Before coming to Rio de Janeiro, I used to have a small and simple cell phone. In fact, I always defended the position that the mobile phone should exactly and only this: a phone. Make and receive calls. Everything else is geekry.

But then I discovered that my old phone wouldn’t work, simply that, in Rio due to a difference of band used in the state. In fact, only São Paulo state uses a different band range and only one provider operates in this range.

So I had to buy another phone. I don’t have a notebook, so I decided to buy a phone with a typical internet functionality. Therefore a smartphone is a reasonable choice. The best phone available at the store was a Motorola Defy. I, my mistake I confess, haven’t made a single research to see which model is good which ones are bad, so I kinda had to accept that phone.

For my surprise, That is a great model. I love it.

The phone is small, light and very fast. The Android version was 2.2, but I soon decided to abandon the product warranty in order to install a newer version from the independent developers called CyanogenMod. This distro is really good, mostly because it doesn’t not have a full selection of bloated apps.

I’m now a bit addicted about cell phones. An entire selection of websites about phones and phone apps, reviews and whatever now catches my attention, even if displayed in a glimpse of second. But even with a very nearest-to-the-hand-possible tool to post stuff, I still don’t enter in the Twitter world nicely. In fact, I’m planning to remove the automatic Twitter posts from the site. Useless since I don’t use it.

There are several design choices that Motorola took that I really like. USB cable that transform into a power cable is one of the most loved ones. It’s practical and reasonable to have only one cable. I don’t use Bluetooth, but it would be nice to use it also.

Now Motorola is owned by Google, I expect to get even better support for Android.

Chris Anderson got the world’s attention by writing the bestseller The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More, where he describes the economic logic behind some eCommerce sites that sell an immense variety of goods instead of focusing on just a few.

In his next book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price, he discusses the free (as beer): why people are so moved by free stuff, and how offering something for free might be a great deal. He gives you a brief and interesting history of the free merchandise, gives several theories (which is the main focus of the book), and several examples that happened in real life.

It has some common aspects with the first book: economies of scale and marginal cost/revenue. He shows that if an item’s cost is too small, you might consider it zero. Imagine HD space: since the price is constantly dropping, a company might consider it irrelevant and gives their clients unlimited space for free. It is not free for the company, but the actual cost is so low that it will not affect your profits in a relevant matter, but will generate an enormous impression for the clients.

Not Too Small to Matter, but Too Small to Meter

The author is prudent enough to not advocate free as a messiah. He believes, in fact, in the idea of Freemium, in which the product is offered as free for most users and a small fraction will pay for a premium offer.

Anderson eats his dogfooding by releasing the book for free as a pdf while the physical is paid for. The audiobook can also be found in a free version and is very curious: the full version, which is the complete book, is free while the compact version is paid. Time is money and the compact version saves you time but not money.

You can read my review about The Witcher. I loved the game, mostly because the huge personality that the whole product. Characters with a unique spirit, non-conventional story, choices that cannot be placed in the simple black-white gradient, adult theme, and the complements go on… For those that agreed with me, great news! The Witcher 2 is all of that, bigger and better.

The polish developers Projeckt CD printed a hollywoodian tone to the game. The storytelling element (both in game and kinematics) is superb. You really care about the characters and their motivations. Some characters that in the first installment were not that relevant in the game (but are in the book series that the games are based on), like Zoltan and Triss, in the second game they are relevant and very likable.

Since Bioware basically imposed the good/evil dynamics, several games were created using the formula. But the Witcher universe is nothing like that. Like in the real world, people are moved by complex motives: religion, politics, economics and even the mundane takes place. that, allied with (spoiler alert) the possibility of multiple endings (in fact, more than 1/3 can be different, depending on your decisions), and you will fill quite tempted to play the game a second time, just to see how things play out if you take other choices.

Graphically the game is nothing but true beauty. The same can be said about the sound and music. And all of them are relevant -so there is no filler stuff- and very well done. Textures, models and visual effects are top-notch. Famous RPGs like Mass Effect, Dragon Age are not even close.

But it’s not perfect. The menus are slow, difficult to select, the game generates hundresds saved games automatically and the turorial… the tutorial … the Trial by Fire, as they call it, was a wrong decision. It seems you are facing a boos as the very first contact with the game. I could also talk about the difficulty, that in the first thrid of the game is really hard.

Have no doubt! The Witcher 2 is problably my favorite RPG game ever. I can go even further? Top 10 games ever. Simply that.

Nintendo just presented to the world the new console, which, by the way, several details were already known.

Wii U. Is the name of the new console. The name is a reference to We and You. In the paper, the idea is nice but after a basic field test, it reveals to be a terrible choice. The president of Nintendo of America, Reggie, said that Nintendo is now going to pay attention to individuality after so many years dedicated to generating the gaming culture for a multitude of the public.

The main attraction of the new console has an embeded controller. It has a big tablet-like screen that receives a video stream from the console (it does not process anything). This means that one cannot play games during trips or even in the backyard. It must be close to the main machine.

A curious feature of this controller is that it can project a different camera of the game on TV from what the player sees in the console. It will bring interesting dynamics to in-loco multiplayer games for sure.

Note: the golf wiimote+wii u controller demonstration is embarrassing. I imagine someone putting the screen on the floor to see the ball from above. OMG

Despite the obvious excitement of all Nintendo staff, the whole product is should be considered more as a Wii HD (it will finally output HD video and have more competitive processing power). I doubt that major games will support the new controller as WE MUST. The rationale is simple: it’s too costly to design a product with a so limited scope.

Games are expensive to make. And spreading your product to the wind, and selling to all video games, and computers digitally and physically would reduce the risk. But if you can only sell to Wii U due to the exclusive controller, it would quite risky. It is not a coincidence that Wii exclusives are generally small companies or small products. Unless developer companies start to develop similar functionalities using alternative tablet/phone/computer combinations.

I am particularly skeptical about this move. I always wondered about Wii and DS merged gameplay, but betting it will be the future is quite strange. Well, Nintendo has a great pedigree about gimmickry.

This year I watched several TV shows. Battlestar Gallactica (which I hated), Downton Abbey (which I loved), Breaking Bad… But Game of Thrones, oh my… Game of Thrones is an amazing show!

I’ve read the book as soon as I’ve heard that it would become a show produced by HBO. HBO series are generally very well conceived. I still remember Rome. The book is very good, with a great environment and great characters. I still have to read the others books from the A Song of Ice and Fire series (A Game of Thrones is only the first book), but that one is great enough to make me happy.

Back to the TV show…

There are several characters that you can empathize – you can understand their motives and actions. No one is purely good or purely evil. The show does a great job by presenting them with a reasoning depth. This is a great achievement because the story uses dozens of characters.

The cast is great. It’s natural to question some cast choices when we read the book first. When reading, we only could imagine their faces and quite often we did not pay attention to some details that the author really put there. But in Game of Thrones, I liked all the choices. I was particularly afraid to see the implementation of my favorite characters: Arya, Tyrion and Ned Stark. But all 3 impressed me.

The first and second episodes exaggerate a bit in sex scenes. I liked 😉 but some people might complain. Violence, that I thought would be pure gore, was quite moderate. The adaptation took the advantage of one of the book’s greatest features: the cliffhanger ending on each chapter. We finish a chapter or an episode wanting more.

Most of the critics are a bit correct about the difficulty on following some parts. It’s due to the rich and complex universe created for the books. The producers had to choose if the series would or not contain the deep ambient. And they chose yes. I agree, but there are several other films and shows that are much worse (ex Matrix trilogy). I really really recommend to see Game of Thrones. The opening sequence will be enough to you embrace this amazing series.