Archive for February, 2010
OneBigGame – Or Is It Actually a Bunch of Small Ones?
Posted by Raiven in Miscellaneous on February 23, 2010
Image Credit: Edge Online
Martin De Ronde, not a name that you might be immediately familiar with, was co-founder of the games studio Guerrilla Games before it was acquired by Sony Computer Entertainment in 2005 and now best known for their Killzone titles. He’s also the man behind the OneBigGame mini-publishing platform that aims to be the Band Aid of the games industry.
What the hell does that all mean? It’s a charity, or rather, a non-profit organization with the goal of getting well-known game developers to create titles to be sold under the OneBigGame label having the proceeds go to charity, much like Band Aid. And it’s working. The first title Chime has already been released on Xbox Live Arcade.
Edge Online has a very nice, three-page article detailing the history of the OneBigGame project that you can check out in the source link but I’ll just summarize the whole deal here. OBG (as I’m going to call it because I’m lazy) gets developers to donate their time and creativity to making games to sell with the proceeds going to charity, rather than asking companies to just fork over cash directly.
Why would developers want to spend their precious time creating a game instead? Well first of all, the license with OGB only ranges from 4 to 12 months (flash games near the latter, XBLA games the former) after which the developer will receive the revenue. Additionally, the developer retains the IP, it’s fully theirs and after the OBG exclusive period they are free to create a new title or an enhanced version of the first. They can use OBG as a proving ground of sorts for new and radical ideas.
The way De Ronde has it worked out right now some larger and well known game studios are working with indie studios on projects. In this way the big name guys act as creative consultant taking less of their time while the indie studio builds relationships, experience and a portfolio based off what the larger studio’s creative team came up with. This concept actually allows big name houses to come up with some more creative and risky titles and in the end, the charities win with a quarterly check from the revenue. Other games are coming from academia where students can use the game as a class project and then in the end, actually have something to release into the world. Lot’s of wins all around.
At the moment OBG’s charity partners are Save the Children and the Starlight Children’s Foundation. De Ronde hopes the one day give them more than just money too such as a game that’s tailored to give Starlight help to their children with problems. While that will have to wait for later, here’s wishing De Ronde and OBG lots of success. Now that the games industry is on par with movies, music and television, it’s nice to see a desire to give back in some way.
Source: Edge Online
Twitter Throws Up 50 Million Tweets Per Day, About 6 Are Interesting
Posted by Raiven in Miscellaneous on February 22, 2010
Despite the fact that I have yet to really find a good reason to use Twitter (yes I use TweetMeme, no I don’t think it’s cool) the cover letter on their latest TPS report (that’s tweets per second, didn’t you get the memo?) is showing around 600 microblog babbles per second. That comes in at over 51 million per day which is no small feat.
For comparison’s sake so 50 million has some meaning, in 2007 Twitter averaged about 5,000 per day, jumping to 300,000 per day in 2008 and then up again to 2.5 million in 2009 with about 35 million a day by the end of the year. That’s some impressive numbers there especially considering that they supposedly do not include tweets from accounts labeled as spam.
Well, good onya Twitter, now please go away as I prefer complete sentences.
Original Post: AppScout
TED: Bing Maps Augments the Hell Out of Your Reality
Posted by Raiven in Nerd Stuff, Web Browsers on February 16, 2010
I’ll be honest, when Microsoft revealed Bing I was glad to see something that might finally give Google a little competition to keep things interesting but I really didn’t expect too much. I use Bing now but of course I still use Google as well, moreso in fact, and iGoogle is still my homepage. When Bing Maps unveiled some cool new tech a while back using Photosynth for a Streetview like display I took some more interest but it still wasn’t quite a “game changer” or anything to steal the thunder from the Googs.
Well with yet another TED conference to unleash the cool involved with Silverlight, Dragon and Photosynth here, Bing Maps has just really blown my mind. Augmented Reality photos from Flickr, live video that is photo-stitched into the streetview image and the full night’s sky viewable from wherever you are in the street level view courtesy of WorldWide Telescope. Watch the presentation video after the break, you shan’t be disappointed. Read the rest of this entry »
Microsoft: Lucky Number Seven
For anyone who somewhat actively follows the mobile phone world (especially of the smart phone variety) it should come as no surprise that Microsoft has finally officially announced and revealed it’s new smart phone OS, Windows Phone 7 Series, at the MWC (Mobile World Conference) in Barcelona today. There are hundreds, if not thousands of different portals on the interwebs where you can read the details of what 7 Series has to offer, read the liveblog of Microsoft’s announcement at MWC or check out a 22 minute long demonstration of the new OS, so I’m just going to summarize here and give you what you really want, my take.
The Quick (Details and such)
So what’s new, short and sweet? I know it sounds trite but seriously, what isn’t new? Hell even the OS’s name has changed from Windows Mobile to Windows Phone 7 Series (not exactly roll-off-the-tongue good but, hey). Now if you take a quick look you’ll see that it looks nothing like WinMo 6.5.3 or any other previous MS Mobile OS, however, you will think right away (if you’re me or an equally techie webnerd) that it does look strikingly similar to the Zune HD. Coincidence? Not even remotely. The interface theme is called Metro and it actually started with the refresh to Windows Media Player a while back, moved on to the Zune and has now found a new home in the 7 Series. Large, bold text and lacking the ‘chrome’ or flashy graphics from other systems. Simple, clean, wholly un-MS like from the start … except now it’s part of one of their main OSes, which is some sort of paradox I don’t want to think about right now. If you stop to think about it (and you are actually interested in that sort of thing), it’s pretty impressive that MS, as big and unwieldy as it seems, was able to shed the WinMo skin so completely, though of course they desperately needed to. Read the rest of this entry »
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