Hyper-local is the new buzzword in the news business. As the battle for attention gets more relentless, this is the ultimate front line: the place where you fight for one reader (and one local advertiser) at a time with the information that is most personally relevant.

The Washington Post’s online salvo in this market (the experimental Loudonextra.com, launched today) offers possible answers to two of the questions that dog Old Media as it turns its attention to this business.

One is how you generate original "content" without breaking the bank. Against the deep web crawling of Google and Yahoo’s local services on the one hand, and the potential for free content supplied by citizen journalists and local bloggers on the other, how can the traditional newspaper model be adapted?

It helps that the company’s first hyper-local site aimed at Loudon County (a 300,000-person suburb of Washington DC, also known as LoCo) can draw on journalists already employed on a twice-weekly section distributed with the Post. Key to the project, though, is data that Google can’t reach. Post journalists phoned the county’s 400 restaurants, 180 churches and 100 schools to build an original database containing everything from dining options to local meeting schedules. Keeping this and other information up to date is projected to take the time of one person, according to Rob Curley, head of the team that developed the site.

The other question is how you build a compelling Web site capable of competing with the fast-improving local services of the big search engines - and doing that in an organisation not known for its technological innovation.

The Washington Post’s answer was to create a "skunk works" team to rush through new products like this. With lightweight database and Web services tools Curley reckons his five-person team can turn out services that keep pushing the envelope. Loudonextra is geo-coding all its information and a second release due next month will let users overlay this on Google Maps, he says.

Curley and Adrian Holovaty, the Post’s online head of editorial innovation, both cut their teeth on the Lawrence Journal-World in Kansas, whose prize-winning online work brought them wider attention. Holovaty’s database software (on display here in his compelling Chicagocrime.org) is the technological secret sauce that brings much of their work to life, says Curley.

It’s too early to judge how the LoCo experiment will turn out - but how many other traditional news organisations are working on models for innovation like this?

With only around 30 major companies attending rather than 400, and 3,000 attendees rather than 60,000, this year’s E3 video games convention was more for suits than surfers.

Gone was the overpowering music, crowds, booth babes and Hollywood sets of the Los Angeles Convention Center.

There were the usual big presentations by the console makers, but otherwise, the shoreline events in Santa Monica were confined to a handful of press conferences and evening parties and lots of meetings in hotel suites with views over the Pacific.

In truth, anything that reduces the hype and noise in this industry is welcome and executives had chance to express deeper thoughts about the state of video games.

As John Gapper points out in his column, the trend seems to be one of casualisation - making games that appeal beyond the core gamer.

This is despite the console cycle still being in the early-adopter phase where core gamers are seen as the biggest customers. Nintendo’s success in appealing to non-gamers has proved a new console introduction can be the best time to find a new audience.

Sony executives seemed puzzled by all the fuss over Nintendo. They are making games for their core audience with the PlayStation 3, but point out that the PlayStation 2 is still selling in big numbers and has lots of family-friendly titles now it is at a mass-market price.

So if you are currently a non-gamer and looking for family-friendly entertainment, this could not be a better time to invest in a console.

Games featured at E3 like Guitar Hero, Rock Band, Boogie, Skate, Scene It, SingStar and a majority of titles on the Nintendo DS and Wii are easy to play, great fun and can appeal to all ages.

However, come the holiday season, the titles for core gamers will be the ones making the headlines. The holy trinity of Halo 3, Grand Theft Auto 4 and Madden NFL ‘08 are about to bless the industry and likely turn this into a blockbuster year.

Price cut, what price cut? says Robbie Bach, head of Microsoft’s Entertainment and Devices division, about Sony’s $100 reduction in the cost of its 60Gb PlayStation 3 console to $499 this week.

Sony also introduced a $599 80Gb version and had earlier dropped the weak-selling $499 20Gb version from the US market.

“What they did was they increased the hard disk size but they didn’t actually reduce prices, so the barrier to entry for the PS3 is the same price today as it was yesterday,” said Mr Bach in an FT interview at the E3 video game summit.

“If high price and lack of content is the issue [for Sony’s poor PS3 sales], they still have high prices and still don’t have the content yet, the dynamic hasn’t changed.”

Mr Bach, who is also responsible for the Zune media player, Windows Mobile for phones and the new coffee-table sized Surface Computer, addressed Microsoft’s billion-dollar charge announced last week to cover a hardware fault in the Xbox 360, among other issues in our interview. The highlights:

The billion-dollar Xbox 360 charge –“We are still on track to be profitable in the next fiscal year. It was more of a broad design challenge than a specific component, that’s our problem so if you want to blame somebody, Microsoft takes responsibility, it’s not a manufacturing issue. The majority of our customers are never going to experience it. We’ve been in the hardware business for 25 years and we’ve made a lot of money in it. Is this a stumble along the road? A billion dollars is a lot of money, yes we’re not happy with that. Our cost of goods on the consoles has come down and at various times we will make money on the console, it depends on how we price it.”

On Sony’s $100 PS3 price cut: “July? A price cut? If there’s 12 months in the year, July would rank 12th amongst the months to cut the price on a consumer product, especially this kind of product. It’s in the middle of summer, people aren’t buying, you could double your volume and people might not notice. We’ll cut the price when we think we need to, and right now demand is actually kinda good. Sony is going to see a spike perhaps.”

Is Sony’s Home online service going to be a threat to Xbox Live?: “We’ll see when they ship, it’s not done yet, I’ve wandered around it and it’s interesting in a way , but these virtual worlds are tough things, getting the dynamic right is very hard and figuring out whether that’s what people actually want to do is an interesting question. I don’t think of it as an online service I think of it more as a multiplayer game and that’s fine and we’ll just have to see how it goes. We have a big lead on Xbox Live and we have many things they won’t have on that service and so I’m pretty confident. We are going to keep accelerating that space we think there’s a lot more we can do.”

On siding with HD-DVD over Blu-ray: "HD-DVD players are outselling Blu-ray ones 70-30 now and have been doing for the past two months. The thing that is driving volume is $299 and price matters. There’s a group of people that thinks it’s not growing faster because there’re two standards and people are confused. Beta and VHS co-existed for many years, I don’t think that’s the issue. I happen to think it’s almost all about price and value proposition and much less about formats. We think HD-DVD is better, go look at the interactivity on an HD-DVD movie and compare it to what’s happening on Blu-Ray."

On Windows Media Center v Xbox in the living room: "Media Center is accelerating, we’ve now passed 50m Media Centers in the marketplace. What has happened is our clarity of purpose between Xbox 360 and Media Center is much higher than it was two to three years ago. There will be someone who wants to connect it directly to the TV, that’s great, but most people are using Media Center to watch internet video at their PC, which turns out to be a nice, growing market, or it’s the place to store their video and project it through their Xbox on a TV. So I think the two go hand in hand, Xbox success helps Media Center and Media Center success helps Xbox."

Zune’s progress: "Zune’s doing well, we crossed the 1m unit boundary, our share is very steady at about 10 per cent of the hard-disk category, and you’d say that’s small but for nine months in the market place I’d feel pretty good about that. The team is doing some great work for the future, I’m excited about it and we’ll talk about it when we’re ready. We said this would be a three to four year thing."

On the iPhone and a possible Microsoft phone: "From a design aesthetic, it’s beautiful, they did a gorgeous device. In the process of that and doing lots of different things, they ended up making some compromises, so the design aesthetic says you can’t have keys on the front, that means it’s not great for text messaging and email. You have to ask the question what is it world class at? It’s not a great iPod because it’s $600 for an 8Gb iPod. I think they are going to help us in the phone market. I think it’s very good for Windows Mobile business.The problem with [us] making a phone is if you want to be successful you have to make lots of different phones. I would never say never, but you would have to decide either there’s some niche segment or you have to say we’re going to produce a series of phones with different characteristics."

On the Surface computer: "The response to that has been phenomenal, way more than we expected. It’s been in development for a long time and it’s always been a cool demo but now its way more than that because people can now tell me six things they want to do with it. So we are going to start with commercial applications, because it’s still a little expensive, and then over time, we are going to drive like crazy to drive the cost down and to make it a consume product. The challenge right now is I have more demand from commercial customers than I can fulfill and more people pushing me harder to get it to the consumer market faster because when they see it they go: it’s game-changing. It’s one of those classic things where people say: Microsoft, you don’t innovate enough. There’s four or five other things that are in development that we haven’t talked about and I can say: Look, we’re doing this kind of world class innovation every day.”

Santa Monica: Sony is a little puzzled at all the plaudits Nintendo is receiving at E3 for its family-friendly gaming.

Wasn’t it Sony who earlier introduced the EyeToy and a range of games that depended on body movements rather than controller buttons? There have been karaoke, fitness and dancing games to play and the PlayStation3 controller has more motion sensitivity built in than the Wiimote.

But Kaz Hirai, who took over as president of Sony Computer Entertainment from Ken Kutaragi, the father of the PlayStation, last November, stressed in our interview that Sony traditionally focuses on hard-core gamers at the beginning of a new console cycle.

He also discussed the recent PS3 price cut, his management style and hopes for the Home virtual world. The highlights:

The $100 PS3 price cut: "The primary driver for the price adjustment on the 60Gb model was the fact that we wanted to introduce the 80Gb model bundled with Motorstorm in the August timeframe. Therefore, you are going to have inventory of the 60Gb at the retailers and we’ve done this in the past, where we’ve done the model change and the then current model does get a price adjustment so that we can make sure that we clear the inventory in the field as quickly as possible. That’s so that we have the primary or the ongoing frontline [model] in the market as we get into the holidays So that was the primary reason for the timing, it wasn’t a strategy really to say we were dropping the price by $100."

Favouring hard-core games rather than being family-friendly?: “If you look at the lifecycle either of the original PlayStation or with the PS2, you need to look at it with a 10 year not a five-year perspective. What we’ve really tried to do as we launch new platforms is have a core base of really hard-core gamers, who in turn can really become your evangelists for further expanding the platform to the lighter users. It’s always been, when you launch a platform, you have more games geared towards gaming enthusiasts and perhaps less in terms of family-oriented games, and as you progress through the lifecycle that shift in emphasis turns to more family-friendly gamers.

"We are fortunate in having a very viable platform in PS2 where the majority of games are family friendly, and are for the more casual gamers, perhaps a younger demographic, a viable entry point into the PlayStation family. So, while we can focus the PS2 strategy in that section of the market, we can work on the PS3 side right now to get the core gaming audience going."

Management style: “Nobody has told me that you must do X,Y and Z, and Ken and I are not the same person, I’ve worked with him for the last 12 years or so and I’ve got a lot of insight and ways of strategic thinking and business acumen from Ken as I have from other senior people at Sony and I do intend to bring in my own way of running the worldwide organisation that’s going to be different from the way Kuturagi San was running it, because we’re not the same person.

"I also bring a different perspective to the worldwide headquarters in that I was running a regional headquarters [RHQ] for the longest time at Sony Computer Entertainment America. The main difference really is giving the RHQs more autonomy, for example, the colours of the PSP. I’ve told them tell me what colours you want as opposed to saying here are the five colours, you will sell these - because that‘s a cultural and market issue that the RHQs have an understanding of and it’s something that people in Tokyo shouldn’t be dictating. So small things like that are starting to change already but I will also be looking at larger changes with the eye again to giving the RHQs more autonomy in running their business."

The potential of the Home online world coming this autumn on the PS3: “I think that Home has a lot of potential in bringing a different community experience for PlayStation users on a worldwide basis and doing it in a very different and entertaining way and also allowing us to come up with different sorts of business opportunities that we’ve not been able to tap into with previous generation consoles. Obviously it lends itself very well to in-Home advertising, which means we get to take a portion of the business transacted. We also have the opportunity to allow game publishers and non-game publishers to provide ecommerce services like travel agents and real estate agents, so a lot of things that can be done on the 2-D internet can be brought to Home for a very different experience. It really expands the horizon of what the PS3 experience can be."

Santa Monica: When Satoru Iwata, Nintendo’s president, took to the stage at the E3 video games summit this week he talked about cookery, vision training exercises, brain teasers, word games and lifestyle coaching.

The latest Super Mario and Legend of Zelda adventures were left to others to demonstrate. The 47-year-old Nintendo chief is focusing on the non-gamers as his company leads the way in expanding the market with titles for its DS portable and Wii console aimed at nine year olds to 95-year-olds.

He talked to us about his strategy here. Other highlights from the interview:

On Nintendo winning the next generation war: “While we have some momentum at this point I don’t think that we have completed our goals, we haven’t succeeded with everything we set out to do. We are still looking at expanding the gaming population and we really feel we are at the entrance to this new market. The reality is you look at the sales of the DS and the Wii on a weekly basis and we are selling more than other consoles. So Reggie [Fils-Aime, US president]’s statement that we would be the leading seller is something that you can reasonably predict in the foreseeable future.”

On comparisons with Apple: “Nintendo is not a game company per se, it’s an entertainment company. As one, it looked at and saw the potential interactivity of video games as a successful product and we were the first company to hit on that product [Nintendo is the oldest surviving console company with products dating back to 1975] I want to expand the definition of a video game. In particular, why we remind people of Apple is we are not afraid to try something different and we really believe the experience our users get from interacting with a product is very important, we really value that experience. But Apple is a high tech company and Nintendo is an entertainment company and while high-tech might be a part of entertainment sometimes, it’s merely a component of entertainment rather than the focus of entertainment. We also both went through some hard times and are now seeing a resurgence."

On competitor’s high-definition products: “I have nothing against high definition, I have an HDTV myself. The reason we didn’t put it in the Wii is it would have raised the prices higher than we wanted and for the mass market audience we wanted to reach, it was too early for that component. When we do release our next console, we will look at whether it is viable and whether it makes sense in the marketplace. It’s all about timing and balance and it didn’t make sense when we were bringing the Wii out. You could say, with some of the difficulties that Microsoft is having with breakdowns in its system, that they tried to do too much too fast.

Could the Wii be a fad?: “Fads don’t have 33 continuous weeks of sell-out success, I feel if it was a fad it’s time would have passed. But people are still talking about it and looking for it and we didn’t create the Wii console to just do sports, I think we are thinking of lots of new ideas to use this functionality and keep that momentum moving forward.”

How are you making games easier?: "Nintendo has been successful at drawing in new casual users, that’s the first step. Step two would be to take a few of these casual gamers and transform them into core gamers. The latest Legend of Zelda game was launched in Japan on the DS and you would assume it is only being played by core gamers. However, we’ve made it controllable only through the stylus and the reason we did that was to try to get new Zelda fans out of those who came to the DS because of Brain Age or Nintendogs. One thing we’ve found is that we are seeing an increase in Zelda users among young women and even mothers. Zelda like a lot of franchises increased in the complexity of the game design and became more difficult to play. We are now seeing people who played Zelda at one point coming back to the franchise. So you get stories of people playing Zelda again for the first time in 10 years. So when we talk about extending the gaming population, it simply means attracting casual gamers and taking from within that group the new generation of core gamers."

China’s policy of blocking overseas websites has been noted here on more than one occasion, but it still comes as a surprise to find that FT Tech Blog itself appears to have become a victim of the government’s shadowy censors.

In recent days it has not been possible to access this part of the ft.com website from Beijing and Shanghai, with page requests just timing out - the usual symptom of a blocked site. The blog loads fine if accessed through an offshore proxy site designed to evade the censor. And a quick check on the block-checker site greatfirewallofchina.org  (see picture) also suggests we have been blacklisted.

Why is this happening and how long might the block last? There is no way of knowing, since China has never even revealed who is responsible for website blocking decisions or what criteria they use. But Beijing does seem to have a particular sensitivity toward blogs that discuss censorship, and internet "management" is a top priority for the government at the moment.

The action against a single corner of the FT’s site is also a reminder of the growing technical sophistication of the commissars. They are already targeting particular entries in Wikipedia. How long before the news sections of international papers start getting cut up by the censors’ digital scissors?

Santa Monica: John Riccitiello says returning to Electronic Arts as chief executive was the only job offer he considered seriously in his three years in private equity with Silicon Valley’s Elevation Partners.

While with Elevation, he oversaw a major investment that brought together developers Bioware and Pandemic Studios and he carried out due diligence on a number of other video game companies.

“I went through virtually every game company out there and had unprecedented access to people that now probably rue the day they agreed to let me in their door. But I got some pretty good insights,” he told us in an interview at the E3 Media and Business Summit.

Mr Riccitiello was president and chief operating officer at EA from 1997 to 2004, when he left to help set up Elevation. He returned to replace Larry Probst as CEO on April 1 and has been carrying out due diligence on the state of his company and the industry since then. Here are his thoughts:

On why he came back: “Being a private equity guy is master of the universe these days and it’s harder to do better than being a founding partner, so it’s a good gig. During the time I was gone, I got called by media magnates to be CEO of a number of different companies and it was always very easy to say thanks but no thanks.

“When Larry and the board approached me about EA, that’s a different question and it’s hard to describe how intertwined my emotions and history and relationships are with EA. It was about a company that I am profoundly motivated to work in and a company in particular in which I’ve got massive passion and belief. I felt I could make a difference and be helpful.”

On the state of the company: “It’s very clear that some companies performed better than we have during the [console] transition in terms of top and bottom line growth. We’ve got to drive our business really aggressively, we’ve got to put distance between us and our competitors and make it exceptionally clear that we’re not just the biggest, we’re absolutely the best. I think people are leveling criticism at us on a couple of different fronts and we’ve got to address that and move beyond people’s expectations whether it’s product quality or top and bottom line growth.”

On his current focus: “It‘s the innovation level of our games. In particular, I’m focused on innovation and accessibility, things that are going to drive new people into the industry. I just think we have to set a higher standard for innovation and we have when we are at our best - we just haven’t been at our best as an industry often enough. I also am focusing on success on a number of strategic fronts like online or wireless or Asia or the new casual business we’re pursuing.”

On how deeper games needn’t be harder ones: “I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the only game in the history of our industry that has sold 20m units is also one of the easiest games to pick up and play ever made – this is [Take-Two’s] Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. I don’t think you have to be inaccessible to be deep. GTA is deep, it’s rich, it rewards the core game player, it’s one of the highest-rated games and it was easy to play - you could finish it and have fun if you didn’t have fast thumbs and had to master a whole series of skills, so that [depth] and inaccessibility are not a trade off.”

On innovative upcoming EA titles: “Army of 2 is a fantastic title, Spore is a game that may be viewed as the most innovative game of the last few years industry wide when we put that out in about a year. Then there’s Rock Band and Boogie, which sort of takes the piss out of other music games, it is so simple, it is so much fun. I could give you a long list.”

The video game industry is growing its arsenal of family-friendly controllers as it tries to expand beyond hard-core gamers.

Nintendo has widened the demographic with its motion-sensing Wii controller. It said today that 1 in 3 gamers using its products this year were women, compared to 1 in 5 for the industry as a whole. The proportion of gamers that are over 25 and playing Nintendo games was up from 14 per cent in 2005 to 23 per cent in 2007.

Nintendo today unveiled the Wii Zapper – a $20 machine gun-style controller – the Wii wheel for Super Mario go-kart fans and the strangest controller you can imagine, in that it resembles an everyday household object – the Balance Board.

It looks like a set of bathroom scales, but as well as telling you your body mass index, it can sense your balance and allow you to play games that improve fitness and posture.

Microsoft is also adding peripherals for the less dexterous to the Xbox 360.

On Tuesday, it showed off the Big Button Pad, which consists of just a big red button and smaller green, red, yellow and blue buttons. It is designed for family quizzes, allowing you to press the buzzer and answer multiple-choice questions.

The first game that will use it is Scene It, a movie trivia game that includes clips in high definition.

Microsoft also showed off the multi-peripheral guitar, drums and vocals that will feature in the Rock Band game later this year – a variation on the Guitar Hero blockbuster that gave air-guitarists something to hold.

This could extend the gamer demographic almost to the baby-boomer generation – Rock Band will allow virtual bands to play original songs going as far back as the complete Who’s Next album by The Who from 1971.

Santa Monica: The world’s biggest video games convention may have been scaled down this year and transferred to this seaside suburb of Los Angeles, but it is still no end-of-the-pier show.

The industry’s leading executives are all here at the E3 Media and Business Summit, including Robbie Bach, head of Microsoft’s Entertainment and Devices division, Kaz Hirai, president of Sony Computer Entertainment and Satoru Iwata, president and chief executive of Nintendo.

Interviews coming up with all three over the next few days on Techblog. In the meantime, Microsoft held a stats and game-heavy press conference on the eve of E3 this evening.

Staged in a high-school amphitheatre with a backdrop of the setting sun, Microsoft emphasised the level of game development now possible on the Xbox 360, with its year’s headstart over the Sony and Nintendo consoles.

Electronic Arts’ sports titles later this year will play twice as fast and smooth as before. The Xbox 360 will be the only platform to have the triple play of Halo 3, Grand Theft Auto IV and the Madden NFL game later this year, due to its exclusive rights to Halo.

Peter Moore, head of interactive entertainment at Microsoft, modestly described it as "the greatest holiday line-up in video game history". All three are sequels and the gamer audience at the press conference did not seem overwhelmed by the trailers shown for Grand Theft Auto and Halo, but they will undoubtedly sell well.

Mr Moore said this year there will be a crossover point where consumers will spend more on games than they do on music.

He pointed out that since the PlayStation 3 and Nintendo Wii were launched in November:

• Microsoft sold 2.7m consoles to 2.8m Wiis and 1.4m PS3s in the US.

• It sold more games than the other two combined.

• Microsoft’s total next-gen revenues were $2.4bn, compared to $1.3bn for the Wii and and $1.1bn for the PS3.

Nintendo and Sony will be sure to put their own spin on the figures in successive conferences on Wednesday.

Two further signs of just how far the lure of social networking is prompting venture capitalists to loosen the purse strings:

Ning, Marc Andreessen’s social networking platform, has just raised $44m from mutual fund group Legg Mason and others (are mutual fund companies getting into social networking now?) Andreessen had been following the low-key style favoured by the early Web 2.0 crowd but has now decided the time has come to push the pedal to the metal.

According to this note on his blog, Andreessen had been staying "lean and focused" but now it’s time for phase two: scaling up the platform, investing in new features and "platform evangelism and support programs." Just in case you thought that meant Andreesen is ready to swing for the fences, dotcom-style, he adds that in other respects "we plan on staying as lean and focused as we possibly can." Hm.

Meanwhile Bay Partners, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm, says it wants to invest money in companies that are writing applications to run on the Facebook platform. The social networking site’s platform strategy has been one of the Valley’s favourite talking points since it was officially launched in May. First it was hailed as an end-run around MySpace, a way to draw more innovation, and eventually users, to the underdog network. That was followed by an inevitable, if rather rapid, backlash as the tech blogs started to question whether Facebook’s platform is all it’s cracked up to be (we blogged about what the blogs were saying here.)

In reality, it’s too early to assess the Facebook strategy because (a) it’s not clear what the business model for the apps will be and (b) how big a slice of the cake Facebook will want to keep for itself when/if the dollars start to flow. Interesting, though, that Bay Partners wants to invest $25,000-250,000 in apps to run on the network, no business model required - only "reasonable theories about monetisation."

Not that this gets us back to the Sock Puppet days quite yet. Still, it’s another step along the road.

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