SUFFICIENTLY ADVANCED TECHNOLOGY

Napster and AT&T expanded their 18-month-old relationship to offer the music service via more than 25 AT&T smartphones and handsets. The cost, $7.49 a month or $1.99 per song, appears on the customer’s regular AT&T bill. Taking a gentle swipe at Apple, AT&T’s exclusive partner for the iPhone, Napster CEO Chris Gorog said, “Switching to our new format gives millions of AT&T customers the opportunity to enjoy the best mobile music experience available, in addition to the world’s largest catalog of music.”

Kudos to Google for having the Halloween version of their logo designed by famed horror director Wes Craven.

Yesterday I moderated a panel discussion as part of the Korea Entertainment & Technology Strategic Sessions at Digital Hollywood Fall 08. The topic was called “Expanding Gaming Horizon: Game Content, Community & Commerce,” which basically looked at what Korean and North American game companies could learn from each other.

The participants included Philip Yun, who was just announced as the new CEO of NHN USA, in his first-ever panel discussion. Joining him was: Robert Ferrari, vp Business Development of Turbine Inc.; Don Choi, COO of OGPlanet; and, providing an impartial voice, Chris Swain, Co-director, Electronic Arts Game Innovation Lab and Asst. Professor, USC Cinematic Arts.

One interesting difference we noted was that American players prefer completely finished and highly polished games, while Korean players are more forgiving of beta versions and enjoy helping to shape the product.

Another important issue was whether gamers played at home or with others. With their pervasive PC café culture, Koreans have a central point of socialization, viral sharing, non-credit card payment mechanisms, and exposure to marketing campaigns. The panel discussed ways of achieving those goals in America.

We also explored free-to-play versus subscription as business models, the importance of having a local partner for multi-national games, micropayments, network speeds and latencies, customer retention, and the value and pitfalls of licensing a well-known property. Something that came up more than once was the recently announced partnership between Turbine and NHN to bring Lord of the Rings Online to Korea.

Respected British newspaper the Financial Times has an article on why Los Angeles is becoming the preferred location for new digital media and online advertising companies. It cites the proximity to film studios, the weather and lifestyle, and the convenient travel to the brains of the Bay Area and Silicon Valley.

“Sony Pictures Entertainment, Walt Disney and Paramount Pictures Paramount Pictures are among the studios with sophisticated digital distribution businesses: Disney’s ABC television network was the first to stream its programming online, for example,” the article notes.

The piece goes on to discuss News Corporation’s Fox Interactive Media and its move to Playa Vista next year, paying particular attention to the potential of Hulu.

“All of our businesses will come together in a single campus,” says Peter Levinsohn, president of FIM. “We’ve really built out the engineering and technical capability of our workforce. We’ve been able to hire high-quality executives and engineers from northern California and bring them to Los Angeles.”

Other new media companies included in the story are Sony Pictures’ Crackle, cinema ticket service, Fandango, eHarmony, Lowermybills.com, PriceGrabber and Frank Addante’s ad optimization company Rubicon Project. (Creative Commons image by tiendan.)

Blu-ray prices rose after the demise of HD-DVD, but according to the Wall Street Journal they’re now following the general rule of all things electronic.  Reporter Miguel Bustillo found Blu-ray players priced below $230 and analysts who think they’ll be available for $150 in the pre-holiday sales. But no matter how cheap the players are, buyers need to make sure they choose a unit with Internet connectivity, otherwise many Blu-ray features are unusable.

The story gives two main reasons for the format’s slow adoption: consumers don’t understand the benefits, and the price of discs is $30 in stores that offer DVDs for half that. I would add that most consumers simply don’t care enough about the higher quality to pay that much extra for it.

Also covered in the article is the imminent rise of digital downloads as an alternative to physical product. Digital entertainment pioneer CinemaNow’s deals with Tivo, Samsung and others to get movies into the home digitally are the latest development in the mainstreaming of this activity. This follows other deals, including the Netflix ones that will get movies onto Xboxes, Roku settop boxes, PCs and anything else that can connect the screen in your home to the Internet.

The Global Network Initiative introduced itself to the world with a press statement and declaration of purpose, which fundamentally is to present collaborative approach to protect and advance freedom of expression and privacy in every aspect of Information and Communication Technology.

“The Initiative is being launched in the 60th Anniversary year of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and is founded upon the internationally recognized human rights for freedom of expression and privacy set out in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.”

Among the growing number of members and signatories are Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, the Committee to Protect Journalists, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Human Rights Watch, and the World Press Freedom Committee. (Image by Michael Rosenstein/Seaworthy under Creative Commons license)

D3Publisher will be releasing video games based on Universal Picture’s upcoming animated film Coraline, which was written for the screen and directed by the incomparable Henry Selick, based on the novella by the equally incomparable Neil Gaiman. (The link goes to the recently launched and extensive official website.)

According to the website, Coraline is the first stop-action animated film to be originally filmed in 3D.

If you need to be brought up to speed on this incredibly promising Real D 3D film, Shock Till You Drop’s Silas Lesnick has a report on seeing more than 20 minutes of it and an interview with Selick and animator Travis Knight.

For more on the game, Leigh Alexander interviewed D3P of America’s evp Yoji Takenaka for Kotaku. The story explains that D3P also is doing a game based on Aardman Animation’s internationally successful Shaun the Sheep, having previously done a game for  Aardman’s Flushed Away based on the Dreamworks Pictures film.

Puppets and maquettes were on display at the NECA booth during this year’s ComiCon, but I haven’t seen the undoubtedly desirable action figures yet.

Those of us who find ourselves doing tech support for friends and family are getting a little help from TV mom Florence Henderson and hit-making country band Whiskey Falls. (Interesting useless trivia: guitarist Damon Johnson started his professional career with Alice Cooper.)

The unusual combination is the work of the Consumer Electronics Association, which is working to smooth the transition to digital TV. It offers a free downloadable pdf, Flo’s Digital Tips, featuring Henderson showing consumers how to go digital, complete with easily understood images.

Whiskey Falls is the centerpiece of a competition based on the CEA’s own You Tube channel. The band sings a little and talks about converting to digital. The contest invites the public to post a short video response to the channel. Rules and prizes are here.

British newspaper the Guardian has become the first major newspaper to offer the full content of its articles as an RSS feed. “This way people can get the guardian.co.uk experience in whatever context is most useful to them,” the paper said in a press statement that should perhaps be required reading for that belief alone.

The service is free and supported by advertising. Users can customize their feeds by several filtering criteria, including by topic, contributor name, print section, “tone” (sports reports, blogs, etc.) and many others.

Technology that you use every day could be used as terrorist tools. Noah Shachtman reported on his Danger Room blog for Wired that a draft U.S. Army intelligence report examines Twitter, GPS, camera phones, voice-changing software and other common technology for their potential nefarious uses. No reference was made to bottled water or shoes on airplanes.

“Twitter is already used by some members to post and/or support extremist ideologies and perspectives,” said the report by the 304th Military Intelligence Battalion, which is on the Federation of American Scientists’ website. It also noted that GPS services have “been discussed in pro-Al Qaeda forums.”