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This week’s been Elite launch week on Tech & Gadgets - and it’s quite nice to have a theme to write around once in a while - especially bearing in mind that I will be launching a dedicated gaming channel in the next couple of months.

Of course, the downside to doing anything that’s Microsoft is that I work for is essentially Microsoft so I’m inevitably going to come off as biased.

I suppose that’s par for the course and it’s something I’ve come to accept since I started here - but tomorrow sees my take on the Elite (loved it - took a good console and made it better) which means that the whole thing starts again.

I honestly adore the PlayStation 3 - and would even more if it had any games that were generally world class - but the Xbox DOES have those games, quite frankly, and the comparative lineups over the next few must have Sony quaking in their boots.

Everyone knows that Halo 3 has been held up as the likely ‘killer app’ for the Xbox 360 pretty much since its launch back in the late stages of 2005, but with Biochock out this week, PGR4 on its way and GTA 4 multi format the PS3 has its work cut out.

Do I think that an HD DVD drive should have been included? Actually, not really. Considering the detrimental effect the Blu-ray drive in the PS3 had and the continuing rows over the format wars, I think lumbering a console with one or the other of the formats is inviting the chance of putting a millstone round its neck.

I WOULD have liked two controllers with the Elite, and I WOULD have liked a game included - but they weren’t.

The fact is that the console wars are far from over but, in the meantime, the split audience is probably not good for the industry. At Leipzigs’s games convention Silicon Knights founder Denis Dyack said: “Nintendo has come out of the gate much faster than everyone anticipated, but how about longevity? The 360 is doing well in America, but not so well in Japan. The PS3 is off to a really slow start but they have a really good brand name… So the truth is, no one knows.

I was flicking through Edge’s ’get into games’ supplement today, which was a guide to working in the industry and happened upon an interview with Rob Yescombe who is a screenwriter at Free Radical.

As you’d expect with Edge it’s a good article with the right questions asked, but one of the bits at the end really intrigued me.

Yescombe says: ‘…we’ve seen some great ‘Hollywood screenwriters’ have a go at writing a game, but without an understanding of how games and interactivity actually function they’re just trying to crowbar something rigid into something flexible.

“It might get by, but it won’t be the better for it.”

The reason I found this interesting is because, as a writer (of sorts), the whole concept of writing a computer game is something that actively appeals to me. The very interactivity that might well get in the way of a movie scriptwriter coming up with the brilliant gaming storyline is also the most enticing thing about game scripting.

For me, the story within the game can be a massive element of what makes it enjoyable. I’ll pick out immediate contrasting examples. The original Half Life versus Far Cry - both games I played through and enjoyed, but the former is - for me - perhaps the greatest gaming experience of all time (in its era) and the other is a great concept that genuinely disappointed me with its predictable descent into mutants and corridors.

At face value the two games share a lot. Single man helped along by occasional others railing against other humans and powerful non-humans. But whereas Half Life’s use of scripted events and stunning set pieces drew you in, Far Cry’s actually began to push me away. The lack of a storyline stopped me suspending my sense of disbelief.

I’m probably going to write a longer article about this very topic in the next month or so. But for me, plot is as vital as graphics and gameplay in deciding a game’s longevity and status and had been for a long time.

With The Simpsons movie on its way out (”Spider-pig, spider-pig, does whatever a spider-pig does”) there’s loads of cool Simpsons marketing out there at the moment.

On the official site you can create an avatar of yourself (and screen grab = not needing to register - woohoo!). I’m sure many of you saw the picture of the enormous ‘chalk’ Homer that has apparently annoyed pagans everywhere.

Anyway - if you haven’t already you should go watch the trailer.

As you may have seen, my main article today is a load of iPod competitors. It’s always fairly tough doing a piece like this and covering all the bases, but I think it’s a fairly decent summation of what is out there.

Personally, I remember having a Creative Zen Xtra Jukebox that was absolutely brilliant for its time - although it’s sat on a shelf gathering dust now because I borked its operating system trying to install an upgrade.

Still - it lasted longer than my shuffle which went walkies out of my pocket one day and is probably now attached to someone else’s lapel somewhere. I just hope they listened to Cola Bear’s classic track ‘Second Time Today’ before they wiped it…

Had a fascinating weekend visiting some friends and their kids this weekend, where I was introduced to the wonder that is Guitar Hero on the PS2.

I have to admit this one had passed me by a little since arriving with a bang of publicity, but when you see a 14-year-old rocking through Heart Shaped Box and Sweet Child of Mine, you can’t help but think this is a step in the right direction.

If you have had your head buried in the sand for the last couple of years, guitar hero’s unique selling point is that you are given a plastic ‘guitar’ controller with five buttons for the chords and a strummer. The notes (buttons) then roll towards you on a belt and you try to play the right buttons at the right time and strum to play the note.

I make it sound complicated (and I managed to make it LOOK complicated too when I had a go) but it really is massively entertaining.

The weekend also gave me another chance to look at how kids behave on computers having never been without them.

Now, without wanting to date myself too accurately, my computer education started very young and on a ZX Spectrum 48k with rubber keys - so I always believe that I am firmly planted in the computer age. I was an early adopter of the internet, online gamed back when it wasn’t a case of just plugging a cable in, and I had a pre-Windows PC.

However, take one look at an 11 -year-old girl building a web page (admittedly a very, very, very glittery one) as well as chatting with her mates on MSN and playing a game all at the same time and you can’t help but feel like a bit of a dinosaur. And what with having a sore shoulder from waving a plastic guitar around for a few hours, I can’t even suggest that the dinosaur is T-Rex.

It’s no longer news that Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is a booming industry. We learned last year that 61% of North American companies with sales over $1 billion planned to adopt one or more SaaS applications this year. And Gartner projects that 25% of all new business software (CRM, ERP, SCM, etc.) will be delivered by means of SaaS by 2011.

What’s becoming news is what’s happening online. We’ve talked here before about the influence of Web 2.0 on CRM development. And the social networking achievements on the Web are compelling, especially as they suggest methods for delivering better customer service.

Datamonitor recently suggested in a report on the pharmaceutical industry that it should develop online communities as a tool for learning about its customers. Datamonitor predicts that in the future, the focus of CRM will move beyond managing customer relationships towards community-building and support.

More than a decade ago Sun Microsystems proclaimed that “the network is the operating system.” Software developers are of course attuned to the development path and behavior of operating systems, since this is where their users and their applications will work together. It should be no surprise that the Internet, as the largest network ever created, demonstrates almost daily new and original uses of applications. Here at Dovetail we take note of these innovations.

The forces at work on the evolution of software are fairly massive, in today’s connected global operating system. Microsoft may yield its original configuration to better online operators, with services reduced precisely to majority needs, or perhaps, to a degree, configurable on-demand. At the same time its original software may unlock so much new value that it occupies or dominates an entirely new market, especially as Microsoft becomes increasingly visible in the CRM field.

The message is: Build in .NET and be able to embrace more services, applications, resources and data.

Dovetail Software’s platform is .NET, as many of you know. We wrote our applications from scratch to run on .NET, precisely because of the ease of integration and rapid development this platform affords. Like Microsoft, we’ve been quietly developing our software (in policy if not in code) according to SOA principles for a long time now. Our architecture allows users of Clarify™ data to create hybrid applications, for example, using Web services for customized data access.

One of our customers who deployed our SDK development platform reports satisfaction in using the Dovetail Web Services because of its ability to “Respond to Market Changes Quickly”. They also praised WebLogic/SOAP/.NET because of its ability to connect with multiple databases and systems to obtain customer information such as loyalty points, service order history, etc. Essentially they can provide each of their agents a portal view across multiple customer data sources.

We developed our applications because we believe that Amdocs is ill equipped to service the evolving needs of the Clarify install base for thin clients, Web portals, and remote data access. But there are two sides to the SOA coin.

Let’s be honest, the current generation of consoles is barely out of nappies, but already people are beginning to ask the question: what next for consoles?

There have been some naïve suggestions that the current crop (probably excluding Nintendo’s Wii) have provided too much capacity for the poor old game developers to fill, but as anyone with half an interest in these things will tell you, gimmicks are all very well but people want power!

Making assumptions about technology is always a dangerous game, but there are some predictions that you can make about the direction gaming is taking. All three of the big boys – Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and the Wii – are machines built to provide online play, and in the case of the former two – consoles are also doubling as multimedia hubs.

But if you were building a next generation super-gamer, what would you be including? We’ve stuck on our thinking caps and come up with our list, and as ever we’d love to see your suggestions for the kind of machine that would grace your living room.

The iPhone is just a cool toy. There’s no 3G in this version. It costs £269 (and that’s just for starters) and the 2MP camera is hardly high-tech.

The phone is a second generation mobile phone in a third generation market… Many of the iPhone features are wants not needs. It whets consumers’ appetites, rather than satisfies their hunger.”

All good points. But let’s not overstate the 3G issue. Nokia packs 3G plus Wi-Fi into its N95 and, should you use either on a regular basis, you’ll typically not get much more than a day’s usage out of the phone. Many users have found that they need to charge their N95s up every night. This is hardly ideal for a so-called smartphone.

She’s dead right about the camera though.

The very fact that the iPhone is a ‘jack-of-all-trades’ phone means (if we adhere to the old saying) that’s going to be ‘master of none’. As we’ve written before, you can think of the iPhone as a phone with a built-in iPod. Or you can view it as a sexy, connected PDA (or Internet Tablet), that you can also make calls with.

The iPhone could be part of an Apple strategy that embraces the ‘connected home’ or ‘digital home’.

And while Carphone Warehouse expects to sell 10,000 iPhones on Friday, there might not be the mad rush to buy one that we witnessed in the US.

Apple will be reaching out to mainstream, picky mobile users who want full content portability rather than a partial service.

There has been more mainstream press on Virtualization technologies and the adoption of roles outside the traditional data center use case. It is apparent that this technology is working its way into the SME (Small to Medium Enterprise).

Internally we are using Virtualization technology (variety of programs) for server consolidation, testing, evaluations and troubleshooting. The ability to load multiple desktops is important in providing demos of upcoming products and evaluating application and program compatibility without disrupting my primary desktop.

It is my understand that the upcoming Windows Server 2008 will have more technology built on virtualization and the ability to manage multiple instances. The core features will occur post Server 2008 launch (http://news.com.com/Will+virtualization+be+Windows+Servers+silver+bullet/2100-1016_3-6190465.html).

The challenge for vendors (Pervasive included) it to identify the best licensing model that meets the needs of all parties.

So I have a few questions for our partners and uses around virtualization:

Do you have any plans to incorporate Virtualization technology into your testing or production environments?
What is your expected timeframe for adoption (6 months, 12 months, longer)?
What is the expected benefit that you are looking at gaining (application compatibility, testing, etc)?
When purchasing products will you start to consider the licensing model around virtualization as a decision in the buy process?

Hey, maybe actually, it is below our standard!

I’m referring to the article titled “New Ethics Code Governs Businesses that Serve Fund Raisers” published today on the News Updates website of The Chronicle of Philianthropy.  Authored by Holly Hall, this article cites the action of the Association of Fundraising Professionals (AFP) to create these “new” ethical standards and invite businesses to pay to attest they meet those standards. They do this by now offering to allow these businesses (including us for GiftWorks fundraising software) to become AFP members so we can display their “Executive Circle” logo.

I’m still trying to understand the logic of being charged to be labeled ethical but I certainly appreciate the need in the marketplace. Fundraisers, often so pressed for time and dollars, can give due diligence short-shrift. Lamentable but true. Then, of course, no field is free of shysters either.

In any case, I’ll hold our Mission Research standards of ethics and demonstrated behavior, up to anyone. Everyone here “gets it”. And we didn’t need AFP to get there. Now about that AFP membership fee….