Digital mania

It's boom times in the $10B per year videogame industry, which is now comparable in size to the film industry. (US box office receipts are about $9B, but worldwide box office plus DVD/VCR revenues total about $20B.) Development costs for sophisticated games now reach $10-20M, which, while only a fraction of the $100M cost of a Hollywood blockbuster, is easily enough capital for most tech startups to develop a software product and bring it to market.

$125 million: Value of total sales for the first 24 hours of Halo 2
$114 million: Opening-weekend gross for "Spider-Man," a Hollywood record

On a related note, Pixar is the most successful movie studio of the last decade, with a perfect 100% record of hits, earning $3B in revenues. Not bad for a company Steve Jobs paid only $10M for in 1986! The technical infrastructure created at Pixar is very impressive - for example, the ability to produce the water effects in Nemo required solving a number of challenging numerical simulation problems. Their campus in Emeryville, CA is nice, too!