News and Analysis

Nasty stuff on Dell is brought to light.  More depressing Fraudclosure-related stuff – including book form! News as games (or games as news!) Plus the inevitable picture of how badass Karl Urban Looks! It's must-know geeky news – with a picture of Karl Urban.

Career:
A pretty good idea: a job-search specific business card.

Economics/Geekonomics:
Sigh. Some petty fraud in the Fraudclosure mess: document fees. Oddly, if this is more widespread it may get more attention on Fraudclosure because it's easily understandable.

If you want to get depressed in book format, there's a new book out called "The Monster" which looks at predatory lending. An exerpt is here, and yes, I'm tempted.

Geek Law:
I'm vaguely putting this under 'Geek Law' since I'm not sure where it should go. Basically it appears Dell lied or at least danced around issues involving a LOT of faulty computers. I vaguely feel this will be taken in stride by the public, but I'm not so sure in these times. Could mean problems for Dell, certainly means plenty of lawsuit material.

Comics:
More on the Batman Live show: which apparently focuses on the origin of Robin. I confess it sounds pretty fascinating and grand – and I suspect the Robin origin story is a great way to get a younger audience into the show (which sounds like it's the intention). I don't see this necessarily spawning any imitators because Batman is, in the end, relatively normal compared to aliens and mutants, and thus easier to do as a live action show.

OK it's all over the internet, so here's Karl Urban as Judge Dredd. I'm pretty positive on the film and sense a chance for a series, and Urban is such chameleon I'm confident he'll do good. Actually I think that this is quite good for him as I don't feel he's really found a "vehicle" that he deserves.

Media:
Games fused with news? Georgia Institute of Technology's Digital Media Program is researching the idea. I'm not quite sure where this could go – and the initial efforts seem simplistic – but the idea is intriguing. Why not drop these folks a line to find out more or get involved?

Yahoo may be having it's problems, but it hired a pretty powerful bunch of people for it's entertainment page. I figure Yahoo really needs to focus on distinguishing itself, and distinguishing itself in media is one way to do it. It'll make them more appealing to AOL when they buy them out . . . (and yes, I'm figuring that's still a possibility).

Publishing:
Amazon to allow e-Book gifting this Christmas. Right on time.

Science:
OUCH. Roche cuts 4,800 jobs and hundreds of them are in San Francisco icon Genentech. It doesn't seem surprising, but . . . well, ouch. Don't think they should go off of a potential employer list (the cuts seem specialize) but it does make them seem a bit less sure.

Technology:
Fan-To-Pro Crush Object Salesforce is doing great financially (and may I say doing well in a reasonable, not-bubble way). I consider Salesforce to be one of those companies that any working geek should keep in mind. Also, they're going to be making a free version of their microblogging software, Chatter.

Television:
Cheaper and smaller cable tiers sound cool, but this author notes this gets you closer and closer to ala carte pricing. He also notes in a way a channel is also a bundle of things . . . and consumers may ask why they even need channels. Great read – and for my money, ala carte of some kind is coming, it's just a matter of time.

Video Games:
Seven45 cuts staff. This does not surprise me.

QUESTION OF THE DAY: Will we go to ala carte cable one day – or just straight to program-by-program? Or something else?

– Steven Savage

MySpace and Facebook friend each other, and . . . oh you know that's the main story, but there's plenty else to keep up on!

Economics/Geekonomics:
MERS is going to be investigated. A look at the whole mess behind the loan system . . . company . . . thing. This could be a shallow nothing, or it could yield a lot of info on the whole mess, so stay tuned.

Matt Stoller discusses how we've gone from sharecropping to debtcropping, noting how the debt treadmill is messing up our society and economy . . . further. Some thought provoking stuff here.

Comics:
The casting for the Superman film begins. Also a good point is made in this article that post Potter, Warner will probably want more big hits and has a lot of properties at its fingertips . . .

Publishing:
Mega-Big econo-political magazine The Economist comes out for the iPad. That is big news because the Economist is an insanely popular magazine, and how it succeeds or fails at this is going to be watched.

Social Media:
Facebook and MySpace are going to get integrated with SOME data, which is causing people to figure it's over for MySpace. The MySpace CEO says otherwise. One thing I can guarantee – speculation is gonna be rampant.

Also Facebook further makes a move against Google with the option to make Facebook your homepage.

Technology:
Either this is utterly brilliant or going to prove to be stupid – but I like it. Plastic Jungle raises $10 million for its gift card exchange business. Thats a nice amount of money, but what a great business idea – because really, how many times to gift cards sit and not get used?

Marketo gets $25 million. They're a northern-Silicon Valley company that does management of email marketing and lead generation, and seem to be doing pretty good. Might be resume worthy.

Video Games:
There's now a cross-mobile platform MMO.

And there they are! OnLive to launch its Microconsole so they're not bound to the computer. At $99 that's a pretty nice deal, smart bit of marketing. I haven't dug up much on OnLive that says people think it's changing the world, but this may help . . .

QUESTION OF THE DAY: Avoiding the MySpace/Facebook discussion, what do you think the next big "cooperative" effort in Social Media is?

– Steven Savage