Google is the sleeping giant when it comes to advertising in video games. While the company dominates search advertising, it has yet to make a big splash in video games. That could change soon, as the company has been quietly testing its “AdSense for Games” product for months.
As the video game industry gears up for its annual E3 conference in July, the reality is setting in that the one-time entertainment extravaganza has become narrowly focused on console games, with very little room for PC games.
Even Microsoft and Intel, the champions of the PC, have conceded that point. Intel isn’t holding any press conferences or functions at the show. And Kevin Unangst, senior global director of Windows gaming at Microsoft, said his team decided to show off PC games at an event in San Francisco this week to avoid being overshadowed at E3.
“As it has morphed, E3 has fundamentally become a console show,” he said. “We didn’t want to just squeeze out some time at a console show.”
To unleash the wild creativity of the Internet on mobile phones, we have to open them up to the real Internet, says Mitchell Baker, the second speaker of the morning at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco.
The chairman (er, chairwoman) of Mozilla says it shouldn’t matter what device you use to access the Web.
Mozilla is the nonprofit that makes the Firefox browser, which is being used by hundreds of millions of people as an alternative to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.
She says that mobile browsers should all just work. The use cases do argue for different devices, but you will always want things quickly and with few keystrokes. “The information is the same,” she said. “We should be able to access it, mix it up, mash it up, save it, store it. All of those things should be the same if I am on a laptop or phone, at home or on a train.”
We’re going to have a veritable galaxy of virtual worlds soon. Investors put $184 million into 23 virtual-world companies during the first quarter of 2008, according to Virtual Worlds Management. That may sound like a lot, but the froth in this sector is actually down from the past.
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