Jon Peddie Research - a technically oriented marketing, research, and management consulting firm in the graphics industry.

EDITORIAL : The problem with crystal balls

Techwatch September 2nd 2010

Twice this past week I was confronted with soothsayers, magicians, and fortune tellers—you know—industry analysts and company guidance managers. One of the problems with having grown up in this industry (but, I’d like to point out, not being grown up thank you) is that you’ve heard and seen it before—a state that feels something like Run Lola Run, Groundhog Day, and déjà-vu. A highly involved, if not evolved, friend called the other day to bemoan the Rodney Dangerfield treatment S3D seems to be getting from the press, and a few commissioned analysts. Seems those hired guns had discovered the consumers don’t really want and may not like S3D. Really? Hmmm, now who would commission such a study—maybe someone who has a warehouse full of old TVs and needs to unload them before the consumer starts snapping up the new 240Hz big screen S3D ready sets. Nah, I’m sure it was a totally objective and well documented survey based on solid methodology. Something like this: Hey Mr. Joe 6-pack (or Joe the plumber—no matter) do you think it’s likely you’ll be buying a $4,000 big screen TV that requires you to wear glasses and may make you nauseous? No? See, …

Gaming PCs and consoles; those damn numbers

Someone said you can make statistics prove anything you want and that person is right. It all comes down to what you use for definitions of the item under scrutiny.  It also has to do with how you count things. The PC Gaming Alliance (PCGA) recently put out a …

Social Media #2 — Getting Started

Social media—1:1 marketing and communications is so new, it sounds glamorous. Some see it as a new sense of freedom, romantic even.  Just you and him (or her) bonding, building a relationship, building sales. The first thing the company has to do is forget about employing their mass advertising …

Social Media – A Company’s Friend, Foe

There’s so much information and misinformation surrounding the power and magic of social media, company management and marketing probably feel like a deer hypnotized by the headlines of a semi on the highway. We all know that word-of-mouth “advertising” is the most powerful – good and bad – promotion …

Quadrillions and Quadrillions of Cycles

The number of processors, both x86 and GPU, available for rendering has been increasing exponentially. Rendering is one of the applications that can soak up all the cycles that are available to it, which is an example of Peddie’s first law – In computer graphics, too much is not …

Jon Peddie to speak at OpenGL BoF at SIGGRAPH 2010

Jon Peddie will be hosting his own Luncheon during SIGGRAPH 2010. As well, Jon will be opening the OpenGL BoF at SIGGRAPH 2010. Complete information on the luncheon is available on the Jon Peddie Research website, and a complete schedule for the OpenGL BoF is available on the Khronos …