CES: SONY Pirates of the Burning Sea Party


SONY Pirates of the Burning Sea Party
Originally uploaded by JoeDuck

Thanks to SONY Online and Flying Lab software for a very nice party showcasing the Pirates of the Burning Sea, a new Massively Multiplayer online game or “MMO”.   I’ve been researching the MMORPG topic for the past few weeks and it was great to get a chance to talk to one of the game developers and Flying Lab PR about MMOs in general as well as their experiences with this game.

Also really fun was playing some poker with professional dealers who were very helpful to the many Texas Holdem novices.   One of my dealers has dealt in the world series of Poker, which was cool.  Very nice guy who could track the fast action in remarkable form.    Interestingly, when asked a different dealer said that he makes about $100,000 per year dealing at one of the top casinos here.  I think most of this is from tips.

CES Press Conference Schedule


Check www.CESWeb.org for official CES information.    Here’s a link to the Press Conference roundup for CES.    It’s really going to be interesting to see how the Blu-Ray buzz shakes out.  SONY must be thrilled to have their standard come into widespread adoption, and look more like they’ll “win” the high stakes battle for the DVD market.   Likewise the HD-DVD folks must really be devastated by the trends away from that technology.  Hmmm – am I remembering correctly that it was SONY that lost the betamax vs VCR battle almost a generation ago?    If so, maybe they learned from that how to win this one? 

Warner feeling Blu-Ray and maybe pocketing $500,000,000


Warner Entertainment decided today to go exclusively blu-ray disk and drop the HD DVD format altogether.   They’d been working with both standards, and this has sent a shock wave – maybe a deadly shock – to the HD DVD standard pioneered by Toshiba.   Blu-ray is the standard developed largely by SONY.

And so we’ve got huge CES News even before the conference starts tomorrow (Sat for Press, Sun for Gates Keynote).   The HD-DVD consotium has cancelled it’s press briefing at CES and is probably scrambling to figure out what hit them.    Rumors suggest it was a 500 million payoff to Warner that got them to “see the light” of the blu-ray format, though it was a superior format by most technical standards.   Unfortunately the players tend to cost more, thus we may see better quality at higher costs. 

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