Alde’s Stuff

I went over to my friend Scott’s house tonight for some ritualistic Playstation 3 2K7 Hockey. Now, we’ve been playing hockey together playstation style for over 6 years, and needless to say, we’ve got the one-timer down to a tee.

We both bought our PS2’s at about the same time in 2001, and there were quite many nights of drinking Guinness and hat tricks. Prior to the PS2, my friend Kyle and I would play lots of NHL99 EA hockey, amongst other things. Kyle was a master of the solder gun; he once modded two PSX’s flawlessly, after drinking a bottle of wine.

My love affair with console gaming Hockey goes back all the way to Nintendo Ice Hockey. You remember, the game with 4 players on the ice (3 + The Goalie), and you could have the three types of players, fast/weak shot, medium/medium, and slow/big shot. But no fighting. Then we got Blades of Steel (cue cheezy sampled voice). Fighting was great! Then I went to college and learned the beauty of Sega Hockey. So, hockey has been one of the cornerstone games that has always been in my games collection. (I don’t remember playing hockey on my Odyssey 2 or the Colecovision however…)

Tonight, as a lark, I brought over NHL99 (PSX) to play on the PS3… My how things have changed. Given the constraints of the CD format, there was the incredible opening movie (I can remember the first time I heard David Bowie’s Heroes play as the opening, a chill went down my spine) and then it all went downhill from there. A game I used to treasure (ok, until NHL2001 and the PS2 dethroned it) and the graphics looked blocky and jaggie, no player customization (Chris Simon had no long hair, Lindros and Jagr were the same size as Sergei Samsonov). Reading numbers was difficult; how do you know if that one timer you’re trying is going to Petr Bondra, or to Adam Oates?

That got me thinking… 10 years (or so) from now, in the rush of the Nth generation console, with SDHDMDPHD Televisions, will we be able to put in NHL 2K7, and marvel at how little things have changed, or will they have changed so dramatically by then the only reason we’ll play it at all is to remember the old lines of yore? Will 1080p be replaced by 2430 scan lines? Will players every facial feature be rendered in minute detail because of high definition facial scanning technology with trillions of polygons? Will the controllers of then be force feedback with the ability to feel the puck on the stick, the poke check of the goalie? Will your passes finally go to the correct player, instead of to the goalie?

I’ve been reading Heinlein’s “Expanded Universe”, where he marveled that in the 50 years since 1900 just how far technology had brought civilization, and in the compressed time of today’s technology, I wonder with the same curiosity as to what we will find in the next decades. When today’s high school freshmen have never known a world in which there wasn’t a Nintendo gaming system or Nintendo Ice Hockey, what will their nostalgic memories of console gaming be?

Ok, so most people have never heard of Wayport, and that’s understandable. When you’re the “Leading provider of highspeed wired and wireless internet access to the business traveler and McDonalds,” not many people will have seen the 0 TV ads or the very few radio commercials run.

Quietly, Wayport endured the Dot-Com bubble, and is generating not just EBITDA positive cash flow, but actual real profit.

You’re thinking, “Ok, why would almighty god of Technology Google want with a network provider to hotels and McDonalds?” It’s really one word… Just one word: Patents.

“Huh?”

Using Google’s own patent search, searching for Wayport, a list of obtuse patents is displayed.

The first patent that is key is Patent# 6326918, which lays down the groundwork for Geographic-based advertising in a wireless environment, which Google and San Francisco seem to have talked about before.

But it doesn’t end there. Throw in the other key patent, 6732176, which in essence patents the “Vendor Neutral” municipal WiFi environment that Earthlink is trying to do with Vonage and Google, and basically any Muni-Fi network in which the Muni is not the only ISP on the network.

And should the Muni try to sell WiFi access to Hotels with interactive ads, you can bank on Patent# 6604087 being leveraged to provide hotel-based ads.

Other than the patents, Wayport is the US’s largest WiFi hotspot provider. There’s already over 6,000 McDonald’s with Wayport WiFi access. Even if T-Mobile had every Starbucks wired, that’s still less than 5200 in the US.

So, there’s already a build WiFi infrastructure, intellectual property that basically covers everything Google wants to do in the WiFi market, and the know how of running a profitable WiFi venture. I’m not sure it’s a matter of if, but one of when?

(Disclosure: The Author owns shares of Wayport.)

These movie sequels just write themselves:

Passengers aboard a Toronto-bound jet experienced a similarly frightening mid-air experience this weekend when a scorpion made it onto an American Airlines flight from Costa Rica to Toronto and ending up biting a man.