Jon Peddie Blogs

Gaming PCs and consoles; those damn numbers

Posted by Jon Peddie on August 24th 2010 | Discuss (1)
Categories: Blogs, Games
Tags: pc gaming console shipments console gaming pcs vs. consoles game developers gaming machines

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 press-release that stated, “Annual shipment volumes for the PC Gaming hardware market in 2009 were over two times larger than the combined Wii, PlayStation  2, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 console units shipped in the same period. They then estimated the worldwide number of consumers gaming with discrete graphics solutions on their…

Social Media #2 — Getting Started

Posted by Andy Marken on August 15th 2010 | Discuss (0)
Categories: Blogs, The Market
Tags: social networking, marketing

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 thinking to social media.  People don’t want, expect, appreciate marketing messages being pushed at them on the Web. According to a study by Digital Brand Expressions, nearly all of the firms surveyed in the consumer industry are committed to carrying out a social media program.   Research where respondents at participating companies…

Social Media – A Company’s Friend, Foe

Posted by Andy Marken on August 2nd 2010 | Permalink
Categories: Blogs, Content Creation
Tags: social networking, jpr, jon peddie research, andy marken, marken associates

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 for a company that exists. As a result, companies, departments, individuals are setting up social network pages, signing up for microblogs like Twitter, establishing management/marketing blogs on their Web site and establishing customer forums on the Web. The challenge is to understand the true value of social media for your business, activity.…

Quadrillions and Quadrillions of Cycles

Posted by Jon Peddie on July 24th 2010 | Permalink
Categories: Blogs, Engineering and Development
Tags: rendering, processors, cloud computing,

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 enough. We looked at the installed base of x86 and GPU processors, applied a factor for the average number of cores and developed the following chart. Cores alone don’t tell the whole story, the real measure is how millions of operations per second can the processor execute. A general figure of merit…

The New Visualization

Posted by Jon Peddie on July 10th 2010 | Permalink
Categories: Blogs, VIZ-SIM
Tags: nvidia ati amd radeon eyefinity 3d surround quadro large scale visualization add-in-boards evans & sutherland

In order to design automobiles, airplanes, search for oil (or contain it), and examine artifacts like a 2000-year-old mummy, large scale visualization systems are needed.Visualization system can mean different things to different people so a little definition is required to avoid confusion and controversy.I make a distinction between large-scale and localized visualization systems. A localized system, by my definition, is a single monitor used by an investigator and may be shown to colleagues, on occasion. Visualization systems employing voxels for medical research is a typical example, as are individual product lifecycle management (PLM) visualization systems. Visualization systems are also often confused…

Nintendo goes with DMP for S3D graphics engine

Posted by Jon Peddie on June 20th 2010 | Permalink
Categories: Blogs, Engineering and Development
Tags: nintendo, 3ds, 3d, gaming, stereographic, autostereoscopic

Today, DMP announced in Japan that Nintendo has adopted DMP OpenGL ES 1.1 compliant PICA200 for the 3DS. The new Nintendo 3DS is an amazing little device. The DS has already been a beloved machine attracting over 100 million users since 2004. Not many products (that I can think of, at least) can match that volume of enthusiasm or the customer base. And it’s self perpetuating because the installed base attracts developers which create new games which attracts new consumers – it is a perfect ecosystem. Nintendo has experimented with S3D for years, starting with the Nintendo Virtual Boy monochrome system, and…

E3 Press event – press need not attend

Posted by Jon Peddie on June 16th 2010 | Permalink
Categories: General Interest, Show reports
Tags:

Against my better judgment I went to E3 two days early so I could attend the “press events” of the console companies. These events are often associated with some form (ahem) of entertainment. They are also oversubscribed, overcrowded, and usually uninformative. Why then are these megamillion dollar extravaganzas held? What’s the ROI for Microsoft, Nintendo, or Sony? Good question. It’s a matter of impressions PR people live for and get measured by the number of impressions they deliver for the dollar. An impression is measured by taking the readership of a magazine, website, radio show, etc, and dividing the costs of…

The business plan:  selling the entrepreneurial idea

Posted by Andy Marken on May 23rd 2010 | Permalink
Categories: Blogs, General Interest
Tags:

With an estimated $800+ billion in funding available for the entrepreneur annually (even in bad times), you may think that venture capital and R&D partnership firms would be falling over each other to fund the latest wave of scientific and technological proposals. Wrong. Venture capital companies such as R&D Funding Corp., Early Stages Co., Mayfield Fund, Asset Management, and others receive an average of 100 technology and service/support proposals each month, even when the economy is “less than desirable.” Unfortunately, instead of paving the way for funding, the proposals are often more detrimental than helpful. The sad truth is that the…

A New Model Cometh

Posted by Ted Pollak on April 29th 2010 | Permalink
Categories: Blogs, Games
Tags: gaming ea mmog battlefield bad company 2 subscription model

One of the biggest challenges for PC gaming is the revenue and refresh models. When I refer to refresh model I am talking about creating sequels. Often there is so much pressure to crank out another version of the game that sequels can end up deflating the franchise and ultimately hurting the game. Generally MMOG’s avoid this phenomenon because they add content along the way. This refreshes the franchise without forcing the gamer to the cash register for a new base software package. This is a better model and the only time the gamer should be forced to the cash register…

TV revolutions; the struggle continues

Posted by Kathleen Maher on April 28th 2010 | Permalink
Categories: Blogs, The Market
Tags: nvidia gaming s3d lenticular 3d ip tv autostereoscopic 3d glasses 3d tv

Revolutions always take a long time. It’s the shooting and fighting part that goes fast. At NAB it looks like we’re just winding up the shooting and fighting part for S3D but that doesn’t mean we know who wins. Clearly, obviously, and totally for sure man, 3D is going to be a fact of life in the movie theaters and it’ll certainly be a novelty for home movies and sports. But, the thing is, TV watching is mutating so fast that we’re not so sure what people will be watching in 2015 and what they’ll be watching it on. We participated…