Beta
JamLegend is Free Online Guitar Hero!
Tuesday, May 12th, 2009 | Beta, Games, Music, WebApps | 1 Comment
Like Guitar Hero but wish you could play it at work without your boss catching you air-guitaring in the break room? Now you can with the recently opened beta online game JamLegend.com!
Pretty much it’s guitar hero meets the keyboard….even allowing you to change up which keys are assigned to which strings, enable or disable having to strum & it even gives you the option to disable 3+ note chords (for the weaksauce soft-rockers). They’ve come up with a way where you can use your keyboard (this is where a wireless keyboard is strongly suggested) similar to how you’d hold the console-version plastic guitars….though if you’re at work I would recommend you not playing in this fashion as it may draw unneeded attention from coworkers.
You can play against the computer, be auto-matched against another online player or even challenge other users and friends to duels/showdowns (A duel lets you take a high score and challenge a user to match or beat it, a showdown allows for real-time multiplayer matches). In addition to achievements there are levels, XP earned/lost as well as a rapidly growing list of songs. Want to hear the song you and your drunk friends recorded on the site? Not a problem – they’re actively seeking new material, all the artist has to do is fill out a short form agreeing to allow their material to appear on the site.
Already have a guitar controller and want to use it with JamLegend.com? No Problem! They’ve got a wiki with instructions for how to use your Wii, PS2/PS3 and even Xbox260 controllers with your computer….so if nosy bosses aren’t a problem feel free to rock away on your fake plastic guitars against other online players in a fight to top the charts as the JamLegend superstar!
Anyhow, there you go – the latest site to take up all the time I should be spending on writing new posts…Enjoy!
Send out your business card via SMS with Contxts.com
Monday, March 30th, 2009 | Beta, Business, SMS, Unusual, Utilities | No Comments
Here’s something cool a came across the other day, it’s a service that will send out your business card via SMS message on demand. That’s right, for any time when you’ve either been caught without a business card or just want sure your number got entered correctly into their phone, this is for you. It’s still in beta so features like having your own user profile are not yet enabled, but the good news is that it’s free while they’re still working out the kinks.
Here’s how it works, you setup whatever information you’d like to be part of your digital ‘business card” and then you’re done. Really, that’s it to participate in this program. And it’s free.
To send someone your business card via SMS, you either tell them to send a txt with your username to 50500 or you can do it yourself by texting “send 3034759204” to 50500 with the 3034759204 being the your new friend.
I can’t imagine sending a potential client or business partner this as a way of contacting me after our initial meeting, but as far as getting your phone number and a brief self-written bio into someone’s phone, this could be great for any after-hours networking.
go check it out for yourself while it’s still free – http://contxts.com
Just Released: Google AdSense for Online Gaming
Wednesday, October 8th, 2008 | Beta, Business, Games, Marketing, News, google | No Comments
Google just announced the release of Google AdSense for Online Gaming. It works pretty much the same as your pre-existing AdSense program, where you place video, image or text ads within your application/game and it displays contextually targeted advertising based on the surrounding content.
From the official Google AdSense blog:
You’ll be able to show these ads in placements you define, such as interstitial frames before a game, after a level change, or when a game is over. Members of our AdWords team will sell your in-game ad placements directly to top brand advertisers, and you’ll also see contextually targeted text and image ads based on content and demographic information.
Now if you’re a budding flash developer, don’t go getting your hopes up just yet – in order to be eligible for this beta program your games must have a minimum of 500,000 “game plays” with at least 80% of the traffic originating from the US or UK. If you fit the mold, here’s a direct link to the application.
So far there are only three marketers listed as partners on the info page: Sprint, Sony Pictures and esurance. I’m sure it won’t be long before that list starts to grow, the publisher round-up is already full of major players in the online game realm: ArcadeTown, Konami, Armor Games, Boonty, Demand Media, Heavy Games, Grab.com, Mochimedia and cafe.com.
This move was inevitable for Google seeing how they recently acquired Adscape Media, a small in-game advertising startup based out of the San Francisco, CA area.
Surprisingly, they already have a “Success Story” listed on the about page for social networking game developer Playfish. These guys primarily produce games that you can add to your Facebook or MySpace profile, so it’s a ‘little’ deceiving in nature.
Yahoo Wants You To Stalk Your Friends – Introducing Fire Eagle
Friday, March 7th, 2008 | API, Beta, Mashup, Tools, Twitter, WebApps | No Comments
Yahoo recently launched Fire Eagle, their first Rails-based web-app that enables you to share your location with other users/services in a variety of ways. It’s still in “beta” mode, but they were smart and came up with a clever way for you to instantly get an invite – By using an already-made mashup incorporating the instant updates. In this case, they chose to use Twitter to interact w/ their api. And after looking at the sample code, it’s pretty easy to setup too. In order to get an instant invite to check-out this beta-release for yourself:
1) First you must have a twitter account (which if you’re reading this blog i’m assuming you already do, even if it was only used once to see what the whole “Twitter” thing was about), you will then need to “follow” DangerDay. That can be done by clicking on the follow link in his profile page or by simply twittering “follow dangerday”
Danger Day will then immediately return the favor by following your twitter account as well, thus enabling you to be able to direct message each other.
2) Now that you’re following DangerDay, you need to get an invite, so next up is direct messaging dangerday with the word “invite”. Once again, this can be done by twittering “d dangerday invite”
DangerDay will then respond with a link for you to follow, enabling you to sign-up on the FireEagle page for an account…what a nice guy
3) Now once you’ve got your account squared away, why not test it out with dangerday? In order to update him as well as the entire Fire Eagle Service as to your location, all you need to do is direct message him again with “u location_here”.. for example: “d dangerday u Atlanta, GA” – that will let dangerday AND Fire Eagle know that I’m currently in Atlanta, GA.
This service, like all other social-dependent ones, will live or die based on whether or not developers get involved and come up with interesting mashups. Right now there are already popular sites that could benefit from being able to twitter or IM an updated location (or be automatically fed coordinates via GPS enabled phones), a good example would be the social travel site Dopplr. This dependency on developers adopting their free Yahoo service isn’t something that I feel is lost on the guys behind this project either – they’re using standardized, open-source tools like OAuth that coders are already familiar with. If they make it easy to incorporate, then they’ve got a better chance of someone using it in their application, even if just for fun. If it was incorporated into a web-app, just using the user’s IP would result in knowing their location and being able to update the service….so the possibilities are endless.
It’s already been incorporated into Facebook so that you can easily stalk follow your friends, I’m sure they’re always just dying to know where I am at all times. Although I will say this – A service like this could come in handy if you were part of a big group trying to meet-up in a crowded location (i.e. somewhere in Austin this weekend for SXSW). One SMS sent to Fire Eagle and then all your buddies would know where you were (i.e. “Already at the bar waiting for you guys to get here!”). And if your phone has GPS enabled, I wouldn’t have even had to send the text, Fire Eagle gives you the option of letting your phone auto-update their service with your whereabouts. Now to find out where another user is, you would only have to use something as simple as the twitter or AIM example from above. So to show you how this works, let’s go back to our good friend dangerday. Direct message him with “q brentter” and it’ll respond with my most recent location (for you non-twitters, that means you’d type: “d dangerday q brentter” but without the quotes).
With the recent release of the iPhone SDK, I can only imagine this service being experimented with alongside the new framework – Erica Sadun in fact has already released an application for your iPhone called firefindme that does just that but without using GPS. Instead she uses another Yahoo service called Zone Tag, which was initially released as a way to geo-tag your Flickr photos based on specific “location tags” that you would assign them (or if you had a phone w/ built-in GPS, it would automatically do it for you).
So far the Developer section of the Fire Eagle site has been steadily growing, with it currently showcasing quick starts, examples api code (right now though only in javascript, php, perl, python, and ruby), and options on various open-source ways to authenticate user sessions. It also looks like they’re hoping to build an application gallery/showcase into the site.
This has some pretty good potential, although personally I feel it’s somewhat of a stretch for it to be utilized in anything major.
And i’m not even going to get into how privacy goes through the window if your phone is sending a webservice updates on where you are. Marshall Kirkpatrick from ReadWriteWeb shares similar concerns about the idea of allowing others to track your every movement (You are given the option of it not automatically pinging your GPS enabled phone to update your location, but just like when Facebook announced their new “mini-feed service,” it just gives give me a the creeps)
[source for some of this information came from Jesse Newland's Blog - SoylentFoo]
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