Will closing the mobile gaming “Loophole” hurt innovation ?
The Labor government is putting an end to what they call a ‘loophole’ in the gaming industry that allowed mobile gaming to go largely unregulated. Is that such an issue though, limited or no regulation of an industry can let innovation flourish and in the largest mobile gaming platform in recent years, Apple has accomplished just that.
The app store currently has tens of thousands of games available direct to consumers. Other branches of gaming like PC and console games require classification before being approved for sale. While Apple does their own vetting of applications against their set of rules, the government classification boards don’t get a look in.
Current legislation is unsurprisingly out of date and does not provide specific guidelines for games on mobile devices. If Labors changes get through parliament, mobile application developers may face classification fees of between $470 and $2040. So what does this mean for free applications ? An application developer looking to create a free game may opt for a paid version instead to cover costs, or worse yet, not bother developing it at all, effectively squashing development and innovation. A dangerous move indeed.
So what’s the real motivating factor behind closing the mobile loophole, is it really that regulatory board want to appropriately grade an application to ensure inappropriate material isn’t seen by those that shouldn’t, or does the Government just seen an opportunity to get a cut of the millions being made in mobile.
Right now the biggest company affected by this change would certainly be Apple, but the change would have far reaching affects including Google with it’s Android OS and Microsoft’s upcoming WP7 OS. This “problem” will only grow as the popularity of mobile gaming increases.
More @ News.com.au
Flumotion first to implement Google’s WebM video
Last week, one of Google’s big announcements at the Google I/O conference, was the new VP8 codec as part of the WebM Project. In an effort to show just how agile they are, video streaming software company Flumotion turned around a demo site using exactly that codec in just 48 hours. Flumotion say is the worlds first live HTTP streaming in the WebM media file format based on the VP8 video codec.
A WebM/VP8 live stream is now available via the Flumotion Demo Site. You need to install a browser that already supports the WebM format, such as a Nightly Build of Mozilla to view the WebM stream in the Demo Site.
I tested the WebM stream with the Mozilla developer preview with varying results. Sometimes the stream would play fine, while other times it suffered from choppy playback. Whilst the demo site doesn’t specifically list it, I tried the latest build of Chromium which is supposed to support the new format. The video image appeared, but did not playback.
It’s very, very early days, so it’s important to remember that this is more proof of concept rather than an actual service you’d visit each day. That said it’s a good start, something keep an eye on.
You can try it yourself at Flumotion’s demo site. For more info check out Flumotion’s blog.
YouTube Audio Transcription broken, hates Australians
Announced on the 5th of March, YouTube had added audio transcription to videos in an effort to increase accessibility. Just hover over the CC button in the player, then select the ‘Transcribe Audio’ option. Available in 50 different languages, it’s an ambitious venture from Google. One that could potentially open up videos to truly world-wide viewing.
The Transcribe audio feature is currently in beta and they’ve certainly got some work to do. I tested it on one of my videos (obviously have an Australian accent), it got this sentence completely wrong.
In the example below, I actually say the words:
“Hi this is Jason from Wodonga Australia and I think the story of the decade has..”
YouTube Translate interprets what I said as:
”but is this just in from would over a stray a and I think the story of the day Kennedy has”.
Clearly it’s not even close, naturally I wasn’t expecting 100% accuracy here, but this translation is so far off, it’s completely unusable. Have you experienced the same results ?
More @ YouTube and the YouTube Blog
Google Nexus One, shipping to Australia ? A: No.
Image credit: Engadget
The latest and greatest Smart Phone is about have its very own launch event in the US. If your really keen, you can tune into the Gizmodo Liveblog at 1PM US Eastern Time (Around 8am AEDST) tomorrow morning to get all the juicy details.
The Nexus One is particularly interesting as it’ll be the first phone to run Android OS 2.1. Pricing leaks indicate a US$530 unlocked. Don’t bother with a US-to-Aus converter, we’re all familiar with the Australian Electronics tax. My guess is you should expect around the A$700-A$800 range. I wouldn’t expect any Australian carrier support and subsidy tomorrow, although that may come in the future. Engadget got hands on with what they believe to be the production model and just posted a very timely review [Engadget].
What is interesting, is that the leaked Nexus One documentation, is this little gem – “There is language in the agreement of shipping outside the US”. Can we conclude from this that the Nexus One will be available via Google’s website with delivery options for Australia ? It’s hard to be sure at this point. Good news is we’ll know soon enough – tomorrow.
I love my iPhone, but I also really want there to be a viable alternative.
Update
Overnight the Google event happened and the official site is now live – http://google.com/phone – you’ll notice when visiting the site from an Australian IP, the right hand side of the page has this message – “Sorry, the Nexus One phone is not available in your country.”
As pointed out by GDGt’s coverage – “As of today Google is shipping to US, UK, Singapore, and Hong Kong.”
Google Chrome OS running !! [screen shots]
Thanks to the guys over at GDGT, I now have Google Chrome OS running in a VMware virtual machine. As you can see from the screens below, it’s really just Google Chrome with a couple of extra icons.
In the top right, there’s control for Power Management, Networking (wifi or wireless) and essentially Chrome options menu.
It did take some configuring to get networking happening, so the first attempt wasn’t exactly successful.
Google Chrome OS running on Windows 7 in a VMware virtual machine
The About Screen
Networking fixed 
Some work to do on getting techAU.tv to display correctly. Related to screen res, no way of changing.
If your thinking you want to check this out yourself.. you don’t. The experience even with a well resourced VM is not a nice one. For now just be content with the Google Chrome browser.
Australian streets getting viewed by Google again
Google maps and more specifically street view in Australia is about to get an upgrade. Next month the street view cars will be back on our streets in force, snapping updated photos of Australia.
When street view first launched one of my biggest questions was how Google would deal with the currency of images. With photographing each street being such a massive undertaking, they could be excused for leaving the current batch of images up for years.
After launching in August last year, Google are sending their fleet to “Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Canberra, Adelaide, Perth and parts of Tasmania”.
The new Australian imagery will be available sometime within the next year..
More info @ Google Australia blog via news.com.au
The Complete Guide to Google Wave
If you got a Google Wave invite, logged in and checked it out, then were left scratching your head as to what the heck you would ever use Wave for, then check out http://completewaveguide.com/
It’s a free, online, constantly updating, comprehensive user manual by Gina Trapani with Adam Pash
