Tough luck, Nintendo

Today will be remembered as the day that Microsoft killed Nintendo.

You may have heard of the Nintendo Wii U, the Wii's older brother. Basically it is a souped up Wii console. The main USP of the U is that they have ditched the USP of the Wii. Gone is the Wiimote, the wand like controller that magically filled Nintendo's pockets and rudely poked a stick into the game console world's side.

Wii(ll)U buy it?

The Wiimote has done something to the games culture that Nintendo have become adept at - making games fun. Microsoft were releasing their next round of Halo and more Gears of War were churning out; the serious gamers had their clawed hands full and their bank accounts empty. The Wii brought a greatly under appreciated demographic into the mix - children. And more importantly their parents. The Wii's approachable Miis and the pure fun of swinging a plastic stick and seeing your avatar swing a tennis racket were a concoction for success. Success that Microsoft and Sony wanted a piece of.

Sony released their blatant 'oh shit why did we not think of that' Play station Move, effectively a Wiimote with a big glowy ball on top, along with their Sixaxis controller - a standard looking PS controller but with accelerometers in.

Microsoft at least upped the ante with their laser ranging, voice identifying, Kinect. Although extremely novel and pretty damn cool, the Kinect falls down on the games for it - development houses have yet to come up with a kind of game that feels a natural use for the (lack of) controller. So even though it might be one of the most impressive bits of kit in the games market, there isn't really a market for the games.
So if it's not the Kinect that will kill Nintendo, what is it?

Well let's go back to the Wii U. So it's a console with greater specs that than the original Wii, that isn't hard as the Wii had very low specs comparatively to its competitors, and in fact the U is still no wower in that department. The USP is the 'second screen' of the controller. Obviously this isn't a new concept, if you care to think back to the Sega Dreamcast. The idea is that the game you are playing on your big screen will have augmented fun on the handheld little touch screen. From maps for your RPG to throwing frisbees and the like. Nintendo have spent a lot of money developing a controller which has a large touch screen, accelerometers and gyroscopes.

What Microsoft have done is realise that you have one of these already.

Some kind of singing game. Each to their own.

Today Microsoft release SmartGlass.

SmartGlass is an application for your phone or tablet which turns it into a second screen for your Xbox. Nintendo's USP just became a SP.
Your average "smart" phone contains a touch screen, accelerometers , gyroscopes, magnetometers, bluetooth, WiFi... the list goes on, so luckily for Microsoft, they haven't had to spend a penny (/dollar/yen) on hardware development.

So as Nintendo are fast in production for their November release date, Microsoft have already jumped the gun and released a product which is better than the Wii U in most ways, without having to actually release a new product. And the best thing is, you don't have to buy a new phone, tablet or console.
Tough luck, Nintendo.

Big Tent

As I was perusing Google+ on Wednesday, I stumbled upon this post by the keen G+ advocate, Robert Llewellyn (Red Dwarf, Scrapheap Challenge). He wrote:

I was going to attend the Google Big Tent event tomorrow up in Watford, then different commitments crop up and now I can't make it.

As it so happens I was planning on visiting my parents, not 15mins drive from Watford. This seemed like too good an opportunity to miss. Now I had not heard anything about this Big Tent event, it had not been advertised at all and seemed to be an invite-only do, however, after a little Googling, I found a registration page.
Seeing as this was the day of the event and that it was still probably invite-only, I thought of it as a bit of harmless fun to fill out the form. So fill I did and to my surprise immediately received a confirmation email claiming to be looking forward to seeing me on the big day.
Again, I thought this was too good to be true and that some automated thing had messed up and I'd get to the event and be turned away by a big burly bouncer looking up and down on a list which didn't have my name on it. But 15mins drive is nothing so it was worth a try, eh?

The event was being held at The Grove. Upon pulling into the grounds of the massive hotel I was sure something had gone wrong. There were no signs of any Google-life anywhere. So myself and my dad (who I had conscripted to accompany me for some company in the likely event that everything went tits-up) drove around for a bit being slightly perplexed as to where to go. A young lad working for the golf course pointed us in the right direction of, unsurprisingly, a big tent.

The tent itself was in a walled area and after parking, we walked up to the entrance where the afore-prophesied big burly bouncer stood. Tentatively we approached and I asked where we pick up our IDs (hey, you gotta pretend you belong, eh?). After a second of being ignored, the bouncer apologised for being dazed by the heat and pointed us in the direction of the welcome desk.

The welcome desk along with punters splayed across various sofas, pool tables, buffet tables, scantily-clad Coca-cola-serving ladies, was contained in a huge temporary green house. 

The Green-house

Pool and air-hockey tables

So after giving our names and, unsurprisingly, the ladies at the desk looking up and down the ID cards to come to the conclusion ours were not there. No problem - a handy printer was at the welcome desk for such an occasion, and within minutes we were the proud owners of Big Tent IDs.

I pretended to be part of my dad's company, so what?

After a spot of lunch (couscous and some little bread things with cream cheese and chutney), we headed into the lecture-tent a little early and sat in the second row. Due to our late arrival, we had missed the morning session (in which the official hash-tag had to be changed from #BigTentUK to #BigTentUK12 due to a porn-spam-hash-tag-hijack (which was ironic/coincidental/appropriate due to the mornings topic being on porn)) but here we were, awaiting the arrival of the man himself, Eric Schmidt (executive chairman, Google).

An empty stage

Introduced and informally interviewed by Channel 4's Krishnan Guru-Murthy, "5 Billion Voices: Eric Schmidt in conversation" gave an interesting insight into Google's perspective on getting mobile devices to citizens of growing countries as both communicational and educational devices. He also criticized Britain for not keeping up with our computing heritage, although welcoming the changes in the national curriculum regarding computer science he said that there is still a lot of work to be done. 

On the subject of censorship, specifically David Cameron's Iron-Porn-Firewall, Schmidt was very careful not to voice too much of his own opinion, saying that it's up to governments to make their own policies, however, that these policies must be clear cut and easily implementable.

Under questions from Guru-Murthy and the audience, Schmidt kept his cool and gave, if not practised, very informed responses. Regarding accusations that Google's search results prefer Google products his response seemed evasive, rather than going on record to say that they don't (or do) he asked whether it was illegal if they did do it. Schmidt seemed very happy when asked whether Google+ has been a failure (especially when compared to the behemoth, Facebook) citing that Facebook has had many years to get it's user base and that 150MUsers in the time Google+ has been active is an extremely good result.

Eric and Krishnan

Next on the agenda were three presentations by journalists from the Guardian, Burum Media and the Huffington Post about the use of modern technology in journalism followed by a discussion and Q&A. Although journalism is not really my field (as you can tell by reading this!) this was extremely interesting, specifically the talk by The Guardian's Simon Rogers on how they used data to better understand what was happening during the riots.

Following a short break, in which I had some liquid nitrogen made, Eton mess flavoured ice-cream, was presentations and then a debate by two authors, under the title "Good or Evil: has the social revolution enhanced or diminished our society?" First up was Andrew Keen, author of #digitalvertigo: How today's online social revolution is dividing, diminishing, and disorienting us, followed by Nick Harkaway; The Blind Giant: Being Human in a Digital World. Both authors were concerned about how to retain humanity under the ever increasing influence of people who are fully immersed in the online experience. This, however, was the sum total of their agreement.

Harkaway took an optimistic view of the whole scenario and I look forward to reading his book (copies of both books were given away free at the end). Keen on the other hand came across extremely pessimistic, ignorant and frankly just a grumpy old man who wants things to go back to the way they were. We all know the famous saying "if you're not paying for something, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold" and Keen is of the opinion that in the future people will pay for the premium of having their privacy protected. This is an interesting concept but as it stands, this is not the way the trend seems to be going. His arguments stood some ground throughout the Q&A until he came out with this humdinger:

Free services like Wikipedia I don't think benefit anyone.

 ...away crumbles a large chunk respect I have for the man. I'd bet good money that he has not known something and proceeded to look it up on Wikipedia and has benefited from it! I could vent on this subject for a while but I feel my coherence may be marred by my frustration so I'll stop here!

Overall, Big Tent 2012 was an extremely engaging event with anybody that you sit down next to being friendly and talkative. The most interesting points raised were that of privacy - people are willing to give up some for the benefit of the service provided, and you can't erase the past on the internet, and that of what comes after "The Social Web".

So all there is left to do is to thank Robert Llewellyn for "letting the cat out of the Google sack" and that I look forward hopefully sneaking myself in again next year.