In my process of tracking down a few links for a post on introducing ideas in an attention driven world I came across a post by Mark Pincus where he takes issue with Fred Wilson’s ruminations on the future of media.

In the post Mark asks/answers:

how many times do you ever watch a rerun of any show? you tivo the new series of the office, not an old ‘i love lucy’. the problem isnt that goog wants to charge $1.99 for it. free wouldnt help either. nobody is going to watch it either way, especially when you add the download.

I don’t agree with Mark’s statement, but that’s irrelevant. I share this to have an excuse to share some Nintendo news (yes, I have a love for Nintendo like I have for P&G).

Nintendo’s Wii sells old games from previous systems online through a virtual store. Players can download the original Mario Bros., Contra, Super Mario Kart, etc. The virtual store sells these games, available solely through download, for minimal amounts of money. With a cost to store/serve the games that’s negligible and sales of 4.7 virtual games to-date, Nintendo must be enjoying a hefty profit on the revenues generated.

With the recent chatter around the benefits of a free pricing model, I wonder where Nintendo’s virtual console profit would compare under a free, ad-supported, model.

I needed a break to focus on a number of things, one being what to do with this site. Lots of quality time spent on runs lost to thought. I’m back.

I spent last week in Vancouver and LA.

It was the first time I was really able to see Vancouver and breathe the city in (a little bit). We had a meeting in Cole Harbour, in a bar across from Stanely Park with the mountains on the horizon. Beautiful. Absolutely beautiful. For dinner we ate at Bridges on Granville Island. The Granville Island area should be inspiration for Hamilton and the area below the Skyway.

LA was LA. Glad to be home.

Thanks to Armenian Eagle’s Category Converter I was able to easily do something I’ve wanted to do for a while: clean-up the categories on Disruptive Thoughts. It was straight forward and easy to use.

The site now has four categories:

Startup Strategy: covering all topics start-up and business related
Social Enterprise: covering all topics on social entrepreneurism
Media: covering music, books, movies, …
General: covering everything else…