Fan To Pro - The Blog of Professional Geekery

My Job Search: Recruiters

As I mentioned I got a lot of leads through recruiters in my job search, though the results from recruiters are often erratic - much more the fault of the economy I'd say, as most recruiters and temp places I've worked with are very good.  Considering the economic chaos of the last two recessions, they have to be.

Links of the Day 12/31/2008

And we ring out 2008 with our last Links of the Day for the year: Anime and Manga

• Neo Angelique Abyss added to Crunchyroll - The online move continues. Sounds like an odd little title too - similar to Aquarian Age.

Economics/Freakonomics/Geekonomics

• Office space prices decline rapidly - This is another side effect of the economic issues that doesn't get nearly as much coverage as it should.

To go on a bit about why the office space issue is important, it's twofold. First there's the impact of lower prices and less incomes on the companies owning the buildings, the loss of money on maintenance of unused space, and so on. Those are the impacts we're used to thinking of up front - people not making money.

The other impact is what comes as prices continue to fall. In Silicon Valley a lot of companies that went belly-up left behind cheap office space, good infrastructure, and other resources that were used by new, old, and surviving companies. Needless to say, they came kind of cheap and had a direct positive effect on the economic recovery of the area.

A fall in office space prices will eventually mean some kind of parity with companies looking for space - and they'll snatch it up fast (and of course lock the property owners into cheap contracts for some time). That may be good for some businesses who get cheap space - and trust me, space in big cities is obscenely expensive - but it will also change the relationships between renter and owner. It also gives the danger some may become comfortable with low space prices and think they'll go on forever. In your career/job/own business keep this in mind - you may find cheap space, but so will everyone else.

(Personally I just thing we need a largescale movement to telecommuting to save money, time, and the environment.)

Technology

• Google will release an API for its reader - I'm thrilled as it sounds like this is one of many improvements to what is a pretty good app. It also, of course, keeps Google in the spotlight, yet helps others, a major strategy they seem to be pursuing.
• Dell is reorganizing around customer segments - Dell's willing to change when they need to, and the plans largely follow their product lines. This is good news for us tech types as Dell wouldn't do this unless it would yield a positive income - my guess is they're already thinking 2010 and the next version of Windows.
• Are applications and tech tools getting usable enough they're vastly changing the learning curve? - An interesting look at a man, his young son, and the latest iPhone. Worth paying attention to because usability is still an issue for onboarding tech users, and I expect companies that produce usable products for everyone (Apple, Nintendo) will be better able to exploit the tech market - which sounds obvious, but is even more vitally important in touch times. Good interface design is an edge a company - maybe your company - needs. As a programmer-turned-manager I assure you that fact can't be ignored.
• Your best target for online services may be a UK Housewife - A fascinating demographic breakdown of net usage that's got quite a few shockers. There's a link to the full report (which is a PDF, so I didn't link directly). REQUIRED reading for us tech-types.
• Mass Zune Outage? - It's summed up here. In fact, it appears to have taken Microsoft quite a bit of time to post on the issue. news moves ever so fast these days.
• Techmeme's Objectively Top Ten Stories of 2008
• ebay's Bill Me Later payment system dropped by Amazon.com - That's 10-15% of the service's volume, and more bad news for eBay who is understandably sufferingin the slow economy. I don't think eBay is going away, but it's going to be a painful 2009 for them.

For geeks, Terry Pratchett has been knighted - Along with a few other very interesting people, including Robert Plant. I'm not sure I can find any news cooler than this, so kudos to Sir Terry Pratchett for a well-deserved recognition. I also have to say for any aspiring writers, his Discworld novels are required reading, as they're not only good, but are practacally writing lessons in book form on witty use of prose.

Finally Wikipedia needs donations. Send money, people.

-Steve

Links of the Day, 12/30/2008

Video Games

Game industry conferences are a huge part of the professional life of the industry, and the number of them is growing by leaps and bounds. Game Developers Career Guide has compiled a list of conferences for 2009 – if you're thinking of making this booming industry your career, it may be worth your while to check one out.

Crispy Gamer offers its year-end review list, the top 21 stories of 2008. Among the items covered: the number of companies exiting the Entertainment Software Association, among them Activision/Blizzard and LucasArts. Some cited financial reasons, others the desire to do their own lobbying in Washington. The president of the group, Hal Halpern, said he expects more defections in the next 12 months. Given that the strength of a good trade association (especially one with clout in Washington) can be a major boost to anyone's career, this is a very curious case, and hopefully, it'll reverse itself with the economy.

Also continuing its Year in Review is Gamasutra, whose roundup of the third quarter includes items such as the free-fall of Electronic Arts and the Xbox 360 price cuts. Definitely worth studying as a lesson in how even big companies can do things very, very wrong. (Just look at Sony's refusal to cut prices).

FanToPro Crush Object Emergent has integrated a complex light map system into their Gamebryo development tool - which compliments a new animation engine.  These are people to send resumes too! 

NC Soft has been sued over patent infringement. The case sounds like a company looking to make a quick buck off of a poor patent, but other MMO makers could get roped into this, which might be troublesome. NC Soft may have been picked due to potential vulnerability over the Tabula Rasa failure. 

For you future and current game pros, a look at franchises to resurrect - and some telling tales of how franchises fade away. 

Technology

Is Microsoft looking to go to pay-as-you-go computing? Apparently, there's a leaked document out there documenting a plan to have hardware that can be utilized on a pay-per-use basis. Users would pay to unlock different levels of computing, meaning that for a high-end game, they'd have to pay heavy to utilize the potential of their own hardware. This is extremely preliminary, but it definitely looks like a company trying to maximize a revenue stream in a slow economy. If something like this goes through, though, it may mean not only a gripe for consumers, but also an extra headache for programmers.

A Dutch IT consultant has started a campaign to have IBM open source Notes/Domino – based on an earlier campaign to have Sun do the same thing with Solaris, which was successful back in 2005. Ian Tree, the campaigner, said that doing so would make the business program "something schools use to teach groupware and application development concepts," which is "how various Unixes, relational databases, Linux, and a raft of other products eventually became commercialized." Interesting concept, and it definitely could do for Notes/Domino what open sourcing has done for the suddenly-red-hot Linux. Worth watching to see if Tree succeeds.

Streaming video has even invaded the world of Blu-Ray. LG has announced that it has added YouTube support to its new line of high-definition video players. If someone has an idea for high-definition streaming video, by all means, put it into practice. You could make a mint.

Chipmaker AMD is increasing layoffs, in a sad sign that the employee cuts in the industry aren't over yet. They've been having problems, so it's not entirely surprising, but it's never good to see another high-tech company hit.

Publishing

Advertising, the bedrock of the publishing industry, will stay in a slump for at least another 12 months, according to trade publication Ad Age. Sadly, this may result in a lot more news of layoffs and consolidations at newspapers and magazines – if you were thinking of making a career shift into this field in the immediate future, you may want to seriously reconsider.

Economics/Geekonomics

A look back at the 2008 financial crisis provided by the blog The Big Picture, and Bloomberg offers a year in review in video form. We've had another sobering reminder that we're not out of the woods yet with the news that home prices have dropped by 18 percent over the past 12 months, falling to 2004 levels.

– Bonnie (with input from Steve)

My JOB SEARCH: What pays off.

Last post I covered how I got my new job after a sudden layoff.  Now a little more detail - just what I did specifically and how it paid off.

Links of the Day, 12/29/2008

Links of the Day returns after our holiday break!

Anime/Manga

Funimation has launched a video portal offering streaming of selected episodes in its library for free. New titles will be offered every week; among those included in the launch were Ouran High School Host Club, Darker than Black and RomeoXJuliet. This seems like an attempt to compete with Viz's online efforts and continues the march of the industry into cyberspace; we'll see if other companies follow suit.

ICv2 is predicting a ten percent drop in domestically published manga titles for 2009. This is definitely a sign of the times, as companies will be looking to publish sure bets and not take a chance on more "fringe" titles. Hopefully, this is just a temporary dip that will reverse itself when the economy starts going in the other direction.

Video Games

Gamasutra is currently offering its Year in Review, broken into segments. Currently, January through March  and April through June are available. Topics covered include the Wii's expansion into Wii Fit and WiiWare, how Metal Gear Solid may have extended the life of the PS3 and the beginning of the end for Flagship Studios.

Electronic Arts got some much-needed good news when it was announced its casual gaming partnership with Hasbro has resulted in sales of more than two million units. Casual gaming continues to be a huge growth area, and it's a worthy one for a troubled company to be focusing on right now.

Nintendo is moving forward with its plans to launch streaming video on the Wii in Japan, partnering with advertising company Dentsu to develop content. Ninetendo will offer both pay-per-view and free videos. Also debuting in Japan, on Christmas Eve, was the DS Ware service for the currently Japan-only DSi, scheduled to come to America about halfway through 2009. Definitely look for both to be moved out internationally if they succeed.

PC gaming companies are increasingly looking to online distribution, according to Got Game News. The Steam service is booming, and Microsoft will be offering its own games portal. Look for computer-based gaming to go increasingly "unboxed" in the year ahead - developers should definitely be thinking "downloadable." In another sign of this being a big-money arena, game and virtual world fundings topped $500 million in 2008, with the biggest winners coming from the online and casual gaming areas. 

Technology

Not surprisingly, Amazon.com says it had its best-ever holiday season, with a 17 percent increase in sales. It's top-selling items were not its traditional books and DVDs, but electronics, which may be bad news for conventional, brick-and-mortar retailers. (Perhaps this was a factor in the collapse of Circuit City?)

Windows 7 was apparently leaked on BitTorrent, after the company said it planned to release the beta in January. ZDNet has said the beta is of "excellent quality." Could this be the make-good for Vista? The company has a lot of ill will to make up for. Meanwhile, there's been a leak on the side of Microsoft's archenemy as well, as purloined screenshots of the next Mac OS, code-named Snow Leopard, have appeared online (this looks like a refinement of the existing Leopard rather than a redo, though). And both Mac and PC are looking at a lawsuit right now charging that Apple and Microsoft, as well as Google, infringed on its patent for a thumbnail preview.

Alleged "Google Killer" Cuil isn't doing well, with its traffic numbers hitting rock-bottom. The search engine sparked some interest upon its launch in July, but since then, appears to have gone nowhere, and has drawn less-than-rave reviews. Lesson learned: If you're going to take on the big boys, make sure you have the goods to take them down with.

Economics/Geekonomics

Was the current recession caused by Baby Boomer greed? A look at how an entire generation's sense of entitlement may have upset the economic applecart in America.

Are employers waiting to hire until Obama gets in office, and they can take advantage of new tax breaks? The job and economic picture might be getting rosier faster than we thought.

Ellen Bratman of Bloomberg News delivers 2008 Winners and Losers, a review of an incredibly turbulent year in video form.

Publishing

USA Today is taking a slightly different turn in the move of newspapers into cyberspace: The paper will be sold via Amazon Kindle, the service's digital reader. The New York Times may do well to follow suit, as the paper announced its November revenues, and they are most definitely not pretty, with even traditional online revenues down. (The Times is definitely the exception rather than the rule in that area, with the top 30 newspaper Web sites posting big gains in revenue.)

The Washington Post and Baltimore Sun, longtime rivals, have come up with one solution to deal with the econmic downturn: They will share some content, including sports stories and photos. While we'd rather see more people get back to work in that field, anything that keeps the newspapers alive so they can hire more people once the economy recovers is a positive move.

- Bonnie          

Your Dose of Yearly Retrospectives

As I check news and we call it a year, there's always "Best of . . . the year" and "year in review" articles.  A few that caught my eye our readership may want to see:

• Wired's Top Ten Technology Breakthroughs of the year - Frankly I'd put flexible displays higher.
• Gizmodo's Top Ten iPhone Apps - Important just because the iPhone is important enough to HAVE its own list.
• Gamasutra's Ten Best games of the year - Note only two sequels.  My guess is that will grow for 2009.  Wired has their own opinion - and I agree No More Heroes should be in there.
• Gamasutra looks back on the top five surprises of the year as well.
• Editor and publisher looks back on the incredibly depressing top 10 newspaper stories of the year.

My Job Search: Getting the Job

 One thing you didn't see here in November is the fact that I got laid off from my job.  I briefly debated posting about my experience, but felt it would be more useful to compile my findings AFTER I got a job to see if there was anything useful for people.

I did get a new job about 30-40 days after I was laid off, and one in a very geeky area.  So now that I've got the new job and have been on it for about two weeks, I'd like to explain how I got there and what I found.  Let's face it though, you want solid advice now - just how did I get my new job?

So I want to make clear that what I'm posting below is what worked for ME.  But I figure it'll give people some good advice.

Predictions: Video Games in 2009

Our predictions conclude with our look at what we expect in Video Games in 2009.

Predictions: Technology in 2009

Our Predictions series continues in this slow news holiday week.  Today after a Christmas Break, we'll tackle our predictions for technology.

Predictions: Media and Publishing for 2009

And now for Christmas Eve, our projections for 2009 for media and publishing!