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Google Fiber Compared To Broadband By Putting A Middle Age Guy In A Bath Robe And Soaking Him With A Firehose
Provo, Utah is getting Google Fiber in the next few months. So how do you explain to the people of this small city south of Salt Lake what that will mean for their Interent service?
You get a guy to wear a bath robe and stand next to a raised swimming pool with a garden hose, symbolic of broadband service. Then you drench him with a fire truck deluge gun and two firemen who come to fill the pool with their blasting hoses to show the comparative power of Google Fiber.
The piece is funny enough but not exactly accurate as pointed out by the Consumerist. There might bem an outlier case for what the video portrays. That is if you use the FCC’s definition of broadband and then compare it to someone who is going from dial-up to fiber. But that’s hardly the reality for Provo. The Consumerist points out that according to a recent town-by-town survey of download speeds, the average Internet user in Provo is getting download speeds of around 21.5 Mbps, which is above the national average. Kansas City. on the other hand, the first major deployment of Google Fiber, averages nearly 50 Mbps.
If Provo were to reach those speeds, that would be a huge improvement, but that’s still just about two and half trickling garden hoses, and certainly not three fire hoses on full blast. Even if Provo residents could achieve the 85 Mbps that top-ranked Ephrata, WA, residents see (thanks to their own dedicated fiber network), it’s still not even close to the comparison made in the video.
The video did draw a belly laugh from me. Maybe its’s the suburban setting with the muddy grass and the tract housing or the Charlie Chaplin sad face of this fellow in his boxers getting doused.
Regardless, the video still works. It avoids the technical nitty-gritty. Instead it uses humor to explain differences that for most people are too technical in nature, All people want is better and faster Internet service.
Technology often gets explained literally by how it works and that can put people to sleep. Get the suburban dude to wear a bathrobe with his belly sticking out by the backyard pool — now that’s how to explain tech.
MLB's iBeacon Experiment May Signal A Whole New Ball Game For Location Tracking
There’s been plenty of buzz about iBeacons and Bluetooth Low Energy radios — they’re supposed to do wonders for in-venue positioning, and plenty of companies have already expressed interest in deploying them in the field. But what is it like to actually stroll through a beacon-laden area? Curiously enough, Major League Baseball took on that challenge and recently decided to show off its vision of a Bluetooth-enabled ballpark at Citi Field in Queens, NY.
“What we’re moving toward is building a platform for any team to put their own custom Bluetooth beacons in their parks,” said MLB Mobile Product Dev SVP Chad Evans as he clutched his iPhone outside the venue.
Let’s be clear about something first: Very little about MLB’s big Bluetooth push is final at this point. It almost seemed that, with this experiment, MLB’s tech team was thinking out loud. A handsomely revamped version of the MLB At Bat app is perhaps the furthest along. Evans says the design language of the app, which now features a seemingly Googlean stream of cards that display your ticket barcode and seat locations (among other things) is near final and will roll out to consumers in the coming months. The visual polish of the software was balanced by the unfinished nature of the hardware that made all those whiz-bang features possible. At this stage it’s all prototype gear, small boards lashed together and housed in milky-white plastic cases to protect them from the elements.
With all that said, MLB’s little experiment shows plenty of promise. Walking across the threshold into the park proper prompted a notification on Evans’ demo iPhone welcoming us to the venue. Stopping in front of the old Shea Stadium Home Run Apple and holding that same phone to a demo stanchion kicked off a video that described the Mets’ home for 44 years. Once we passed into the park’s rotunda and paused in front of the escalator, the app recognized us as a first-time visitor and offered us $2 off a Nathan’s hot dog. Eventually, Evans said, the app and those Bluetooth beacons will be able to direct users to the closest route to their seats.
One has to wonder how much further MLB could take this concept. If you could track app users as they bounded from location to location in a ballpark, you could probably develop a pretty granular profile to help target for ads or other engagement opportunities. Repeat visitor to the Mets Team Store? You could get pushed a loyalty discount. Were you spotted making more than a few trips to the bathroom? Maybe you shouldn’t be pushed any more drink specials. Granted, the second example is pretty extreme, but Evans didn’t completely rule out the possibility of more fine-grained location sniffing… if the organization can figure out how to accomplish that sort of thing without creeping out the fans.
How far could MLB take the concept?
Once you start seeing what MLB (and plenty of other organizations like it) can do with iBeacons, it makes sense why Bluetooth Low Energy is suddenly so in vogue. The level of targeting and reach that a smartly assembled array of Bluetooth beacons provides could profoundly change how companies try to interact with us for better or worse. It certainly doesn’t hurt that support for Bluetooth LE is something both Apple and Google have committed to either — iDevices as old as the 4S can take advantage of these features if they’re running iOS 7, and Google confirmed that Bluetooth LE support would be one of the main additions to Android 4.3. That means a huge swath of the devices out there and in the pipeline will be ready to, well, play ball with this newfangled approach to interaction.
Evans admitted that MLB has explored a few other location-based content delivery systems in the past, but solutions like NFC’s stop-and-tap-and-wait approach never reached the level of ubiquity and reliability to make it worth a major rollout. Even platform-agnostic modes of interaction like scanning QR codes and AR applications apparently just weren’t elegant enough to get the job done. But with iBeacons, MLB may have finally found exactly what it’s looking for.
For now, though, the name of the game is fine-tuning. Evans noted these Bluetooth-powered experiences will start rolling out sometime in 2014, but it’ll be some time before the functionality spreads to the rest of the nation’s major league ballparks. After all, there’s a lot to consider when it comes to crafting a smart location-centric experience like the one demoed on that warm September afternoon. Part of the plan, naturally, has to encompass the sorts of content that users are given access to, but there are plenty of technical concerns to tackle, too.
Consider the issue of range, for one. MLB doesn’t want to accidentally trigger a response within the app if you’re too far away from an attraction or a point of interest. Even the materials used in the construction of the park can affect these radios’ reach, so each one has to have its power output and transmission rate tweaked so they can collectively hit the right spots. You can bet that Fenway Park — opened in 1912 and festooned with architectural holdovers from years past — is going to require a significantly different layout of Bluetooth transmitters than my native Citizens Bank Park (go Phils!).
If this sounds like a painstaking process, you’d be right, but Evans is convinced that taking the time to meticulously hone the hardware is well worth it.
“We’re baseball, we’re not a small startup,” Evans conceded. “We want to be nimble and quick and take new opportunities, but we also don’t want to roll something out that’s going to confuse fans.”
AppSeed Relies On Computer Vision Tech And Your Phone To Speed Up UI Design
Digital designers point your eyes at this neat Kickstarter project which is utilising computer vision tech to speed up the early stages of the design process. The basic idea is to give designers a way to quickly transform the sketches in their (paper) notepad into a functioning UI prototype to test work flow and get feedback on early-stage design ideas.
How does it work? The plan is to make an app, called AppSeed, which lets designers use their phone to snap a photo of their design. AppSeed’s computer vision algorithms will then isolate and identify the different UI elements in the sketches, and make them work as intended — so, for instance, a quick sketch of a text box becomes a field where text can be inputted.
AppSeed’s creators are using the open source computer vision library, OpenCV, plus their own algorithms to isolate and identify UI elements. The software will either guess what an element is, based on analysing things like its shape and or relative location. Or prompt the user to specify its function from a list of UI elements if that portion of the design isn’t immediately obvious to its artificial eye.
“The app uses the OpenCV library to identify enclosed shapes and then decides what the UI is based off its location, size and shape (but only when obvious). So an arrow shape in the top left is likely a back button while a series of three short horizontal lines in the same spot is likely a menu button. An empty rectangle that is about 50px tall and very wide can be assumed to be an input text,” explains AppSeed’s Greg Goralski.
“The app makes things into buttons by default and of course the designer can set the UI directly (which is the main way things get set). It uses two techniques, find contour and template matching, to identify shapes and specific elements.”
The focus for AppSeed is squarely on the early stages of UI design — the “initial brainstorming and iterating stage” as Goralski puts it. “The more ideas you have at the start of a project, the better the final product is. We want to make that part easier, faster and more intuitive.”
It’s interesting that an app for digital designers is convinced that paper will continue to play a key role in the process — despite there being no shortage of electronic alternatives for sketching directly into a computer (tablets, smart pens, design software and so on). But for brainstorming early design work, Goralski reckons old school ink is hard to beat.
“We can definitely have digital files brought in directly, but feel that the sketching process with pen and paper will be with us for a long time,” he says. ”Pen and paper (along with whiteboard and marker) are so quick and intuitive that they are a natural place to start a project. Digital tools are great, and have been around for a long time now, but pen and paper feels right, is easily collaborated on and is almost always with you.”
The design that’s been transferred from paper to AppSeed will run as a UI prototype within the app but can also be shared as an HTML5 prototype so others can test its work flow without also having to have AppSeed.
There’s currently no full list of UI elements that will be added to the finished app (assuming it gets funded), as the team plan to take feedback from backers to find out what they want, but Goralski says likely additions are: Maps, Streetview, slider, popups, side menus, switches, lists, back button, social media connects, open camera (and other buttons), as well as gestures such as swipe, pinch and tap.
After the AppSeed prototype stage is done and dusted, designs can then be handed off for the next stage of the design process by being sent to Photoshop as a layered file (i.e. with each button or element separated onto its own layer for easier manipulation).
Goralski says the main competitors to the AppSeed concept are POP app and Protosketch but he argues that by bringing computer vision tech into the mix AppSeed is going one better.
“Both [rival apps] take pictures of a sketch to bring it onto the device as we do. The difference is that we then isolate the elements with computer vision. It is this step that gives us the ability to actually make the draw shape into the UI element. This is a powerful difference,” he tells TechCrunch.
At the moment, the Canada-based AppSeed team have a functioning prototype of their app but are looking for a funding bump to turn that into a fully fledged iOS app (with an Android version planned as a stretch goal for the crowdfunding campaign).
They’re seeking CAD$30,000 to build the initial iOS app — and have taken less than half that amount in pledges, with around a third of their 30-day campaign left to go. Pledges for a Kickstarter edition of the app now start at $30, all lower pledge levels having been taken up. They’re aiming to ship the app in January.
Azimo Raises $1M Seed Funding To Take Its Money Transfer Service To Europe
It seems there’s still money be made in money transfers. Azimo, the UK-based social money transfer service that competes with legacy players Western Union and Moneygram, and to a lesser extent, PayPal, has raised just over $1 million in seed funding from the European arm of VC firm eVentures. Existing angel investors also participated in the round, including CapitalOne founder Matt Cooper, which brings the company’s total funding to-date to around $1.5 million.
Azimo says the new capital will be used to expand the service to other parts of Europe, in terms of who can send money (the service already supports 190 destination countries around the world). TechCrunch understands that Germany will be first, with Ireland, France, Spain, and Netherlands pegged to follow on the startup’s roadmap.
Launched in August 2012, Azimo aims to disrupt the remittance industry by letting users transfer money internationally to friends, family or other contacts via the Web, its mobile apps or Facebook, charging between 1% and 2% of the transaction, which is significantly cheaper than the rates charged by the likes of Western Union, PayPal or the indeed the banks. The recipient receives the money either in their bank account, at local cash collection points, or as “mobile wallet” top-up credit.
Talking up the size of the online money transfer market as a whole — $500 billion, citing the World Bank — Azimo claims 30,000 registered users, and says that 60% of customers make a repeat visit in their first month. To mark its one year anniversary, the company is waving its fees from today till the end of October. I guess that’s one way to spend VC money.
In a canned statement, Azimo’s fund raise seems to have got the approval of the UK Government’s Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, Vince Cable, who says: “This German investment into a British startup demonstrates that the UK has the infrastructure, the skills base and the competitive edge to capitalise on our expertise in both financial services and digital technology and UKTI is working to ensure that the UK is leading the way in the FinTech revolution. Competition in the financial services sector is vital to ensure consumers get the best deal possible and I commend Azimo on securing this financing.”
Of course, Cable is right, the UK does punch above its weight in financial services, and this is also translating to FinTech. To that end, another potential competitor in Europe is the multiple VC-backed TransferWise. However, Azimo is more about consumer transfers via collection points akin to Western Union, while TransferWise largely targets bank transfers, particularly by businesses, not least startups.
Cue the now obligatory statement from Joanna Shields, CEO to Tech City UK, the British government organisation charged with trumpeting startups in London: “Fin-tech is a lucrative and exciting growth market with many start-ups and young businesses creatively disrupting traditional models and re-imagining our relationship with money. I hope that Azimo’s success and this funding milestone will inspire other investors to join in the new wave of financial innovation happening in London.”
The Upcoming Glass Development Kit Launch Will Finally Allow Google Glass To Live Up To Its Potential
The limited launched of Google Glass earlier this year was greeted with a lot of hype and the inevitable backlash, but one thing this first version of Glass didn’t show yet was the full potential of the platform. That’s because developers can’t do all that much with Glass right now. They can push messages and receive images, videos and audio from the device through the so-called Mirror API, but that’s about it right now.
Even though Glass runs on Android, the company hasn’t made its long-announced Glass Developer Kit (GDK) – which will allow developers to write complex Android apps that run on Glass itself – available yet. For many developers, the Mirror API was quite a disappointment, especially after Google showed off some of Glass’ more advanced features in a demo video last year and then didn’t develop a similar experience in the first prototype. Now, however, it looks like it’s just a matter of weeks before Google will release the GDK and allow for Glass users to install “real” Glass apps on the device.
Google started encouraging developers to hack Glass and run Android apps on it at its I/O developer conference earlier this year, and in July, it told people to start using the standard Android SDK to work on Android apps for Glass.
With the release of the GDK, Google will open the doors for a whole new group of Glass apps that are currently either impossible to build or just available to those who are willing to hack their $1,500 spectacles. The GDK will allow apps to access the compass, gyroscope, accelerometer and other low-level hardware on the device. Most importantly, however, developers will also be able to render complex OpenGL-based graphics on the devices. Right now, all they get are HTML-based cards for their apps, but with the GDK, they will be able to build real-time augmented-reality apps, games and more complex and innovative user interfaces.
I’ve seen a number of these apps as hacks over the last few months and they make for a completely different user experience on Glass than the usual interface. To get a glimpse of what’s possible with the GDK, just take a look at the Glass navigation experience. That’s currently the only full-blown app on Glass that uses most of the graphics capabilities of Glass and the built-in sensors. The other Glass feature that shows you some of the potential of the GDK is the famous Glass easter egg that introduces you to the Glass team.
All of these new capabilities will likely stir some of the controversy around Glass once again – especially once the first real-time facial recognition apps find their way onto the device without the need to hack it. Still, the GDK will finally free Glass from being what’s essentially a fancy Google Now client with some third-party apps to a full-blown platform for developers.
What Games Are: Steam's Big Bet
Editor’s note: Tadhg Kelly is a veteran game designer and the creator of leading game design blog What Games Are. You can follow him on Twitter here.
There had long been hints that Valve was up to something. Hints like Gabe Newell decrying the state of Windows 8 and speaking in favor of Linux. Hints like Big Picture, the TV-like dashboard. Hints like the Xi3′s boxy little machine. With new consoles and microconsoles starting to pop into existence, this week Valve finally revealed its answer: SteamOS. Steam Machines. Steam Controllers. Boom. Its ambitions are not to launch a console but a whole solution for home gaming entertainment.
In a sense it has to.
Valve’s Problems
For Valve and many other studios the decline and fall of the PC is a slowly dawning apocalypse. Sales of gaming PCs may be up while the rest of the market is down but there’s a point at which the support that comes from the wider PC ecosystem starts to dwindle. Perhaps video cards start not keeping pace. Perhaps driver software becomes less updated. Perhaps commoditized components stop being cheap and PCs become much more expensive. The knock-on effects of this decline could wipe out Valve, Blizzard and a number of others.
However Valve’s second, and largely unique, problem is that a recovery in the PC space implies tighter integration of the platform by Microsoft. With the purchase of most of Nokia and a search for new leadership underway the Wyrm may finally be starting to turn at Big-M. Windows 9 (or 8.5, or whatever) may well turn things around. If it does though it will be for a Microsoft that’s far more interested in device-and-service thinking. It will mean more prominence for the Windows Store. It doesn’t compete much with Steam today but one day it will.
Finally Valve’s third problem is its ecosystem. It has a massive following of both players and developers. Steam is perceived as art house venue of games and every indie wants to be there. That ecosystem has evolved hand-in-hand with the PC paradigm since its inception and is resistant to fundamental change. Steam’s adoption took forever and required deeply discounted sales to overcome suspicions. Nowadays it’s huge but that doesn’t mean its audience is ready for a big shift.
These problems have essentially defined Valve’s next generation solution, but they breed problems of their own.
SteamOS
A few weeks ago at LinuxCon 2013, Gabe Newell gave a talk about the future of Linux as a gaming system. Obviously this was something of a preach-to-the-choir crowd and so the talk was warmly received, but outside of its domain does anyone really care? Linux may be powerful but it’s also geeky. Getting into it requires rolling up your sleeves and doing some digging. It’s cool for motivated people but for everybody else (even the comparatively savvy gamer crowd) it’s a chore. This is why, although it has had Linux support for a while, Steam is still largely a Windows client in most people’s eyes. It’s just easier to make and run games in Microsoft’s house.
With SteamOS Valve is trying to be the Android of the game consoles, to do the hard work of taking a cool kernel and make it user-friendly. The company sees itself as providing a nexus solution to everyone’s problems, and maybe even harboring hopes of Android-sized success. Manufacturers can use SteamOS as the core of a gaming deck that they would then sell, creating a class of home-hub devices that would be a bit like consoles but also their own thing. There would be choice and range in the market yet a common platform to power them all, much like today’s PC. And there would be neat features like streaming games across your home network. Like an Apple TV and iTunes.
Sure, but the big problem with that vision is developer support. The majority of games in the Steam catalog are old, all created for the Windows PC paradigm. They’re built to work with mouse, keyboard, DirectX or OpenGL and so on. Support for updating them to work on modern Windows machines is hard enough, but to shift platform? Many don’t.
As an anecdotal example, I own about 150 games through my Steam account. Only about half of them work with Mac. The other half are either pending support or simply won’t ever have it. The Mac is arguably much more stable and better supported than Linux PCs tend to be, and yet plenty of game makers are not bothered. They can’t make the business case for it to be worth the effort. So what hope does Valve have of convincing risk-averse game developers to create full ports of existing games for SteamOS? Or even convincing them to make original games designed specifically for the OS?
On the face of it, very little. Game makers tend to be look-before-you-leap types (as I have often argued, to their cost) which means new platforms often have to deal with chicken/egg paradoxes. You can’t get interest in your platform without great games, and you can’t get great games on your platform without proving it has significant interest.
For non-dedicated gaming platforms like PCs, iPhones and Facebook this problem tends to resolve on its own because so many people buy into the platform for other reasons that game makers overcome their skepticism. However dedicated platforms usually have to solve it by opening their wallets. That billion dollars that Microsoft is ploughing into Xbox One for game development? This is why.
If a platform essentially offers to pay game makers enough to make it worth their while, they’ll dive in. But is Valve really willing to do that? Sure it has its own key franchise in Half Life 3, but I seriously doubt it will make the mistake of making that game Steam Machine exclusive. If it is relying on providing the platform and then hoping developers will support it, it will need to sweeten that deal somehow.
Steam Machines
Irrespective of the support question, the strategy of being the Android of game consoles reminds me of Microsoft’s Windows Media Center adventure. The basic gist of WMC was a mini-PC sitting under your TV and acting as a powerful hub for all your entertainment. It was primarily for movies and recording TV but had other conceivable uses too, such as games.
This idea has always been compelling to some people yet it’s never really taken off. One reason is that the hardware has sucked. It’s been expensive, underpowered and far more fiddly than it was supposed to be. The living room is not the desktop and does not induce nearly as much tolerance for messing around to make something work. Does anyone really want to have to faff about with their home hub while their family looks on? People want a product that they are confident will not be like that.
Existing console platform manufacturers tend to shy away from multiple-manufacturer ideals for precisely this reason. Similar to the difference between today’s iPhone and Android, working with partners tends to detract from control over the user experience and leads to fragmentation. Standards can not be enforced nor compliance ensured. The cognitive load that this places on the user is high, which the user then finds discouraging. The guarantee that every game will just work can not be assured.
So one of my big fears for Steam Machines is that the balance of power between Valve and its partners will favor the partners. The partners may want, for example, to bundle their own dashboards in their machines and develop their own brand relationship with their customers. We see that happening all the time on Android, so why not SteamOS? All that deluded cruftware that you get when you buy an OEM PC? Imagine that under your TV.
My second fear is that Steam Machines will turn out underpowered. Valve may want them to be top-notch but partner manufacturers often have to rationalize the cost of production and shave a bit here and there to make a profit. Ecosystem-led approaches tend to result in halting periods of innovation as a result. For some audiences this wouldn’t be a problem, but for PC gamers it is. The perception of being behind is not one they enjoy.
Look at Microsoft’s attempts to make Windows-powered tablets and phones work. For years the idea was to partner with everyone and let hardware sort it out, as it had in PC. The result was years of bad Windows Mobile phones and awful touch PCs. Instead the company had to pivot from software to devices and just make the units themselves (or with Nokia). It had to because it’s in the nature of OEMs to sit back and make smaller innovations with low-powered (and often just crappy) tech. But to compete with iPad Microsoft needed something much bolder.
While they may have their flaws, one thing that Xbox One and PlayStation 4 will be good at is delivering super-lush (and reliably so) games. Like the Surface or the iPad, the vertical control over the platform has a lot to do with that. I suspect a similar story will play out for Steam Machines, and that Valve will eventually conclude that it should just make its own. It goes against the DNA of the company in many ways (it’s used to working with lots of others) but still.
My biggest fear for Steam Machines, however, is price. Sony is able to sell PlayStation 4′s for $400 because it’s taking a significant cut from each game. The console is probably being sold at cost price, or even below, because higher prices tend to make customers queasy. Unless a platform has a deeply held marketing story of being much better (say Mac vs PC) then it can be very hard to make a case to customers that they should pay more.
I just have a hard time believing that there are many gamers out there willing to spend $900 on a console, when one of the big cheering points of PS4 vs Xbox One was the $400 vs $500 starting price. Gamers who want big games will be able to buy a dedicated console for half my guesstimated price of a good Steam Machine. Meanwhile the ones who want indie or casual games will be able to buy something an OUYA for $100. All in all I think this hub strategy means Valve’s primary customers for Steam Machines will be the people who are already invested in Steam, and only a subset of those who haven’t already shelled out a couple of grand on a big PC gaming rig.
Which leads me to…
Steam Controller
For a long time I’ve wondered who would properly reinvent the modern joypad and do something cool with it. Joypads have been ungainly multi-pad multi-button affairs for a long time, holding on to legacy features like D-pads long past their sell-by date. So I love the idea of the Steam Controller. While the initial renders of it look kinda kooky, I’m excited.
And yet: Do PC gamers want to move away from their mice and keyboards? Irrespective of the problems looming over the PC landscape and how they might be an issue for game makers down the tracks, don’t people who go out and buy gaming computers do so because they like to game on computers? Do they actually want to go console at all? Joypads have been available for PC forever yet haven’t ever really made the leap into being considered a part of the default spec. They still lack support in many games, and there’s a strong resistance to them from the pre-existing community. It simply believes M+K to be best, and for many types of game it is.
And also: Do PC gamers want to move out of their bedrooms and into the communal living room? The guy who plays MMOs night after night in private doesn’t necessarily want to do that in shorter bursts on TV because his family wants to be able to watch Netflix. The quirky indie fan might prefer the experience of being absorbed in Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs by a screen close to her face. Closer screens blot out the world more effectively than the at-a-distance feel of TV gaming.
Admittedly that’s a somewhat archaic view of modern family life, yet one that still makes me ponder. While it is possible to cross-sell users from one platform to another (Apple and Nintendo do it all the time), with PC gamers there’s often a component of the deliberate choice. They have often played many a console game (such as the good folks at Rock Paper Shotgun) but ultimately decided they preferred computer gaming. They are the reason why gaming PCs boom as all other PCs fall.
So I just don’t know that joypad gaming will ever be for them.
Streaming and Funding
Valve’s biggest asset is the legion of fans willing to give Gabe the benefit of the doubt. That’s no small thing. It’s other big asset is its methodical approach and willingness to keep driving at a problem until it’s solved. It did it with Steam, turning a much-hated e-commerce barrier into a thriving community over the course of half a decade. So while I may have questions over what the company has recently announced, I firmly believe that it will answer them in the long term.
Steam Machine’s likely success comes down to the price of the consoles and the support of game makers. This is why perhaps the most interesting announcement from all of this week’s news was game streaming. You’ll be able to stream your Steam games to your SteamOS console under your TV and play them across your local network. Hopefully that won’t be as laggy as remote solutions like OnLive turned out to be.
While customers might struggle to buy into the idea of a $900 console, they’d be much more amenable to a $100 Apple TV-sized streaming unit. I could, for example, see a partnership with folks like OUYA to develop a SteamOS player. I could see something similar for Android tablets, particularly if the Steam Controller could be made to work with those systems. Perhaps by doing something in that vein the company could get access to the living room without all the overhead.
And then what about the actual PC? If Windows is slowly sunsetting that doesn’t necessarily mean that the PC form factor will go with it. The PC game player will still want a gaming computer to enjoy her MMOs in her bedroom. While SteamOS has been pitched as more for the living room than the desktop, why not also have a desktop edition?
As for game support Valve has one big advantage that it’s not yet using well. Through efforts like Steam Greenlight Valve has brought its community into the publishing process, which has given many indies exposure. The missing piece, which I’ve previously argued, is crowdfunding. There’s no good reason other than reticence why Steam isn’t essentially the Kickstarter of games (even more so than Kickstarter itself), and if it were then the resulting funds would encourage game makers to get on board with Steam Machine.
If Valve could pin crowdfunding to its new console platform together then the sky could be the limit. However it remains to be seen whether the company is willing to take that step.
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