IT Buoy

Longtime Silicon Valley entrepreneur Steve Perlman has been ferreting away on a new cloud gaming service called OnLive for a while now. Finally, it’s got a due date to go live–June 17 at the E3 conference in Los Angeles. As in OnLive will be live, but it’s not live yet. Get it? Perlman announced the launch of the potentially innovative service, which plans to offer high-quality games on any computer or smartphone without a dedicated console unit, in a keynote at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco today. That includes 3D, since all the rendering is done in the cloud and brought down via streaming to OnLive’s software. Whether it will be twitchy enough for the ADHD set of gamers will be the big question.

Cisco took the lessons learned from the dot-com bust and applied them to the current economic climate. Plus, 10 Internet Champs for the next decade, on today’s Digits live show.

A Conde Nast site’s attempt this weekend to block users who block ads presents yet another question about the painful transition from traditional to online media — what to do about anti-ad software. Technology-news site Ars Technica tried an experiment Friday: It blocked its content for users who were employing a particular ad-blocking tool. The response from the site’s readers consisted of confusion, some apologies and a considerable amount of indignation — prompting editor Ken Fisher to pen a piece entitled “ Why Ad-Blocking Is Devastating to the Sites You Love .” The gist of Mr. Fisher’s argument is this: Unless they use a subscription model, sites rely on advertising to survive. And although some of this advertising is on a pay-per-click basis, much of it is under a pay-per-view system. Furthermore, unlike in the world of print and television advertising, where measurement is fuzzy, advertisers online count whether an ad is loaded or not. This means that people who block ads are denying revenue to the sites they visit.

From TechCrunch: Yesterday, [Marc] Andreessen was in New York City and we met up. We got to talking about how media companies are handling the digital disruption of the Internet when he brought up the Cortes analogy. In particular, he was talking about print media such as newspapers and magazines, and his longstanding recommendation that they should shut down their print editions and embrace the Web wholeheartedly. “You gotta burn the boats,” he told me, “you gotta commit.” His point is that if traditional media companies don’t burn their own boats, somebody else will. Read more at TechCrunch > Join the conversation about this story

Cisco’s plan to rule the Internet will be unveiled next week during a press event on March 9 . What is it? Read the rest of this story