nwbusinesswatch.com

Now, there’s an interesting fact about these cards. Retailers love them over any other product they have in their store, because the cards themselves don’t take up any inventory.

The really big untapped market for these digital media companies is gift giving. No matter how much someone loves an online world no one is going to say “hey, merry Christmas. I logged into your account and gave you 25 bucks.” Not to mention the impulse buy.

GMG started in the marketing services working with retailers–specifically Target–but around the same time as that, well, it’s not very well known, but it’s Target who actually brought the idea of the pre-paid iTunes card to Apple and sold them on that.

The tale of retail game cards is a pretty amazing one. In a recent interview Rob Goldberg, founder and CEO of GMG Entertainment, a publisher of “digital currency cards” that you see on sale at Target, Safeway and a number of other big-box shops, shed some light on how the market came to be and where it’s going in the future.

According to Goldberg, sales of the game cards will be worth $75 million to $100 million this year with an expected run to $500 million by 2010. Interestingly enough, Target was the retailer that figured it out first and convinced Apple to offer iTunes cards.

The first iTunes cards were co-branded and were exclusive to Target. In terms of retailers in North America who were focused on pre-paid cards for digital entertainment, Target were ahead of the curve.

It’s a great interview if you have even a remote interest in virtual goods and gaming. It also shows that no matter how bad the economy is, someone will figure out how to make you spend your money.

And why do retailers love these cards? The economics work in their favor.

They’re not activated until they’re purchased, so they don’t sit on the balance sheet of the retailer. They feel like “free money” to retailers. So it’s a very positive business for retailers to get into, and it really lowers the bar for any retailers who are unsure about it, they don’t need to worry about losing money on it.

(Credit:
Netgear)

Given that most Draft-N routers sell for at least $60-70 at the moment (Amazon sells this model for $99 new), I don’t expect these to last long. Get one while you can!

Find more deals, coupon codes, and bargains on CNET’s Shopper.com.

In case you’re unfamiliar with it, the new 802.11 Wi-Fi standard (currently known as Draft-N) promises better range and faster throughput. The WNR834B is backwards-compatible with older 802.11 hardware. It comes with five Ethernet ports, three internal antennas, built-in quality-of-service (QoS) features, and, because it’s a refurb, a measly 30-day warranty.

CNET gave the router a reasonably good review, though it was nearly two years ago, and Netgear has released several firmware updates since then. If you decide to pick up a WNR834B, make sure you grab the latest firmware.

If you’ve been itching to hop on the 802.11n bandwagon but discouraged by the high prices of the routers, CompUSA has a sweet deal: A refurbished Netgear WNR834B Wireless N Router for $29.99 (plus shipping).

The British Steam Car spouts off as it gets ready to make a run at a 103-year-old land speed record.

The vehicle’s peak speed in the first run was 136.103 mph, and in the second, 151.085 mph.

(Credit:
The British Steam Car Challenge)

The British Steam Car, a project 10 years in the making, is no jet, but it does have its share of modern trappings, including carbon-fiber construction. The 3-ton, 25-foot-long vehicle has 12 boilers, and its steam gets superheated to 400 degrees Celsius before being injected into the turbine.

(Credit:
The British Steam Car Challenge)

In each of its runs, the Steam Car, driven by Charles Burnett III, actually traveled more than 6 miles on a dry lake bed at Edwards Air Force Base, Calif. On either side of the measured mile, it requires a 2.5-mile stretch for acceleration and deceleration. In going for the record, the vehicle had to make the second run within an hour of the first–the steam team says it made the turnaround Tuesday in 52 minutes.

After holding onto its land speed record for 103 years, the homegrown Stanley automobile from the early days of motoring has been overtaken by a late-model import. The British Steam Car team said Tuesday that, earlier in the day, in the two runs required to be considered for the record, the Steam Car averaged 139.843 mph over a measured mile.

The Stanley Steamer may have finally been dethroned.

Photos: Steam Car team eyes record

Charles Burnett III behind the wheel of the Steam Car.

Tuesday’s achievement still awaits official confirmation from the certifying agency, the Federation Internationale de l’Automobile.

The steam-powered mark to beat was 127 mph, set in 1906 by Fred Marriott, driving that Stanley Steamer at Daytona Beach, Fla. (According to the FIA, the overall World Land Speed Record is 763 mph, a supersonic speed reached in 1997 by a jet-powered car, the ThrustSSC.)

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Mark Shuttleworth points to an excellent way to let Ubuntu Linux newbies give it a try without leaving the comfort of their Windows machines:

…I was absolutely delighted with the way Agostino Russo and Evan Dandrea steered the Windows-native installer for Ubuntu into 8.04 LTS. What I think is really classy about it is the way it uses the Windows Boot Manager sensibly to offer you the Ubuntu option. If I was a Windows user who was intrigued but nervous about Linux, this would be a really great way to get a taste of it, at low risk. Being able to install and uninstall a Linux OS as if it were a Windows app is a brilliant innovation.

Indeed. Most of the open-source software I use (I mean, besides Google and its ilk) is desktop software that runs on the proprietary
Mac OS X operating system. Windows and OS X are the secret Trojan Horses of open-source software. As more and more great software is written to run on these platforms (as well as Linux, of course), a greater number of people will encounter open source and will embrace it, not because it’s open source, but rather because it works.

Until the day when all software is open source, there are the many days when it’s not.

This is Google’s video introducing its work with artists worldwide to create
beautiful, funky, and visually enticing iGoogle pages for the masses.
(Credit: Google)

If you thought Google’s capacity for high design didn’t go far beyond its primary-colored logo, think again.

The iGoogle personalized home pages have been graced with new flair thanks to the introduction of iGoogle Artist Themes, a way for Google members to do digital interior decoration.

It may not help Mountain View on its quest to organize all the world’s information, but it can make some of that information look a little prettier. Microsoft did something like this with Zune Originals, trendy designs for its music players.

“We’ve collaborated with almost 70 artists from around the world,” an e-mail announcement from Google reads, “inviting them to use iGoogle as their canvas by creating unique, dynamic themes for our users to personalize their pages.” The imagery in each theme changes continually.

Artist Jeff Koons' 'Google doodle'

(Credit:
Google)

This is no small-time operation. Google has pulled out the stops, with contributions from artists and architects like Jeff Koons, Michael Graves, Philippe Starck, and Yann Arthus-Betrand, as well as fashion luminaries like Diane von Furstenberg, Tory Burch, Oscar de la Renta, Marc Ecko, and Dolce & Gabbana. A few music artists like Coldplay, the John Butler Trio, and the Beastie Boys also are present, as are pop-culture figures like BoingBoing’s Mark Frauenfelder, Jackie Chan, The Wiggles, and…Lance Armstrong.

To celebrate, Google will host an art-themed party Thursday night at a nightclub in New York’s Meatpacking District, the upscale shopping and nightclub enclave that lies conveniently adjacent to the company’s sprawling Gotham satellite office.

In addition, the Google.com logo has been tweaked by Koons for the day.

SAP CEO Henning Kagermann has some advice for how Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer should spend $45 to $50 billion.

“I’d encourage him to spend it on Yahoo. For Microsoft, the challenges are more on the side of the consumer space, not the enterprise space,” said Kagermann.

While Ballmer walked away from Yahoo over the asking price and other issues, he might be back if Yahoo fails to show that it can gain momentum.

Kagermann was speaking at SAP’s Sapphire conference in Orlando, Fla. ZDNet’s Larry Dignan captured the action. Kagermann speculated that Microsoft wouldn’t have made the offer if it didn’t have a good handle on how to integrate the two companies.

In 2004, Microsoft and SAP were in talks to merge but nothing came of it. It could be that Kagermann hopes that Microsoft acquires Yahoo so it will be distracted with the merger and not get any ideas about trespassing on SAP’s enterprise software territory.

I was working on this when I read this CNET News.com post. Apparently, Bill Gates believes that a strong technology sector will help keep America’s economy healthy. I couldn’t agree more. But I have a somewhat different take on the role tech has played in the U.S. economy.

Over the past few decades, the U.S. technology industry has had a number of “the sky is falling” moments, and every time we’ve managed to work through it and come out stronger than before.

For example, when I entered the job market in 1980, my employer–Texas Instruments–was the world’s leading semiconductor maker. But in 1986, NEC and Fujitsu took the top two spots. By 1998, Japanese companies held the top 3 and 6 of the top 9 positions and TI had slipped to No. 5. Intel was the only bright spot, climbing the charts from 10th to 7th place.

Fast forward to 2006, when U.S. companies occupied 4 of the top 10 positions, including No. 1 (Intel) and No. 3 (TI). Rounding out the top 10 were two companies each from Japan, Korea, and Europe. That’s certainly more balanced. What changed?

(Credit:
Microsoft)

Well, U.S. technology companies and their employees seem to have a knack for innovating. But we don’t just invent technology; we also create and dominate markets. We don’t just rise to the occasion when our economy is threatened; technology innovation and marketing seem to be innate strengths of our culture.

For example, Intel, Microsoft, and IBM together created the personal computer. Contributions from Apple, Compaq, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, and others helped to make personal computing the most important product category in tech history.

Nokia may be the dominant cell phone company, but U.S. companies like TI dominate the chips inside, and Qualcomm invented CDMA–the competitor of Europe’s GSM standard.

U.S. companies invented and dominate networking and the Internet. American companies invented the Palm Pilot, Tivo, and of course the
iPod and
iPhone. Except for Vizio, we don’t make TVs, but TI invented DLP technology–the core of a new generation of HDTVs and video projectors.

It’s surprising that we occasionally manage to out-innovate and out-market Asian and European consumer electronics giants like Sony, Samsung, Panasonic, and Philips.

First manufacturing moved offshore, followed by outsourcing of data and call-centers and even software and hardware development. But our unemployment rate has averaged just below 5 percent for the past 10 years, and it’s not expected to change anytime soon.

When we’re confronted with a challenge, we retool, innovate, create, and market. As an industry and with the occasional help of the government we also protect our intellectual property rights–one of the biggest challenges we’ve faced, and continue to face, since the early ’80s.

At the end of the day, it’s imperative that we continue to develop, nurture, and protect our human capital, our intellectual capital, and our venture capital. And not just in traditional electronics, but in biotech, nanotech,
green tech, and energy tech.

Just as they say in the stock market, past performance is not a guarantee of future results. Technology is a treadmill that never stops or even slows; we can’t either.

Note: a prior version listed Blackberry as an American invention. Research In Motion is a Canadian company. Thanks to Neal and sorry to all you Canadians out there.

Watching the Microsoft-Yahoo show? Here are two figures to watch in the coming weeks:

$1.32 billion and 11 cents.

Yahoo is projected to generate $1.32 billion in revenue and earn 11 cents a share for the first quarter, according to analysts’ estimates collected by Thomson Financial.

Anything less than that when the company reports its first-quarter results on April 22 could apply greater pressure on Yahoo to accept Microsoft’s unsolicited buyout bid that was initially valued at $31 a share. This especially holds true if no other white knights emerge to make a deal with Yahoo.

One interesting theory posted on Henry Blodget’s Silicon Alley Insider suggests that Microsoft may want to cool its heels until Yahoo reports its first-quarter results. If Yahoo’s quarter falls below Wall Street’s projections, Microsoft could withdraw its bid, let Yahoo’s share price fall back to the teens, wait a bit, then return with a lower bid of $25 a share.

But then again, why wait?

Yahoo could totally blow the quarter, but its share price may not tank because investors still know Microsoft has its bid on the table.

Microsoft could withdraw its bid at any point, before or after Yahoo’s quarterly announcement, and potentially watch Yahoo’s stock fall back to its pre-buyout bid levels.

If Microsoft withdraws its bid before Yahoo’s quarterly results, it will have a sense of the cause-and-effect of its buyout bid and then another reference point of any investor dissatisfaction if Yahoo misses Wall Street’s projections and the stock falls further.

That’s called a one-two punch.

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At today’s Open Source Business Conference Jim Zemlin, president of the Linux Foundation, said something interesting (and hope-inducing) about open-source development. The session was on what the open source world can learn from Microsoft.

Surely, there are many things to not learn from Microsoft. Usability, however, is not one of them. Say what you want about Microsoft, but it has led the industry in lowering the bar to computing for average people. When I was in law school Microsoft used to give me free software so that it could come by my house to watch how I work. Microsoft spends considerable resources in the field to determine how people use, or could use, software.

I asked Jim to comment on how open source can match that, given that open-source communities (as opposed to open-source commercial projects) tend to be comprised of developers who may or may not have a feel for what non-developers want.

Jim suggested that it’s a question of leadership. That is, within open-source projects that place a premium on usability, this trickles down within that project and eventually expands beyond to adjacent projects. He noted Ubuntu as a classic example of a project that is making usability a top priority, which is having an effect on other desktop and server Linux distributions.

I suppose this isn’t all that different from the proprietary world. Microsoft is good at usability, but many of its proprietary peers are not. There is nothing inherent in proprietary software that is better than open source when it comes to usability. Rather, it’s either a core cultural priority or it’s not.

Importantly, there is something inherent in open source that can be better about usability than proprietary software: The users write the software for other users. There is no intermediary that processes product requirement documents to translate use cases to engineers. There are just engineers.

The trick for open source will be finding ways to bring non-developers into the conversation. I’m not sure how to accomplish this, despite spending five or six years thinking about it.

Your thoughts?

AUSTIN, Texas–Despite having plenty of blogging work still to do on Friday night, I decided to check out some of the South by Southwest Interactive Festival’s notorious after-hours scene. Man, it’s enough to give anyone a headache long before the aftereffects of the free drinks set in the next morning.

Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos (center) in a photo op with Mashable's Tamar Weinberg (left) and PaidContent's Joseph Weisenthal

(Credit:
Caroline McCarthy/CNET News.com)

Friday night promised to be the least party-heavy night of the week, with only one “official” party on the books: PR firm Porter Novelli’s happy hour at the massive bar called Six Lounge. Probably because of the lack of other SXSWi parties, the line outside the door at Six soon stretched round the block and satellite soirees popped up at several other bars, like the zillion-beers-on-tap Ginger Man down the street. Nevertheless, the onslaught of Twitters and text messages saying that everyone should hit up a certain bar–or even more specifically, a certain floor of a certain bar–got really, really nuts. And if you left one bar for the next only to decide to go back, you had to hop back in line.

But the company was worth keeping. The most unexpected socializer of the night was arguably Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, who said he wasn’t in town to host a panel or make a high-profile appearance at SXSWi–he was just around to socialize and talk to people, which everyone seemed to think was pretty darn cool, and was also an effective strategy in convincing bloggers that it would be rude to ask him prying questions about Amazon.

Blog entrepreneurs and perpetual Valleywag gossip targets Pete Cashmore and Robert Scoble.

(Credit:
Caroline McCarthy)

Spotted at either Ginger Man or Six: uber-blogger
Robert Scoble, Digg founder Kevin Rose (who told me in jest that his company doesn’t have a buyer but is up for sale on eBay), WineLibrary.tv host Gary Vaynerchuk, PaidContent blogger Joseph Weisenthal, Gawker’s Nick Douglas, AllFacebook’s Nick O’Neill, Pownce co-founder Leah Culver, and a whole crew from social-networking blog Mashable, whose founder Pete Cashmore was passing out business cards and swag rather than dancing this time.

At least thus far, it appears that Twitter is the new Twitter. The microblogging service managed to hold up in the wake of Friday night’s SXSWi activity, and was getting used nonstop across the board. But Saturday night’s parties will be about an order of magnitude bigger, so we’ll have to see if it manages to survive another evening out.

See more stories in CNET News.com’s coverage of SXSWi (click here).