Hal Stern's thoughts on the economy, software, services, technology, and snowmen. Hal Stern: The Morning Snowman

Life imitated art again today: Our little Devils took the ice after the big Devils finished their practice session. After losing in a shootout last night against Colorado, the Devils ran through a few shootout drills, and more than a few cycling from behind the net to the low slot drills (Colorado had two goals with that play Friday night).

I went back out to my car to get the well-traveled and chronicled Alexander Mogilny Russian Army jersey, hoping I might finally get the sublime sharpshooter to put the subtle Sharpie strokes on my sublimated sharp Lutch sweater. Alliteration and my feets failed me now; I missed Mogs by about 10 steps. He left the ice just as I re-entered the rink.

As the players left the ice, I couldn't help but join in with some of the visiting youth players looking for autographs. I provided player names and pens. Zach Parise signed my semi-official scorer's book. I have to remember to pull that page out before I use it to count shots on goal in our next home game.

Before heading into the locker room to change and then catch a plane to Columbus, Parise wished the little guys good luck in their game. Parise will probably get passed over for the Calder and Byng trophies, given how the Devils are playing this year, but he gets major props from me for being a model to young players.

Big day Friday for the M&A deal makers.

Yahoo! is buying del.icio.us, a decidedly tasty Web 2.0 flavored startup, adding the shared bookmark site to the stable that also includes Flickr. So now Yahoo! owns two of the biggest write repositories in the read-write web. Content searching is much more interesting when you own and control the sources of meta data that builds relationships betwixt and between the content entities.

The other business headline that caught my attention (because, with full disclosure, I'm an Electronic Arts shareholder) is that EA is buying Jamdat. This makes Electronic Arts a Java mobile application developer, it means that some of the outstanding properties to which EA has rights can be cast as mobile games (in Java ME), and it casts a very strong vote in favor of a rich set of client gaming devices, wireless and home consoles alike.

Here's what blows me away: already the Wall Street analysts are calling the EA/Jamdat deal "rich", as in "you overpaid." But Jamdat has excellent distribution channels into one of the few fast-growing game console markets, and it is profitable. Let's compare that to, say, the Xbox 360 market this holiday season. Our local Toys R Us got about two dozen units. I can assure you that more than two dozen people in our Toys R Us geography are getting Java ME capable cell phones in their stockings. If you want a nice analysis of the real economics of the Xbox 360, check out the the Game Guy's slice through the hype. Aren't you supposed to pay for growth?