Editorials

So Apple has released review samples to the press in order to build up interest in their entry into the smart watch market. It is an interesting move for Apple as they have sent out their $1,000 product to a select group of reviewers just to see what they think. After reading a number of them (some I could not get all the way through) it seems that Apple might not have the magnificent product they were hoping for and even the most Apple faithful sites had a hard time spinning the deficiencies that are there.

There is an old saying in business that you have to spend money to make money. The meaning is sort of plain, but we will give you a clear example of what it means. In the tech world, if you are not spending money to improve your products or to build the next generation then you are pretty much going to have a very short life. This is not to say you have to dump huge mounds of cash into research and development, but you do have to spend some on the right things. This means that you can tell a lot about a company’s focus and future outlook by simply looking at their R&D spending.

Data collection, monitoring, storage, and mining are simply part of our online lives. If you connect to a site, it is going to collect some information about you. If nothing else it will collect the session information (IP address, time on site, pages read etc.), but will not use that for anything more than understanding traffic. Other sites will collect and maintain more information than that and in extreme cases you will get much more collected than that. However, no one seems to know what use this data is being put to and if there is any benefit to the collection at all.

The days of the long campaign game are almost dead and gone. Since Half Life 2 we have not really seen a game with the same sprawl even with its linear path. The reason for this is that game developers are under increased pressure to get the title out. They do not have the time to create the massive world that we saw in Half Life and Half Life 2. To combat this game have been turning to the idea of the side quest. These are little mini games inside the world of the larger game that provide opportunities to explore the world further. Of course games have moved away from the end to end style of games like Half Life, Modern Warfare etc. The need to allow for player development has moved games in a new, and needed, direction.