Nintendo released the new channel, Nintendo Channel, for Wii recently in Europe. It was released about a week after WiiWare, the channel that enables online shopping and downloading of games. WiiWare is interesting in the sense that we can easily expect some really amazing stuff coming out through that channel, while Nintendo Channel is something that exemplifies why Wii is different from other consoles.

It is an interesting channel in regards to Nintendo’s blue ocean strategy (discuess earlier here by Jeremy), but like many other aspects of Wii, it leaves me wanting more. The channel is basically an advertising/marketing channel for Nintendo. You can download demos, see information and trailers about upcoming games, and some other stuff. One of these additional functionalities is the feedback section, where you can submit feedback back to Nintendo on the games you’ve played on your Wii. You can also enable a tracking feature so that your Wii will send information what you do (the same info it shows in your Message view) to Nintendo and in exchange the channel will recommend you titles and allows you to download demos for DS. All in all, really simple stuff, but the execution is really nice – and dead simple.

I know that one main aspect of Wii is its simplicity and many of the things I think I’d want it to do would just make it too complex. I’m well aware the limitations of the console – most of which seem likeconscious design decisions by Nintendo. The hardware has been optimized for cost and really makes the developers focus on the gameplay (instead of graphics, like on the other next-gen consoles). The software and mutliplayer are made as child-safe as possible, to the point that mutliplayer racing in Mario Kart Wii feels like anonymous one-night-stand-orgy. It’s a bit like with most Apple products, you know the limitations in (mostly) advance and accept them as they are the reason “things just work”.

Remote would be one solution to aforementioned problem, but that of course is totally infeasible solution. Wireless broadband adoption of today doesn’t also warrant spending too much time on making I find it sad that some innovative features are underutilized with the Wii. I’d love that my Mii character would actually be “in the cloud” and propagate through my friends, carrying over my settings and accomplishments. Now, my Mii can only propagate a read-only copy of its appearance across other Wiis. No doubt the authentication scheme for such feature would be a nightmare. I like to fantasize something like this was in the initial vision of Wii, because otherwise I can’t understand why the Wii Remote has storage capabilities. Tying your character to a WiiMiis the global representation of my Wii gaming they could be. The ubiquoitus rules of unlockable content on console games mean that, as it is today, my gaming experience depends on how far the I or owner of the Wii I’m playing has progressed in a game and not how far I have progressed in some Wii. I guess this tradition will remain for all nomad Miis who wander from a firend’s Wii to another.

The current “next-gen” consoles have me split. While Wii is truly exciting and something new, it is a bit too centred still on the age-old Italian plumber. The Playstation 3, on the other hand, has only GTA IV going for it (okay, and Super Rub-a-Dub) and it’s twice the price. Xbox 360 just doesn’t feel right, and that it has like twenty different editions á la Vista doesn’t help. The Wii of course has lots of hidden fees in form of accessorizing (Component cable, Wii Wheel, Wii Fit…), but the other consoles are guilty of this to some extent too.

What interests me in today’s console gaming is multiplayer, both on my sofa and online. Both of these aspects are taken more into account on the Wii, where most gaming has been designed as a group activity. PS3 and Xbox360 have taken the more traditional PC way of mutliplayer and have focused on online only, which is stupid as the expectation that my friends would be online at the same time at their own homes playing the same game is really, really far-fetched. On the other hand, some games insanely enough do not supportmultiplayer on the same console even if they have online-multiplayer. This anti-social tendency I can understand in story-driven games as GTA IV, but not otherwise.

I did answer on Nintendo Channel’s feedback section that, in my opinion, Mario Kart Wii is, in fact, a Hardcore game (as opposed to casual). Once you’ve passed the easiest cups you start to see the classic Nintendoesque features. The game cheats as much as it can in the hard mode, just like in Mario Strikers Charged Football. It’s amazing just how in the last 10 meters or so, I’m hit with all the suffering theWii can inflict on me (red and blue shells, lightning…) just like it’s able to make a goal in the last second despite me trying to tackle the seemingly invincible player with all my players.

It is really exciting to see how Nintendo tries to do new innovative things with Wii. This has been no doubt a risky decision, but it seems to have paid off as Wii is still outselling other consoles, even though its pricing is exactly the same as on the launch date. The other consoles have seen aggressive price cuts, no doubt in part response to the success of Wii.

I’m quite sure that Wii can and will probably surprise us in the future, but I’m afraid the initial design decisions of PS3 and Xbox360 means that they can only replicate or improve, but not innovate. One reason, I guess, is because of people like me, who want to expect certain things from them. There’s no room for innovation when you got expectations on top of long traditions. In those circumstances you can only perform.

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Hello la’ys & gtnlmen,

summer is here (!) and so are various risks associated with UV, swimming, pool-walking, heat, diet, etc.

Did you ever think how knitting could be dangerous for you? Ok, it may be quite weird to consider knitting during summer, unless you are a doily enthusiast or just want to make a personal gift to Jeremy’s artist elephant (an elephant-sweatshirt takes some time)

Think twice before picking up your needles, think about Mazz…

Mazzmatazz, a Dr Who fan with a talent for knitting, published photos and pattern directions of Ood and Adipose, on which BBC Wordwide had copyrights,since they are Dr Who characters. This got her an email in her inbox alerting her on the legal consequences of this act.

Mazzmatazz removed these elements from her website and searched for support from the Open Rights Group on this intriguing situation. It’s not everyday that you risk legal prosecution for buying into a brand symbol.

Is this an exaggerated situation indeed ?

I would say it is, since it interprates the motivation : the “Mazz did nothing more than contrefacon” attitude reduces the creative transformation process to a simple copying reflex.

Then, it sets a miserable legal granularity that drives semiotic diversity to extinction. If nobody can speak, sing, sketch, imitate moves of Adipose without buying copyrights beforehand, then Adipose will not fertilize any other ideas, and will be a symbol quickly forgotten. Save fat !

but wait,

Do we actually have somebody playing tennis in the swimming pool? eh, I mean mixing up the rules of two different business models: If BBC Worldwide is getting royalties from the brand and paraphernalia, it seems to me that Mazzmatazz did not monetize this artwork by selling it directly. If she goes for indirect revenue generation (let’s say from traffic on her site, or publicity, or from boosting her productivity by having a fulfilling hobby, or whatever), let her play on her field. Or else, BBC is bullying “we are competitors, either you like it or not”.

On the other hand, BBC Worldwide, may have needed some field exercises on applied IP law on digital content (mesure the image impact, the propagation speed, the volatility of its arguments). Fair,because when a real crisis is in, I suppose it will be too late to test the legal function.

Or maybe they are doing some buzz about the new cycle of Dr Who series. Knitting is a rather cult activity, exactly like the audience of Dr Who.

Anyway, just in case you got as impressed as I were by this story, remember not to facebook any monument-like castles your cousins built on sand this summer. And let’s hope that this IP hot stream will begin to settle down until Halloween / carnival because I want to pose with my Pink Panther costume. Tara rara, rara…

Georgia

( for a more in-depth legal analysis on the issue, see Andres Guadamuz content, enjoy)

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Can you believe this?

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/v/He7Ge7Sogrk&hl=en]

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Ken Blanchard, the best-selling author of The One Minute Manager (13m copies sold), was the guest of the eBay Speakers Series last week, to present his new book, the One Minute Entrepreneur. I had such a great time listening to him that I read his book in an hour on the same day. Like most of the great speakers, it is really tough to sum up in an article what he said: he presented essentially life stories rather than business ones, without any PowerPoint (and I can tell you that it is pretty unusual in this kind of setting!), but with a lot of humor, modesty and wisdom. For those who are interested in great speakers, you can check out his impressive biography. Since it is hard to share those anecdotes, I’d rather highlight what I liked in his book.

If you want to purchase an entrepreneurship book to know how to approach VCs and start your business, just buy The Art of Start. If you want to understand the mindset of an entrepreneur from a psychological point of view, and how it translates operationally, just buy The E-myth revisited. But if you want something more inspirational, a story on entrepreneurship rather than a business book, then The One minute Entrepreneur is the right choice. It basically relates the story of an entrepreneurial adventure, and highlights the “one minute insights” that we can derive from this story. They can be summarized under 4 Ps:

• Passion: You need to love what you’re doing, otherwise you’ll never accept all the sacrifices that go with your venture; leadership is about love (loving your missions, your people, your customers)
• Profit: You need to find people willing to pay you for what you love, otherwise you have a hobby and not a job, and quickly eating becomes more important than having fun
• Priorities: this is the one I like the most. You should have your priorities in order, and find the right balance in your life. There is a good quote in the book, from the book When Bad Things Happen to Good People from Rabbi Kushner, who says that he never heard anyone on their deathbed say “I wish I had gone to the office more”. And Ken Blanchard seems to be really putting that into practice: he spoke more about his wife during the conference than about his job, he seems completely enthusiastic about his life, and has accepted the bad things that happened to him recently (loss of his house during the fires in San Diego) without too much pain because he has a clearly defined set of priorities.
• People:
  • Entrepreneurship is about mentorship: you don’t have to do everything by yourself, you just have to send a positive energy and a lot of motivation to get people to help you. In the story of the book, it is clear that the entrepreneurs manage to find the advice of the right people at the right moment, and being able to ask for help appears in this case to be their main success factor
  • You need to be a servant leader: you have to empower your people to take decisions (bottom up approach rather than top down). A leader can’t be there during all the interactions with a customer, so he has to give the right power to his employees to make the right decisions during the Moments of Truth of the customer relationship with the company. It reminded me of what Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, mentioned a few weeks ago about creating a strong culture so that your employees do the right thing without being obsessed by processes and rules.
  • You need to help your people get an A: as a professor, Ken Blanchard never understood the need for a normal distribution, and mentions that nobody recruits according to a normal distribution, which is really true! He advocates that in companies, the role of a manager is to make his people get an A rather than grading them. Therefore evaluations shouldn’t be a surprise but only a collection of ongoing discussions.

This book is worth reading for many other insights, and apparently there is a free offer here, so you shouldn’t hesitate. Do you have any suggestions of good entrepreneurship books that you would like to be reviewed here on TIE?

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A week with an iPod Touch… time flies by! a few Pros & Cons so far:

Pros

1) It’s nice, flat (8mm) and light (120g): no bulk here, it’s even more convenient than regular iPods. I haven’t had the chance to test its solidity, but I’m not going to do that voluntarily, even for the sake of scientific progress -sorry.

2) The OS is really intuitive, everything rolls out smoothly and without time-loss. Operating it is nearly a game in itself.

3) The Wi-fi capability is really great, and was one of the main reasons I chose it over a regular iPod. Also, attachments can be opened -which is impossible to do on blackberrys for instance, as far as I know. It is a bit slow, but hey, I didn’t expect anything much faster.

4) Earphones (regular Apple earphones) are pretty comfortable. I often have trouble adjusting to earphones, but not this time, so hurray! However if I wanted to run (which I don’t), I guess I wouldn’t be so happy.

Cons

1) I must say I hate the way it organizes songs with iTunes. I have lots of music with no (or little, or miswritten) ID3 tags, and I litteraly spent a day re-organizing everything, putting right tags and creating lists. Would it have been that hard to be able to keep original folders? (This is a first-approach impression, as I had never installed or extensively used iTunes before. Still, this first impression is a really bad one)

2) The video system is outrageous. It turns out you have to buy an additional software (Quicktime Pro) in order to convert your videos so you can read them on your iPod -and I’m talking legal, .mov movies shot with my point & shoot camera!

3) No plug-ins (flash, shockwave, etc) are accepted while surfing the web -but I imagine it was technically difficult to implement. Still, it is a disappointment.

4) 8 or 16Gb is not a lot. It’s great, but I can’t have ALL my music on it -however I knew that when I bought it, so there.

But nevermind all that, I must say I’m still having lots of fun with my new toy.

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This is once again a post “back to the community”. When I encountered this problem, I looked aroung the net and I found many discussion in different forums, but couldn’t find any solutions. This is how I got things working, your mileage may vary.

I recently got a new computer, but I totally forgot that the printer I use (HP LaserJet 1100) only has a parallel connection while the new computer only has USB ports. Okay, you can get new black/white laser printers for less than 100€, but I happened to have a spare print cartdrige for that too so I’m not in a hurry to get rid of this rather nice printer, which was discontinued by HP in 1998 and which has this really lousy paper tray so that half of my prints end up with noticeable skew. Also, I noticed that there was several different kinds of USB-adapter cables available, which could solve my problem for just 20 – 30 euros!

After a long Google exploring session, I found out that there were some problems and lack of sure knowledge if this worked, especially on Mac OS X.

The Cable

I ended up getting Aten/Deltaco USB-parallel-adapter with DB25 female to USB connections. This cable probably is sold under different names around the world, but I guess the main thing is that most (all) of them has the Profilic Technologies’ IEEE-1284 controller in them. In addition to the old HP LaserJets and DeskJets, it also supports many other printers from other manufacturers (like Epson, Canon and Lexmark).

This is the cable you’re after if you’ve got one the HP printers with just a small connector in the back

This cable goes between your current cable and your computer’s USB port. Because my printer is LaserJet 1100, which doesn’t have the normal-sized connector coming out of it, but a smaller version (like many other HP’s printers of this time), you can’t use a a bit cheaper cable that connects your printer directly to USB. Of course, it doesn’t matter.

If your printer has it, the huge thing in the printer’s back is called Centronics-36 or Cen36 (also known as IEEE-1284A) connector. HP has instead used the smaller version, Mini-Centronics. I’ve no idea if there is a Mini-Centronics <-> USB cable, but because you can extend the Mini-Centronics <-> DB25 (the normal cable, that you used to connect the printer to your computer) with the DB25 <-> USB -cable, I don’t think so.

The box my cable was packaged said that this cable was supported on Win 98 to Win XP and on Mac OS 9 (and it came with one of those annoying tiny-format CD with drivers for Win 98). So, no mention of Mac OS X, but I figured that it would be really odd if a USB-thing would work on Win XP and an earlier version of Mac OS, but not on Mac OS X, so I took the risk. At home, I connected the cable to my printer cable and my computer and everything seemed to work, OS X recognized instantly the “new” printer. This was too easy!

The Problem and a Work-around

There is, unfortunately, one problem. For some unknown reason, after you’ve connected the printer you can only print once on Mac and. After that your jobs won’t get through and you’ll get an interesting error message “GenericClass: Waiting for device” instead. The only known workaround on the net was to reconnect the printer after printing (or restart your computer). The whole thing might be a problem with CUPS USB backend or somewhere (that’s the last operation CUPS logs in Console show before the job gets stuck), Google search doesn’t give a consensus.

Anyway, this isn’t really an acceptable workaround – especially, because it looked like every time you reconnect the USB cable, Mac OS X finds another instance of your printer, which is rather annoying, and you still can print only once. Also, if you have the printer manufacturer’s drivers for Mac OS X, try those instead of using Gutenprint-drivers or some others. The problem with LaserJet 1100 is that HP discontinued the printer way before Mac OS X was released so there aren’t any drivers on HP’s website for it.

Anyway, after a burst of reconnecting madness, I noticed that I had three devices (see image below) listed in the printers. One of them is the Printer-USB-cable controller and you definetly can’t print to it (in a moment on desparation, I tried). I’ve not tried what happens if I print to LaserJet 1100-1 printer, because, for some strange reason, I can print as much as I want with the first, LaserJet 11000! I’ve no idea what happened, but it works and I’m not going to touch in case the voodoo wears off.

This is probably a problem that could be fixed in a later version of CUPS (and some people say that things worked fine before Mac OS X 10.5), which means you might have this exact same issue in other OS running CUPS, like Ubuntu. I wouldn’t hold my breath, though, because we’re talking about 10 years old not-that-well-working-anyway hardware with a mystical adapter. New printers are cheap, but the old HP LaserJets seem to be made to last.

So, I hope this works for others, just reconnect the cable couple of times and don’t mess with the printer setup screen. It’s stupid, but so far I’ve not had any problems in over a month. Please let me know in the comments if you have some suggestions or improvements.

One way to easily fix this problem, I guess, is to get your hands on an old HP JetDirect-printer server (or any other pinter server with parallel connectors). This way you could add the printer directly to your LAN using Ethernet, which is a nice bonus. You should be able to get them off eBay or something or your company’s IT departments closets. The only thing is that these things probably cost more than a new printer, so they probably aren’t worth your while.

PS. I know it’s a miracle in itself that I got a working LaserJet 1100. Many of those didn’t last a year before breaking. HP printers before and after it, though are good, but my earlier LaserJet 6P was just way too slow. The good thing about that one, though, is that it’s network-able with the right, HP first-party-accessory, cable (which I believe is really, really hard to find these days). It is also rumoured that you could shoot a 6P with a shotgun and it still would work.

PPS. If someone has done this same thing by connecting an old printer using this USB-parallel-adapter to a Airport Express/Extreme’s (or other WLAN router’s) USB port and got it working, my congratulations. I’ve not tried it, but I don’t see why it wouldn’t work.

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Hi, Fidji here. In the context of my thesis on the democratization of art via the Internet, I had the chance to interview Alain Romang, in charge of the online communication of Les Abattoirs, a modern and contemporary art museum based in Toulouse (France), which has developed a real Internet strategy to reach a new audience. I find really interesting to understand how the Internet, based on open access, has been used by museums, which have tried for a long time to cultivate their sacred atmosphere, whereas their mission is to make their collections as accessible as possible. Here are the most interesting pieces of the interview.

What is the purpose of the online communication of the museum? Attract different people on the website, or in the museum, or is it essentially a loyalty tool?

The first objective was to give some elements of information on opening hours, driving directions… to an audience that starts all its searches on the Internet. Our stats prove that most of the site visits are related to the planning of a visit to the museum. But what we appreciate is that the Internet is also a way of preparing people to the visit of the museum by giving some background on the artist, so that they really can make the most of the exhibition. We can also follow-up after the visit by providing tools to go deeper into the understanding of a particular piece. In terms of finding a new audience thanks to our online initiatives, it is clearly one of our objectives but we haven’t done any survey to prove that it is working yet. Let’s say that we strongly suppose the correlation between the increase in number of visits on our site and the increase in number of visits of our museum.

You offer the possibility of accessing 2000 pieces of art virtually: do you think that it is possible to feel a real artistic emotion on the screen of a computer?

It is almost a philosophical question, but yes, I sincerely believe it, at least if we believe that there are several types of artistic emotions. In the physical museum, there is a relation to the architecture, to a particular atmosphere, and also the intervention of simpler things such as the reaction of other visitors, that you obviously don’t have online. Which is why you really need to use the most appropriate tools online to compensate this, and some virtual exhibitions have clearly manage to achieve this goal.

Do you think that there is a risk of cannibalization of the offline by the online, if most of the collections are accessible online?

I think that the contrary is more likely. I feel that a certain audience, who is not used to visiting museums (for geographical, cultural or sociological reasons) will be more likely to plan a visit to a museum if it had the opportunity of discovering some pieces online. I believe that both experiences are interesting: the Internet is for example much more appropriate for educative purposes since we can put more information online. The two experiences feed each other but there is no cannibalization.*

What are the different objectives of the tools that you use: video, blog of the museum, Facebook page?

The blog allows a better reactivity. We have created it to talk about news of the museum, events or marginal subjects with a more original view that don’t fit within the website. The possibility of commenting is also interesting, since it is, at least for most museums, a new kind of interaction with the audience. And obviously it improves our referencing on search engines thanks to more content and key words.

Concerning pictures and videos on Flickr/Youtube, it is part of the mission of archiving of the museum, but also allows new interactions: Flickr announced the creation of « pools », which will allow visitors to post their own pictures of the museum directly in Les Abattoirs’ Flickr space.

Facebook is more of an experiment so far. Of course the idea of federating a community around the museum is really interesting, but so far we’ve been there only because it is a tool with an amazing growth and I didn’t want to be “late” on such a tool. And thanks to all the new apps, we find new useful modules to add every day, so it forces us to keep being innovative.

What are the next steps to be sure that your museum will remain on top of the new Internet initiatives?

So far we are focused on improving the current tools: redesigning the blog, feeding Flickr and Youtube, expanding our Facebook network. We also want to develop podcasting, targeted to specific exhibitions. Finally, there is the debate on the presence on Second Life: we have done a simple ROI calculation and it seems that at this stage, the time spent to create Les Abattoirs in Second Life is not justified by the frequentation. Of course it creates some media exposure, but we don’t want to do that only to appear in blogs and newspapers. We want to launch this initiative only when we will have more visibility on our return on that, especially since the hype around Second Life is already declining. But we are watching it closely.

* A survey realized by the Institute of Museum and Library Services proves Alain’s point: it shows that people connected to the Internet go to museums 2.6 times more than people without any access. Among the respondents, 45% have visited both a virtual and offline museum, 50% a real museum only and 5% a virtual museum only.

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