Gaming via the cloud

More and more things are moving to the cloud. The hype around OnLive and their solution for “Cloud Gaming” reached a fever pitch in early 2009. By years end they had a beta running. The following is a demo by CEO Steve Perlman to students at Columbia. As more things move to the “cloud” it offers interesting opportunities for new forms of social interaction. The following vid is cued to the demo section. But there is interesting info throughout the vid and Perlman gives a nice overview of the platform and biz model.

Filtering the news and tv

This past week I came across two filtering / aggregation projects which were both developed within internal lab divisions – one from url shortening service Bit.ly and the other from Google.

Bitly.tv takes the 2 billion plus links that flow through the service and filters them to find trending vids. Based upon Bit.ly’s own bitrank algorithm which measures popularity, persistence and velocity in an attempt to predict what could go viral. I would imagine Bit.ly is swimming in interesting trending data that can be monetized in a variety of ways. This marks the first of a number of filtering projects that the company plans to rollout.

Living Stories is a collaboration between Google, the New York Times, and the Washington Post. An experiment to rethink the presentation of the news in an online environment. The effort aggregates a collection of stories surrounding a topic, presents a nice timeline view and attempts to harness a community discussion around the newsworthy topics. It’s early yet but you could see this merging at some point with google reader. I’d love the ability to trace linkage and timelines between news stories.

Future of Text

With the excitement building around Apple’s announcement of a tablet device rumored to be called the iSlate – I hope in 2010 we’ll see digital magazines and books step into the transmedia fold. The integration between apps, APIs, and a strong movement towards standardizing “activity streams” across social services present fertile ground for transmedia storytelling. Character extensions, augmented reality, supporting materials, back stories, experience hyperlinking that ties into online / offline events not to mention real-time interactions between readers all are fuel for rich transmedia experiences. A re-design of what a book and / or magazine experience can be, have the potential to shake some of the issues that the publishing industry has been struggling with lately. Could Apple’s announcement and new tablet usher in a next gen of a print experience? Hardware has the potential to change consumption behavior. It also has the opportunity to establish new revenue streams something that the publishing industry desperately needs. But the content needs to be something that readers will seek out and most importantly something that creates a quality experience while containing a strong value proposition. Only time will tell if readers are ready and if the publishing industry is up for the challenge of innovating a print experience that defies convention.

The following vid shows some nice design concepts around a tablet and the rethinking of a magazine. What I’d like to see is a rethink on the content, interactions and transmedia extensions – it seems like this could be the prefect time to rethink the digital print experience. To me the real excitement is how a tablet can become a storyworld gateway and in many cases it won’t be what the editor places on screen – it will be the connections between.

Mag+ from Bonnier on Vimeo.

(hat tip 4 the vid Film Futurist )