Macworld sits down with Apple’s Sr. Director of Pro Apps Marketing to dispel rumours which were rampant last week that the development of Apple’s flagship pro-image workflow application had fired or reassigned it’s entire staff.
“The reports of Apple reducing their commitment to Aperture are totally false,” Kirk Paulsen, Apple’s Senior Director Pro Applications Marketing, told Macworld. “In fact, we’ve got more people working on Aperture right now than ever before. (Macworld)
Aperture’s current engineering team was assembled before the original team left. Aperture was never without an engineering team, and the product’s future was never in jeopardy. (Daring Fireball)
A few weeks back we all heard that Microsoft had acquired Massive Inc., a company focused on the nacent in-game advertising market. Despite some rough starts, there’s clearly a great deal of promise to this area for marketers, reaching the valued 18-34 male demo as they find a new home away from broadcast television. The news from the weekend indicates that the first deployment of this tech for MSFT will be inside the XBox Live service.
“Advertisers are having a tough time connecting with the elusive 18- to 34-year-old male demographic because this group continues to spend less time watching TV and more time playing video games,” said Joanne Bradford, corporate vice president of Global Sales and Marketing and chief media revenue officer at Microsoft. “Massive and Microsoft can help lead with our shared vision of delivering more targeted, measurable and effective opportunities for advertisers to reach today’s youth audience in a largely untapped market.” (From the press release)
Now, speaking as a consumer, I’m already paying something on the order of $50 a year for the priveledge of enabling the online features of all the $60 game titles I’ve purchased for the 360, and the thought that this experience is now going to be plastered with ads pimping that new soda I don’t give a %^#@ about is kind of annoying. Will we see a price drop in the sub fee? Will the Xbox community react positively to this ‘enhancement.’ I’m not holding my breath…but I do know that the makers of the new consoles on the horizon (Wii and the PS3) will watch closely.
The family is taking it easy, staying at home today. Amy is under the weather, and it’s been pouring most of the day. Sam is more entertaining than any day out and about town, so we’re still having a grand old time. In the past week or so, it seems like more and more of those little synapses are firing – and hitting. Although we think his recent early AM wake-up calls may be the sign of another upper tooth coming in, he’s been most helpful lately using the simple sign language we’ve been showing him since he was about six months old. During a 4:30 AM cyring jag, he was standing in the crib, putting his fists together to say ‘I’m hungry’. Officially, that means ‘more,’ but who’s gonna argue with a 13-month old? He also knows how to say ‘all done’ by moving his hands, palms down, from side-to-side. And of course there is the plaintive lifting of both hands when he’s on the ground in a sign for ‘UP!’ All very cute, and frankly amazing for us first-time parents to watch.
Greetings and salutations. I’ve been longing to redesign ye olde Trotz.com for a few months now, and found it so very simple to quickly install WordPress 2.0, pick a nice theme, and add a handful of enhancements during my lunch hour. I’m very pleased with the result – much cleaner, hopefully eaiser to use (note the font size control at the top of the right column). Shout-outs to Jerik One (developer of the Lush theme), PhotoMatt (creator of the Sidebar Widgets architecture), and the creators of all these fine widgets: Weather widget & Plugin, the FlickrRSS widget, Last.fm Covers, XboxLive Gamercard, Netflix widget and plugin, the Category Cloud widget. Please take advantage of the comments feature to tell me what you think!
Update: I’m aware of some problems with the navbar appearing in Internet Destroyer Explorer. I’ll work on this after our evening out tonight – if the margaritas don’t do too strong a number on me.
