Wow, can you believe the Bourne Ultimatum game is already one third over? Seems like we are just getting started.

Day 5
A new Dater Notes profile to view for today’s challenge: Mustapha Nayet. We’re supposed to figure out the locker code by watching his YouTube surveillance videos. I’m with reader Bernice who left a comment on yesterday’s game, this one was pretty easy.

Hint: Today’s hint comes in part from reader Bernice who writes:

it’s numbers.

To which I’d add, watch the last video for the numbers. You can put it together.

Day 4 of the Bourne Ultimatum game had me knotted for awhile.

Day 4
Today I was stumped trying to figure out where Treadstone’s Nicky Parsons is “located now.” Her Dater Notes profile including zip code indicate New York, NY, but that is not the answer. Confession: I got the answer with help from my friend Lestat. Two brains are better than one.

Hint: Use Google web search on the names in Nicky’s picture gallery.

Today’s Bourne Ultimatum challenge won’t take you too long. It introduces the first use of a Google tool in the game for non French-speaking players. We’ll find you yet, Bourne! Good luck fellow players.

Day 3
Use IM to exchange more messages with Luc Godat and uncover the name of the logistics coordinator.

Hint: If you don’t speak French using translate.google.com will come in handy.

Yesterday Google (disclaimer: I own stock) started a daily puzzle game via searchforbourne.com to ramp up to the launch of the theatrical release of Bourne Ultimatum. Remember the tracking we did for the daily puzzles for the Da Vinci Code? We’ll try to provide the same coverage for this one. Like Da Vinci, there are some prizes for this (50 United States only), but it won’t be based on speed of completion of the puzzles, see the official rules page. It’s also different in that Google has setup a fake dating website complete with Adsense to exchange codes that are being used in the daily mission briefings. Each day you return for a new briefing.

Also like we did with the Da Vinci puzzles, there might be some additional clues offered here, but please do not give away the answers to others. This spoils the challenge and fun and while it might be a bit more frustrating figuring things out on your own, it’s a lot more satisfying when you do. In that spirit, any comments left here with the answers will be removed or edited out at our discretion, but you’re welcome to and encouraged to provide other players additional hints and tips to the answers. Just don’t give the answer away.

How to play
Just login with your Google handle at searchforbourne.com and click on the link in the daily briefing section. Being it is day 2 you can catch up with day 1 and day 2. Each day you do the puzzle you’ll be entered into a drawing for prizes like cash and new car.

Since it started yesterday, here’s a recap of the missions for the first two days.

Day 1
Locate a picture showing Luc Godat’s is located in paris and copy/paste the image URL to it. Hint: It’s not on his main profile page.

Day 2
Send an instant message to Luc Godat’s screenname.

Hint: Use the instant message client under the communication tab inside the agent console. [I kept trying to use GTalk which I’m hoping that isn’t a valid screenname — oops! I got it, though and you will too once you know what to use and what to say]

Some controversy over the Bourne game launch
Phillip at Google Blogoscoped in a post titled “Google’s Undisclosed Movie/ Self Promotion” points that the contest launched with a bit of stealth which may have been misinterpreted — or properly interpreted depending on one’s perspective — as Google providing itself preferential promotional search results that weren’t labeled as being promotional.

Phillip writes:

However, it’s not the first search results “cooperation” for Google – a company claiming they don’t “manipulate search results by hand” – and also not the first Google results self-promotion (the latter, Google retracted after criticism).

Is Phillip just making a newsworthy point or is he being smug? I can’t tell, can you? If it’s the later than sheesh Phillip, ease up on the sphincter, will you?

Personally, I think sometimes people get too anal over what Google does and doesn’t do (myself included sometimes) and this is a shining example. This is for a freaking game. You know, fun, enjoyment, smile, laugh, ha ha. It wasn’t like they were trying to jam Google Toolbar ads into unrelated queries or use those godawful mouseover text ads that blow up and interfere with reading a page. It’s a long way from violating their evil mantra. Are the Google search result pages so sacred that they can’t temporarily try different promotional spots in the search results for related queries in a game other than the bland, almost invisible text ads?

If Google wants to temporarily manipulate related search result pages and show unmarked to make a game more challenging and/or promote a time sensitive game like this, I don’t have a problem with that. Do you? Yes, even if it is promotional for them and yes, even if it knocks down a few of my listings for similar keywords (didn’t in this case, but could in the future). It seems that Google caved after criticism and they now label a few select Bourne results as “Google Promotion.”

What do you think? Is it ok for Google to do this in a promotion or do you want their advertorial stuff always marked? I realize there are FTC concerns with using properly marked advertising, but the line gets gray when talking about a game like this, doesn’t it? I’ve never done any stealth game like this but I think it would be fun to do so someday and would like to think it would be lawful to do so. Your perspective?

In case you haven’t heard, The Simpsons have a movie coming out a week from this coming Friday.

They already have some good things going on at their movie website with three games including Simpsons Movie Wrecking Ball. The object is to use Homer’s wrecking ball to boot The Simpson’s car as far away as possible. Also see the Ball of Death, which lets you ride Homer around in a ball and Three Card Moe.

If that’s not enough Simpsons fun, then try your hand at creating your own Simpsons avatar. I used the roll dice feature to randomly generate my Simpsons avatar to the right. You can register at the website and save your scores from the game

Break time wasters perhaps but it is kind of unusual seeing this level of website interactivity for a new movie. There are also full games coming to the console systems (Xbox, Wii, etc) in October (doh!) which, yes, is late, and features a plotline of the Simpsons family trying to escape a video game.

How well will the Simpsons movie will do in theaters? I’m already on record, sight unseen, saying that it has the global potential to rival Titanic and will do at least 750 million worldwide. Last chance to get your predictions in below, how much money do you think The Simpsons movie will generate in theaters worldwide?

Hmmcast #137 mp4

Until June 28 Mcdonalds is offering the first Austin Powers movie as a free movie download in the Xbox Marketplace. I poked around looking to see if this was a US-only offer and didn’t see an official page from Mcdonalds or Xbox (anybody have a link to one?). I found the offer on the blade after logging in.

Some people like to gleefully annoint YouTube as the bastion of original content. It is. And isn’t.

It could be the place to display where the next technological version of Hollywood emerges. While I’m in favor of amateur created videos, watch and share my fair share as well as have been producing my own videos (Hmmcast) regularly since the start of this year, I don’t see any live video sites that TechCrunch mentions in this post making a YouTube-like splash. Why not?

YouTube emerged as a breeding ground for copyright infringement
Miraculously YouTube had enough attention focused on original videos and away from infringing content to persuade Google to buy them instead of meeting the original Napster’s fate. I don’t care how popular YouTube is today, and despite being a shareholder, still strongly believe that the YouTube acquisition has been Google’s biggest strategic blunder to date. If they lose the lawsuit to Viacom and it’s conceivable to believe they might if it makes it to court, this could cost them a lot more than the billion plus they overpaid for YouTube. Courts won’t throw copyright out the window and it’s very difficult for any unbiased third party to objectively analyze the level of copyright infringement at YouTube and say Google is doing everything they can to clear this up.

I know, I know, they are working on it. They are supposed to have some amazing technology that will filter and identify copyright infringing content that rushes in and saves the day and I hope it works. My guess is that it will work about as well as current anti-spam filtering technology.

Back to why there will be no live YouTube video breakthrough site: live video sites aren’t anything new. Historically the only amateur produced live video people have been willing to pay for en masse is adult content and that has been happening at sites like iFriends.com since the late nineties. It’s worth noting that iFriends is more mainstream-focused on their homepage today than they were nearly 10 years ago when they were primarily adult focused. Compare this to Zinio which I wrote about in the last post which has gone the opposite way by being almost anti-adult to creating an entire separate website dedicated to adult magazines.

Popular geeks like Robert Scoble and Chris Pirillo and newcomer Justin.TV might be able to garner a few followers to be casually interested, but the whole Ed TV thing has nowhere close to the legs of sharing clips of copyrighted content or low-quality bootlegged camera phone concert videos. People are looking for the good stuff, you know, the stuff you usually have to pay to see.

Napster, anyone?

Besides, there is the issue of what it takes to produce great live video. Takes a lot more than just a camera and a subject. There are some great reasonably priced tools out there that can produce studio-like live effects like Visual Communicator now owned by Adobe, but the vast majority of live video content is going to be as boring as hell. It’s going to be people saying and doing mundane activities with fixed camera shots and backgrounds. Pet rock video.

What will happen with live video in the future?
I think we’ll see the NFL, MLB and NBA directly or with a big name partner — wouldn’t it be ironic if that was YouTube? — offer live sports through the web everywhere (not only outside the United States). They have already begun to experiment and the first one to pull the trigger worldwide will be their own mini YouTube of live video more than any of the sites TechCrunch mentioned. I’m kind of surprised that the three major professional sports haven’t seen the potential here yet.

And when the US Government gets around to legalizing online gambling — and they will, mark my words — we’ll see live internet broadcast sports with the ability to wager. We’ll see interactive commercials that people can experience while watching the event instead of being forced to skip through at some predefined intervals.

Hollywood will finally wise up and start using the internet as a secondary or perhaps even primary distribution channel. A lot of the networks offer TV shows legally on their websites. The decentralization of TV, bring it. People like our family who can and would like to receive the content through the internet legally are ready.

Finally, a third party aggregation site like YouTube isn’t going to have — or likely be given — the rights to make money off the backs of the people producing compelling live content that people are willing to pay for any time soon. The whole notion of ad-supported everything is flawed.

AT&T could soon be sinking to new lows — tracking and reporting its “frequent offenders” er, AT&T customers, of suspected piracy — according to an article in the LA Times:

The San Antonio-based company started working last week with studios and record companies to develop anti-piracy technology that would target the most frequent offenders, said James W. Cicconi, an AT&T senior vice president.

On a case by case basis with court order this behavior from a company one does business with wouldn’t be so bad. You have to follow the law and it isn’t right to steal music. While those who download movies and music they haven’t purchased will try to argue that downloading music or movies isn’t stealing, it is, but that doesn’t make what AT&T is doing right — and they are the first major company to admit they will be doing this type of surveillance according to the LA Times article.

I still believe that DRM is more appealing than piracy. Why isn’t AT&T working on a better DRM system as opposed to an advanced tattle tale model? The problems with tracking all your customers activity and ratting them out to the RIAA and MPAA without any sort of legal mandate are staggering: AT&T is playing judge, jury and executioner. Why pit your company and customers against each other?

Only a company with bad DNA could do something like this to their entire customer base. Don’t do this, AT&T. Again, I fully support AT&T and any other company by court order tracking select customers suspicious of breaking the law, but I will never support any company doing this to all their customers.

Go get ‘em Dave:

They should do things to reward customers for being smart enough to have chosen AT&T as their Internet service provider. Instead, they would make their customers the stupidest people on the planet, choosing the only ISP that will send you to jail to create a new business model for them. Instead of competing to provide great service at the lowest possible price, they want to drive their customers to financial ruin, for having made the mistake of choosing AT&T.

There is a reason AT&T is on my Do Not Do Business With list and it’s anti-customer behavior like this that remind me to keep them there. I’ve told the story before, so you’ll be spared reading it again unless you click through, but coming from this completely rehabbed former AT&T customer they’re a company I’ll run not walk to get away away from. It’s actually a bit of a challenge not accidentally doing business with them because they are in a lot of places doing a lot of different things.

In fact on Tuesday when we were looking at the different prepaid wireless plans a plan from Cingular was in the running at one point — until we realized that Cingular was now owned by AT&T.

Just remove the ampersand and the name is correct: ATNT. Self-destruction began a long time ago.

My favorite non-tech magazine growing up was Mad Magazine. The spoofs on tv shows and movies are legendary. It’s good to see their humor is still as zany as ever. With Pirates of the Constitution, your desktop may never be the same. Mad also offers a Fanatic Four download. It’s still too bad Mad isn’t available digitally, but maybe they are recycling.