Reality disappointed: What we actually got was a limited library of not-new games (Homefront, anyone?), many of which you already owned, but even laggier than on your own hardware. Turns out traditional retail, game publisher, and hardware platform companies made it difficult for cloud gaming services to get the best games on the day of release, and even then the gameplay quality was slightly inferior.

But the concept of gaming in the cloud is still an idea worth pursing for a far greater promise: the ability to deliver an entirely new kind of game experience.

Historically, in games as in any other media, new distribution technologies enable new creative experiences. Pong wouldn’t have been possible without a new device plugged in to your TV. Internet-connected computers meant you could play Duke Nukem and Quake with other people online. The evolution of server technology brought massively-multiplayer games. The iPhone brought Angry Birds, a game designed for a touch interface, and so forth.

So why should a cloud gaming service be used to deliver the same old games as before that were built for a $250 machine?

What we should be wondering, then, is what new kinds of games and gaming experiences cloud delivery could inspire? Compared to the gaming hardware you own, a cloud gaming service could access much more computing power—with a limitless capacity to add processing. Consider after all that the most powerful supercomputer in the world, the Titan, is about 70,000 times more powerful than an Xbox 360. Granted the Titan costs a cool $100 million, which cuts out most households, but scaling back to basic and accessible data center prices would still offer many orders of magnitude more computing power than any current or near-future home console . (And this isn’t to say great gaming experiences are limited to powerful hardware—to the contrary mobile phones play compelling games, too. They’re just of a different sort.)

As for content itself, games purpose-built for the cloud do not yet exist — ones that aren’t encumbered by the limits of processing power, that would use the full advantage of many more, and more powerful, CPUs and GPUs. These “supercomputer games” would open up creative possibilities far beyond what games of today are capable.

Imagine supercomputer games with vividly lifelike worlds and characters (and not the almost-real, uncanny valley of current-generation graphics), or a single battlefield with 50,000 other players playing at the same time — or opponent AI on the level of IBM’s Jeopardy!-winning Watson. Supercomputer games could be dramatically different from anything you can play tonight at home. I’m no game designer, but what if we could use real-time traffic data to fill the streets of the next Grand Theft Auto, or step into a computer-generated world that looks as compelling as the Lord of the Rings movies?

Now, there are many reasons, beyond the technological, that these games don’t yet exist: It would be prohibitively expensive to pay artists to create all those detailed graphics, and simple AI is good enough to defeat most any player at most any game. But the record of creative innovators is that eventually they find a way to stretch the available technology to its limit. And some gamemakers are already beginning to probe at the games you can create if you host some of the game in the cloud.

There is a nagging constraint to the cloud, of course — bandwidth, which simply isn’t growing at the pace of Moore’s law. Network latency makes fast-twitch games, in which defeat is determined in microseconds (like with the top console genre, first-person shooters) hard to play over today’s internet. So, at least until the next engineering breakthrough, these supercomputer games might be designed around genres requiring slower player reflexes than, say, Call of Duty or StarCraft.

Best of all, the only hardware you would need at home is a basic input device like a controller and a box to render the graphics, and it could be cross-platform so that you could play from a PC or Mac or any smartphone. As one for-instance, OUYA, the new open, Android-based console I back, could be great for a cloud-delivered game (hear me, developers?), and its notable that Sony bought up Gaikai and certainly has plans.  (Full disclosure:  OUYA also has an announced partnership with the relaunched OnLive.)

Supercomputer games could be extraordinary. Now some intrepid game developers just have to make one.

Roy Bahat is Chairman of the open, Android-based game console company OUYA, and is former president of IGN. He is also on the faculty at UC Berkeley. Follow him on Twitter @roybahat

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People want access to all of their important content wherever they are on any device. The addition of Dashwire’s cutting-edge sync services and deep mobile cloud experience strengthens our ability to deliver these services in a more powerful way.

That’s HTC president Fred Liu last week announcing his company’s acquisition of Dashwire, a Seattle-based mobile cloud platform developer. The acquisition underscores the growing importance of the cloud in mobile, but as Boy Genius Report noted, it also highlights how valuable patents have become in the space. For example, Core Mobile Networks, which recently scored an investment from Citrix Systems, could be targeted for patent-pending technology that delivers cloud-based content with contextual relevance to mobile devices. Another potential acquisition is Blaast, a Finnish startup that seeks to leverage the cloud to bring smartphone-quality data services to feature phones, although that company has to reveal details of its technology.

Patents will drive substantial M&A activity — and plenty of lawsuits — as we increasingly lean on the cloud to access mobile data. For more thoughts on how patents are shaping the growth of the mobile cloud industry, please see my weekly update at GigaOM Pro.

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That’s a 17 percent reduction in a consumer’s energy bill, too, and EcoFactor found it could reduce consumer’s bills by up to $56 per month when its service was used. EcoFactor did many of its trials during demand response events for utilities, which are times (like a really hot day) when a utility wants to turn down the energy consumption of some users to better manage the grid. EcoFactor also found that it delivered better demand response events for utilities, providing a 36 percent increase in yield for utilities during the event.

As I noted back when the company launched: finally a smart way to control thermostats. I’m not sure why every utility, energy service provider and consumer wouldn’t want to use this. The only requirement is a connected thermostat (well, and waiting for the service to be available in your area).

Here’s how it works: EcoFactor collects thousands of data points — from weather to regional building codes to home value — that give a clue about how an individual home might use energy and also respond to a service that promotes energy savings. EcoFactor then combines that service with the consumer’s ability to manually override the system (i.e., press up and down on the thermostat). When a consumer signs up for the service, EcoFactor uses the first couple of weeks to set a baseline for how that individual user prefers the temperature in their home: When a person pushes up or down on the thermostat, the original baseline starts to get set.

Then EcoFactor’s service automatically makes over 1,000 micro adjustments per month to the thermostat, bumping it up and down every so slightly, so that the user doesn’t notice the temperature change but also reduces her energy consumption. During demand response events on a particularly hot day in the summer, EcoFactor can precool some houses, turning on the AC a bit before the demand response event; then it can turn down the power use of the house during the event while the house acts essentially as a thermal battery, and the residents don’t notice the inconvenience of having their energy use curbed.

EcoFactor is first and foremost targeting consumers as its end customers, but it is working via distribution channels like utilities, broadband service providers (cable, DSL) and home security systems companies to reach those customers. The only reason EcoFactor isn’t in more widespread use today is probably because partners like utilities and telcos are notoriously slow-moving when it comes to adopting new services. EcoFactor worked with Oncor in Texas and other unnamed utilities for its trials.

It’s still in the early days for the service. The demand response trials included hundreds of homes, and EcoFactor says by the end of the year (after its summer trials), it will have been tested in “tens of thousands of homes.” In the utility world, that’s still a small footprint.

But EcoFactor is one of the only companies out there in the energy and utility world that is truly leveraging big data tools and the cloud to make energy use smarter. (To learn more about cloud computing, come to our Structure event on June 22 and 23 in San Francisco.) And for those not used to reading energy reduction metrics, 17 percent is actually really high for an energy management service. In comparison, OPower’s smarter energy bills on average reduce consumer energy consumption by 2 percent. EcoFactor is backed by RockPort Capital Partners and Claremont Creek Ventures.

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