Writer, Agilist, Elder Geek
More financial meltdowns, less adult content on Vudu, and more money for Zillion TV! Change your channel to "Geek Career News" and let's see what's on!
Career:
10 ways LinkedIn helps in a job search – Short, sweet, and useful.
Poewar, a writer's resource, has a dynamite job hunting to do list that's good advice for anyone.
Economics/Geekonomics:
Freddie Mac seems to be worried about more home foreclosures – I'm more concerned about commercial real estate, but only in that seems to have a bigger chance to go bad. This is Not Good.
Geek Law:
Yelp is involved in a class action lawsuit over review removal and claims of blackmail pay-to-remove-bad-reviews. This is one I just found out about, so I bring it up due to Yelp's prominence. I'm not sure how legit the claims are. On the heels of discussion of Zynga's past and the ever-increasming prominence of internet reviews and data, this is important to follow as it may set precidents.
Video:
ZillionTV gets $10 million investment from Qwest. Good for Zillion, which launches in a few months. Good for Qwest who gets a piece of the action. Possibly good for you if Zillion goes and uses that money to hire people. ZillionTV, for all it's doing, often gets overlooked in the news, which might be an advantage to them as they can come out of no-where into the market.
Wal Mart buys streaming movie startup Vudu, and closes its adult section. Not surprising, but it brings up the question of what else Wal Mart may remove to maintain it's image (as one commentor notes, you can't get pornography, you can get horror films). I'm not sure Wal Mart really knows what its getting into with the streaming movie business and think this isn't the last time we'll see them pulling things out of Vudu.
Video Games:
Bluehole Studios of Korea has created a new gaming company, En Masse Entertainment in Seattle. First – well new company in Seattle, so send resumes. Secondly, they have a good starting staff. A company to watch – even if you don't send a resume.
Take Two opens a Japanese office – Previously they did it via partnerships. Considering some of the great properties they have, this is a good move for them.
Question of the Day: Does Wal-Mart's move to clean up Vudu weaken their hand in getting people interested in the service?
– Steven Savage
So recently I put the game Dungeon Fighter on my Asus Netbook. Dungeon Fighter is an interesting game – a side-scrolling beat-em-up game and an MMO at the same time. You play one of several unique classes (that at times vary from fantasy archetypes or expand them), fight monsters in modular dungeons, and have colorful sprite-based fun. It's easy, simple, surprisingly deep, and the Priest class whacks enemies to death with giant crosses, scythes, and rosaries, so how could I resist.
The game is of course free-to-play, but you can blow cash on getting extra equipment, respecs to re-build your character, and, of course, character clothing so you don't look like everyone else. Very standard model.
So as I played this game, I debated if I wanted to get some credits in the game for extras. It suddenly struck me that the freemium, free-to-play, and other free-but models differ from the usual monthly-charge MMO games in another way besides the obvious.
They allow you to timeshift your expenses.