Major League Baseball is giving away MLB At Bat 2012 free of charge on February 29th, 2012 for both the iPad and iPhone app. However you will need to purchase a yearly subscription to MLB.tv for $119 if you are a returning customer and $125 if you are a new customer. That is a savings of 29.98 if you normally get MLB.tv and both iPad and iPhone app.

MLB.tv subsciption allows you to watch live out of market mlb games on a wide variety of devices including iPhone, iPad, Apple TV and PS3.  It is a great value for people who love a team outside of their coverage area.  Not so great if you are a Blue Jays fan and live in Canada, 100% of jays games are blacked out Nationwide.

Both Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis have announced their resignation as co-CEO’s of RIM. The resignation takes effect immediately. The board of directors has unanimously appointed another oddly named man to replace them, Thorsten Heins. Heins has been with RIM for the past 4 years and was recently names chief operating officer of product sales.

Lazaridis will remain vice chair of the board of directors as well as chair of its new innovation committee. Balsillie will remain on the board of directors.

“I agree this is the right time to pass the baton to new leadership, and I have complete confidence in Thorsten, the management team and the company, I remain a significant shareholder and a director and, of course, they will have my full support.”

said Balsillie.

The company’s market share has been in steady decline with increased innovation and competition from Google and Apple. The Waterloo, Ontario based company was Canada’s most valuable company at its peak.

While playing online with friends or random players is fun and has its place in gaming. My problem is that players can no longer play games in the same room as their friends. Unless of course you are one of those people with two consoles, two TVs and two copies of every game.

Sure there may be a couple of good reasons for this. One would be technical requirements. It’s possible that games such as Battlefield 3 are just too resource demanding to be able to split it into 2, 3 or 4 different screens. Each one having to render the world, player and bad guys. Or it could be a waste of time for the developers to concentrate on local multiplayer when online multiplayer is so prevalent. Of course we have to bring up the money reason. 4 players on one purchased game on one console are 3 people who are possibly not buying the game. We all know game companies are trying to squeeze every last penny out of their fan bases. In game micro purchases, one time use license codes for onnine play.

The future of local multiplayer does have one bright spot. It currently has a high cost of entry and little support among games. However it is the best implementation of local multiplayer to date. Full screen two player multiplayer on the same console, game and TV. It involves using the two feeds on a 3D TV to display Each players screen at the same time. Normally when you watch 3D TV it displays two separate images at the same time. One of the images is filmed from a slightly different angle amd when each eue only sees one of the two images it makes it look “3D”. Basically one player would have two “right” eyes in their glasses which would only allow the player to see one of the two feeds. The other player would need the two “Left” eyes.

Hopefully we haven’t lost all of our friends before this 3D TV multiplayer becomes more readily available.

The book is also available in Hardcover on Amazon.

AT&T has seen extraordinary demand for iPhone 4S with more than 200,000 preorders in the first 12 hours alone, the most successful iPhone launch we’ve ever had. It’s obvious customers like AT&T’s 4G network, which is the only one that lets their iPhone download twice as fast and talk and surf simultaneously.
-AT&T

Sprint and Verizon have yet to announce their pre sale numbers.