated recording device, and then proceeded to spend 10+ minutes adjusting the various buttons on it to presumably make sure it could record her concert at the highest enough fidelity.  Having spent enough time with Rhapsody and the legal side of music, I simply don't believe you should be able to nakedly record music, presumably to do something else with it, like make it available on your site - it's simply not your right...The only possible exception would be if Kathleen had a pro-taping policy, as some bands do, but there weren't any signs of that, and he didn't act like it was legitimate.

Am I aware that there are a variety of services which allow you to steal/borrow digital rights to their music ?- Of course.  However, when I ask you in the middle of an artist's live show why you feel able to record a  full concert and your answer is "i will talk to you later, and I haven't have time to ask her", you should not be surprised when I make sure to yell into the mid-point of each concert recording, so that you eventually went away, as you did tonight.

The end result is clear - Kathleen Edwards rocks in concert, and more importantly, stop recording digital musical concerts and pretending its OK, unless the artist approves of it - otherwise, you should all drive these guys out of the arena.  Great creative music is too important to leave to music pirates.

Gay Marriage is Legalized in California

I normally keep personal topics on a small blog called SF Breeders, but today's big CA Supreme Court win was too big to not spread to a larger audience - feel free to ignore if not interested...

In a tight 4-3 vote, the California Supreme Court today ruled that same-sex couples have the constitutional right to marry.  This is a huge win for everyone, especially for the countless LGBT couples in San Francisco which want to have the full rights of a married couple when it comes to raising children in SF - why shouldn't it be easier for them to join all of us in the pain and joy of raising children in San Francisco?  Given that my brother will be marrying his boyfriend in NY in August (technically a civil ceremony), I'm now encouraging them to swing by CA at some point in August to make it fully legal.

In addition, as my father pointed out, it's going to be a big economic win for California.  For the months of June through November, we're going to have countless gay couples rushing to get married in CA, driving the economy upward since weddings are incredibly expensive affairs.  On a less favorable note, tons of right wing, conservative and religious organizations will now hurl tens of millions of dollars into CA politics and media trying to to pass the November ballot initiative banning this inevitable process - but at least it will help our economy in the meantime  :)

The anti-gay wedding bigots may win in the short run, as has happened in most states in the US where this process has gone forward. That having been said, this decision is one more chip in the wall, and as we saw in Berlin, that wall eventually comes down.  As the homophobic older voter base continues to die off, the gay marriage effort will finally pass, just as it did with inter-racial marriage in the 60's, but unfortunately, millions of loving gay couples will suffer in the meantime. 

For now, however, this is a great day for everyone, including parents in San Francisco.

CBS/Cnet Deal - Good Price/Great Fit

CBS (NYSE:CBS) announced today that it will acquire CNET Networks (NASDAQ:CNET) for $11 a share, or $1.8B, which is a big bump up from the $7-8 where Cnet has been trading in recent times.  Some analysts are questioning how CBS justified a price that high, but I think it's a great fit, and it's a really well thought-out purchase.

Like all traditional media companies (newspaper, magazine, radio, broadcast), CBS's core business is declining - no matter what CBS does, fewer people will listen to the radio and watch CBS tomorrow than they do today, although their cable businesses are doing fine.  So, the company either needs to exit those declining businesses or find complementary ones which are growing faster.  In order to do this, they need to pay higher valuation multiples than their core businesses, which is why they can justify the Cnet deal and price.   

To not do a deal like this would simply make future deals more expensive, as all traditional media companies are finding out as they watch their core assets decline - e.g. what are the big magazine conglomerates doing, waiting for their circulation to totally disappear before the make a move?  There is always risk in acquisitions, but this $1.8B bet comes with an actual business attached to it, unlike the Google YouTube deal for $1.6B, so it's a fairly good bet.

With a market cap of $16.5B, CBS needed a core, complementary Internet asset that was big enough to make a difference to their company, but not so large that a failure would pull down the entire firm, a la AOL/Time Warner.   With Cnet in house by next quarter, they can then go back to smaller, bolt-on acquisitions which fit nicely into their larger Internet strategy, which looked a little random before this deal.  On the CNet side, they (and the shareholders) get a strong price for what I regard as a top notch set of properties, and they finally get away from this unrelenting proxy fight being pursued by a group of hedge funds - it's truly a win win on both sides.

Knowing the players at both firms, the culture fit is strong, there are tons of synergies across the offline and online media groups, and on the selfish front, it means SF's only true media company lands in good hands.