TheMadPeacock On The Sofa

Dr peppers all round

Special thanks to our sponsors

This video is a feel good moment for me.. its great to see the perceived underdog triumph!

As this is created using Gamebryo I am going to be FORCED to play it a lot…. its homework…. its part of my job!! what can I do?

Warhammer Online Gets Release Date | Rock, Paper, Shotgun

This story touched me, photos affect us, they can change our lives..

How much, I wondered, did that moment — just 1/250th of a second when three lives intersected on a river bank in Iraq — contribute to the burdens he’d brought home with him? If I’d never taken his picture, would he have ended up as he did? Would he still have been a casualty of war?

Ricochet - washingtonpost.com

A moderate earthquake occurred at 11:42:15 AM (PDT) on Tuesday, July 29, 2008. The magnitude 5.8 event occurred 3 km (2 miles) SW of Chino Hills, CA. The hypocentral depth is 12 km ( 8 miles).

We even felt it over here in Calabasas over 50 miles away as the crow fly’s. It was more of a roller than a shaker but still the biggest I have experienced in the 4 years I have been in LA.

It was probably the launch of MobileMe and a comment from a friend about how she uses it to run her business that got me thinking about this..

IT has evolved, has your business evolved with it?

More and more of the IT services a business needs to function are moving to SAAS (Software As A Service). These SAAS providers offer everything you need to run a system, the servers, the storage, the software, the IT staff for support, maintenance and upgrades.. you name it and someone probably does it.

In a recent IT overview presentation to the Exec team here at Emergent it was a surprise to myself and others that although we have traditionally hosted every part of our business internally and are culturally very security sensitive (its a competitive market) we are already relying on several SAAS solutions to manage some of our MOST critical data.

• Development is internal, it is the core of our business and we feel safer hosting it internally (for now)
• Salesforce.com is used by almost every department, we hold market data, customer information, prospect information, marketing analysis data, product documents, company documents and much more up in that particular cloud and it has been rock solid.
• We use SAAS systems for our accounting, payroll and HR systems.
• We host our own Exchange servers, a policy that has been problematic up to now with frequent and prolonged email down time. We now have all new servers and a new improved network. IT promises much better performance but part of me wonders if any 3 person IT team can deliver 99.9%+ up time to rival even basic SAAS email solutions like Google Apps? That’s less than 9 hours down time a year!
• Project management can be run through basecamp
• Intranet is available through Google Apps, ZoHo and others
• Blogs, Forums and traditional corporate web site hosting is probably the one service area most company’s already outsource and is available from thousands of vendors.

And the list goes on and on…

With “3 nines” (99.9% up time) products (like Google Apps) being seen as sub-par, “4 nines” a normal level of service to expect and some vendors now boasting “5 nines” service contracts, that 5 minutes of down time a year! can an IT team of less than 20 people possibly offer safer more reliable service?

I am interested to hear how your company gets on with SAAS, horror stories and successes.. Please post your experiences and thoughts below.

Over on Gamasutra they have an interview with Mel Guymon, Google’s 3D operations director and in it he is kind enough to give us a shout out… thanks Mel!

He suggested the application, which runs in a webpage plugin using elements of Emergent’s Gamebryo game engine, could be compared to existing applications such as Second Life and Scenecaster

You can read more here - Google Announces Lively Online World

Over on the Emergent Asia blog there is a fun post and video on a recent event we sponsored.
A Hoot of a Fun Time in Shanghai
Hooters in China! does anyone else find that amusing? Or is it just a symptom of the global economy?

As fun speculation/rumors go this is a dusey!

Image from Bagelturf.

Over on Bagelturf there is a post that Apple is (should be) interested in purchasing Tesla Motors. Bagelturf - Apple To Buy Tesla Motors
I am propagating the rumor simply because perhaps wishing will make it so…

Pass this on, link to it, digg it, whatever you need to do.. with luck we will be driving iCars before the American car industry completely implodes.