Out of the Newsroom

A second post for you on this Sunday, as you are likely watching the championship games of the National Football League.

And that turns out to be the topic of this update: Games.

You will likely see a TV commercial or two for the game “Mass Effect 2″, a big new release coming out for the XBOX360. In fact, as the NFC championship game is underway, Bioware–the company behind “Mass Effect 2″–is hosting a live streaming TV show featuring a couple of their folks answering questions about the game while giving updates on the Vikings-Saints matchup.

And about five thousand people are watching the live stream as I type this. Now that’s not anything like the number of people who will be watching the NFL games on TV today, but its more than just a few hundred die hard gamers.

Jeff Scott of the great blog 148apps wrote a must-read guest item for the folks over at CrunchGear about what the importance of games could mean to this week’s expected announcement of an Apple tablet device.

I was reading that about five minutes after catching the news item from the widely read tech blog Engadget about how attendees of the Game Development Conference will find a little more than the usual sponsor swag in the bag they get when they check in for this year’s conference. This year’s GDC attendees will get their choice of a spanking new Droid or Nexus One smartphone.

So why is that a big deal? (Aside from being a cool phone to get for free?) Because it shows that Google, whose Android software powers both phones, wants the game developers who attend the GDC to think about writing games for their phones, as well as that very successful and popular phone with the first letter “i” from Apple.

Because when you get right down to it, that is the big difference between the iPhone and Blackberry–the big name in “smartphones.” You know, those cell phones that seem to do everything besides letting you make phone calls. Blackberry users typically don’t have a lot of games on their devices, in part because they aren’t that into games–and even if they were, they’re not a whole lot of games available.

Not ones that you’d want to play that much. Aside from the ubiquitous “brickbreaker” maybe.

Compare that to the iPhone (and it’s cousin iPod Touch) that has so many games, you can’t even keep track of them all. It may not be the aforementioned XBOX or a PS3, but neither of those will fit in your pocket. Closest comparison you would make would be to the pocketable Nintendo DS, but the DS is mostly in the pocket of kids.

The iPhone/iPod Touch seems to be in the pocket of every other person over the age of 16. And it’s a respectable platform with the ability to let you buy a game pretty much anytime, anywhere you want.

Now do you understand why Google would give away a $500 phone (if you bought either the Droid or Nexus One new) to as many game developers as they can? Did I mention that in 2009 the market for all video games was something like a 50 Billion dollars-PLUS one? And even though the recession may have slowed down the market on the consoles like XBOX, PS3 and even the Wii, the games market on mobile devices is going up, up, up?

Because these days…playing games is anything but kid stuff.

I’ve been on the road for a few days. Not like I was once was. Back then, I was trying to be like George Clooney’s character in “Up in the Air.” My office was likely to be seat 4F in an airliner, somewhere over America.

In recent years, I’ve been more grounded, traveling only a couple of weeks a year–rather than over 40 weeks. When you travel that much, you begin to think as the road as your home. You don’t really see your permanent address as much more than a place that you empty your suitcase, get clean clothes and spend some time with those people you only talk to on the phone during the week.

So coming home on this Sunday, I was reminded how much I love our little house in the woods.

It’s not a huge house, barely two thousand square feet of three bedrooms and two baths. We’re surrounded by woods on almost all sides, only able to see glimpses of our neighbor’s houses when the trees are bare, as they are right now.

The place needs some work, probably a new coat of stain, and a new roof isn’t too far off in our future. We just spent a pretty penny to replace the heat pump, so it would be easy to see the place as a money pit masquerading as a mortgage payment.

But today, it looked like home. A place where you live life, and all that it brings. Today, a little furry dog greeted me at the door. The warmth of the place hit me as soon as the door opened and I heard the bark. (So maybe the money for the heat pump was worth it after all.) The place looked great and felt familiar.

I gave Chester the dog a hug and got a face full of licking. I know it sounds sappy, but its never been more true than today.

It’s good to be home.

So this is what all those MS upgrades pays for! (Snarky aside, very cool facility, and nice of them to host 400 plus Wordpress fans.)

Herman Miller Aeron high chairs at NERD center

What the view looks like from the NERD center in Cambridge, looking at Boston across the Charles river, on a beautiful Saturday morning.

Part of the crowd, which is standing room only at the Microsoft New England Research and Development center, gathered for WordCamp Boston.

The NERD center (i swear they call it that) is very cool, but they are already struggling with AV issues this AM.