BenTheManager - Slashdot User

Angry Birds Boss Credits Piracy For Popularity Boost 321

Posted by Soulskill on Wednesday February 01, 2012 @02:08AM from the easier-to-do-that-when-you're-successful dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Mikael Hed is the CEO of Rovio Mobile, the company behind popular mobile puzzle game Angry Birds. At the Midem conference Monday, Hed had some interesting things to say about how piracy has affected the gaming industry, and Rovio's games in particular: '"We could learn a lot from the music industry, and the rather terrible ways the music industry has tried to combat piracy." Hed explained that Rovio sees it as "futile" to pursue pirates through the courts, except in cases where it feels the products they are selling are harmful to the Angry Birds brand, or ripping off its fans. When that's not the case, Rovio sees it as a way to attract more fans, even if it is not making money from the products. "Piracy may not be a bad thing: it can get us more business at the end of the day." ... "We took something from the music industry, which was to stop treating the customers as users, and start treating them as fans. We do that today: we talk about how many fans we have," he said. "If we lose that fanbase, our business is done, but if we can grow that fanbase, our business will grow."'"

Submission + - Google Gets Its iPhone Voice (infoworld.com) 1

Submitted by snydeq on Tuesday January 26, 2010 @01:54PM

snydeq writes: Google has found a way to let iPhone owners use Google Voice, launching a Google Voice Web app that runs on iPhone 3.0 OS devices, as well as on Palm WebOS devices. The Google Voice application leverages HTML 5's functionality for running sophisticated Web applications on a browser at speeds matching those of native applications, Google said. The Google Voice-iPhone conflict is one of several issues putting the companies on a collision course, the latest of which involves Apple potentially courting Microsoft to tap Bing as the iPhone's default search.

Microsoft vs. Google — Mutually Assured Destruction 416

Posted by CmdrTaco on Monday July 13, 2009 @11:06AM from the pieces-are-everywhere dept.

jmcbain writes "Robert X. Cringely asserts that nothing good will come out of the ongoing war between Microsoft and Google: 'The battle between Microsoft and Google entered a new phase last week with the announcement of Google's Chrome Operating System — a direct attack on Microsoft Windows. This is all heady stuff and good for lots of press, but in the end none of this is likely to make a real difference for either company or, indeed, for consumers. It's just noise — a form of mutually assured destruction intended to keep each company in check.'"

Submission + - Is Apache or GPL better for open-source business? (ibiblio.org)

Submitted by

mjasay

on Wednesday April 29, 2009 @08:03AM

mjasay writes: "While the GPL powers as much as 77% of all Sourceforge projects, Eric Raymond argues that the GPL is "a confession of fear and weakness" that "slows down open-source adoption" because of the fear and uncertainty the GPL provokes. Raymond's argument seems to be that if openness is the winning strategy, an argument Michael Tiemann advocates, wouldn't it make sense to use the most open license? Geir Magnusson of the Apache Software Foundation suggests that there are few "pure" GPL-only open-source projects as GPL-prone developers have to "modify it in some way to get around the enforcement of Freedom(SM) in GPL so people can use the project." But the real benefit of Apache-style licensing may not be for developers at all, and rather accrue to businesses hoping to drive adoption of their products: Apache licensing may encourage broader, deeper adoption than the GPL. In sum, the old GPL vs. BSD/Apache debate may not be about developer preferences so much as new business realities."

CRTC Mulls Canadian Content On the Internet 269

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday February 17, 2009 @01:19PM from the home-grown dept.

PsiCTO writes "The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission is going to weigh Internet content regulation — this could mean requiring some amount of Canadian content coming across Canadian pipes. The CRTC is akin to the FCC. They get that they can't 'regulate' the Internet, but are proposing to promote additional Canadian content in some way, as is currently done with radio and TV content. Likely they will discuss tax credits, subsidies, grants, or other traditional mechanisms. What do people think about this? Are there similar efforts, existing or proposed, in other countries?"

Comment My Favs (Score 1) 306

by Warhammer on Thursday January 24, 2008 @12:54PM (#22169918) Attached to: Will the Web Replace TV?

Red vs Blue
Ask A Ninja
Pure Pwnage

Music Execs Say Apple's DRM Hurting Industry 405

Posted by Zonk on Thursday March 01, 2007 @01:56PM from the reference-the-pot-and-the-kettle's-similar-color-here dept.

EMB Numbers writes "C-Net says last year saw a 131 percent jump in digital sales, but overall the industry still saw about a 4 percent decline in revenue. Some executives at this week's Digital Music Forum East conference lashed out at Jobs, blaming Apple and its CEO for their troubles. The impression at the conference was that Jobs' call three weeks ago for DRM-free music was anything but sincere. As the article puts it, 'Apple has maintained a stranglehold on the digital music industry by locking up iTunes music with DRM ... and "it's causing everybody else who is participating in the marketplace — the other service providers, the labels, the users — a lot of pain. If they could simply open it up, everybody would love them.""

Blizzard Unbans Linux World of Warcraft Players 300

Posted by CmdrTaco on Wednesday November 22, 2006 @12:00PM from the panic-subsides-throughout-the-land dept.

An anonymous reader writes "World of Warcraft players using Cedega (the Linux-based Windows emulator) had their bans lifted after an investigation by Blizzard in cooperation with the Cedega development team revealed that the bans were in fact made in error."

Comment MS Shop (Score 1) 367

by BenTheManager on Monday May 16, 2005 @03:12PM (#12546917) Attached to: Updating Free Software in the Enterprise?

I also run a small MS shop, servicing about 150 desktops and about 15 servers, all MS.

I too have been looking to make a migration, but there is no straight forward solution.

We also use SUS and Group Policy to push updates and security settings.

If a migration was to be feasable, a stepped approach would have to be taken.

First start changing client apps on Windows desktop, then change desktop OS. Such as Firefox for IE, Openoffice for MS Office. It would be very helpful to be able to use Group Policy and SUS for maintaining those apps!

Same on server side, port .Net apps to Mono running on Apache on Windows (yikes!) than move OSs. The other option would be to port the app and run on new server. Course, one of the apps has been done with Java, so no probs there. :)

I know I can run Samba for shares and printers and the like, but what about services like MS Exchange. Apps will have to be moved from MS SQL Server to Postgres or the likes.

Big job! Plenty of costs involved. Then there's training! Talk about vendor lockin.

Journal Journal: Canon Digital Rebel

Journal by BenTheManager on Friday January 09, 2004 @09:29AM

whoot whoot, today's the day! Gonna go down to the camera store today and pick me up some digital SLR! Todays serving of digital SLR will contain one Canon Digital Rebel, a memory stick of some kind, and a good camera bag. Stay tuned!

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