As most of you probably know, Microsoft’s next-generation gaming system, the Xbox 360, debuted last week. While the Xbox 360 will undoubtedly be the “gotta have it” gift this Christmas, exactly how successful the Xbox 360 will be for Microsoft will not really be known for a few years. The Xbox 360’s competition, the Sony’s PlayStation 3 and Nintendo Revolution, will be hitting the market within a year or so and the gaming masses will soon get to choose which of the three gaming franchises they want to buy into. For the past few years, most gamers have been choosing Sony’s PlayStation 2. Sony enjoys approximately 60% of the console market. Microsoft has around 20% and rising. Some analysts call 20% a success because Microsoft, in its first attempt, was able to take the 2nd place spot from Nintendo. Others say that given the investment Microsoft has made into the Xbox franchise, they could have done better. For the Xbox 360 to be labelled a success, how much of an increase in market share does Microsoft need to achieve? I personally think a number like 35% would be a great accomplishment. Such a 15% increase would likely come directly out of Sony’s market share, putting Sony and Microsoft almost neck-and-neck.

Ultimately though, no matter how great a gaming console is developed or marketed, success hinges primarily on the quality of the games that are developed for that console. Console manufacturers know this: they sell the consoles at a loss. Profits rely on license royalties from games sold for the console.

With a couple exceptions such as Halo, quality of games is where Sony and Nintendo dominate Microsoft. Will this change with the Xbox 360? I visited Fry’s over the weekend and got a look at some of the launch games for the Xbox 360. Two of the more anticipated launch titles, Call of Duty 2 and Project Gotham Racing 3, were on demo. Nearly every shopper that walked by turned their head and stared at the beautiful HD graphics offered by both games. Even with these first generation of titles, clearly the developers are utilizing the newfound horsepower in the Xbox 360 to make some awesome eye candy. Is killer graphics enough?

Let’s take a look at IGN’s list of the top 10 video games of all time:

#10 Super Metroid/SNES/1994
#9 Star Wars TIE Fighter/PC/1995
#8 Street Fighter II/[Many]/1991
#7 StarCraft/PC/1997
#6 Sid Meier’s Pirates/PC/1987
#5 Super Mario 64/N64/1996
#4 Sid Meier’s Civilization II/PC/1996
#3 Tetris/[Many]/1986
#2 Zelda: Ocarina of Time/N64/1998
#1 Super Mario Bros./NES/1985

What do you notice about this list? Well for starters, the newest game on that list is seven years old. Moreover, none of these top 10 games are for the current generation gaming consoles. The newest of the games on that list are for the now two-generation old Nintendo64. The PC games on that list are just simple, good ol’ 2D games. Digging deeper, if you look at IGN’s reasoning behind choosing each of these games, there is little mention of graphics. Instead, in nearly every case, what was mentioned was great storylines, innovative and depth of gameplay, and intuitive controls.

For me, the two innovative trends in gaming are:

Game Interaction
Dance Dance Revolution isn’t wildly successful because of the graphics. It’s been successful because you get to be in the game. Dancing on the DDR mat is far more visceral than pushing buttons on a controller. A few months ago I bought the Logitech force feedback wheel and pedals for use when playing Gran Turismo. I had been playing the Gran Turismo series for several years with the regular controller and it’s always been a game I enjoyed. With the Logitech wheel/pedals, the fun I have has really gone to the next level. I can honestly say I’m having more fun playing GT4 than I’ve had playing any other game on any console. When will I be able to play a fighting game and actually play by doing the fighting motions? Or play a golf game by actually swinging a club?

Online Gameplay
Definitely the biggest movement in gameplay has been in enabling multiplayer activity through the Internet. No more playing against lame, predictable AI opponents. Online gameplay clearly takes competition to the next level whether the game is sports, first-person shooter or MMORPG. But I think the really cool applications of online play is those that form community gaming experiences out of individual gaming experiences. Games like The Sims or Nintendogs. Remember how big those Tamagotchi virtual pets were? In Nintendogs, you have a virtual pet, but the pet lives in a virtual world thats shared on millions of devices.

Unfortunately, instead of innovating, most game developers are just taking the easy road by re-releasing the same games with better graphics and a couple new elements. What’s next…Tetris 360?

MIT OpenMind Commonsense Project
Learner (you don’t even need to register for this one)

Peekaboom - It’s a fun game and you can see the fruits of your labor using Peekasearch!

Amazon Mechanical Turk

Note: If you’re really bored and want something geek-funny, read the history of the real Mechanical Turk

Back in 2000, in an article titled “Not Your Father’s Internet”, Bill Gates wrote

In many respects, today’s Internet actually mirrors the old mainframe model, with the browser playing the role of “dumb terminal.” All the information you want is located in centralized databases, and served up a page at a time (from a single Web site at a time) to individual users. Web pages are simply an HTML “picture” of the data you need, not the underlying data itself.

What Gates is describing here is the fundamental difference between the Internet infrastructure which stores and exchanges raw information and the Web whose purpose is to convey this information to humans.

Currently, for any type of information, there are often multiple sites each with their own database containing information of that type. Let’s take a simple type of information like classifieds, specifically auto classifieds. There are several sites on the Web that have auto classifieds listings: AutoTrader.com, Craigslist, Cars.com, and many others. Now, if you need to search these classifieds to find a 2001 Honda Civic in your area, you will need to go to each site and perform a search. Horrible.

To be more efficient, you could try a classifieds meta-search site like Oodle which will automate the process of searching several classifieds sites for you and return you a single aggregated result. Sure this is a time saver but there are inherent limitations to meta-search engines. Meta-engines do not, of course, have access to AutoTrader’s database or Cars.com’s database, all they can do is crawl and scrape these sites which is an imperfect process. No matter how much intelligence you can build into the scraper, it will never provide a superbly accurate, comprehensive, or up-to-date set of results. There are other limitations like being only able to search the common denominator of information (if Cars.com differentiates between transmission type but AutoTrader.com does not, then Oodle can’t offer transmission-type search refinement).

This same auto classifieds example can be applied to many types of information: product data, job listings, news articles, etc. It is a coincidence that these are the same information types found on Google Base? Of course not.

Ultimately what we humans want is the perfect set of information matching a given search. Any search engine, if limited to searching humanly readable documents (e.g. HTML, PDF, etc.) will never be able to provide perfect information. A better search engine will have access to raw, unadulterated, structured information.

Google Base is simply an attempt to unify the data found in the databases of the world. It’s not sexy, but raw information isn’t sexy. While you and I can add our own data to Google Base, the real power is in the bulk data upload. Imagine if the major classifieds sites continuously uploaded their data to Google Base. Google Base would then become the ultimate classified search. Now, of course, that’s not going to happen so easily because a site like Craigslist, whose value comes entirely from the information in their database (some would argue that Craigslist has other significant value-adds like its user community and simplistic interface), will effectively be putting itself in the fast-lane towards extinction.

However, if eBay were to upload auction listings to Google Base, that would be great for eBay because it would allow Google to more effectively search eBay auction listings. Unlike in Craigslist’s case, it would not threaten eBay’s existence. That’s because for eBay, the auction data is just one part of the puzzle in the auction process. eBay still owns the surrounding processes, like bidding and payment, which are necessary for the auction data to be significant. I doubt Google really has any desire to get into the auction vertical. Google just wants to organize information, not build verticals around this information.

I’m sure most of you AIM users noticed that when you logged in today, you had a couple new items in your buddy list under the group “AIM Bots”. I noticed it as well and, like you, my first instinct was “wtf?”. I was just about to delete them from my buddy list when my curiosity got the best of me and I opened up a chat window with MovieFone and said ‘hello’. I was greeted with:

its Rishi: hello
MovieFone: Hey there. Just ask type a film name, actor or director any time and I’ll tell you what’s playing.

I proceeded to play around with it, typing in a sequence like ‘Jarhead’, ‘94304′ and got local movie showings for the movie Jarhead. The text interface is very easy to follow and response time is minimal. If you’re an AIM user (you don’t need the AIM client, 3rdParty clients work fine) I highly recommend you check it out next time you’re looking for movie showings. You’ll save a lot of time versus having to load up the movie website of your choice and searching for the same information.

They also launched a shopping bot called ShoppingBuddy. I was somewhat less impressed by it but still it is an interesting attempt at a text-based shopping search.

The most intriguing aspect is that anyone can create their own bot relatively easily using AIM chat API’s which are available in many languages. Here’s an example of a simple Perl-based Amazon AIM Bot. This rudimentary example only accepts an ASIN as input, queries Amazon via their REST interface, and spits out product details. Given the fact that most of Amazon’s db is accessible via REST, this simple bot can easily be expanded upon.

For information like sports scores, stock quotes, traffic reports, etc. where it is straightforward to understand what information the user is asking for based on their input (’94304′ into a weather bot, ‘Yankees’ into a sports score bot, ‘GOOG’ into a stock quote bot), I think such chat bots are an efficient and convenient medium - more so than the Web.

Side Note:
One thing I have yet to try is using these AIM bots via my cell phone (all the carriers have some way to access the AIM service even if it’s just a clumsy SMS-based interface). It seems like this is an interesting alternative to “mobile search” services like 4INFO, a startup which provides information access via SMS. While services like these supposedly employ AI techniques to understand what the user is asking for, these companies plan to drive revenue thru advertising which will be delivered along with the reply message. As someone who would get ADBLOCK as my personalized license plate if it was available, I could imagine myself preferring to use advertising-free sources of information even if they were less sophisticated. Of course there are other issues facing mobile search like the fact that most carriers still charge for SMS. This fact alone has kept me using WAP as my source of mobile information. (Yes I know most carriers also charge for data access but Verizon + 3rdParty WAP gateway = free WAP for me!)

While my intent for this blog is not to just syndicate other blog content, I will do so when I find items that are unique and thought-provoking. One such example is a post by Bob Parsons (founder of Parsons Technology and more recently Go Daddy). He wrote a really great piece on his attitude towards dealing with problems he faces in both his personal and business lives. If you’ve got problems (and I know you do), you owe it to yourself to read what Mr. Parsons has to say on the topic.

My favorite line:

The obstacles you face do not get in the way of you living your life – the obstacles you face are your life. So why not change your perspective and simply enjoy the process of dealing with them.

This is sort of reminiscent of the message that Nissan popularized “Life is a journey, enjoy the ride” but I think the way Parsons puts it is more pragmatic.

The link:
Problems. They can ruin your day if you don’t have the right perspective. Here’s a secret and a few mind tricks. Handle any problem. Make your business more successful.

If you find this interesting, I highly recommend you poke around his blog and read more of what he has to say. The first time I landed on his blog, I ended up spending a couple hours reading through his posts from the past several months.

Shawn “Jay-Z” Carter, Sean “Diddy” Combs, Russell Simmons, Damon Dash.

What do these four men have in common? They are all African-American, self-made business moguls who each have a net worth of well over $200MM (almost $500MM in Russell Simmons’ case). Each has used the fame and money they made in the world of hip-hop and parlayed it into huge business empires that include record labels, clothing companies, restaurants, film subsidiaries, beverage brands, and magazines to name a few.

As a result of their success, they each have tremendous influence in the hip-hop community and, as a result, tremendous influence over a large percentage of America’s youth, especially African-American youth. Because of the image that is portrayed by the music, music videos, and other media in the hip-hop world, a lot of kids might conclude that the two best ways to become rich and successful is by becoming either a sports star or a recording artist.

How cool would it be if Jay-Z announced that he was going to use his money to start investing in technology. Let’s say for starters, a fund called Roc-A-Tech that focused on investments in consumer-oriented technology ventures started by young African-American engineers. How cool would that be? The reason why I said “consumer-oriented” is because these ventures would leverage the fame of Jay-Z and friends in the company’s marketing efforts. That’s a huge advantage in itself. If done right, it would be a win for everyone. The fund would further add to Jay-Z’s wealth. But more importantly, he would send a powerful message to the hip-hop community: Science is cool. Entrepreneurship is cool. Use it to get where I am.

I can’t think of any group of four individuals who, through their personal image and business-activities, have more influence on such a large, diverse chunk of America’s youth. They certainly have the money and pull to do it. And they definitely have demonstrated the entrepreneurial spirit to do it as well. Besides, how many Sand Hill venture capitalists can say that they went from being a struggling drug dealer in NYC housing projects to having a net worth of $320MM in less than 15 years?

I find it both funny and annoying when I hear people say stuff like:

1) I really want to start a company, I’m just waiting for an awesome idea!
2) We’re not telling anyone what we’re doing. If someone finds out, they’ll steal our idea and we’ll be screwed.
3) Every time I think of a cool idea, I find other companies already doing the same thing so I give up.
4) Yeah it’s a problem, but I’m sure Google or Yahoo! is already planning to do it so there’s no point in pursuing it myself.

Paul Graham (among other achievements, founded and sold ViaWeb to Yahoo! and is founder of an early stage VC, Y-Combinator) shares his thoughts on ideas for startups. As is typical with his writings, I found this essay enjoyable to read and filled with real, actionable advice.

If you find yourself making statements like the ones above, you should read it. It might change your attitude.

Just wanted to give a quick congrats to Huston Street for winning AL Rookie of the Year. The poise and confidence that he displays on the mound, in even the stickiest of situations, is uncanny for a 21 year old closer. Couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.