Read on to find out what’s in the latest issue of TechWatch and to hear our thoughts about new industry trends.

* MarketWatch –our quarterly report on the graphics industry has been revamped and it’s ready for subscriber download or purchase online..

* The AIB Report – JPR tracks the sales of add-in-boards for graphics. Armed with this information developers know the capabilities of the machines in use today. In addition the report provides data on important trends including dual-graphics-board implementations and memory use.

* The Workstation Report – A comprehensive report on the workstation industry with information about CPUs, GPUs, and markets.

Coming soon: The DCC Report is in the final stages of editing and the Handheld Report update is nearing completion.

TechWatch is out and ready for subscriber downloads.

In this issue:

* GDC – E3 might be gone but the Game Developer Conference has grown – and that makes sense. Games are big business on PCs, consoles and telephones

* Get a life – Sony’s Phil Harrison and Microsoft’s Shane Kim and Chris Satchell revealed future plans for their respective platforms. Both companies want to keep their gamers online and talking

* DIY – Development tools open up the field for independent game developers including new software tools from Autodesk and Avid/Softimage.

* Motion Capture revisited – The motion capture companies are finding sources of revenue outside the entertainment industry but it’s safe to say entertainment is the first love of the people in this business.

* Meanwhile back on the graphics ranch – Nvidia introduces new development platforms for gamers

In the next issue we’ll report on SXSW Interactive among other things but here’s a preview of what we’ve been thinking about.

Who we are and who we want to be

Sometimes it’s not what you learn but how the pieces fit together. The last few weeks have been very instructive as Jon Peddie Research traveled to Barcelona for 3GSM, back to Los Angeles for the Game Developer Conference, and off to Austin for GDC.

By the time the jetlag wore off and we could accurately answer the question “what time is it?” We realized that we had been through a life changing experience. Really. Again.

It isn’t what you know. It isn’t who you know. It’ who you are when you know it. And, it wasn’t really the stuff we learned but where we learned it and who we learned it from and who they were at the time that was important.

Perhaps a visual aid is in order:

There was considerable contrast between the different sensibilities at the three shows, with 3GSM tilting towards the business side and SXSW favoring the artist and writer. At GDC it’s always casual day and the inexperienced might have trouble telling the difference between the game developers and the marketers – a quick rule of thumb, the marketers are the ones having fun and hitting all the parties. The game developers have to rush back and get to work.

At SXSW everyone just acts amazed they make any money at all and no one admits to being marketing their stuff. To expand a little about the SXSW entrepreneur: the lucky few like Blogger founder Evan Williams or YouTubers Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim make a few millions selling a simple idea and a technology to go with it and they doggedly remain just folks. The rest are out there trying to sell ads for their blogs or think up the next big thing.

SXSW has become a major stage for a particular breed of creative type who doesn’t mind putting their lives out there for everyone to see. Or rather, they’re inventing lives for public consumption. They might look a lot like gamers, but in general, the gamer community doesn’t really intersect that much with the blogelites (oh, finally, we found a name for ‘em.)

And, it’s fair to say when business people are being business people they don’t really socially intersect with gamers or the blogelites either. To make things a little easier, let’s just forget about business executives in all these markets and talk about users. Business executives are kind of like politicians. We assume that they have private lives in which they have friends, interact with their families, play games on the mobile phones, and listen to the Rolling Stones, but we can’t really picture it. (And few of us would ever identify ourselves as business people even if that’s exactly what we are.)

There is one place that just about everyone intersects and that’s the mobile phone but do you know who is really sending you messages? Identity is the real new frontier for all of us. Take two examples from recent movies, in The Departed and Casino Royale characters took advantage of the mobile phone to hide behind different identities.

For another example. The latest phenomenon from the Blogelite, is Twitter, the latest effort by Evan Williams, ex Blogger and founder of Obvious Corporation in San Francisco’s South Park. .. Twitter lets people instant message each other around a particular theme such as things to do at SXSW, John Edwards, or what that cute girls named Ashley. Twitter asks people “what are you doing?” and more often than not people answer all too literally: “I’m pulling a coffee for the next jerk in line,” “I’m walking down Market Street,” “I’m waiting for this stupid barista to stop playing with her phone can finish my coffee.” John Edwards who wants to be just folks tells us he’s getting on the bus, he’s going to have dinner, he’s getting on the bus. But not everyone tells the mundane truth. People exaggerate. They lie. And, they hope to seem more interesting just by the act of Twittering. (Good luck, by the way. As of this writing the site seems to have become completely overloaded as a result of all the attention it’s been getting.)

The next step? Selling your identity. There is no way we could finish up this little meditation on identity without mentioning Second Life. In Second Life people with no real life go online to talk to other people with no life and they build a life. Why not? Everybody’s got to be someplace. And, in order to be someplace, people are buying and selling clothes, real estate (virtual estate?) and furniture. But if you have no life in real life why would you be interesting in virtual life? You see where I’m going with this: why not let someone else build a really cool life and then buy it.

Maybe the jet lag hasn’t worn off.