iPhone 4G: 25 most-wanted features

The day the iPhone 3GS launched, I wrote a column entitled "364 days and counting to iPhone 4G." Since then, thanks to Google, I've gotten a lot of e-mails from folks wondering just when the fourth-generation iPhone will come out, whether other carriers besides AT&T will offer it, whether it will actually work on 4G networks, and just what features it might have.
Until I hear otherwise, I'm sticking to my guns and saying the iPhone 4G--or whatever Apple chooses to call its next iPhone--will arrive almost a year to the day from when the iPhone 3GS was released. But now that we're around 90 days away from a possible launch, I thought it was time to put together a wish list of design and feature upgrades I want to see in the iPhone 4G.
Kent German put together an iPhone wish list of his own back in January, and I nabbed some items from his list, but I also scoured the Web for more wishes (Macrumors.com has a good message-board thread going) and compared them with my own wants.
The end result is a list of 25 items ordered from least important to most important in a reverse countdown. We also included what we think are the odds of Apple actually implementing each request. As always, feel free to agree or disagree with me and make your own suggestions (and to post your own ordered wish list). I will update the list after the comments start rolling--so get your two cents in. Perhaps Apple's listening.

"iPhone 4G: 25 most-wanted features"
From "http://www.cnet.com/"

The Future of Virtual World Creation

Think of Star Trek TNG's Holodeck, but re-imagined in the present, now add on to that the creation tools of Second Life. Bruce Branit's World Builder gives you a vision of what that could be like. It is a stunning short movie, well worth a watch.

Meet the man who invented Mario : Shigeru Miyamoto

Mario, Wii Fit — what’s next for Nintendo?

Shigeru Miyamoto is the man responsible for many of Nintendo's best selling games, from Mario to Zelda. What's next?

There is a story about Shigeru Miyamoto, the head of design and development with Nintendo. When you meet him, it is said, you are free to discuss all the characters and games he has created, from Mario in the late 1970s to the Wii Fit of today. His private life, however, is completely off limits. 

Not that the 57-year-old Miyamoto has anything to hide. He lives with his wife and two children in Kyoto, near the Nintendo HQ. He breeds dogs. There are no skeletons rattling in his closet.

The reason for the secrecy is that Miyamoto’s private life has a way of emerging in his work. When he bought a puppy he was so intrigued by the interaction between his family and the animal that he created Nintendogs, a dog-rearing game. It has sold about 25 million copies worldwide.

“Yes,” he admits, “ my hobbies have a habit of surfacing in the work I produce. Most recently, as I got older, I started worrying about my weight, weighing myself every day and talking about it with my family. It made me think that perhaps health could be a subject for a game.”

The result was Wii Fit, a balancing board for the Nintendo Wii console that monitors your weight and centre of balance and suggests a tailored exercise programme. It, too, has sold more than 25 million copies.

Clearly, the details of Miyamoto’s life are big business. But it’s not all about sales. He is in London to accept a Bafta fellowship at tonight’s Bafta awards for video games. The award is a belated recognition of the influence of a man whose Super Mario games for Nintendo have created a gallery of characters as familiar to today’s youngsters as Mickey and Minnie Mouse were to their parents.

“I’m always a bit uneasy about accepting awards like this,” Miyamoto says. “I’m not a novelist. Video games are not created by one person alone. Also, when I look at the past recipients of this award, such as Alfred Hitchcock, I doubt whether I deserve to be in that sort of company.”

Such humility is characteristic of the annoyingly youthful-looking Miyamoto, dressed for our meeting in jeans, T-shirt and blue velvet jacket. Though on one level he is the personification of the Japanese corporate ethos, on another he’s still the scruffy 25-year-old who fluked his way into Nintendo in 1977.

The story of Nintendo’s rise from a Kyoto-based manufacturer ofhanafura (children’s playing cards) began when, with the company facing bankruptcy, its president turned to Miyamoto to invent a game that might work on a failed arcade machine. Donkey Kong, starring a carpenter — his plumbing days were in the future — called Mario, was born.

“There is no way I could imagine it ever becoming such an international company,” Miyamoto says. “But at no point have we sat round and come up with a corporate strategy for expansion. Everything we have done has been done gradually, organically. If you ask me what the biggest surprise is, it’s that I’m about to receive this prestigious award. I’m an industrial designer.”

Surely he must take some pride in what his work has achieved? “In the Wii console we brought games into the living room and made them for the whole family. At the moment I am more interested in expanding the video game experience, using games to visualise things such as health that are not normally easily visible.”

What will he do with his free time in London, I wonder? Study the answer that follows carefully. There might be a multimillion-selling video game lurking in it. “The thing that fascinates me about Europe is how old everything is. I love looking at the details of buildings. I look at the intricate carvings and I can imagine them being made by one man, tap-tapping away as part of a huge team of people who gradually constructed these huge churches or cathedrals. They must really have been motivated by love for God or their work.” Or perhaps, by a particularly clever boss.

The Future of Virtual Worlds

At the AlwaysOn Stanford Summit 07 the virtual worlds was under scrutiny. Virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier led a panel (below) with Philip Rosedale, CEO of Linden Labs (Second Life); Irving Wladawksy-Berger of IBM; Chris Sherman, CEO of Gaia Online and Chris Melissinos, chief gaming officer at Sun.

The big question was whether virtual worlds would be a real business or just merely a place for “Meetings, learning and training may be killer apps of virtual world. Don’t underestimate any technologies that help us do that in a more human way,” said Wladawsky-Berger.

“The money question is like asking in 1995 or 1996, how do you monetize the excitement. eventually the answer became clear–the Web significantly expanded the number of people who used IT as well as the number of applications. More and more, if you are an IT company like IBM or Sun, the more people who use IT the more money we make. We love that. Virtual worlds is the evolution of the Web,” Berger said.

Lanier quipped that IBM could apply its army of consultants to fix buggy Web and virtual world.

Wladawsky-Berger responded, “Virtual worlds is presenting what IT does in a much more human way. At some point ERP will be reinvented for the virtual world. For example, a hospital administrator can design and manage a hospital in ways that look more like their [physical] hospital. It will require massive innovation and that will happen.”

“Virtual worlds are critical to adoption of next generation services,” said Chris Melissinos, chief gaming officer at Sun. “This will be a multimillion dollar marketplace across the board.”

Rosedale predicted that in ten years virtual world access will be more ubiquitous than Web access. “The technical infrastructure will be some sort of highly open and decentralized architecture,” he said. Virtual worlds are spaces with 3D objects require enormous amounts of computation. Currently Second Life infrastructure include 12,000 cores and 15 gigabytes of data. “The network of machines will be larger than the Web architecture today. Google has a couple hundred thousand machines–the virtual world will have tens of millions of hosts.”

In addition to making money for infrastructure providers, Rosedale noted that content creation is also a viable virtual world business. Residents of Second Life transact more than $1 million a day, and about 40,000 residents are cash flow positive, he said. In one Second Life shop, 830 residents are making greater than $1,000 per month from selling virtual clothing. “Just like the Web, a network effect business is driven by creativity and economic success,” Rosedale said.

Gaia Online environment, which is aimed at teenagers, has more of a 2D environment. “In a few years, computer graphics will be as good in real time as watching a movie, but today we have to be open to different modalities,” Sherman said. “Teenagers are looking for accessibility. They are multitasking and don’t necessarily want to be in a deep environment.”

Lanier pronounced that “civility is the killer app of virtual worlds.” He modified that point, stating that “open creativity” is the killer virtual world app, distinct from a game environments, which often bring out less civilized behavior.

Rosedale added that virtual worlds are appealing for the future for humanity because they have the potential to bring a more balanced offense and defense, whereas the real world moves people closer to a larger radius of damage…like wars.

“If give users the sense that they own or control things, they will police 50 times better, Melissinos said.

Lanier concluded the panel predicting that in 25 years the technology will be so good there will be no IBM or manufacturing jobs and that buying and selling goods in the virtual world will save civilization.

Virtual worlds won’t save civilization, given human nature seems to replicate itself in digital worlds. It could potentially be more like “The Matrix,” if you the machines get too smart, but in the near term you can count on virtual worlds becoming an economic force in business and entertainment. It’s not hard to imagine the intersection from Facebook and Second Life, for example, where, as Rosedale predicts, people will spend more time in virtual worlds than on the ’standard’ Web. Some of us will continue to hang on to the analog world…
From http://blogs.zdnet.com/

3D Virtual World Environment For New Employee Assimilation

In this article, I want to talk about how to take advantage of virtual world learning environment as the new employee assimilation tool, the objective is to make it easier and faster to train a huge influx of new employees — allowing them to quickly understand IBM’s policies, culture, products and services, decision-making regimens and technical skills they need to be productive, as well as build out their social networks.

 "New IBM employees separated by thousands of miles will be able to mingle, interact and share ideas in the virtual world before their first day on the job. They can learn real-life working skills such as signing up for benefits, developing code as part of a global team and ramping up sales skills before they meet with IBM clients.“ - Ted Hoff, IBM vice president of learning

Let’s have a look at what IBM did before on the virtual world in terms of new employee assimilation:

• In India, IBM has begun using virtual worlds to help onboard thousands of new employees who work in geographically dispersed offices.
• In China, IBM launched a global program called Fresh Blue for interns who plan to join IBM after they graduate college in 2007.
• In China, IBM launched a program called Sales Quest to train hundreds of new salespeople on how to sell products and service in the real world in 2007.
• In US, IBM use the virtual world for former IBM employees -both retirees and those still working to mentor new hires through speed mentoring.

In the beginning of this year, I was requested to take lead a project which called Your IBM Virtual World for China New Employee Assimilation. The scope of this project will cover all new employees in GCG and the content should integrate current Your IBM learning contents, activities and services into virtual world environment. The function should support persistent content hosting, well structured learning guidance and up-to-date learning events and pervasive mentoring/networking opportunities for new employees.

In my design, the key features of this virtual world should include:

• “Meta-geography” - Participants can be widely distributed across geographic locales and time zones, yet share a common virtual location.
• Avatar embodiment - Enables a sense of presence, gestural communication, body language, social cues
• Software agents (bots) - Useful for orientation, guidance, explanations, demonstrations.
• Teleportation - Instantaneous movement within the virtual world, useful for structuring presentation of learning material.
• Collaborative and asynchronous communication - encourages collaborative learning.
• Collaboration and Social Networking - Mutual interdependence. Employees need each other to find answers and solve issues

Here I put 3 charts for inspiring your ideas on how to do the similar projects if your organization will put efforts on developing virtual world for active learning or development. The first chart is about Project Activities, in which some key project components have been listed and you need to take special look and come out your own workstream. The second is a land demo chart on how your ideas could  intially communicated to your development or coding team. The third chart is a snapshot for how the demo Welcome Center looks like once your production version is put online.

Chart One: Project Activities

Chart 2: Land Demo

Chart 3: Demon Welcome Center

If you are interested in this topic or you are the expert on this subject, pls contact me for more discussion. I am looking forward to learning more knowledge from you.
From http://blog.pincn.com/

Google artık 1 numara değil!

Facebook ilk kez ABD'deki haftalık trafik rakamlarında Google'ı geride bıraktı.
İnternet trafiğini takip eden Hitwise firmasının rakamlarına göre 8 Mart’ta başlayan hafta Facebook’un trafik payı yüzde 7.07 olurken, Google yüzde 7.03’te kaldı.

Aynı hafta Facebook.com adresine tıklayanların oranında yüzde 185 artış olurken, Google ziyaretçileri sadece yüzde 9 arttı.

Huffington Post sitesinin bildirdiğine göre Facebook günlük olarak daha önce de birkaç kez Google’ı geçmişti, ancak ilk kez haftalık toplamda bu gerçekleşiyor.

Facebook, trafik rakamlarında her geçen yıl Google ile arasındaki farkı kapatıyordu. İzleyen birkaç yıl içinde halka açılmayı planlayan şirketin tahmini borsa değerinin bugün itibarıyla 35 milyar dolar civarında olduğu düşünülüyor.

Türkiye’de ise trafik sıralamasına göre Google’ın liderliği sürüyor. Alexa web istatistik sitesi verilerine göre ilk sıradaki Google.com.tr’yi Facebook.com izliyor. Üçüncü sırada Google.com, dördüncü Microsoft’a ait live.com, beşinci sırada ise erişim yasağı uygulanan Youtube.com yer alıyor.