ohmsenergy.net

“I don’t think they are crazy to think this way,” Darren Herman said when asked if Hasbro and Mattel are totally off base. “Scrabble came out in a time when everyone guarded their (intellectual property) tightly.”

“It wouldn’t be an issue if Scrabulous weren’t so popular, right?” observed Darren Herman, director of digital media for marketing firm The Media Kitchen. It’s the sheer mass of Facebook Scrabulous users that have made it a high-profile case as well as an inevitably ugly situation, if the game is indeed taken down. “We’re seeing the power of social media in its early days. Since we’re still trying to figure out the rules of the game, no pun intended, these types of issues are bound to arise.”

A game of Scrabulous on Facebook.

Fans of Scrabulous, for one, aren’t happy about the takedown news. On Facebook, an unofficial group called “Save Scrabulous” is growing fast, with more than 7,000 users at last count (and 5,000 hours before.) Its members, including the aforementioned “hunger striker,” are livid.

Others were more visceral: “I’ve burnt my Scrabble board in protest!” one exclaimed.

(Credit:
Scrabulous)

In other words, according to Herman, the debate over Scrabulous is indicative of the fact that the world–or at least certain mainstays of the game industry–still hasn’t quite figured out that a traditional course of action just doesn’t always work on the Web.

The companies in charge of the “real” Scrabble, for obvious reasons, aren’t happy.

Game companies Hasbro, which distributes Scrabble in North America, and Mattel, which is responsible for its overseas trademarks, have reportedly asked Facebook to remove the game from its application directory. And you can tell it’s a serious legal matter because nobody’s talking.

So said one adamant Facebook user in the wake of the news that game manufacturers Hasbro and Mattel were trying to do something about the wildly popular, unquestionably addictive online game known as Scrabulous.

Facebook declined to confirm the report, and it said that it has not yet issued any kind of statement about Scrabulous; representatives from Hasbro did not respond to calls for comment.

It was a catch-22 for the Agarwallas. The “Scrabulous guys” became Facebook celebrities, but the exposure meant that they were much more visible–and so were the obvious similarities between Scrabble and Scrabulous.

In the old order, a takedown notice may have been the only route. But this is the Web, and plenty of people have pointed out that Hasbro and Mattel are sitting on a marketing gold mine with Scrabulous. They have a gleefully addicted fan base, a machine for viral buzz (Facebook’s platform), and the deep pockets to offer to buy Scrabulous outright–or at least strike an innovative advertising deal.

“I’ll go on a hunger strike!”

There’s also no direct competitor. Neither Hasbro nor Mattel operates a Web-based, ad-supported version of Scrabble; video game manufacturer Electronic Arts owns the rights to electronic versions of the game, and it currently sells a PC game of Scrabble for about $20. (EA was not available for comment on the Scrabulous issue.) With Scrabulous, all three companies may be sitting on a marketing treasure trove.

The game, which rose to fame when its creators turned it into an embeddable Facebook application, is a word game that’s a whole lot like the classic board game Scrabble. It uses a playing board with “bonus” spots just like Scrabble. In fact, the rules are identical to Scrabble’s.

“Leave Scrabulous alone!” one of them posted in the group’s message board, a thinly veiled allusion to the “Leave Britney Alone” viral video.

Scrabulous is the creation of two brothers in India, Jayant and Rajat Agarwalla, who founded Scrabulous.com in 2006. When Facebook launched its developer platform in May, the Agarwallas soon transformed their Scrabble spin-off into an application designed for the social network, and it caught on like wildfire. More than 2 million Facebook members are active Scrabulous users, and several hundred thousand of them play the game each day.

“Do these greedy fools not realize that they should be paying the creators of Scrabulous for all the damn fans of the game they created?” one angry Scrabulous fan from the United Kingdom asked on the group’s “wall.” He brought up a further point–that this is getting people excited about the musty old board game in a way they haven’t in years. “It’s like the music vids put on YouTube. It makes me buy tracks I never would have done, and frankly, before this game emerged, Scrabble was just something for rainy days in my childhood.”

The similarities between Scrabble and Scrabulous are crystal-clear, and it’s a no-brainer to see why Hasbro and Mattel are miffed. To add to that, Scrabulous serves up advertisements, which means that its creators are making money off the concept. But what the game companies really ought to do is take a step back and realize that they can use Scrabulous to their advantage–without removing the viral game from Facebook.

Another member of the group put it more concisely. “Scrabulous brought Scrabble back in style. They should be thankful.”

Hasbro and Mattel might not get it. But the members of Save Scrabulous think that they do.

In a week in which Mozilla’s CEO confirmed the imminent alpha release of its mobile Firefox browser, codenamed “Fennec”, Mozilla was also busy talking up a cool extension to its desktop browser: Geode.

The potential here is for more than just restaurant lookups. For example, imagine an RSS reader that knows the difference between home and work and automatically changes its behavior appropriately. Or a news site whose local section is, in fact, actually local. Or Web site authentication that only allows you to login from certain physical locations, like your house.

This is amazingly cool, and is enabled by following the W3C Geolocation specification. Mozilla continues to demonstrate leadership in browser innovation. Geode is just the latest example.

What is Geode? Perhaps the best question is “Where?” Geode makes your browser location-aware, adding intelligence to applications like search and more:

commentary

The pic briefly showed up on a French Web site, and just as quickly vanished, but not before several sites (from Valleywag to Wired) were able to grab copies of the photo. (The original post is now up again.)

Some Apple faithfuls are crying “fake!” while others think it’s the real deal–we should all know for sure at Apple’s next big press event in mid-October.

We present the original photo here for your examination and interpretation.

(Credit:
nowhereelse.fr)

Let the Internet comment trolling commence!

The Interwebs are atwitter with a single blurry cell phone shot of what may or may not be one of the newly redesigned MacBook laptops we’ve been reading about.

(Credit:
Industrial Light & Magic)

Over at Skywalker Sound, Randy Thom was nominated for best sound editing and best sound mixing for his work on Pixar’s Ratatouille, which was also nominated for best animated feature. In addition, Michael Semanick, a two-time Oscar winner, was nominated for sound mixing and previous Oscar winner Michael Silvers earned a sound editing nomination.

ILM was nominated for its visual effects work on both Transformers and Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End.

But up here in the Bay Area, there are some pretty happy people as well.

ILM’s John Knoll and Hal Hickel were nominated for the best visual effects Oscar for their work on Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End, the third film in the Pirates franchise. Knoll and Hickel have been nominated for each of the three films, and they won the Oscar last year.

(Credit:
Industrial Light & Magic)

ILM animation supervisor Scott Benza and associate visual effects supervisor Russell Earl earned their first Academy Award visual effects nominations for their work on Transformers. Visual effects supervisor Scott Farrar was also nominated for Transformers, his fifth overall nomination. He previously won the Oscar for his work on Cocoon.

Finally, Skywalker Sound’s Matthew Wood also got a best sound editing nomination, as did two-time Oscar winner Ethan Van der Ryn for his work on Transformers.

That’s because the folks at Lucasfilm divisions Industrial Light & Magic and Skywalker Sound were honored with a total of six nominations Tuesday.

As you probably have heard by now, it’s Oscar nominations day, and Hollywood is all a-buzz.

Skywalker Sound’s Randy Thom, Michael Semanick and Michael Silvers earned Oscar nominations for best sound editing and best sound mixing for their work on Pixar Animation’s Ratatouille. The film also was nominated for best animated feature.

ILM’s John Knoll and Hal Hickel, who were nominated for their work on both of the two previous Pirates films, and who won the Oscar last year, were nominated again for the third Pirates movie.

And ILM visual effects supervisor Scott Farrar, animation supervisor Scott Benza, and associate visual effects supervisor Russell Earl were nominated for their visual effects work on Transformers.

(Credit:
Pixar)

(Credit:
Stephen Shankland/CNET Networks)

Olympus cameras are shown here frozen in a block of ice.

In one demonstration, the camera drops down a pegboard, banging off several on the way down before splashing into a tray of water.

The 850 SW should be on sale now for about $300, and the 1030 SW in March for about $400.

An Olympus Stylus 830 SW splashes into water after banging down a pegboard.

(Credit:
Stephen Shankland/CNET Networks)

LAS VEGAS–I can’t speak for their optical quality or performance, but I like the idea behind Olympus’ shockproof and waterproof compact cameras–and I liked the publicity stunts the Japanese camera maker used to show them off at the Photo Marketing Association trade show here.

Both are dustproof and can withstand temperatures as low as 14 degrees Fahrenheit. The 10-megapixel 1030 SW has a 28-102mm equivalent zoom, can be dropped from 6.5 feet up, and will work as deep as 33 feet underwater, and the 8-megapixel 850 SW has a more stylish design, is equipped with a 38-114mm lens, can be dropped from 5 feet up, and will work as deep as 10 feet underwater.

Olympus announced the two waterproof models, the Stylus 850 SW and 1030 SW, earlier in January.

And several cameras were positioned in a number of aquariums decorating the company’s booth.

On another, a handful of cameras were frozen in a large block of ice.

Correction 7:50 a.m. PST: The lower-end model is the Stylus 850 SW.

Updated 3:15pm PT with comments from conference call.

Doubling revenue and earnings per share wasn’t good enough for Research in Motion’s investors, who punished the company Wednesday after its outlook fell short of expectations.

The real ire, however, came as the result of RIM’s outlook for the next quarter. The company said it expects revenue between $2.55 billion and $2.66 billion as well as earnings per share between 84 cents and 89 cents for its second fiscal quarter. But analysts had been expecting earnings per share of 90 cents, and investors hammered RIM’s stock in after-hours trading, sending it down more than 9 percent. Before the earnings announcement, shares of RIM rose $1.87, or about 1 percent, to close at $142.35 Wednesday.

Perhaps the unanswered question is if RIM isn’t concerned about the
iPhone, why does it feel the need to boost advertising spending at this particular point in time? Balsillie briefly touched on that notion in terms of the expected growth in the overall smartphone market, which he sees as “a bit of a land grab game right now.” This town may very well be big enough for both RIM and Apple as the overall market grows; “all roads lead to adoption right now,” he said.

RIM recorded first-quarter revenue of $2.24 billion, up 107 percent from last year’s first fiscal quarter. Earnings per share were 84 cents per share on net income of $482.5 million, compared to last year’s first quarter, when earnings per share were 39 cents per share. Both of those numbers were within guidelines set by the company last quarter but slightly off of what analysts polled by Thomson One were expecting: $2.27 billion in revenue and earnings per share of 85 cents.

Balsillie also professed to be unconcerned about the pending debut of the iPhone 3G, pointing out several times that RIM has been gaining market share in recent quarters. When pressed by a financial analyst on whether he sees an overlap with Apple’s customer base, Balsillie emphatically said “Nah, nah,” and you could almost hear him shaking his head over the conference call bridge.

RIM added 2.3 million new BlackBerry subscribers during the quarter, and shipped 5.4 million devices, it said. The company is expected to hold a conference call later today to discuss its quarter, and I’ll update this post if anything interesting comes out about RIM’s performance and its outlook for the rest of the year.

UPDATED 3:15pm - RIM co-CEO Jim Balsillie and Adele Ebbs, vice president of investor relations, told analysts that the company plans to spend more money in the upcoming quarter on marketing initiatives, among other things, designed to lift RIM’s profile with consumers. If you’ve been watching television lately–especially the NBA Finals–you’ve seen dozens of BlackBerry ads, and with the BlackBerry Bold expected to make its debut later this summer, expect to see more.

I had a charter family membership Seattle’s Experience Music Project or EMP, which opened in 2000. But after a couple years, I gave it up. The exhibits didn’t change enough to warrant a lot of repeat visits, our periodic out-of-town guests had all been at least once, and the promise of early alerts about live shows at the museum never seemed to come through. (The one show I really wanted to see, the Television reunion in 2001, was sold out before I was ever informed about it.)

Their replacement? iPods with jukeboxes of music from featured artists like Nirvana and Jimi Hendrix. Given that Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen established the EMP, you might have expected them to replace the MEG (which was built on Windows CE) with a
Zune. But no–even though the EMP has held Zune-sponsored events and even had a few Zunes on display for a while, they’ve apparently decided to go with the industry standard MP3 player instead.

With a teenaged niece in town and my daughter just getting old enough to enjoy the museum experience, we decided to rejoin yesterday. After facing a few years of low attendance, the museum has made a lot of positive changes, like lowering prices for memberships and daily passes and offering free admission on one evening per month.

(Credit: Cacophony, Wikimedia Commons)

Seattle's Experience Music Project

As part of this revamp, they killed MEG. Also known as the Museum Experience Guide, MEG was a portable device about the size of a portable CD player with a laser scanner, headphones, and an LCD screen. Visitors would point the scanner at a point on the wall and hear information about the exhibit and maybe some relevant music–for example, famous guitarists like Vernon Reid shredding one of the museum’s rare guitars. Nobody loved MEG: they were awkward to carry and hard to figure out, and I always ended up putting mine down somewhere halfway through my visit.

As my ZDNet colleague Larry Dignan (who was more on the ball on this) points out, the move gives Microsoft’s security unit the Department of Defense as a customer, along with the Department of Homeland Security.

Meanwhile, ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley points out that Microsoft is moving forward with “Stirling,” the next generation of its Forefront, which will add in further management capabilities.

The Komuku name and independent product line will go away, Microsoft said, but most of the 4-year-old company’s nine staffers are joining the software giant. Microsoft didn’t announce financial terms of the deal, which closed on Wednesday.

Microsoft said it will build Komuku’s technology into future versions of both its Windows OneCare consumer security products as well as Forefront, its line of security software for businesses.

Microsoft said Thursday that it is buying Komoku, a Maryland-based company that specializes in software to detect rootkits.

Without a doubt, these services have advanced the field. Publicly available images are used in computer simulations to make realistic-looking buildings and pinpoint a robot’s location. Robotic planes can match onboard camera views to satellite images, showing the extent of damage to a disaster area. Robotic helicopters use them to test window-tracking algorithms in realistic environments.

Under the guise of preventing terrorist attacks, the bill seeks to blur satellite imagery of government buildings, medical facilities, schools, and places of worship to remove “air duct”-level detail from the images. If Mr. Anderson’s claim–that only “bad people” want to know that level of detail–is true, then count me among them.

I am a robotics researcher at the Drexel Autonomous Systems Lab (DASL) in Philadelphia. At DASL, we develop flying robots and ground vehicles to help emergency responders in disaster recovery and search and rescue.

These are a few of the many applications that have aided in cleanup after hurricane Katrina, fighting wildfires, and building the world’s first autonomous
cars.

Editor’s note: This guest post by Drexel University researcher Keith Sevcik is in response to statements made by California assemblyman Joel Anderson in a Q&A conducted earlier this week with CNET News.

By saying “there are no other uses for knowing on a map where there are air shafts,” Mr. Anderson simply ignores the widespread use of these technologies by academia. Enacting this bill would effectively set robotics research back 10 years–to times before realistic photos were readily available. In trying to prevent terrorism, he is actually preventing the advance of search-and-rescue technology.

One of the biggest challenges facing urban rescue robots is navigating city streets, and flying in and around buildings. Satellite images and pictures of buildings were once hard to come by. We often used street maps or low-resolution terrain maps to plot the path of our robots.

California Assemblyman Joel Anderson wants to censor Google Earth and other satellite mapping services from providing detailed images of sensitive areas.

With these maps, you could easily tell that your robot was driving through the parking lot behind the school. However, they don’t show the street lamp in the robot’s way or the telephone wires it’s about to fly into. Google Earth and similar programs put these tools at our fingertips, allowing us to focus on building and programming robots.

Though Panasonic is working on making its own OLED set, Sakamoto said “we may have to redefine the market position of OLED.”

CHIBA, Japan–Already skeptical about the ability of OLED to uproot the TV technology dominance of plasma and LCD in the next few years, Panasonic cast even more doubt on the opening day of Ceatec 2008.

It’s also not clear that we need OLED TVs before then. They’re still prohibitively expensive, small, and LCD and plasma are continuing to make great gains. Here at Ceatec, for example, several major TV makers like Sharp, Toshiba, Sony, and Panasonic are showing off incredibly thin TVs as well as those with decreased power consumption, both features of OLED.

Speaking to a group of reporters, Panasonic AVC Networks President Toshihiro Sakamoto reiterated that OLED (organic light-emitting diode) TVs will not be made in sizes of 30 inches or greater for now, and it’s still not suitable for mass manufacturing. Currently, Panasonic does not have an OLED product on the market, but Sony does: it makes and 11-inch OLED TV, and is working on a 27-inch model.

Click here for more stories on Ceatec 2008.

His quasi-cryptic comments indicate that LCD and plasma are here to stay for a while, and that the mass production of OLED TVs could be even further off than his previously stated estimate of 2015.