todaytest 04/02/2008

Social gaming picks up momentum  Annotated

tags: utr2

Social Gaming Network, whose games include War Book, spun off from Freewebs earlier this year and started operating in Palo Alto this month.

"We're in the Pong stages of social gaming," said Shervin Pishevar, CEO of Social Gaming. "In terms of building new ideas, you should expect to see innovation for what it means to be a game and tap into the social graph, the people you enjoy playing games with."

Veeple uses Flash to make videos come alive with ad links » VentureBeat  Annotated

tags: no_tag

The Los Gatos, Calif. company can embed anything — including advertising web page links — into videos. It does so by putting an interactive overlay on top of a video in the Adobe Flash format. It thus makes the video come alive with links and other creative features. Users can thus imprint their own thoughts on a video in the parts where they want and then share it with their friends.

You can place a “VeeSpot” on any part of a video and make that spot interactive. You can turn it into a speech or a thought bubble with a sarcastic message. You can also record a voice message that plays when someone clicks on the VeeSpot. If you want, you can quickly share that video with family, friends, or everyone you know.

Omnisio also uses its Flash overlay to allow people to make comments on videos. (Our coverage). PLYmedia also allows movie viewers to embed comments in speech bubbles in movies.

With Veeple, you can also embed an ad link, such as an eBay logo, into a video. Users who click upon Madonna’s sunglasses in a video can thus link directly to a site where they can buy those glasses.

Scott Broomfield, CEO of Veeple, says that Veeple can distinguish itself from its rivals in a variety of ways. The company has its own object recognition technology that it can use to find and recognize objects within a video. Hence, if an advertiser puts a VeeSpot on an object in a video, that VeeSpot will appear whenever that object appears in the video.

“We consider these links within a video to be unintrusive to the viewer,” Broomfield said. “Since viewers aren’t putting up with 30-second commercials, we consider this to be the next logical step for video advertising.”

todaytest 04/01/2008

Online Chat, as Inspired by Real Chat - New York Times  Annotated

tags: no_tag

Vivaty, a start-up based in Menlo Park, Calif., is creating 3-D virtual chat rooms that people can add to the Web pages and social networking profiles on the sites where they spend most of their Internet time.

The company has been quietly working on its technology for three years and will begin a private test period on Facebook this week in advance of a wider introduction this summer. It is backed by the blue-chip venture capital firms Kleiner, Perkins Caufield & Byers and Mohr Davidow Ventures.

Vivaty turns a flat profile page into a three-dimensional live chat room. Users choose characters to represent themselves from a list of preternaturally handsome avatars — a requirement for any such service — and proceed to one of a dozen environments, like a gothic urban warehouse or seaside villa.

With videogame-like precision, they can then navigate that virtual space, which may feature their Facebook photos hanging from the walls and a YouTube video playing on a widescreen TV. Up to 15 others can choose avatars and enter the same room at the same time for text-based live socializing.

todaytest 11/15/2007

Android Developer Challenge - Android  Annotated

Cool apps that surprise and delight mobile users, built by developers like you, will be a huge part of the Android vision. To support you in your efforts, Google has launched the Android Developer Challenge, which will provide $10 million in awards -- no strings attached -- for great mobile apps built on the Android platform.

todaytest 08/16/2007

Tech Confidential Blog: Damn the mobile data, full speed ahead!
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ndsets and the venture capitalists funding companies to provide services via mobile devices. However, new data out from M:Metrics, a research firm in London, shows that those services aren't being used with much frequency. In the U.S., the most popular services are text messages, with only 42% of subscribers using it, and photos, with 18%. Only 3% of subscribers downloaded games with the same amount also downloading screensavers and wallpapers.

There's no data on the use of location-based services or accessing maps online in the report, but another hot topic in the mobile space — connecting to a social network on a handset — attracts less than 4% of mobile subscribers in the U.S. That's more than the European countries surveyed, but is still only 7.5 million people, many of whom are under 25. Sure, the geriatric generation who didn't grow up in the age of connectivity (I'm talkin' to you, GenX and older), probably has better things to do than check their Facebook and MySpace networks from a cell phone — or maybe the type is simply too small for their aging eyes to read — but that 4% is getting an inordinate amount of attention from investors.

The fact that more than half of cell-phone users apparentl

VentureBeat » What can the VC community do to help our energy crisis?
  Annotated

New Electrons Powering the Planet

There is a tremendous opportunity in what I call “new electrons” to help drive a substantial change in the energy source of modern society. New electrons are technologies and techniques that efficiently harness and

todaytest 08/12/2007

WordPress MU › Newspaper Like Content - Pull From All Blogs? « WordPress MU Forums - Mozilla Firefox
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SamG, for your second request, I'd suggest a custom plug-in to keep a list of your featured posts. See if anyone else has ideas though, I tend to do things quickly that work before giving much thought to if it's the best way to do it. lol

Your 3rd request you could just hand code in the links on the sidebar, create a Page with the list, or again do some sort of plug-in to maintain the list.

Creating the plug-ins is pretty much the same, especially if you are just creating custom ones for the main blog and don't have to worry about everyone being able to use them. I've just been doing plug-ins for a couple weeks and I'm pretty proud of what I have made so far. The best one so far is a used textbook listings plug-in for the site I'm working on. I created some custom tables in the database, placed the menu additions file in the mu-plugins folder (so everyone will see the add/maintain menu when they log in) and the main plug-in in the plugins folder.

MobileCrunch » Mobile Game Goes Massively Multiplayer - Mozilla Firefox
  Annotated

Mobile Game Goes Massively Multiplayer

Posted by Peter Suciu

Fighting a war in deep space is challenging enough without having a lot of competition. But sometimes a little – or in this case a lot – of competition can really make for a more engaging experience. That’s the hope with Space Wars, a new ad-supported massively multiplayer mobile game from Cellufun. This free mobile Internet game lets players battle for control of the galaxy, and compete against up to 120 other players.

“The Space Wars experience is far-

todaytest 08/08/2007

MIT duo see people-powered "Crowd Farm" - MIT News Office
  Annotated

MIT duo see people-powered "Crowd Farm"

Plan would harvest energy of human movement

July 25, 2007

Two graduate students at MIT's School of Architecture and Planning want to harvest the energy of human movement in urban settings, like commuters in a train station or fans at a concert.

The so-called "Crowd Farm," as envisioned by James Graham and Thaddeus Jusczyk, both M.Arch candidates, would turn the mechanical energy of people walking or jumping into a source of electricity. Their proposal took first place in the Japan-based Holcim Foundation's Sustainable Construction competition this year.

A Crowd Farm in Boston's South Station railway terminal would work like this: A responsive sub-flooring system made up of blocks that depress slightly under the force of human steps would be installed beneath the station's main lobby. The slippage of the blocks against one another as people walked would generate power through the principle of the dynamo, a device that converts the energy of motion into that of an electric

todaytest 08/03/2007

30+ WordPress Plugins To Get More Blog Readers  Annotated

Gaining blog readers is hard; Wordpress makes it much easier. Here are 30+ WordPress plugins to help you garner some of that attention, and then retain readers once they visit.

Marketing Your Blog Part 1 - Essential WordPress Plugins - simple pixel  Annotated

Marketing Your Blog Part 1 - Essential WordPress Plugins

Search Engine Optimization, Technology - posted by Adam Add comments

Here are some essential WordPress plugins to assist in the process of optimizing your blog for pickup and sharing by visitors, search engines, and aggregators. Make sure you know what you are doing before you go and install these, some play nice with each other, and some do not.

Social Marketing

Share This - provides an unobtrusive way for your visitors to add your posts to various social bookmarking sites.

Sitemaps

Google Sitemap Generator - automatically generates XML sitemaps for WordPress. Includes many options such as auto-ping, change and priority adjustments and selection of content for inclusion.