TheMadPeacock On The Sofa

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.

So I have a week at home with my new baby and between feeds I am getting some time to sleep and catch up on some of my hobbies.

Music is something I love, I played violin as a kid, (I wanted to play electric guitar but my parents made me play violin; don’t know why) so my interest in playing died early.. but not my interest in music.

One of my challenges in life is finding new music I like, I don’t have time to stay up to date and as I follow several genres of music what I really need is someone to recommend new music to me. iTunes tries but it is a very weak system.

Pandora to the rescue! I just Stumbled onto Pandora, the free radio station that uses the music genome project to take one song or artist you name and create an entire radio station of similar music! Its amazing.

For us nurds who like to know how things work here is an extract from Wikipedia

The Music Genome Project, created in January 2000, is an effort founded by Will Glaser, Jon Kraft, and Tim Westergren to “capture the essence of music at the fundamental level” using over 400 attributes to describe songs and a complex mathematical algorithm to organize them.

A given song is represented by a vector containing approximately 150 genes. Each gene corresponds to a characteristic of the music, for example, gender of lead vocalist, level of distortion on the electric guitar, type of background vocals, etc. Rock and pop songs have 150 genes, rap songs have 350, and jazz songs have approximately 400. Other genres of music, such as world and classical, have 300-500 genes. The system depends on a sufficient number of genes to render useful results. Each gene is assigned a number between 1 and 5, and fractional values are allowed but are limited to half integers.[1] (The term genome is borrowed from genetics.)

Given the vector of one or more songs, a list of other similar songs is constructed using a distance function.

A nice feature of Pandora is that if the system picks a song you like but do not know or own you can directly purchase it from iTunes so you can play it when you are offline.

You can create as many “stations” as you like, I have a New Rock, Rap and Old Rock station so far and I am discovering new music all the time…

Thanks Pandora!

I get asked that question a lot, and I have tried to explain it… a lot…

Over on GameCareerGuide.com Jeff Ward from Orbus Gameworks as taken a stab at answering the question What is a Game Engine?

I find it interesting that he categorizes Gamebryo as a Mostly-ready game engine, its an interesting categorization, definitely food for thought..

I am a big LinkedIn pusher.

I see tangible benefits of membership every day and the more I put into my network the more I get out. If after listening to me babble on about LinkedIn time and time again you still are not using it (you know who you are) then perhaps this post on the new LinkedIn Learning Center will succeed where I have failed…

If you bother to follow the link!!

if you dont do it NOW I will perhaps give up on you and talk about something else… you have been warned!

What is LinkedIn? - LinkedIn Learning Center

Her name is Skye and she arrived today!

New Warhammer Online Footage, Interview | Rock, Paper, Shotgun
“WAR is looking like an MMO that will sit down to tell you a good story, then fart in your face and run away. I stress that this is a good thing.”

Another great Gamebryo game on the way… I think I will need to “test” this product extensively as part of my total customer care initiative.

Four new blogs have popped up authored by friends from within Emergent. I am excited to see this happening more and more as we have a truly great bunch of people working here with a lot to share.

• John is blogging at – Emergent Game Technologies in Asia
  John is the tireless supper-traveler that puts all road warriors I have ever known to shame. He has a truly awesome family and an unshakably open and friendly attitude to life.
  What he says (I am the General Manager of Asian Operations for Emergent Game Technologies, and proud to lead this blog. Emergent is doing some GREAT stuff in Asia (and indeed all over the world), and through this blog I will share some of the cool things we are doing in the region. I can be reached at john.goodale@emergent.net.)
• Dan is blogging at - What Makes You Think I’m Not
  To survive as a sales person in a technology company you need to have go-to people in the development team. People who will drop everything and head out to visit a customer with you if the need arises. Dan is one of those people and he has helped me out a bunch o times. He is generous with his time and he is very knowledgeable about the entire product.
  What he says (Welcome to “What Makes You Think I’m Not.” I’m just a guy who writes video game software, practices the martial arts, and wonders if he’s a super hero.)
• Shaun is blogging at - Shaun Kime’s Blog
  In my view Shaun has one of the most critical and challenging jobs at Emergent and although I don’t get the opportunity to interact with him that much I hope to get to know him better by reading his blog!!
  What he says (A bit about me. I’m 29 and recently married. No kids. One cute but ornery Australian Shepherd. We live in North Carolina. I’m a technical director at Emergent Game Technologies working on tools for the Gamebryo graphics engine. I’ve been at Emergent/Numerical Design Limited for about 7 years now and have worked on a variety of technologies from Max exporters, animation systems, particle systems, .NET based editing tools, shade-tree generation systems, etc. These days I don’t get to write a huge amount of code, so I’m hoping that this blog lets me try some experiments and put them out there for the wider web community.)
• Ian is blogging at – iansight
  The newest member of my team Ian is a recent graduate who has taken on the big job of Technical Account Manager for North America. He is a technical artist by proclivity and a real great addition to an already strong team (even if I do say so myself)
  What he says (This is an example of a WordPress page, you could edit this to put information about yourself or your site so readers know where you are coming from. You can create as many pages like this one or sub-pages as you like and manage all of your content inside of WordPress.)
  Shame on you Ian, placeholder about page… one demerit :-)

I am a huge fan of LinkedIn, I think they are providing one of the top “Web2.0″ services for business individuals and as I have indicated in other posts (LinkedIn : Company Profiles) It continues to be one of my most valuable sales tools.
I congratulate the LinkedIn team on securing this new round of funding and look forward to using the cool new tools this $53M pays for
The LinkedIn Blog: Bain Capital Ventures Joins the LinkedIn Team