Video has finally surfaced of Angry Birds’ business development leader Peter Vesterbacka starting a funeral march for console gaming, meanwhile San Francisco has stepped up and offered to support an app that could be used to save lives and it’s not Angry Birds!
Fire Department app gets a San Francisco treat
If you’ve ever worked in a large office setting, you’re familiar with the concept of first responders; people that, in the event of a medical emergency, have been licensed to provide basic medical care like CPR while waiting for paramedics to arrive. Now imagine if an entire city had a first responder system like that.
Fire Department is an app that is attempting to create just such a system, and TechCrunch reports that San Francisco has just signed-on as the first major city to support the app.
The idea is that the Fire Department app would passively keep tabs on your location and in the event of an emergency near you, could send a push notification to anyone within the vicinity of the emergency who might be able to assist.
Although support for the app is extremely limited right now, future expansion could make this as commonplace as your Safari app for people trained in life saving medical techniques like CPR.
Angry Birds’ Vesterbacka jumps gun predicting death of consoles
Over the weekend there were numerous reports of Peter Vesterbacka, known for heading the development company that created Angry Birds, explaining at a panel discussion how mobile gaming will end up killing console gaming.
Well VentureBeat now has video of the panel discussion so you can see Vesterbacka’s comments for yourself. They’re just a small segment of a 25-minute conversation, so it seems unfair to malign the man too much for such a tiny percentage of his actual comments, but even hearing them again they strike me as surprising.
While Vesterbacka probably makes a very good point regarding a tablet’s gaming advantage over handheld consoles like Nintendo’s upcoming 3DS or Sony’s PSP, the home console market which his comments seemingly were directed towards plays to a much different crowd.
Until someone can adequately recreate the immersion and feel of a home console sports game, or the multiplayer battles of console first person shooters, the tablet gaming market and the console gaming market seem unlikely to cannibalize each other.
