| Tuesday, April 13, 2004 |  |
| Virtual IM |
 BBC, via Marc's Voice: A Matrix Online game is being released that includes built-in AOL Instant Messaging. That means that anyone with AIM, ICQ or iChat will be able to receive messages from inside the game in real time.
Nothing technically very remarkable about that, but it is somehow intriguing. Links between virtual and real worlds. Of course one can take it further, to be able to make voice or video calls between a virtual world and the normal tools on my desktop. Would I then be looking at an avatar in the middle of chasing a monster? Reminds me of AlphaWorld 8 years ago, where I was trying to figure out how to create meaningful links with the outside world. One could use outside graphics files to paste on signs and virtual screens. So I could make "fake" graphics files that ran a program on my server, which would IM me that somebody just came by and looked at my building. And I could of course have made the picture show some dynamically generated information in return. [ Technology | 2004-04-13 19:19 | 1 comment | PermaLink ] More > |
| File sharing economics |
From Mopsos:Felix Oberholzer of the Harvard Business School and Koleman Strumpf of UNC Chapel Hill just completed an extensive empirical analysis of p2p sharing which concludes thatCould it be? Maintaining the status quo? Why would the music industry do such a thing? Because they in danger of going extinct, that is, and their model no longer makes sense. It is close to being a lie that file sharing hurts their sales. The analysis figured that maybe 5000 file sharing downloads might make one of them decide not to buy a CD. And other studies show that file sharing in many cases increase sales, making people buy a CD they wouldn't have been aware of without file sharing.Downloads have an effect on sales which is statistically indistinguishable from zero.Now that's interesting. Is the battle for IP protection based on false assumptions? Could it be after all about maintaining a status quo, so that intermediates who used to provide a valuable service before P2P technology existed can still make money even though the value of the service they provide has reduced dramatically? [ Information | 2004-04-13 19:19 | 0 comments | PermaLink ] |