A non gamers perspective on the Gaming consoles

Recently I got xbox360 kinect bundle. It was the appeal of Kinect that drove me to buy xbox. I also own ps3 and wii even though I am not a gamer. I have only played family games. Recently quite a few of my non-gamer friends have asked me about how these consoles differ, hence this post.

Wii has established itself firmly as an non-gamer console of choice. It probably has the largest collection of the Family Friendly “E” rated games. Wii also has a extremely low learning curve. It allows grandparents to play side by side with their grandkids and have fun! It is a great way to have a fun filled family night. *Wii Fit * is a must have, It puts fun back in the exercise. It actually makes you want to do exercise.

Few things that I did not like about Wii are that it does not do HD. I have a big screen HD TV, and I hated seeing crappy graphics on it, so Wii has been relegated to the basement “play room”, where my kids can enjoy it with their buddies on an older CRT. We have two Wii controls which get shared during group play dates. It usually becomes hassle to keep reminding kind to use the wrist band. and we have had our fair share of wii remote becoming a projectile tossed around the room.

PS3 has been a premier gaming console. I have not bought the new move so my review is of console only. I essentially got PS3 because of things it could do outside of gaming. I was looking for a cheap bluray player last year and PS3 was the cheapest and best bluray player. It is wifi ready, connects to internet, and does does DLNA. It comes with sufficient storage. We use it to view movies over net, watch dvds (it upconverts), bluray and to share pics/home videos via DLNA. PS3 does great hi-def and is 3D ready. Being able to watch online movies on big screen via ps3 is huge as most Bollywood movies are available online and I don’t have to run around to try to rent it.

Unfortunately PS3 is not casual gamer friendly, maybe move will change that, but having a physical control to gesture with, is just projectile waiting to smash your TV.

Xbox w/ Kinect Xbox with Kinect is a game changer. Its the newest kid on the block, thus, there are are just a few games. Xbox/Kinect has all the signs of being the console that rules the causal gaming and your coffee table will be the collateral damage. Kinect makes you move your whole body, making you jump, kick, wave, dodge and gesture with your hands, giving you a full body exercise. You will ache in places you never knew existed. Its very intuitive to use and is fast and amazingly good. It also makes a great party gadget, guests can joining and leave seamlessly. No controller to exchange. It is also a lot of fun to just to watch people play. Old and young play it alike. Couch potatoes will also have an urge to stand up and join in.

Although, Xbox does Hidef, it can’t play bluray disks. Also, for some inexplicable reason, MSFT changes monthly fee for online access (via xbox live). For me it means I cannot use netflix, facebook and other online features. Xbox doesnt have a browser, so cannont watch stuff online (like you can with PS3). You are stuck whats supported by xbox live and have to pay for it. I have not tried DLNA, but it seems to be limited to MSFT Media center.

My dream console would have been PS3 with Kinect. Sigh. Kinect will definitely dethrone Wii. Nintendo stopped innovating after Wii, and they will have to pay dearly for it. Kinect has enough appeal and geekry for it to rule the roost in my household. PS3 will still be there for its bluray and online/DLNA capabilities.

These are a few things I am thankful for

Thanksgiving gives us an opportunity to think about the things around us that we usually take for granted. It gives us a moment to pause and acknowledge their impact on our daily lives. Here are a few techie things I am thankful for.

I am first an foremost thankful for innovators & entrepreneurs for continuing to fuel the immense growth in the tech industry. It feels great to be part of the tech revolution.

I am also thankful to the open source community. They continue to amaze me by continuing to evolve open source alternatives, and keeping them at par and in many cases ahead of the closed propriety system. hats off to them

I am also thankful to Social movement. Twitter helps me feel the pulse of stuff around me and facebook helps me find and keep in touch with friends and family. I could'nt image a day without either of these.

I am also thankful to Apple & “app” phenomenon fueled by the iOS devices. Rise of the “apps” has in a true sense democratized the market and eliminated the entry barrier. It puts a normal individual developers on the equal footing with a large corporation. Our apps are placed side by side and thus can now compete on features rather than the marketing/supply chain/big company infrastructure.

Finally I am thankful to apple to give us techies the wares to lust about. We had been given utilitarians pcs, phones that we used because we had to and not because we wanted to. By putting design at par with with tech has given rise to the a beautiful lust worthy gadgetry. The rest of the market is following quickly. and as they say mimicry is the best form of admiration!

You think you are a customer ? Think again

We all think of ourselves as customers of the various websites. We almost feel initialed to a free or a freemium model for sites we use. We all assume that ad-supported model works and it should be pay for usage of the sites.

As online usage continues to grow, so does the competition for online ad dollars. Thus the sites are increasingly trying to make ads more “effective” and “attractive” for the “Ad buyers”. The way this is being done is by making ads more relevant and appealing to the web surfers in hopes to get more clicks. The way these websites can make the ads more relevant to the users are by sharing the information about the users with the advertisers. this is done via cookies. WSJ recently had an interesting article about how some of well known sites use 100s of cookies each to track the browsing habits of its users.

Lets quickly review the definitions of a product and customer.

Product:  something that is marketed or sold as a commodity
customer:  one that purchases a commodity or service

This brings us to the topic of this blog post. From the website's perspective the customers are the companies that are buying ads on its sites. The product is the data that they are selling - our personal data, our profile.

In order to complete in the market place, they need to improve their product. They improve it by coming up with new and innovating ideas of collecting increasingly more and more personal data. Facebook makes an very interesting case study.

Just think about the things facebook has added over the years. We think we are the customers of facebook and these new features are added to serve us. Once we see the real customers, we see that these are pretty amazing and well thought attempts to improve the product. The very popular like button, the facebook connect, now defunct facebook beacon, share via facebook, and now facebook messages. using our personal profiles they already know where we live, went to school, work, what what we like, who we communicate with, and now what we communictae about. This will create an unparallel product for the real customer

Too much social is not a good thing

I do agree, the three things that are doing to define the coming years are : social, location and mobile commerce. Increasingly we will look to our social graph for recommendations on restaurants to eat at, movie to see, or next electronic gadget to buy. Vendors will try to lure us by customized coupons pushed to our mobile phones based on our profile, and we will buy stuff or pay our bills by our phones.

Having said that, I still think that we are not a throughbred social animal. Agreed society is a big part of life, but we are not ready for it to become our life. Me for one am not willing to give up my privacy. Also, I refuse to create multiple “avatars”/profiles of myself to please the different vendors in order to get a deal, or to present a favorable image to impress my professional colleagues.

I do believe in power of social and location powering the mobile commerce to herald the next generation of web. I hope it is done right by respecting our online privacy. The trend that I find most troubling is Give me your passwd and we will import your friends etc to our site

Increasingly I run into sites online, or apps on my mobile phone and try to lure me into giving them my userid/passwd of of my existing accounts. They claim to do that to import my friends and contact information to help jumpstart my experience on their site/application. I get the dilemma these sites are in. A normal user uses may be 4-5 sites at most on a regular basis. Most users do not have a time or a need for yet another site to be part of their daily online experience. Thus, its a huge uphill battle for the startups & importing data is a huge help. I get this.

What irks me the most is the blatant way in which they ask us for our passwords. To me its like Maitre d’ asking me to hand over all my credit card statements so he/she can suggest the best dish for me. Today most online portals that I use, contain a ton of information about me, the list of friends is a very small portion of it. I do not want to give them access to everything. Plus, unless I immediately change my password, there is nothing for them from snooping around in future. e.g I Use a ton of Google services, gmail,gtalk, google voice, google checkout, google documents, google adsense, blogspot, youtube, appengine. They all share the same password. If I give a new site my Google password, and hope they will import my Google friend list and without snooping around with everything else, now or till such time that I change my password, I am being very naive. Storage is cheap, data about users is gold mine. I am sure they want to get as much information as they can. Even if they are pure in their intensions, I cant trust the folks who actually coded or handle the data, almost everything is outsourced throughout the world, one on knows anymore where the data end up today or in future

I do believe in power of linking social networks from different sites. These startups do fill a niche. But I don’t want to give them “keys to the kingdom”. I wont trust them anymore than I would a guy on the street asking me for my Google passwd. I would give them access to data, on my terms . Things that will make me comfortable are:

1. I do not want to reveal my password to a site wishing to import data. Instead I should be able to tell google to give a onetime access to just the
   data I want to be made available to that site nothing more.
2. If I have given a access for a certain duration, I should be able to revoke that permission at any time.
3. Every time any external site does access my data based on these permission that should be logged and I should be notified, if I so choose.
4. I should be able to preview the access I have given the data that was shared any time in future.

Some of the above have been addressed by technologies such as SSO, OAuth etc. Google does support OAuth. But I find sites (including Google) to be seriously lacking at reporting. They don’t allow us to pick and choose what we want to share or notify us of what was accessed. I really don’t feel in much control when I share stuff using what is implemented.

I really hope as “social” takes the center stage and as new and upcoming sites encourage us to share more data, some of the technologies do come to our rescue and keep us in control.