Gaming giant EA have reportedly signed exclusive advertising deals with IGA and Massive to deliver dynamic advertisements directly into gamers’ virtual environments.

EA are stating that the move is to keep advertisements within games “fresh and relevant for gamers”, although obviously this is about EA getting more money from their games, with game production costs very high. With games for ‘next generation’ consoles costing a lot more than their current-gen peers, with Microsoft particularly needing to reclaim the losses they make on selling the Xbox 360 hardware, EA are obviously looking for some way to get more money into the game development without further pushing up retail prices.

Another issue here is piracy. EA (and its rivals) lose a lot of money to game piracy, but EA will presumably still have in-game advertising revenue as a sort of ‘damage limitation’ with this new deal.

Advertising in video games isn’t new. Product placement occurs already in many popular series. Take Splinter Cell, for example, which is published by Ubisoft (EA aren’t alone in picking up on in-game advertising). The second game in the series Pandora Tomorrow and its sequel Chaos Theory featured obvious product placement - from the Sony Ericcson mobile phones to Airwaves chewing gum appearing in-game and in movie sequences.

What’s different with this move by EA is that the advertising is dynamic - your new EA game will contact IGA and/or Massive via the internet and download new ads and then place them in game. Presumably the ad agencies will get data back from gamers showing which ads have been seen, for how long, and will help advertisers target the market.

Dynamic in-game advertising hasn’t seen a wide take-up until now. One notable exception is SWAT 4, published by Vivendi. A patch for the game introduced ‘dynamic’ advertising from Massive, and there’s an interesting deconstruction of what data passed between the game and the advertisers at this site. Interestingly, the patch only displayed ads for US gamers; the UK version of the game still fed data back to the advertising company, but didn’t display any ads.

There is an enormous untapped advertising market for video games. Games are big business and from SWAT 4’s example, it would be possible to target people in a particular market with different products. It might even happen that gamers become ‘profiled’ and the advertisers then target gamers according to what times they are online, for example.

This is certainly going to be important for the video game market in the future, and with heavyweight EA taking up the offer - it won’t be long before most, if not all, video games feature ‘dynamic’ advertising.

In the wake of the coverage on Gizbuzz of Zoho Projects, I received an email from another Project Management service launched two months ago called Teamwork Live, which claimed it was better than Zoho Projects, and that I should take a look.

At first glance, Teamwork Live looks like a very strong product. It boasts features which as far as I know are unique, such as access to project information offline and a user- rather than company-centric approach, which in theory should make it easier for individual users to track multiple projects with different teams. It also beats Zoho Projects by having a robust notification system, including RSS feeds.

Despite this, I did not like Teamwork Live, for one simple reason. It suffers from appalling UI design. When using it, I had the feeling that it was created by some fantastic developers able to execute complex features, but that no designers had been involved at any stage. The whole system almost always behaves counter-intuitively, without any obvious reason for doing so. 

Whilst there are too many cases of this to mention each one, a specific example is the tabs across the top of the page. Despite having spend a reasonable length of time with the program, I cannot remember exactly what is on each tab, with the exception of the ‘calendar’ tab. I created a new project from the ‘my teams’ tab. And how is the user supposed to know at a glance what the difference between the ‘my teams’ tab and the ‘my teammates’ tab is?

The only reason I can imagine it has any users is the fantastic help system, including detailed video tutorials. This service is only going to appeal to those who desperately need all of its features, and who have several hours to spend getting to know the service. I cannot imagine that there are many such users.

Update: Tuyen Truong of Teamwork Live has posted a follow-up comment below.

A new web browser, Browzar was released today. The 264kb download promises to make your browsing experience much more secure by not keeping any history, cache or autocomplete record and deleting all cookies at the end of the session. There is also no need for installation, so the program can be run off a flash drive or even from temporary folders (the ’run from site’ option in IE6). The browser is using the IE rendering engine, which means its restricted to Windows until they make versions for WebKit (Mac) and presumably Gecko (Linux). Browzar promises such versions are on the way.

The company behind Browzar is giving the download away for free, and hopes to monetise by including a proprietary search system in the browser. The search does achieve reasonable results, although the adverts could be labelled much more clearly. I particularly like their ‘Should’ve used Browzar’ campaign, reminiscent of the UK Specsavers’ TV ad series. They have a page of stories from people who have had their embarrassing web browsing history discovered.

All in all it is a good way for people with little tech knowhow to give themselves a little more privacy, but the approach obviously suffers from the fact that you are using your own IP and are not encrypting your connection in any way. Thus your ISP will know exactly what you have been up to. For full anonymity, most geeks turn to TorPark, a USB key installation of Firefox, which uses the EFF’s anonymous browsing system Tor.

Gizbuzz is in the process of moving hosting. Please bear with us during the change, as Gizbuzz will be hosted in two places for the next two days while the name servers change. For the moment I have disabled all comments until this change has taken place.

Meet you at the other side!

Both Zoho and Google are working on equivalent products, respectively called Zoho Drive and Google Drive. Zoho’s product is going to be released in the short term, and has already been formally announced, and GDrive’s existance, whilst not officially acknowledged, is well known following the famous presentation leak.

The basic principle, as explained by the Chief Architect of Zoho in the Gizbuzz Podcast, is that once you have uploaded a file to the internet, you shouldn’t have to download it again. Thus if you upload a .docx Word document to your online drive, in future when that is opened, it should open in a Rich Web Application, such as Zoho Writer or Writely. This makes version control, sharing and collaboration much easier, as simultaneous editing is possible and it is only ever necessary for one copy of the file to exist.

Once Zoho Drive has been released, all the documents, spreadsheets, presentations etc. that you create in the rest of the suite will be stored in the Drive rather than separately. Such an online ‘drive’ is also not limited by conventional file systems. There is the possibility to base the file system entirely on metadata rather than physical location (think Artist and Album tags on an MP3 file, rather than the folder in which it is located). This is infinitely more powerful in a number of circumstances. For example, a company could store its documents based on what client they related to, the specific client matter and the employees creating the documents simultaneously. The same document could even relate to different clients.

To sum up, the notion of an online drive offers a great chance for integration of Rich Web Applications as it provides a centralised storage system which plays to the strengths of an online app as opposed to its desktop equivalent.

This post is part of the Online Office integration series. To read the rest of the series, click here.

It’s true and officially confirmed by Apple.

Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, has been accepted onto Apple’s board of directors, in a move that will no doubt help relations between Apple and Google. From Apple’s press release:

“Eric is obviously doing a terrific job as CEO of Google, and we look forward to his contributions as a member of Apple’s board of directors,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO.

“Like Apple, Google is very focused on innovation and we think Eric’s insights and experience will be very valuable in helping to guide Apple in the years ahead.”

Google have traditionally tried to be platform-independent - many of their desktop tools, including Google Earth, are available on all three major desktop platforms, including the Mac. Apple can certainly make no complaint about Google making software for their platform.

Apple also make Google the default search engine in their Safari browser, the default browser on the Mac. The companies’ relations have always been good, probably partly due to the fact that they don’t compete in many areas. But their relationship is likely to get more close with Eric on both boards.
What’s interesting now is whether we’ll see more Google-Apple cooperation and Google desktop applications coming out on the Mac faster. Maybe I’m reading too much into it now, but it could help Apple by making Google’s rich web applications have better support for Safari.

Anyway, very big news for both companies, and with Google a big competitor to Microsoft in the search arena and Apple also a competitor for computing on the desktop, I’m not sure how happy Steve Ballmer (Microsofts CEO) is about this move.

Eric’s happy, anyway.

“Apple is one of the companies in the world that I most admire,” said Eric Schmidt. “I’m really looking forward to working with Steve and Apple’s board to help with all of the amazing things Apple is doing.”

Read the whole press release.

One of the major products we’re seeing as part of Web 2.0 is the Online Office. Zoho and Google are building full suites, and countless other companies are providing one or other component. Despite some impressive features, the online office suites aren’t integrated at the moment. Users of Microsoft Office are used to integration of the programs, from OLE (Object Link Embedding) to UI consistency to the ability to write emails in Word and send them with Outlook. However, neither the Google or Zoho office suite has any integration on the same scale as Microsoft Office.

That’s not to say that Zoho and Google don’t recognise the importance of integrating their products, or that they aren’t working to achieve that. They are, but in very different ways. I thought I’d take a look at how they’re going about achieving integration, since I am a strong believer that if Zoho or Google integrates better and faster than the other, they will win the online office war.

There are a few opportunities for integration, and I’ll be looking at them in a series of posts. First up is the ‘Online Drive’, which I’ll look at tomorrow.

This post is part of the series of Online Office integration. To read the rest of the series, click here.

NeoWin is reporting that Windows Vista’s launch prices were leaked thanks to Microsoft Canada. The leaked page has since been pulled, but not before some eagle-eyed people picked up the prices and spread them around the web.

The prices look set to be quite high for a lot of the ‘premium’ features Microsoft is pushing in the form of Windows Vista Home Premium Edition (’premium’ is certainly right). Prices to follow (in Canadian dollars and then my conversion to USD and GBP). Note that these prices might differ depending on the market - for example, traditionally we Brits are charged more. Let’s hope that isn’t true for Vista.

• Windows Vista Home Premium (Full) - C$299, US$269.15, £142.28
• Windows Vista Home Premium (Upgrade) - C$199, US$179.09, £94.67
• Windows Vista Ultimate (Full) - C$499, US$448.62, £237.08
• Windows Vista Ultimate (Upgrade) - C$299, US$269.15, £142.28

Also, The Register has prices for a couple more editions:

• Windows Vista Home Basic (Full) - C$259, US$233, £123.17
• Windows Vista Business (Full) - C$379, US$341, £180.21

Obviously, these are the retail prices and OEM versions bundled with new PCs will enjoy a significant saving - plus most PC buyers are blissfully unaware of the price they pay for Windows anyway.

Still, these prices to me seem very bloated, especially as some of the main features Microsoft are pushing are only available in Home Premium - which is a significant step up.

As you know, Peter and I are part of a new tech podcast, PodDev. Previously we had been using Basecamp to plan our episodes, but in the wake of Peter’s positive review of Zoho Projects, we transfered to that system. However, no system is ever perfect, and so after the jump I have published a feedback email that I sent to Zoho, requesting some features and pointing out some problems I have with it.
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This post is another Explainer post, and it’s about APIs and what they can do. Through a couple of examples, by the end of this post you should know what APIs are and how they are useful and why they are popping up in so many Web 2.0 applications.
I found this site a while back and it’s a really cool demonstration of what the power of Google Maps can do.

It’s called Goggles, and it’s essentially a Flash-powered ‘flight simulator’ where you can fly over real images of the world and explore Google Maps with a little bit more finesse.

(Linux users - it requires Flash 8, which isn’t on Linux, but I found a workaround if you want to try this and other Flash 8 stuff out).

It’s an impressive demonstration of what the Google Maps API can do and it’s certainly an interesting project. A lot of sites and web services have made use of the Google Maps API; for example, Frappr uses it for all the maps, but this is the most inventive and most complex use of the API I have seen yet.

Google opened the API up so that site developers could do this sort of thing with Google’s data and a lot of Web 2.0 services also have (slightly less impressive) APIs, for example, Youtube has one so that you can include some of their video services on your site.

So what exactly is an API? Find out after the jump.
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