Jon Peddie Blogs

Digital Reality and Adobe

Posted by Kathleen Maher on May 8th 2013 | Discuss
Categories: Blogs, General Interest
Tags: adobe adobe max

The ability to translate the physical into the digital and vice versa is rapidly changing our world. Adobe startled us at their annual Adobe Max conference. The company demonstrated its experiments in hardware; something we did not expect to see. The company demonstrated a new pen design, a ruler, and a digital white board for magazine production. The pen is a real marvel. I talked to Geoff Dowd, senior experience design lead at Adobe, and he’s mighty proud of the pen. He said Adobe realized if they wanted a pen truly useful for their users, then it had to be designed…

Travel insights

Posted by Kathleen Maher on April 29th 2013 | Discuss
Categories: Blogs, Games
Tags: 3d adobe vfx game

Industry is facing the same issues all over the world - it’s just the timing that changes If you care, I’ve been pretty much on the road since early March. I’ve enjoyed myself and I’m possibly smarter, though I’m further behind on my work with each airplane ride. In fact, at a certain point I may just have to stay out of town permanently rather than face the music about where various deliverables might be. As you could read in this paper, I’ve been to SXSW, NAB, COFES, Smart Geometry, and the FMX conference. We haven’t quite gotten to writing up Smart…

New technologies for old problem

Posted by Kathleen Maher on April 10th 2013 | Discuss
Categories: Blogs, Games
Tags: 3d adobe vfx game

Could the game industry really be the source of salvation? Years ago, when I worked at a publishing house I was on a committee to figure out how the company would go digital. This was a publishing company that was already more than a hundred years old. It had hundreds of titles and millions of back issues. Usually we spent the first part of every meeting staring at each other in horror. The last 15 minutes were dedicated to screaming at each other. A big part of the problem was we didn’t even understand what was meant by “going digital.” By…

Opening at NAB

Posted by Kathleen Maher on April 9th 2013 | Discuss
Categories: Blogs, Content Creation
Tags: tv nab luxology sony

  As the person on the monorail said, “it’s raining, we might as well go to the sessions.” The weather is surprisingly unpleasant for Las Vegas but inside, there is a lot going on. Perhaps no other industry has gone through so many changes as the TV industry. TV doesn’t mean networks or cable it means video. We’re all broadcasters now. This year 4K is a given. At CES 4K television sets were on exhibition. At NAB the content makers are racing to get 4K content created. But why, you might ask, the distribution channels aren’t even built yet. Content is…

Technology’s dark side is getting brighter

Posted by Kathleen Maher on March 28th 2013 | Discuss
Categories: Blogs, General Interest
Tags: kacynski sxsw unibomber

One of the panels at SXSW that we didn’t actually see but really really wish we did was a debate between University of Michigan at Dearborn philosophy lecturer David Skrbina, billed as the Unabomber’s pen pal, and writer/philosopher Peter Ludlow from Northwestern University. As you might expect, Skrbina goes to some lengths to distance himself from Kaczynski’s crimes, but he points out that the guy did have some valid points when it came to the dangers of technology. Skrbina cites cellphone addiction, toxic stress levels, ADD, autism, and a whole host of mental disorders as side effects of our love affair…

The Cult of Maker prays for a burst-resistant bubble

Posted by Randall Newton on March 26th 2013 | Discuss
Categories: Blogs, Content Creation
Tags: sxsw 3d printing dotcom bubble

3D printing shows signs of resiliance Most of us at Jon Peddie Research are old enough to have witnessed more bubble moments in the tech industry than we care to recall. Like stock market bubbles (to which they are usually connected at the bubble-hip) tech bubbles start with hype, grow with enthusiasm, float on a greedy breeze, and pop when poked by a pin of bitter unfulfilled expectations. Most of the promises made during the dotcom bubble era (1997-2001) came true only after a series of spectacular failures, when “burn rate” (the speed at which a start-up could spend its investors’…

What goes around, comes around

Posted by Kathleen Maher on February 27th 2013 | Discuss
Categories: Blogs, Content Creation
Tags:

Watch out, looks like bricks and mortar are coming around. Somewhere, some time or another I’m reasonably sure someone around here predicted the end of bricks and mortar, and just a few short years ago, as we rummaged the desolate aisles of failing record stores and bookstores, that day seemed to be coming sooner rather than later. But, a funny thing happened on the way to oblivion. The champions of digital are opening their own retail stores. Apple started it all, as you might expect, and there have been sporadic efforts from Samsung, Sony, and others. Microsoft,  eager to rebuild its…

The Year of the Snake

Posted by Kathleen Maher on February 12th 2013 | Discuss
Categories: Blogs, Content Creation
Tags:

Chinese New Year is a major celebration in the Bay Area. For at least a week in the city, the sound of fireworks is a day and night constant, and a casual walk downtown will almost certainly be complicated by hit and run Lion Dances. This year is the year of the Snake and it can’t come to soon. The year of the Snake promises prosperity. Snakes are crafty creatures that like to be hidden and protected. They're successful creatures but if they have a major fault it's that they can be greedy and they can be stingy.  So, beware. This…

The lost fortnight

Posted by Kathleen Maher on January 29th 2013 | Discuss
Categories: Blogs, Content Creation
Tags:

Maybe a 12-step program is called for It was a short little work trip. No real heavy lifting would be needed on the road, but a Windows device for ongoing projects would be nice, so I thought I’d take along the Windows 8 Surface RT device we’ve been sharing in the office. Slim, lightweight, long battery life, just the thing for four days on the road. Except for one thing: it broke. Now, I’m not going to go on and on about how this machine broke because that stuff happens, especially with early product and all that. And besides, I’ve already…

CES 2013, a major industry transition point?

Posted by Kathleen Maher on January 15th 2013 | Discuss
Categories: Blogs, Content Creation
Tags:

Aren’t they all? Not necessarily So, what have we learned from CES 2013 that we didn’t know before? Most of us now know that Las Vegas is not as much fun as it’s cracked up to be. I will also say there are some LV vets who can show you a thing or two about Las Vegas. You can have a much better time, but it might be better for your health if you stayed away from those people. Otherwise you’ll be waking up with a Karaoke hangover. For that reason, I’m not going to tell you who they are. The…