The revelations that Hollywood stars were paid to smoke in the 30s, 40s and 50s made me wonder what other kind of product placement deals are in place?

Of course James Bond has become the King of such deals, getting products to pay for their marketing, but do gun manufactures pay to get their pistols into films? Does it work that way?

And with advertising exploding in the virtual world, especially sports simulations, where will it end? Are we working towards a future with personalised advertising like Minority Report?

I hope not!

Al

It would seem that my PSP is not just for gaming. In fact it is now seen as a tool for learning.

Check out the video here

I wonder if any of our eLearning clients will ask for us to make PSP compatible learning?

Al

I may be a programmer at heart, but I'm always interested in cool new stuff including the new Flash player 10

Catch the live broadcast of the CS4 launch

- Scott

10 years in development, and it seems Spore doesn't quite deliver in the final product.

It's a pretty sad story as Spore is a great concept, and for the first time in a while my attention was actually drawn to a game due to it's uniqueness and potential.   For a hardcore gamer a little over 30 hours gameplay is not much return in change, and will leave you slightly disappointed with the lack of depth in the game despite its several stages of evolution to complete.

What's more surprising is the once again badly thought out and poorly implemented DRM that's wired into the game.  Does anyone seriously think this is a good idea?  Pirates will (ironically again) have the best copy of the game free of this DRM and play it how they wish, whilst a paying customer can quite easily be frustrated and locked out of a game they paid with their hard earned money!   DRM might seem a good idea on paper but I've yet to see a version that's acceptable and would rather see the idea consigned to history that allow companies to install various rootkits or any other software activation just to prove I've bought something. 

Such a decision has actually spurred on quite a backlash, where angry gamers have been deliberately rating spore 1 out of 5 on amazon leaving it sitting at around 1.6/5 in overall rating, surely enough to deter the casual gamer and make them skip over this title

I'm a developer too and naturally I would like to protect my IP, but some things are just taken too far when your legitimate customers are the ones who are suffering most. EA are not exactly in my good books having swallowed up most of the good game developing talent in the world in the last 10 years, and they see fit to churn out the same games with updated squads for an extortionate amount.  I hope some common sense returns to this world before the PC gaming industry goes the way of the dodo.

- Scott

After launching their new browser Chrome, Google have experienced a less than stellar start in the browser space after several vulnerabilities and proof of concept attacks have left them with a little egg on their face.  Never mind, it's in beta which leaves them with some excuse to fall back on.  I do however find some of the flaws slightly surprising in that they identical to the ones Apple suffered with their WebKit, which Chrome 'borrowed'.   Lesson learned yet?

- Scott

As it becomes easier and easier to tailor what you can view online (iGoogle, the new BBC home page...) I suppose it's no surprise that you can now set up a RSS news feeds based on keywords you are interested in. So, for example if you are interested in news articles on knitting (knitting is very in by the way, honest) you can just go to this site (see link below), enter the word knitting and add the news feed to your reader or iGoogle home page. Love it!

Check out http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/001001.html

Lydia

Whilst attending a meeting for SEO yesterday, I was demonstrating examples of other search engines (yes there is more than Google as I hear you gasp), one of which is Searchme.  It's coverflow inspired presentation style of web pages allowing users to flick through a small rendered preview of each search result is pretty cool, if not a bit useless.

Linky

- Scott

Forgive me for sounding less than enthusiastic after Google announced their long awaited browser called Chrome.  Google have released under the fabled beta tag and you can now download and use it.  It's a multi-platform (Windows, OSX & *Nix) open source browser (good for some), which has borrowed quite a bit from Apple's WebKit and unsurprisingly Mozilla's Firefox.

Initial use of the browser would indicate a similar speed to Firefox, and sometimes faster with JS, but some sites can be slower than you are used to.  Of course to differentiate themselves from other browsers, chrome have brought some new idea's to the table like process isolation per tab (surprised this doesn't already exist in others), and all in one search/address bar.

Will I switch? Probably not as I love all my extensions in Firefox like Adblock, mouse gestures, firebug that are just not available for chrome.   What it does however mean for me and other web developer is yet another browser that we have to support/test for.  I now make it 5 major ones with Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Opera and now Chrome. And of course Internet Explorer 6, 7 and 8 as companies are so stubborn (and security lapsed) to bother upgrade it.

What does it mean for Firefox though?  Mozilla recently announced an extension of their deal with Google who pays Mozilla a substantial sum.  In 2006 alone the total amounted to around $57 million, around 85% of the company's total revenue. The deal was originally going to expire in 2006, but was later extended to 2008 and will now run through 2011.  Imagine if you will Chrome taking enough market share from Internet Explorer and Firefox, they could invariably sever their deal with Mozilla leaving them struggling for operating costs.

- Scott