New Game Business Model

What do you get when you cross a venerable war-game franchise with cartoon graphics, a massively multiplayer approach to combat, and free distribution?

If you're Electronic Arts, you call it Battlefield Heroes and you hope to make your money from advertisements and micro-transactions in which players pay a small fee for upgraded equipment. In fact, Battlefield Heroes is the trial run for an entirely new business model that EA has dubbed Play 4 Free.

I suspect that you'll see more like this in the future!

IBM Goofs

If I were a tech company, I'd make darn sure that my tech works right... every time... all the time.

Not so apparently at IBM.

The Sunday New York Times carried an interesting story about a new visualization technology from IBM. Here it is the following Tuesday, and the related IBM web site keeps spewing out error messages... which I have been seeing since the weekend.

Who in their right mind would want to trust their important corporate information to folks who can't seem to properly maintain their own web site?

Here are the error messages I've seen so far...


If you're a new user, you may experience a delay of several minutes to an hour before you can log in.
This is a problem that is currently affecting some IBM websites. If the problem persists, please contact the
IBM Registration Helpdesk.

Our apologies: something might be broken.

get is not valid without active transaction

Help us improve Many Eyes: report a bug

show
stacktrace

Internal Server Error

The server encountered an internal error or
misconfiguration and was unable to complete
your request.

Please contact the server administrator,
farl@us.ibm.com and inform them of the time the error occurred,
and anything you might have done that may have
caused the error.

More information about this error may be available
in the server error log.

---

IBM_HTTP_Server Server at manyeyeshost Port 80

So far, I haven't been able to get the web site to offer up anything remotely useful.

What's that error message you sometimes see when your email won't go through?

"I'm sorry your message didn't go through. I'm giving up..."

And IBM... so am I!