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Northrend's Gross Domestic Product: 719 million gold
Our friend The WoW Economist started a little project the other day: he added up, according to the top items lists, all of the products sold from Northrend across the servers, and then multiplied each by what he calls a "median" price (though exactly how that's reached, we're not sure), and landed on a huge amount of gold: 719,918,239.7. Obviously I'm not a WoW Economist (I'm not even that good at math), but that sounds to me like Northrend's gross domestic product: players are creating an economy of 719 million gold in Northrend from week to week.Unfortunately, that number alone doesn't tell us much, except that there's a lot of gold moving around in Northrend (it would be interesting to compare this to, say, Azeroth or Outland's equivalent, though the more useful numbers would probably be Outland before the new expansion hit, when everyone was still farming and selling items from there). And it will be interesting to see this tracked in the future: the real GDP is usually used as an indicator of both standard of living and a country's economic health, and while there are drawbacks to using that number to gauge both of those qualities, it's probably fair to say the economy in Northrend is booming. Maybe tracking this in the future will let us see how new content patches or item or even class updates can affect what the economy does there.Very interesting. EVE Online's creators, CCP, have actually hired an economist to help run their ingame economy, and while WoW's isn't generally seen as quite that complicated, there are still plenty of big numbers to play around with..
Median M-Cody MX-400M: a VoIP phone and DAP collage
What do you do with a so-so DAP that hasn't exactly taken the global marketplace by storm? Well, if you're Korea's Median, you make use of that sliding USB jack, mic, and speaker already found in the MX-400, slap in some VoIP software from Callpia, and relaunch as the MX-400M MP3 Player and VoIP phone we've all been, uh, waiting for. The kit ships with an IR remote control, SD slot, about 20 hours playback of Li-Polymer battery, and even up to 2GB of on-board storage. They've also managed to pack in an FM radio, line-in recording, and support for MP3, WMA, ASF, OGG audio and AVI, MPEG1/2/4, and WMV video formats viewable on that 1.3-inch 260k TFT LCD. Impressive -- but just 'cause you can, doesn't mean you should. Anyway, if this sounds like the shiznit to you, then feel free to unburden yourself of the 149,000 Korean Won (about $161) required to take her home.[Via AVING]
Median's M-cody M-30: today's DAP sponsored by the letter "M"
Median is prepping to toss a new slim, metal DAP into the mix with this, their M-cody M-30. With a 260k color TFT-LCD, the M-30 delivers MPEG-4 video playback as well as the more staid MP3 playback (and presumably WMA/WAV/OGG) and FM tuner already seen in the 7.5-mm slim, M-20 bro. Sorry, no mention of such trivialities as storage capacity, price, screen size, or whether they've managed to shave off that excess millimeter to best the measuring stick of audio player slimness, the iPod nano. We do know that it'll go for 11-hours pumping audio or 5-hours for video and record both voice and encode audio from connected devices. Great, but will it come in red whenever it might ship?
