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Down in the Valley

  • Darren Waters
  • 5 Mar 07, 04:16 PM

"This is CalTrain 12 your baby bullet."

I'm down in Silicon Valley, riding the rails to meet some firms that are instrumental to how we live our digital lives now, and in the future.

The first stop is Mountain View, and at first glance it appears to be a sleepy town with a quaint railway station, clad with clapper boards and a main street of one-storey shops, restaurants and cafes.

But there's something different about this place; you can see it the age of the people descending from the trains. Most seem to be mid 20s, clutching Crumpler or Timbuktu laptop bags.
There is also a host of shuttle buses waiting to take people to offices, idling in the car park.

You can feel the difference too in the coffee shops, all of which seem to offer free wireless (Britain: take note).

Like many of the stops along the CalTrain route - Santa Clara, Palo Alto, Sunny Vale - Mountain View has a resonance with technology lovers.

This town is home to Google, Mozilla, Sun Microsystems, Adobe and a host of other tech firms, big and small.

It's the first two companies I'm interested in because I'm meeting with them today, meeting Google's open source lead Chris DiBona and Mozilla's chief technology officer Mike Schroepfer and Chris Beard, the vp of products.

Silicon Valley has changed enormously in the 36 years since the term was first used to describe this corridor of towns south of San Francisco to San Jose.

The term was created by journalist Don Hoefler in 1971, who spotted the proliferation of chip firms in the area. Now of course the term refers to all hi-tech activity and not just microprocessor production.

More recently Silicon Valley has seen the rise and fall and rise again of web firms, of which Google is the greatest success story.

I'll also be visiting some of the smaller players such as Meebo, the web instant messaging firm, as part of a series looking at some of the bright young things in the web space.

But there are so many bright young things here in Mountain View I could probably pull up a chair next to anyone in any coffee house here in Mountain View and get deep into conversation about web standards, dotcom 2.0 and XML.

It's going to be an interesting day in the valley.

The name of the game

  • Darren Waters
  • 5 Mar 07, 06:22 AM

If I were to list the following names; Lucas, Coppola, Scorsese, Hitchcock, Ford, you would know I was talking about famous film directors.

But if I were to say Kojima, Miyamoto, Molyneux, Newell, Spector and Wright, would you know I was talking about leading game developers?

Perhaps if you were immersed in gaming, you would recognise the names. But even then, would you buy a game purely on the strength of the name of the developer?

Jamil Moledina, who runs the Game Developers Conference here in San Francisco, believes we are on the verge of the rise of the celebrity developer.

These figures are so well-known, he argues, that people will buy games purely on the strength of their names.

Certainly it is true, for example, that Will Wright's forthcoming title Spore will sell on the track record of Wright himself and I would expect publisher Electronic Arts to make great play of his name in any marketing.

But do we want celebrity game developers? Is it accurate to laud one individual above the scores of others involved in the creation of a game.

Film directors have not always been seen as the ultimate creative talent in film production; for decades the director was "just another" hired hand, no different from the cinematographer or director of photography.

The film critics of the 1950s changed all that - placing directors such as Hitchcock and Truffaut on pedestals, from which few directors have ever stood down.

Game development is no different, It is of course a team process, involving scores of people with different technical and creative talents.

Leading developer Dave Perry is trying a different approach entirely - he is trying to harness the creative talent of the masses to provide the fabric and texture of the next Massively Multiplayer role playing game he is developing. It's called "crowd sourcing"; the internet-enabled trend of using the weight of numbers to solve a problem that few could solve alone.

I'll be writing about Perry's vision later this week. What is clear that, at least for the marketeers, a name is something to "hang a peg on".

So whatever the truth, expect to see a much bigger marketing push around named developers in the coming 12 months.

Do you have favourite developers? Or are franchises more important?

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