Firetop

This evening I attended my first British Interactive Media Association event at the BT Centre in Central London. I finally became a member of BIMA last month so that I could attend this event entitled ‘The Great Facebook Debate’. Facebook has seen phenomenal growth in the UK in the past twelve months - now at ten million users according to one of the evening’s slides. However, it’s not really clear to me how anybody is going to monetise this social networking tool without impacting on the user experience; yesterday whilst logged into Facebook I was delivered a leaderboard ad for ‘Phoenix University, Arizona’ – you would have thought that my detailed profile would more than adequately provide a better optimised advertising experience for my demographic! Where’s Google Adsense or Amazon ‘related products’ generating referral commission? (more…)

For the past week BBC online has been quoting games producer and researcher ‘Emma Westecott’ who says ”Although women outnumber men in playing games online, only 18% of game developers were women”. “Hang on a minute” I thought to myself when reading the article - “Women outnumber men in playing games online… since when?”. I play on Xbox Live for at least ten hours each week, and in three years I’ve only come across two female gamers (and one of those could actually have been a small whiny American boy). Xbox Live was reported in March to have hit the six million member mark - are more than 3 million of those members women, and if so where are they? Since moving to the Xbox 360 in 2005 I had (until yesterday) met absolutely no females at all (more on that later). On closer examination of global industry metrics and demographics, it seems that what is crucial here is the definintion of a ‘female gamer’. (more…)

Since I wrote a posting detailing what ‘Microsoft Online SVCS‘ represents on a credit card statement (it’s for Xbox Live subscriptions), it has gone on to be the most popular entry I ever made. One would imagine that when people find my page, their mind is put at ease - or at least little Billy gets told off by his mother for borrowing her VISA card, and promptly loses hours of fun when she calls Xbox Support. However, of the many public comments made on that entry, so many people have said they were seeing multiple payments going out of their account, or were completely baffled by the existence of a payment at all. Having read about the experiences of Kevin Finisterre - a gamer threatened online with having his account hacked, and promptly discovering the next day that it had been… I’m beginning to wonder if the credit card hacking problem could be bigger than Microsoft are letting on. (more…)

A few weeks back, whilst on a night out in Crawley, I was very concerned about an ID scanning system which seems to have come into force. Called ‘Clubscan’ it seems to have crept into use across the UK at pubs and clubs, to build up a database of UK citizen IDs by scanning driving licenses and passports. These records are associated with unknown details with potential for marketing. More worrying is that this scheme does not seem to have been launched with any proper thought to data security. (more…)

I bought a Toshiba Satellite Pro laptop a few weeks ago, I got sick of the iBook to be honest - it’s pretty but the CD drive packed up (I’m definitely a PC man!). To make life easier I wanted a docking station so that I could come and go quickly, to and from my office. Instead I had to settle for a port replicator. This handy device plugs into the laptop on a USB port, and everything else plugs into it - saving me the hastle of inserting and removing multiple connections from the laptop each day. However, I did discover a keyboard and mouse ’PS2′ problem with this particular model - the ‘Toshiba Port Replicator II’. (more…)