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Square Enix has unveiled the first gameplay footage for their upcoming multiplatform action-RPG that is being dubbed as the “next great story”, Nier.
 

This infographic depicts the number of sales that must be made in order for a solo artist to make “minimum wage” in a month. The graphic is obviously meant to be a bit shocking, but even the slightest bit of digging turns it into more of a shoulder shrug. First of all, it is a bit misleading in that it compares not quite apples to oranges, but apples to apple slices to apple sauce to apple juice — all in one chart. It compares albums and singles and streams all on the same scale, which is a bit unfair. If you sell 1 album for $9.99 (that had 10 tracks on it), then of course you would expect to have to sell (roughly) 10 times as many tracks for $0.99 to make the same amount of money — that’s not really much of a revelation. By looking at the data, we can compare apples to apples and get a better sense of what is going on:

format	average retail price	musician revenue	sales to earn min. wage
Self-Pressed CD	$9.99	$8.09	143
iTunes Album Download	$9.99	0.94	1,229
cdbaby Album download	$9.99	7.49	155
Retail Label-backed CD	$9.99	$0.30	3,871

Clearly, it’s difficult to make a living simply by selling albums, but it’s always been that way. Musicians have long known that in order to make real money, they’d either have to be U2 big, or tour. However, it’s very interesting to note that in the new, digital era, artists actually make more off of their album sales in iTunes than they did in the old, physical world. And selling albums digitally through cdbaby, without a label, stands to bring in much, much more money for the artist — and frees them from the headache of distributing a physical product. The band Pomplamoose, for example, is making a perfectly good living doing just that.

Moving on, the data claims that to make minimum wage, an artist would need 4.6M plays on a streaming service like Spotify. While that might be technically true, it’s a pretty meaningless calculation. It does not take into account the promotional value of streaming — and unlike selling 143 CDs, getting 4.6M plays of a digital track would certainly lead to significant revenue elsewhere. Surely an artist would be able to translate that much attention into successful live shows or their own CwF+RtB offering. After all, we’ve seen time and time again that focusing on something as narrow as money earned per track sold (or streamed play) is a limited way to view a musician’s earning potential.

So, while at first glance, this infographic may seem pessimistic, digging a little deeper into the data gives the real story. Exciting opportunities still abound in the world of music for those creative enough to seize them.

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Welcome back ASX/200 at 5,000. You look a bit winded. But the extra points look good on you. Who says a plus size resource boom isn’t as sexy as the housing market?

Yes, for the first time in 19 months the benchmark index for Australian stocks is breathing rarefied air. But the question today is whether this is just a base camp for the 6,000 level (a kind of false summit), or the actual summit itself of the post-reflation stock market high.

Commodities are certainly enjoying the view. Palladium made a two-year high at US$548/oz and gold was up. And to think that neither of those two precious metals are Dr. Alex Cowie’s favourite metal of 2010. That honour is reserved for platinum.

You would think with markets trudging higher, Joe Bloggs would be happy. But that was not the case yesterday when David Lowman, an executive for JP Morgan who was in Washington to testify in front of Congress, invited homeowners worried about getting foreclosed on to “come to me.” They did.

Not quite with pitchforks. But according to Reuters, “around 50 borrowers burst from the audience and presented Lowman with a 6-page document alleging his bank reneged on a pledge to help struggling homeowners.” Back on Wall Street, JP Morgan reported a 55% increase in first quarter profits on $3.3 billion in net income.

Anecdotal evidence, via ZeroHedge, is that U.S. homeowners (perhaps encouraged by the government and NOT discouraged by the banks) are simply not paying their mortgages. This boosts consumer spending. And the banks participate in the fiction by pretending the payments are being made and not marking the loans to market.

Not living in America anymore, it’s hard to say what’s really going in. But it sounds like the whole place has become a kind of Absurdistan where the government changes the rules of contract willy nilly and bank balance sheets can be whatever you want them to be, provided they are not accurate.

Hey while we’re thinking of it, good luck to Steve Keen and his crew on their way to Mt. Kosciuszko. We agree with Steve on the inevitable correction in house prices. But perhaps we both have underestimated the government’s determination in supporting prices. Still, it would be nice to get some fresh air today. The walk can’t be all that bad.

Uh oh. Just when you thought it was safe to jump back into Greece again, news comes that Greek borrowing costs have soared above 7% interest. AFP reports that, “Taxi drivers and lawyers have begun strikes against planned budget cuts.” Yet the important news here is that despite the assurances of loans from the EU, market investors are making the Greeks pay to borrow. Why?

Let’s turn the floor over to BIS Working Papers No 300, the future or public debt: prospects and implications, written last month Stephen Cecchetti, M S Mohanty, Fabrizio Zampolli. Hang on! Wake up! This is important.

“So far, at least, investors have continued to view government bonds as relatively safe,” the trio begins. “But bond traders are notoriously short-sighted, assuming they can get out before the storm hits: their time horizons are days or weeks, not years or decades.” This, by the way, could also be a symptom of fiddling with interest rates. It incentives short term financial calculations at the expense of long-term capital allocation.

“We take a longer and less benign view of current developments, arguing that the aftermath of the financial crisis is poised to bring a simmering fiscal problem in industrial economies to boiling point. In the face of rapidly ageing populations, for many countries the path of pre-crisis future revenues was insufficient to finance the promised expenditure.”

Australia, you might argue, would not fit into this dismal forecast for industrial economies. After all, Australia has rising real growth from its trade and commodity relationship with emerging markets in Asia. Even rising real interest rates won’t cripple the government ability to borrow internationally, provided it can service that debt with income from the commodity trade.

But what would happen if global investors started putting the question to governments more pointedly about how they intend to pay for future spending? “The question,” the three amigos write, “is when markets will put pressure on governments, not if.”

“When, in the absence of fiscal actions, will investors start demanding a much higher compensation for the risk of holding the increasingly large amounts of public debt that authorities are going to issue to finance their extravagant ways?”

If you’re a prudent investor, the answer to that is: now!

As we mentioned the other day, one way of explaining the new highs in the indexes is a rejection of government bonds in favour of stocks. Mind you, the conventional wisdom is that stocks are moving higher because investors are fleeing out of “safe assets” like bonds and back into “risk asset” like stocks or even emerging market bonds.

But with valuations already stretched, you shouldn’t be surprised to see stocks run out of momentum from here. What’s the old expression…sell in May and go away! But go where?

How about cash and tangible assets? This is what’s driving, at least partly, higher precious metals prices. And we’d venture to guess that more people now prefer actual ownership of those metals to paper claims on them. In fact, we aim to prove next week that there is a shortage of precious metals relative to paper claims on them next week.

For now, what should you expect? Well, unstable debt dynamics have a way of leading to unstable geopolitics too. You can never know what external event is going to trigger a loss of confidence by investors. But it will be a cold slap to the face when it comes.

But in the meantime, our editors here (Kris, Alex, and Murray) are using the higher index levels to lift their trailing stops and lock in profits on open positions that have benefitted from the rally that began last March. You can make money. But at this point, it looks a lot like speculation and very little like investing.

More on the BIS paper tomorrow…and on how to make it large in the second world.

Dan Denning
for The Daily Reckoning Australia

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Due to lack of water in Peru, locals are forced to harvest fog to convert it into a usable resource. The world water shortage is a crisis and we need to look at the right side of the issue.

There are many developments taking place around the world that are acts of desperation. The issues often go unrealized because we focus upon the innovations that people are using for the sake of survival. We’re focused too greatly upon just how resourceful people are being rather than looking at the reasons why they are forced into commiting those acts that they do in order to get by day after day.

(more…)

Oddly, many of the same Chinese industries benefiting most from Chinese government stimulus are also experiencing extremely long overdue payments, according to a survey of 966 companies by Coface.

The survey covered the fourth quarter of 2009 and found transportation, construction, industrial machinery, agriculture, steel & metals, and electrical appliances to be the top six stimulus winners.

China Daily:

Yet these sectors, with the exceptions of agriculture and transportation, also include the highest numbers of companies reporting long overdue payments accounting for over 2 percent of total sales.

“Generally, more than 2 percent of total sales overdue is regarded as a dangerous level, whilst a payment that is overdue for over 12 months has a high probability of becoming a bad debt,” said Richard Burton, regional managing director of Coface in China.

“The survey results reflect the fact that overdue payments remain a key concern among companies in China, even though their sales or profits may have been improved by the stimulus,” he added.

The survey also reveals that companies in China face overdue payments with more average days overdue and greater weight in total domestic sales than in 2008. The number of respondents experiencing payments overdue for over 60 days has increased by 55 percent.

Meanwhile, 55 percent of respondents reported that payments of more than 2 percent of their domestic sales were overdue for six to 12 months, while about 24 percent reported such payments being overdue for more than 12 months – twice as many as in 2008.

Read more here >

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Article Tags: Richard Treadgold

It seems that New Zealand is living in “interesting times,” in the Chinese sense. I wish I knew more about the details, like Vincent Gray provided on Greenie Watch. See also the rebuttal to Treadgold: http://hot-topic.co.nz/hook-line-and-stinker/ – AS

There’s little of royalty attached to recent climate change missives emanating from the Royal Society. Did I call them missives? I meant to say emissions.

Professor Keith A. Hunter, FNZIC, FRSNZ, Vice-President, Physical Sciences, Mathematics, Engineering and Technology, Royal Society of New Zealand, issued a statement on 7 April entitled Science, Climate Change and Integrity.

He means to support the hypothesis that human activity is dangerously warming the world’s climate. He uses whole sentences and impeccable syntax, but the evidence he cites is wrong.

The package is lovely but the contents rotten.

There are now several of our prominent public scientists who are unaware it is not sufficient merely to tog themselves out in the royal or other esteemed branding — they must actually live up to it and, before all else, speak the truth.

The senior scientists who’ve made misleading public statements about global warming include Peter Gluckman, David Wratt, James Renwick, Brett Mullan, Andrew Reisinger and Jim Salinger.

Their cheeks are smooth and their mouths are smiling but their breath stinks.

Source: climateconversation.wordshine.co.nz

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FreePlay’s ZipCharge claims to be the perfect device to grab and go when you need to charge your device. The gimmick is that you can quick charge your device and provide whatever you’re charging with enough to run all day.

The ZipCharge’s claim to fame is that you plug it into the wall and charge it up (and it doesn’t take long to do that either), and then plug it into your device when it’s needed. The company claims that connecting the ZipCharge to your mobile phone for 60 seconds will give you a talk time charge of 15 minutes, or 8 hours on standby. No word on if the device will melt the charge port on your phone. Details on exactly how the ZipCharge works are quite scarce, but it is compatible with USB 2.0, and comes with extra connections so it should work with almost any device. While the ZipCharge isn’t available in the US as of yet, you can pick it up in the UK for £49.95.

[via Gizmodo]

Did you notice that little option to “get Gizmodo in your inbox” over on the left side, above all the writers’ names? It means that you can sign up for our freshly redesigned newsletter and receive Gizmodo’s top stories daily. More »

Chinese GDP grew 11.9% year over year in Q1 of this year, according to the National Bureau of Statistics. This was ahead of the 11.7% expected by economists polled by Bloomberg.

Note the economy grew faster than the 10.7% reported in Q4 of 2009.

The nation’s consumer price index also rose 2.2% in Q1, and 2.4% most recently in March.

Q1 Chinese growth confirms what looks to be a V-shaped recovery from China, though of course one with a bottom at 6.2% GDP growth, rather than a negative value like most nations who entered recessions.

As an aside, some question the validity of Chinese GDP reports (we get emails every now and then) even though the World Bank and most China-focused economists have yet to find major problems with the data despite checking it from multiple different sources.

Join the conversation about this story »

Article Tags: Statement, The Royal Society of New Zealand

Statement from Professor Keith A Hunter FNZIC, FRSNZ, Vice-President – Physical Sciences, Mathematics, Engineering and Technology, Royal Society of New Zealand

SUMMARY OF STATEMENT

The science of climate change has been the subject of recent harsh criticisms in the popular media, with attacks on the integrity and professionalism of scientists. There is fault on both sides of the equation, with the need for absolute transparency of information being the key issue. Adopting a more transparent approach to the dissemination of information will lead to a clearer picture of the facts.

Science has not “proved” beyond all reasonable doubt that human activities are changing the climate. But it has clearly shown that there are multiple lines of evidence all pointing in the same direction, and this view is supported by theories that are well-founded in fundamental sciences like physics.

Commonsense and prudence says we should respond and not ignore the evidence about climate change as it currently stands. The risks of doing nothing are too great.

The mitigation measures suggested for climate change (reduced use of carbon-based fuels, more renewable energy sources, carbon capture and storage, less use of nitrogen-based fertilizers) are all part of a portfolio of approaches that are needed to produce a more sustainable world.

Source: royalsociety.org.nz

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by Julian Ku

That very trendy and useful legal concept – the right of self-defense — is not just for targeting U.S. citizens to be killed. The U.S. military’s new “Cyber Command” chief has asserted that the U.S. government’s right of self-defense almost certainly permits it to take offensive “cyber” attacks.

… commanders have clear rights to self-defense, he said. He added that while “this right has not been specifically established by legal precedent to apply to attacks in cyberspace, it is reasonable to assume that returning fire in cyberspace, as long as it complied with law of war principles … would be lawful.”

Is the law of war the right paradigm? I suppose so.  I await further thoughts from our “resident” cyberwar expert. Prof Hollis?

Text-based searches might be great for hunting down relevant chunks of text-based information, but searches for multimedia content can be a little more hit and miss. Searches that rely on manually assigned metadata and often misleading titles can return off topic results, while searches that require the unpacking of compressed data can slow up the search. DIVAS is a new multimedia search engine that addresses these problems by using digital “fingerprints” that, according to its developers, return more reliable results…
Continue Reading DIVAS multimedia search engine finds content using digital ‘fingerprints’

Tags: Fraunhofer,
Multimedia,
Search engine

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Harbour Town, one of my favorite stops of the spring. Let’s handicap it from a fantasy perspective.

A-List: Luke Donald finally returned to Harbour Town last year after a long layoff and finished second. When you consider the profile of Donald, a player who favors precision over power, that’s no surprise. He should be in the hunt this week. … Scott Verplank isn’t a bad play on a short week in the top group. He’s made ten straight cuts here and the track plays to his skill set. … I’m on board with the upside of Bill Haas, but you can’t use him here (four cuts and a T27). … Zach Johnson has cashed in 4-of-5 visits at the Verizon Heritage but there’s just one deep run in there, a T6 three years back. Johnson’s got a profile that works for target golf; he’s 14th in tee accuracy, 35th in GIR and 51st in putting average. … Jason Dufner has made 8-of-9 cuts this season but he’s yet to grab a six-figure check. Get some face time on a Sunday afternoon, then come back to me. … Picks: Donald, Johnson. 

B-List: It’s surprising that K.J. Choi hasn’t made this a regular stop because this is the sort of track that fits his game (he came to Harbour Town in 2001, missed the cut, and hasn’t been back since). His comeback in 2010 is very real and you can tell this is a man at peace with his game – he didn’t bat an eyelash when paired with Tiger Woods for four straight weeks at Augusta. … It’s basically a home game for Lucas Glover and he’s got a solid enough track record at the Verizon Heritage (26, 7, cut, 12, 47, 16, cut). I’d feel a lot better about his chances if he weren’t sitting 119th in driving accuracy and 104th in putting average.

Jim Furyk‘s got a strange hit-and-miss record at Harbour Town, working a fourth and two seconds around a pair of missed cuts in the last five years. His steady iron play and patient demeanor make him a perfect candidate for target golf. … Brian Gay steps in as the defending champ and he also ran T16 in 2007 and T9 in 2006. I’ve yet to spend a play on him, so this week looks like an automatic. … Aaron Baddeley won this tourney in 2006 and he’s been sharp since(21, 2, 10) but his current form makes him just about unplayable. He hasn’t cashed a check over 15K all year. … I hated Sergio Garcia‘s body language on the weekend at the Masters, and his last trip to Harbour Town came in 2001. None for me, thanks. … I guess you could use Charles Howell III if you felt in the mood (37, 12, cut, 19 in four trips). But I’m always a little nervous trusting him after the first quarter of the year. … Picks: Furyk, Gay, Choi, Glover.

C-List: Matt Kuchar has made 8-of-10 cuts this year and banked a cool $1.6 million without a victory; you get a solid run from him just about every week. He’s got two Top-10 finishes at Harbour Town in the last four years and 2010 looks like a major breakout year for him. … Vaughn Taylor knows his way around Harbour Town, finishing fourth in 2007 and third in 2006 (and he was a solid T30 last year). The last time we saw Taylor he was in a playoff in Houston (losing to Anthony Kim); look for Taylor to keep the momentum rolling here. … Davis Love III is a guaranteed check at Harbour Town; he’s won the event five times (most recently in 2003) and he’s been solid in recent years (32, 3, 47, 36, 36, 21). But the C-Pool has guys who can win this week, and Love’s no longer a major threat just by showing up.

If you want to go with a name grab on Paul Casey, I won’t try to stop you. He was a solid T11 in his Verizon Heritage debut last year, but is he completely healthy? … It’s a shame we can’t use Boo Weekley with any confidence this week, given that he won this event in 2007 and 2008 and he was 13th last year. But do you really want to roll with someone who’s 143rd on the money list? I just can’t do it. … Tim Clark has made 6-of-7 cuts here but his only real run at contention came in 2006 (T7). It seems like an assignment that would fit his game, but I’m sick of waiting for that first victory. … Picks: Kuchar, Taylor.

We hinted last month that Twitter was working on an official Android client, but some people found the news hard to believe. Since that time Twitter launched a BlackBerry app and acquired Tweetie for its official iPhone version.

Today at Twitter’s Chirp conference, CEO Ev Williams announced an Android client was next on their list.

“We found we were under-serving users. We realized we had to have a core experience on these major platforms just like we do on the Web, otherwise we are failing users. It’s (Android client) going to be awesome.”Ev WilliamsTwitter CEO

Some sites are speculating that Twitter might acquire a current Android app to make their own, but I’ve been told that an original client is already in development and has been in testing for several months.

The real question now is, how long before Twitter releases the app and when will Google integrate it into their Android operating system?

In exchange for offering their own native apps, Twitter will offer developers limitless user streams and annotations and continue to push their @anywhere platform. Twitter is hoping that devs will use their huge pipe of data to launch killer apps that start entirely new businesses.

Other Twitter announcements from Chirp included the coming additions of places to its geo-tweets (check-ins, but not really) and its own link shortener.

Speaking of Twitter, are you following @androidandme?

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Intel plans to release a dual-core Atom chip during the second quarter, CEO Paul Otellini said on Tuesday. “The next innovation coming to Atom is on dual-core,” he said on the company’s first-quarter investor conference call. He didn’t, however, disclose if they would be for Atom’s traditional home of netbooks, or for smartphones or tablets, into which Intel is also hoping to get its chips.

The idea of smartphones with multiple processor cores isn’t a new one — last year I talked to Texas Instruments about it, and earlier this year Qualcomm said it would release a dual-core processor that could hit processing speeds of 3 GHz. Marvell  is also exploring the idea of quad-core chips inside phones and other mobile devices. The goal of such tinkering is to beef up the performance of the smartphone so it can handle compute-intense tasks like multimedia gaming and multitasking.

As I explain in a new GigaOM Pro piece (sub req’d):

Speaking in early January at the launch of the new Nexus One phone designed by HTC and Google, Andy Rubin, VP of engineering at the search giant, compared the device he held up to the laptops he carried around four or five years ago. He was a little off the mark; the Nexus One’s 1 GHz processor from Qualcomm isn’t quite as powerful as the 1.5 GHz Intel Centrino processor that sits inside my ancient Toshiba from 2004, and the phone doesn’t offer anywhere close to the 60 GB of memory provided by the eight-pound machine. But as he waved this phone around, his point was clear. In his hand wasn’t a mere phone, it was a computer.

As the lines between computers and mobile devices blur, traditional PC vendors are building phones and the traditional phone manufacturers are trying to build mobile PCs. But with mobility come constraints — particularly around power consumption and battery life. So the big task for every device manufacturer is figuring out how to cram all the functionality of a big computer into a tiny handset. Many chip firms believe tomorrow’s phones will be powered by multicore processors that deliver the performance the consumer wants without destroying the lengthy battery life such devices need.

So as more vendors add multiple CPU cores to their chips aimed at mobile devices, the computing gap between a mobile phone and a laptop will close, leaving users to focus on features such as keyboards and screen sizes when choosing their mobile compute device. The real question is when this happens. Texas Instruments believes next year is when we’ll see them, but I wouldn’t be surprised if something sneaks out before this year is up.

We’ve just published our 2010 ECM and Document Management Market Analysis, and it makes for fascinating reading

This week I have been heads down reviewing RFP responses for a large ECM project. These vendor proposals could give readers the misimpression that the products in a complex suite of modules were all designed on the same drawing board