Cyberspace Monopolies and The Search Engine Market

This post is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

Password:

This post is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

Password:

This post is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

Password:

This has only been brought to my attention recently, when for my Programming for Entertainment Systems module I am required to learn DirectX and C/C++. And as always lecture + tutorial time is never enough to learn a new language, so home learning is essential. What has inspired me to write about this subject however is the lack of community surrounding iPhone development. Yes iPhone development is new and its community will take years of development to get to the level of support available for DirectX but Googling has only uncovered one website, which hosts iPhone tutorials.

The ADC does have a wealth of documentation surrounding iPhone development, but you almost feel like Apple is holding back a little and apparently I’ve heard that your not actually meant to blog the development of an iPhone application due to a certain application agreement by Apple. Very strange.

Either way what I’m trying to get at is if you want to develop for the windows platform then there is an endless number of resources online. But if you want to develop for the iPhone the resources are limited mostly to one website and the ADC, which requires you have a certain level of experience in Objective-C.

It only took us about an hour and half, which was pretty quick. Although the game is relatively small and only really has a 5 or 6 different views to be built and designed, its all the complex behind the scenes stuff that is going to be a bitch a bit tricky.

Having looked through the iPhone documentation today, establishing network connections and reading the users location on a consistent basis and then relaying that to the server is going to be where the problems are going to crop up. Oh and I forgot to mention creating a compass using latitudes and longitudes requires some serious maths, beyond my level of knowledge at least. In fact pushing myself to learn more seems to be the theme at the moment considering neither me nor Kseniya have actually touched Objective-C before and here we are build an app for the iPhone using Objective-C. Given the technologies I have just talked about we are setting the bar pretty high also.

I have to confess that without the help of a certain website. I think the road to iPhone development requires a lot of Objective-C experience and I think Apple knows this and intends to leave it this way. You see I think Apple likes the fact that there is a certain exclusivity on the iTunes App Store. I’m not saying this is a bad thing I mean now I am getting to grips with it, it just makes it more appealing for me to create quality apps because the competition is relatively small at the moment. Plus the cost of distribution is nothing.

There was an early idea in the pot already conceived by me and Airs but we had already ruled that out for being too hard to build. Airs had come up with another, which was basically murder mystery for the iPhone using location based clues. This was ok, but it lacked gameplay mechanic and the crucial hook. That drive that keeps making you play more and more. Plus I had another idea, which I thought was better. And commence ye-old vintage Gav vs Airs battle.

My idea was to change the way we purchase and play games using the internet as the glue to stick platform together. Basically imagine WOW (Word of Warcraft) on a Mac, iPhone, Xbox, PS3 and any other platform you can think of. Not a new idea I mean PES (Pro Evolution Soccer) comes out on most platforms with varying degrees of graphics and intelligence depending on platform constraints, which would be the same for our game. The core of my idea was to store user saved data online and allow players to play from the same point in a role playing game on any platform. Currently if I have Half-Life on PC and have almost completed the game I couldn’t pick up my PS2 and continue from the same spot, with our system you could. To make it even better we would supply the game to you on any platform for free over the internet, gamers would just pay a subscription to access their user data and the game could only be played via the data on our servers. The concept would be commercially viable now and could potentially turn the way we pay for games and use an array of gaming devices on its head.

There where only two problems when running it past Dan, firstly we had 12 weeks to create this framework and a killer game to run on it, there isn’t enough time if you take into account our other modules on the go. Secondly we had to create a killer game and that is difficult enough without creating an entire new framework also. Thus we presented Air’s idea to Dan and the issue with this was as we suspected, it had no hook nor gripping gameplay mechanic. Back to the drawing board.

Dan did actually say one thing when pulling apart both ideas.

“If you had said Sardines merged with another game”

Well we thought, none of this ‘if’ let’s do it. Let’s merge sardines with something. Well we had already gone down the road of location based gaming for the iPhone, so there was only one thing that could spawn from this really. Sardines over a large area using the iPhone as a finding aide by displaying the user a compass which pointed them in the right direction, kind of and a hot/cold meter. What we were also able to do is use a server to mediate the game meaning people can join or leave a game whilst the game is in motion, giving the possibility of an endless game. The hook, the gameplay mechanic, the innovation, it’s all there really, thus we’ve already scoped the game screens and are beginning programing very soon.

Naturally I kicked of the ideas with Wet Room Entertainment, which I thought was a good name it had all the attributes; catchy, quirky and symbolised something (surfing, of course). It was vetoed instantly. The debate continued and didn’t really go anywhere, we all just looked at each other.

I got proactive and busted out the pen and paper. I just wrote words down that came to my head, that allowed me to spawn other words on the same lines, word association if you will. This helped everyone else to spin in words. We were looking for something cool and symbolic about our standards. Then came the suggestion of EPIC from Pete. Just on it’s own it makes sense, kind of. We are EPIC, are games are EPIC. It’s short, catchy and memorable. Little did I know it’s actually the producers of Unreal Tournament, but it’s too late to change it now, we have a logo and everything.

It came apparent to me today that an online based OS had already been done (a couple of times infact) and to a pretty good standard as well, in terms of technological development anyway. There is even a Wikipedia article describing the term WebOS, though there isn’t many terms not on Wikipedia. Pete a colleague on iDAT introduced me to one, which I have forgotten the name of, when I ran my idea past him earlier today. The one Pete showed me was good, but not great. I quickly Googled it to see what else I could uncover and I found it eyeOS an open-source online operating system, if you want to have a play then there is a demo link on their website. It is pretty sick, to be honest, there is allot of technology in use including; video playback, file uploads, office applications, instant messaging, photo management, email and contacts, to name a few. Also other things you don’t notice in an OS that are actually difficult to build like; window management, dragging and dropping files, file management and application management, basically allot of behind the scenes development. It is clear that allot of work has been put into creating this awesome RIA (Rich Internet Application), which is what it is when you boil down to it. It even has a third party application directory.

However no matter how much technology and cool animation you throw at something it doesn’t make it a good product or usable for that matter. What’s really weird is how they all advertise there WebOS’s in the same way ‘take your desktop anywhere’, well yeah but I can do that already with MobileMe. I have my files, photos, bookmarks and contacts what more do I need? apart from some decent applications, but for that I need access to the hardware of my machine thus a WebOS is insufficient, see where I am going here. There are two inherent problems with all the so called WebOS’s out there; one is they are all confined by the sandbox of the users browser, two they all emulate what a current OS does, just not as good. So what’s available on the market thats going to make me use OS X with Firefox to run their ‘OS’, nothing apart from the fact I can use the same desktop anywhere, which I can do already.

“Come up with a field of interest in culture and technology to write your dissertation on and come up with something you can make worth 40 credits linked directly to your dissertation, in a week”

Nice, no rush, no pressure, no none at all. Next, I did what I always do when faced with a challenge got silly drunk and put off thinking about it in anyway till the next day. There is some reason behind this before you stop reading! Firstly let’s get one thing straight, drinking wasn’t required, however it’s the week after freashers week and as I’m going to be bogged down with work for the rest of this term (at least) I needed to get more fun out of the way. Secondly, I can never completely remove something from my mind and as I have found by experience, something great just seems to come to me after a couple of days pondering the problem, most of the time in the shower oddly enough. I don’t know why or how it happens it just does.

The theory proved accurate, thankfully. I am going to look into the field of internet super companies and whether they can actually monopolise a given market, given the ‘open’ barriers to entry, to any market on the internet. And the project? I hear you say. No, I’m not going to monopolise the market to prove it can be done. What I am going to do is take an already monopolised market, convert it to an online market and innovate on it. Three simple steps, which will no doubt be very hard. I am going to take Microsoft’s dominant operating system Windows, build an online OS (obviously not as complex as Windows) and innovate. Innovation being the key, seeing as after reading The Google Story I can pretty much conclude that Google is where it is now due 70% to innovation. In a sentence they took a service (internet search) innovated on it and tore the market apart because their search was just better than the competition, thus I intend to do that.