Wanted to capture this wonderful image of Google’s home page today, before it went away.

Gosh!  That Google painting in the style Jackson Pollock must have been pretty hard to do.

BTW, just joined SEMPO.

Pretty strong panel for online gaming at the Hatchery at Scholastic, tonight (see panelist names online) – you can watch a recording of the session here.

Scaleform is a company that wants to be a real time 3D gaming development, UI middleware, real time engines. I thought the Scaleform presentation was good and smooth, but not that exciting.
A lot of Scaleform’s focus is localization and they enabled Other software such as Adobe.

Btw, the opinion of the panel – Scaleform needs to expand the audience they are going after. Interestingly, the value of many these new startups is 1x annual revenue. Transition from a developer platform to an Artist/Creator platform.

The next company to present was Goozex that is a trading platform for used games, but I found myself to be disinterested and this presentation is going I forever, yawn.

Dimension M (M=Math) was a better presentation for online math training. I liked what I saw with Dimension series of games.

I was about to leave but this speaker and his presentation convinced me to stay longer. Questions about distribution strategy came up next with targeting is done at the district level.

Takeaway – the charisma of the presenter and the quality of the presentation are all important.

I just read Michael Arrington’s heartfelt post at TechCrunch this morning titled “Some Things need to Change” and I’m sad that some people are getting to the point where they’ll spit in  Michael Arrington’s face if he doesn’t write about them, or threaten his life, as he mentioned in the post.

Arrington does play rough with role at TechCrunch.com, he is often very opinionated, but he provides really good content and he loved what he was doing.

Lately, his job doesn’t sound like much fun, to be totally honest, and he’s right to take a pause.  It makes me wonder if it’s better not to be famous -then to be famous enough, make enough enemies, to have people hovering around you, constantly ready to strike out, and at unpredictable moments.

But let’s bring in the Economy, lousy finances all around; this will push people off the edge; people are often on the edge, you know. Times are tough, really tough, and about to get even tougher.

Now is not the time to make enemies if you can avoid it – people are on edge – and it doesn’t take that much to tick them off – and I think that’s what Micheal Arrington found – when he was in Munich.

I’m sure he’ll have a great time in Davos – but Davos is  a walled garden – a bunch of elites and influentials – getting together to talk how private industry failed and the Governments must now rescue us all – while they have parties upon parties to go to – I’d sooner read Jeff Jarvis‘s writings about Davos than anything else – he tells it like it is in

Davos09: A crisis and failure of leadership

, and hopefully, I’ll get a chance to say hello to Jeff Jarvis at SocComm next month (going to the VIP dinner the night before would be nice, too – we’ll see).[qwidget question="65"]

Getting back to Michael Arrington’s unfortunate experience in Munich yesterday – t o some people, the stakes got so high to be noticed, that TechCrunch became a decider, but maybe, too important.  But, on the other hand, isn’t that what TechCrunch strove to be?  An influencer.

A lesson.

Better to not be so famous or infamous that people want to spit in  your face, or throw shoes at you!