A heard a story just before Christmas.... A friend of mine's business partner had a request from her daughter for the big present: All 12 of the Barbie dancing princesses.

Apparently there are 12 different dolls, some of whom are Caucasian in appearance, some Chinese and some African....

At the local store where she went to buy her daughter the present she found that there were different price points for different dolls, that appeared to be based on the racial appearance of the doll.

Since I wouldn't believe that any multi-national toy company would want to buy into a concept like that, I can only assume that the price point was based on demand of the various racial stereotypes - with the lowest price being for the least in demand.

Shows you what good old Australian values are, doesn't it!

13.5 million mobile subscribers downloaded a game in Q2 2006. Average monthly revenue is $46.9 million for the quarter. Annualized 562 million. Over the preceding six months subscriber numbers downloading mobile games  increased 15%. But revenues increased 63%  4 times as fast. Boom. Boom. Boom.

Sony is running late with the PSP launch.

This has got to be a body blow for the company notwithstanding the announcement today that IBM is on track, using the Sony 'cell' chip that is at the heart of the PSP, to build a new supercomputer.



The supercomputer is going to live at Los Alamos and be used to model nuclear aging. The PSP is also being planned to be networked by some people in the domestic environment to simulate supercomputer performance. So soon gamers will be able to contribute their downtime to research!

Technology always wins. The Australian Open Tennis tournament debuted a moveable roof on its Stadium in 1988. It's been used innumerable times since. For rain. For excessive heat. Whatever. But television worldwide fans always know that there will be tennis, entertainment, available when they tune in. It's a guarantee. It's a technology promise.

Tennis is global big business. Yet the pooh bahs that run it treat it like a cottage industry. They just don't seem to care about certainty.

Wimbledon consistently tut tutted a roof.  The US Open rejected a roof. Other tournaments sniffed. This week the US Open has spent days giving back millions of dollars for rain outs, and, losing viewers as they stage washouts. That's smart?

Getting line calls right with hawkeye. Good step. But you have to have playable games.

Head in the sand, you see it everywhere. But its amazing when there's an example that works, that's doable, that's old technology now, and yet, is rejected. They wonder why tennis is still a second order sport?

Oh yes. And eventually? There'll be a roof. Even Wimbledon, now almost twenty years on has moved, just they didn't want to rush into it. But technology always wins.

American Apparel are smart marketers. They have just set up the first retail shop on Second Life to sell clothes to the games avatars. The PR value is tremendous. Second Life is frequented by smart young hipster types. Perfect Match with American Apparel buyers. Apparel shops are springing up everywhere in trendy America. They play off a reversion to pure, like cotton, and made in America sentiment, ie its hip to be anti-global. Apparel also like tough sexualised advertising.

But the signals are clear. Avatars. Games. Virtual. It's the in and fast crowd territory.

Watch for all three, and the American Apparel culture, to spill out into popular culture everywhere quickly.

Moving new business models from one demographic to another is one of the most fascinating things that is taking place nowadays. It is pervasive and very effective. It is one of the critical societal consumption drivers.

It starts quite often in the on line gaming and mobile spaces. It is in these spaces that marketers are able to capture demand very quickly from a youth market that is highly geared to adoption of new ideas and cool things regardless of how ephemeral they might be. And since oftentimes it is the parents who foot the bill, they have no care about how billing takes place. And consequently a new rental model flourishes that then migrates by osmosis into the broader demographic.
And then by the time we get to see this in the mainstream as the model moves from 'adopters' to 'adapters' we forget where the model started....  by that time it has gone viral.....

So - if you buy into that premise have a look at Infolust. It is posited here that all the things that we are currently getting online will migrate into the non-online space over the coming months. And people will demand the googleization of information about products at retail - we are already starting to see the emergence of comparative shopping via bar code analysis. What else.....

Computers are boring. The Windows environment is crushingly dull. Most of us use the Microsoft Intel Computer environment unthinkingly. Bill Gates and IBM set up a paradigm we basically all live by today. Yes, its breaking down. Seeping to other environments, like phone. But slowly.

So what if you approached work computing a different way? The Brain showed different graphical ways of organizing desktop content years ago. But go a step further.

Assume games are the dominant idea amongst kids and hipsters because they're fun and visual. We can see!  The other players,  IM's, our ranking,  settings, the world of the game. Everything.  Particularly online where vast scenes are unlockable.

OK, so why not import the idea into a business setting? Why not create World of Work. Second Business. Taskscape? Why not make everyone live in PerceptricLand?

You log on via a browser, say Firefox. Get allocated an avatar. You voice that accordingly. Now your avatar lives, works, moves in PerceptricLand. I'm the boss, because I'm the company Chairman so I set the tableau's limits and what we work on. Or not. Depends what sort of company we run. 

But now we can all see each other, and what we're doing. Data is online, applications run in PerceptricLand from online sources. You see billboards of information (including ads!) as you move around. You collaborate with others by an inLand, online browser. And get this. Essentially, this is  what all the current crop of games do, this exact minute.   

Realizing that, guys are trying to make things happen. Like? Hive7. (which crashed my machine several times today)  Webtop technology.

Webtops are presented at B2Day. Some debated them as if they a dumb idea. But another Business 2.0 story fleshed out the trend and same writer Om Malik put the technical grunt into a second story. 

It's parallel worlds. MySpace's 60 million users inhabit a world of blogs, music, idea, connection.  Cyworld's 11 million Korean users are in the same notion. Ten of millions are living and building virtual worlds with the massive multiplayer games.

One idea is essentially word and machine based;  the other is graphical; audio, video, internet ideas. They are going to merge. Intuitively you know that. We already have a huge installed user base familiar and comfortable with graphical online experience who see no difference in sourcing applications, data, and work from the net.

How long? Years maybe, but it's underway. Web 2.0 took from 1999 until 2006 to get overnight acceptance. 

PerceptricLand!. Coming to your browser soon. Step by step.

Nintendo report that the DS, their portable two screen handheld, has crossed one million wifi users in four months. March 20, Nintendo introduce Metroid Fusion, which adds VOIP to the online game experience. The device had a built in mic. So. Your kid upstairs? Or at the corner hotspot?

Playing games, talking, interacting, with the kid in Korea, Nashville and France. Unconsciously. Think about how that changes basic attitudes.To games. Voip. Geographic distance. Wifi. How huge a step into a new world is this?

US retail sales of video game hardware, software and accessories hit a record $10.5 bln in 2005 as strong demand from portable gaming gadgets offset weakness in console players, says NPD Group  The old record was $10.3 bln in 2002.  6% higher than the $9.9 bln of 2004.

Big movers were portables like Nintendo Ds, GameBoy Advance and Sony PSP. Up 42% to $1.4 bln it was a second straight year of sales above $1 bln.

Microsoft have sold 600K XBox 360 consoles since the Nov 05 launch. And 2 mln users of the original XBox now subscribe to XBox Live, say 10% of the potential. Microsoft plans to reach 50% of XBox 360 users for its XBox online service.

But Electronic Arts has suffered. They report the lack of consoles means consumers have waited to buy 50 dollars games. Profit there was down 31%.

So, we see a growing expanding market with new generations of gamers joining the old. But, they are selective, and this year its all about PlayStation3; Xbox 360 and Revolution. There should be another record fall. But only if there consoles are in the marketplace, the games are available and there's a new dimension to the play.

Video games sold  a record 10.5 billion US dollars in 2005 retail. This was on the back of Sony's PSP and Nintendo's DS launch yet Game Boy Advance still held half the portable 1.6 billion dollar market. Consoles struggled last year. But 2006 is the year of Playstation 3, xBox 360 and Nintendo Revolution. All are eagerly awaited by gamers. Understand that DS and PSP game development is barely tapped so far, and you understand why 2006 will blow the record away as the combination of new hardware and games in both console and portable markets drives monster  sales. But what will this do to other entertainment and content options?