I’m sure you’ve heard about the next-gen gaming consoles and the current battle between the three big guys. If not, basically there is Microsoft with their XBOX 360 console which has been out on the market for a while now and dominating against the older consoles. Then you have the not-yet-released Wii console from Nintendo and the Playstation 3 (PS3) from Sony.

Now console gaming is a massive multi-billion dollar industry and competitive too. The companies manufacturing the consoles generally don’t make much profit from the hardware (and in fact Sony will be losing about US$200 per console), but make-up for it with software licences and other services. So most of the marketing battles are focused on the gaming experience (gameplay, game graphics etc).

But people not only want a great console to run these high-end games, but they also want the price to be cheap:

Wii - US$170 (expected price)
360 - US$299 (current price)
PS3 - US$499 (expected price)

Looking at those prices, what would you buy?

I’ve always been a playstation man having gone from an NES to a Super Nintendo to a PSX and currently have a PS2. But I can tell you now I will probably be buying a 360 and Wii combo which will still workout cheaper than buying a PS3.

Now there’s a bit of a story behind why the PS3 is so expensive and if you follow the tech news you will know that Sony is also trying to launch their “Blu-Ray” portable media (it’s pretty much just a dvd disc that can hold 50GB+ of data). However they have some big competition in this sector too with another large storage portable disc called “HD-DVD”. So what Sony is doing is including a Blu-Ray read/burn drive in every PS3 in the hopes that they can establish Blu-Ray as the standard. Problem is that it’s very new technology and the drives and discs cost a truckload to produce.

Rumours have it that at US$499, Sony is set to lose about $200 per console produced… so they’re putting a lot on the line and its a big risk.

Being such a large risk and all, you’d think Sony would setup a skilled marketing team and carefully map out their pre-launch marketing as most consoles do. *pffft lol*

Sony have had soo many hiccups and bad PR, I would bet that the PS3 will be the worst console launch in gaming history.

They’ve had numerous delays, massive public outrage over the price and all-in-all just constant (almost weekly) bad publicity. Some recent announcements have been that they haven’t started production yet and so the PS3 won’t be released before Christmas, another was that their initial production output will be cut in half, and they just released their first commercial! (too bad it really sux)

Sony’s major flaw is simply that they have OVER-PROMISED and UNDER-DELIVERED. When they should be UNDER-PROMISING and OVER-DELIVERING.

From the start they should have set a later release date, announced a high price, and perhaps even scrapped the Blu-Ray component. That way they could have released “early”, “reduced” the price and when the Blu-Ray technology reduced in cost and matured a little more they could have released an advanced PS3 version with the technology included.

The Wii on the other hand has been doing everything absolutely perfect, and are set to launch before this Christmas. They are actually doing so well that they have Microsoft saying “Buy a 360 and then buy a Wii” and they have Sony saying “Buy a PS3 and then buy a Wii”.

So it will all be very interesting to see how things pan out

If you own Sony stock: SELL SELL SELL like there’s no tomorrow!

Nathan Waters
“Wii60″ - Wii/360 combo?

Who would have thought that online community forums could be so cut-throat!

As you may know, I’m a common lurker and poster (username: nado) at 4 young entrepreneur forums (sorted here in alphabetical order):

• EntrepreneursTalk.com (run by Scott)
• NetpreneurForums.com (run by Khalid)
• YoungEntrepreneur.com (run by Adam & Matthew)
• YoungGoGetter.com (run by Eric & Travis)

But those four are by no means the only young entrepreneur focused forums on the Net. I’ve been seeing a new forum popup every single week and some other great ones that I just haven’t yet got into (either because they are new, have little post activity or just aren’t for me) include the Blogtrepreneur Forums (run by Adnan), YoungEntrepreneur.com.au (run by Chris), EntrepreneurLounge.com (run by Jamie), NetBusinessTalk.com (run by Spencer Fry), YoungCeoForum.com (run by Maurice), GoBigNetwork.com (run by Wil) and many more.

Some offer something a little different than others, some have more traffic than others, some have better moderation than others, some have better content than others and some have better members than others. But of course any community forum requires a community to grow, so there tends to be some competition to grab new members and retain them…

OK, I’m going to try and keep this as unbiased as possible and let you decide

I’m a mega forum-addict and so I tend to spend more time on the forum with the most post-activity, which also generally means it has more members. Currently that forum is and has been YE.com which I’ve been registered with since mid-2005 and have over 900 posts.

However YE.com has been plagued with a couple of problems such as SPAM, lack of moderation, lack of features and a diminishing sense of community where the admins/mods seem to only show up to ’solve’ an escalating forum issue. In recent months the problems have been slowly getting better, until about a week ago when this thread went live: Adsense websites for sale. Have a read through it, as it’s a long story.

Basically a guy from New Zealand (username: F360) who I chat to every now and then via instant messaging was selling a few websites he had as he had been banned from Google Adsense (which was later found to be a mistake on Google’s behalf).

Within days after this thread… F360 (501 posts), fattony (389 posts) and iGROWyourBiz (134 posts) were all banned with apparently no publicly-released reasons.

Exactly… WTF?

Daniel (aka akula) posted this thread: fattony - unban him, which is also worth a read (esp akula’s reply).

The vibe I get from Adam (one of YE.com’s admin) is that those 3 members were promoting other competing forums for young entrepreneurs and so were banned and shut-out. But you can make up your own mind from the threads

The point of this blog post is that a community forum only exists if there is a community. I believe that stereotypical fierce business competition cannot and should not be applied to online community forums. Admins need to be focused on enhancing a sense of community through involvement and member wants/needs rather than focusing on competing with other forums for members.

What I’m after in a young entrepreneur forum are (in order of importance):

1) a sense of community
2) helpful responses
3) intelligent members
4) admins that respond to the community’s desires

btw, I’ve been spending a lot of time on YGG after that incident. I have absolutely no influences in any direction, but having got back into the YGG forums I am yet to see a single thread which Eric or Travis (the admins) haven’t been involved in, I am yet to see a single piece of SPAM, and I’m loving the additional features.

Nathan Waters
Always Looking For a Forum High

The richest man in Australia died last night aged 68.

The Packers own most of the media and casinos in Australia, so I guess it also makes them the most powerful family in Australia.

His son, James Packer, is set to take the reins of the Packer empire, however speculation surrounds whether or not James Packer will sell television station “Nine” in the coming years.

Will post links and more info when the journalists play catchup with the bloggers

In the meantime, the Wikipedia Article is up-to-date.

EDIT: Here’s an article