Mozilla ‘Fires’ yet another ‘Fox’
Microsoft & Mozilla launch their latest browsers, presenting an update

(column by Shashank Shekhar)

Amidst the ceaseless confines of cyber space, zillions of battles are being fought day in and day out. Leading the hordes this October are Microsoft and The Mozilla Foundation, each unveiling new variants of the Internet Explorer (IE) and Firefox, respectively. So while version 7 of IE announced its arrival looking zingy and evolved, folks at Mountain View, California (Mozilla’s headquarters) churned out another marvel to add to their open source sheen, the Firefox Version 2.0. Old foes, just that now they’re with new armour. A global open source project, Mozilla’s Firefox 2.0 being most compatible and lucid in its make delivers a winner. Having been overhauled with quite a few anatomical changes since version 1 & 1.5, Firefox’s recent enhancements, amongst others, include a superior interface, form controls and its much famed browser tabs. Further, an in-built ‘web forgery’ (Mozilla’s personal take on anti-phishing) identification system marks its debut this season endowing it with security features with a much-needed impetus against phishing bluffs or forgerers! Even the IE springs a few surprises. Following a five year lull, version 7 of the Internet Explorer finds itself a reputation by a successful transformation from what is now the browsing Stone Age. Foremost amongst the firsts is IE’s cleaner looking interface followed by tabbed browsing, a first time appearance in any of the IE versions. There’s another button added to the familiar line up, the orange colour RSS feeds subscription icon. Also in the fray, like 2.0, is a phishing-blocker tool that sniff s every web page for all those offensive phishers. Infusing more vigour into the open source debate, Firefox 2.0 emerges the blue eyed boy owing purely to a forward thinking approach and friendly features. While with IE7, Microsoft appears to have moved on with anti-phishing, tabbed browsing et al, Mozilla has strengthened on its already existing machinery that earlier included the explorer’s newbies. While IE remains stringent, Fire- fox fits unassumingly to the user’s whims and fancies and therefore continues to deliver its promise to delight…

(End of Shashank Shekhar column)

Missed it in the grind? Just rewind!
With IPTV, Indians can watch their favourite shows when they please

(column by Shashank Tripathi)

Indian consumers are set to upgrade to a completely new level of entertainment. Yes, the much hyped Internet Protocol Television’ (IPTV) has finally reached Indian shores with MTNL announcing that it will be launching the service in Delhi and Mumbai from November 1. With IPTV, consumers will be able to hold time to their will. They can opt, demand, receive and control contents on the idiot box as and when they feel like. IPTV technology is open to myriad possibilities with prevailing applications like video-on-demand, audio-on-demand, game-on-demand, video calling, tele-medicine, e-distance learning and virtual classrooms, at a price less than Rs.250 a month for up to 30 channels and a minimum fee of Rs.125 a month for basic service of Free-to-Air channels. IPTV is enabled with the latest MPEC-4 and ASDL-2 technology for broadband and compression with thousands of compressed audio-video fi les accessible at the click of a button. With its unlimited potential, IPTV looks to be tough competition for cable TV & DTH. But MTNL Chairman RSP Sinha admits, “We aren’t going to take away market share (of DTH & cable). This technology will only prove a supplement.” We live in times when intensely hectic lifestyles prevent us from catching up with our favourite TV programmes on a regular basis. In terms of value, that is precisely what differentiates IPTV from the rest. On the flip side, the price tag is a bit high, but then, isn’t that a small trade off for being in total control? Well, that’s for you to decide!

(End of Shashank Tripathi column)

Loot, plunder, pillage... and do it online!
There's tremendous amount of 'real' money at work in the 'virtual' world of gaming

(column by Frederick Zarndt, President, Planman Consulting, North America)

“Video games are bad for you? That’s what they said about rock ‘n roll.”
Shigeru Miyamoto, game designer for Nintendo.

“I’m the best. I just haven’t played yet.”
Muhammad Ali

Once upon a time, when I was but a green soft ware engineer at Novell and the Internet was young and browsers were not yet an idea in Tim Berners-Lee’s mind, I played video games on an 800x600 resolution monitor. The games were controlled by graphics hardware & soft ware that are to the current generation of graphics technology as 3.5" floppy diskettes are to 1 TB USB 2.0 disks. And a weekend excursion to play Pong at a local business establishment with a Pong console was really super! Can you hear the snickers and derisive laughter from today’s gamers? Video game hardware has evolved into Xboxes and Sony PlayStations while the games themselves have evolved into a dizzying variety of genres & titles like adventure, role-playing, first-person shooter (FPS), third-person shooter, sports, racing, puzzles, turn-based strategy (TBS), real time strategy (RTS), action adventure, massively multi-player online games (MMOG), et al. Let’s look at game economics. You will be surprised...

Traditional Economics

For slightly less than $8000, one can purchase from DFC Intelligence, a respected “strategic market research and consulting firm focused on interactive entertainment and the emerging video game”, several reports such as China Game Market and Game Industry Overview as well as updates for one year. The subscription fee alone says that video games or entertainment soft ware, as the Entertainment Software Association (ESA) calls it, is big business. DFC estimated that from 1996 to 2005, the US video game industry doubled to $7 billion. And contrary to perception, US is not the largest video game market. It's Asia, whose market is predicted to reach $23 billion by 2009 in a recent Computerworld Singapore article. Game economics viewed from a different perspective shows that in its first 24 hours of retail sales, Microsoft ’s “Halo 2” had sales of $125 million. And the numbers are not only monetary: Wikipedia recently listed 189 web pages of game publishers & developers. The game economy isn't just big, it's also profitable. In 2005, Electronic Arts had worldwide revenues of $3.1 billion, roughly $500,000 for each of its 6500 employees. Similarly, Sony Computer Entertainment has a 2005 market capitalization of ¥1.933 billion on revenues of more than ¥737.9 billion. Many schools and colleges offer programs in video game design, character animation and technical direction including some established and respected universities as well as upstarts which cater specifically to the game industry. The schools making these offerings appear to be about evenly divided between technical and art schools, but include some surprises. For example, the Georgia Institute of Technology has a PhD program in digital media and in 1998 Carnegie Mellon University established its Entertainment Technology Centre, which offers advanced degrees in entertainment technology through courses like 'Building Virtual Worlds' & 'Game Design'. By traditional measures, the game economy is big, growing bigger and definitely here to stay!

Virtual Economics

Impressive though traditional economics are, virtual economics are equally astounding and a bit bizarre. First a background. Designers recognize that time and practice is needed to gain gaming skill and for that reason build skill levels into the game. In MMOG games as in chess and other “real” world games, the skill level of a player’s avatar or character is attained in game-specific ways. Similar to but otherwise different from chess’s Expert, Candidate Master and International Grandmaster, the video game levels are given virtual world labels such as Private, Grand Marshal, Scout or High Warlord in the World of Warcraft (WOW). And like the “real” world, avatars in Everquest or WOW accumulate weapons, gold & other virtual possessions. This should not be too surprising. What is surprising – at least it was to me – is that video game experts, many of them teens and some of them younger, earn good money coaching video game neophytes. USD $65 per hour is not uncommon. (www.gaming-lessons.com reports its youngest coach is 7 years old and began playing when he was 2 years old). Even more surprising is that some affluent online gamers who lack the time or patience to acquire virtual possessions or work their way up to higher game levels, outsource their acquisition. According to a New York Times article from December 2005, online gaming factories in China may employ as many as 100,000 young people as full-time gamers. These factories in China, Mexico and elsewhere, purchase online gaming soft ware & accounts. The accounts, each of which may have one or several avatars, are then given to an employee, some of whom play for up to 12 hours a day. The employee’s job is to win virtual possessions or acquire skill levels for an avatar. Once an avatar is for example a WOW level 60 Shaman, the factory sells the account on some internet commerce site like eBay. In its entry for virtual or synthetic economy, Wikipedia reports that one gamer purchased a virtual space station for $100,000. Similarly on December 17, 2004, BBC News published an article “Gamer buys $26,500 virtual land”, which tells about how an Australian gamer bought, using real money, a virtual island which exists only in the game named as Project Entropia. Edward Castranova, currently Associate Professor of Telecommunications at Indiana University and author of Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games published by the University of Chicago Press, is an economist who for years worked by day in near obscurity teaching economics and studying welfare at California State University in Fullerton. By night he used to play video games including Everquest. He discovered that when Everquest players retire from the game, they oft en sell off their virtual money, platinum pieces in this case, in exchange for real money on eBay. In 2002, after gathering data on auctions of virtual wealth for real money, he determined that the value of an online Everquest player’s time is the equivalent of $3.42 per hour in real money and that the annual per capita gross national product of the virtual land Norrath is $2266 per capita – again in real dollars. Imagine a land which exists only in the realms of computer RAM and hard disks has created a real world economy larger than that in all but 77 real world countries!

Lessons learned?

Two impressions from my exploration into the world of entertainment soft ware: First, as Castronova suggests, virtual worlds could be a powerful tool for economic and social experiments and will undoubtedly be the subject of future scholarly research. My second impression is tinged with dismay at the oft en violent nature of games as well as the apparent lack of real world fulfilment, which in part must motivate participation in virtual worlds. Have real world social, government and religious institutions & organizations failed so badly that gamers feel a need to seek virtual fulfilment? Generally though, I marvel at the wondrous virtual worlds created by the game designers and players and cannot help but agree with famous 19th century philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche: “In every real man a child is hidden that wants to play.”

(End of Frederick Zarndt column)