The first womens (print edition) gaming magazine, Play Vanilla, will be launching April of this year. The press release floating around included the ever popular industry stats highlighting how female gamers are in fact on the rise. While most female gamers tend to fall into the extreme “casual gamer” category (solitare, simms, yahoo/online games etc.) it will be interesting to see how things turn out for Play Vanilla - - unfortunately Germany is rumored to be the only one who will regularly see this title (hopefully they will have an online version).
Wii’s already proven success in reigniting casual gamers (ummm hello it outsold the ps3 in japan) will hopefully play a big role in attracting more females to the gaming community. Hopefully all this buzz will get developers to start including female fully dressed game characters in newly developed video games.
I ran across MSN’s top ten picks for the world’s most unique hotels online the other day. Props to Arizona for making the map. Who knew throwing it back tree house style could cost so much. Price depends on season but the links below lead you in the right direction… one step closer.
- Four Seasons Tented Camp by Thailand-Las-Myanmar border (Golden Triangle)
http://www.fourseasons.com/goldentriangle/
- Ice Hotel, outside of
Quebec City
http://www.icehotel-canada.com/en/index.en.php
- Award-winning boutique hotel (converted prison)., Malmaison in Oxford,
England
http://www.malmaison-oxford.com/main.asp
- Quinta Real Zacatecas, a beautifully restored bullfighting ring turned hotel
http://www.quintareal.com/
-
Taprobane Island, Sri Lanka a Palladian-style mansion set on a 2.5-acre island
http://www.taprobaneisland.com/
- The Lighthouse, North Wales dates from 1862 (served as a lighthouse until 1985)
http://www.lighthouse-llandudno.co.uk/
- The Utter Inn, a one-room hotel three meters below the surface of Lake Mälaren, in
Västerås, Sweden
http://www.vasterasmalarstaden.se/artikel.asp?lang=2
- A concrete teepee at the WigWam Motel in
Holbrook, Arizona
http://www.galerie-kokopelli.com/wigwam/
- Wild Canopy Reserve in southern India
http://www.wildcanopyreserve.com/
- Woodlyn
Park, in Waitomo New
Zealand: World’s First Hobbit Motel
http://www.woodlynpark.co.nz/accommodation.html
Like the user generated news garden digg.com, this music based website lets users “jig” through a library of mp3 streams and vote for favorites. After hanging around for a while (of about 20 streamed songs I only voted for four) I ran into a pleasant Snow Patrol remix. Nonethless, I support most endevors that give the next generation of artists a voice.
www.ijigg.com
It looks like everyone will soon know what it feels like to be sponsored. Like the often agitating always convenient service Free 411 (800-373-3411), cell phone providers will soon offer subscribers exclusive monthly discounts in return for their time. According to the NYT’s Blyk, a service in Britain, will soon release a completely free cell phone plan to those that opt in to a series of daily ads. Currently in the US, Xero Mobile (started by Gizmondo exec’s), plans on launching a service that offers college students up to 40% off of monthly costs in return for viewing four commercials a day.
Sounds like too much commitment? Watch for small doses of this type of offering. Things like free streaming episodes of the content you want after watching a few ads and monthly ad-based text messages filling you in on what is going on your neighborhood or what book you should pick up on your way to Barnes and Noble.What could the future look like? How does sponsored trips to the movie theatre in exchange for watching an hour of advertisements sound like? Perhaps having weekly circulars zapped to your cell phones every time your phone’s GPS detects that you are close to a best buy is more your thing.
Here is a project that is worth tuning in to. Words like aggregators, algorithms, treemaps and news all in one sentence can really take away from the creative thinking behind this venture but lets keep it real we all have a little inner geek in us. That’s right dancing in front of the mirror doesn’t exactly classify you as cool. Anyway, imagine how interesting it would be to get some behind the scenes action on how Google prioritizes their stream of digital news. Consider Newsmaps your ticket into just that. I will leave it up to them to describe how the technology works…
Website: http://www.marumushi.com/apps/newsmap/index.cfm (Newsmap is an application that visually reflects the constantly changing landscape of the Google News aggregator. A treemap visualization algorithm helps display the enormous amount of information gathered by the aggregator. Treemaps are traditionally space-constrained visualizations of information. Newsmap’s objective takes that goal a step further and provides a tool to divide information into quickly recognizable bands which, when presented together, reveal underlying patterns in news reporting across cultures and within news segments in constant change around the globe. Newsmap does not pretend to replace the googlenews aggregator. Its objective is to simply demonstrate visually the relationships between data and the unseen patterns in news media. It is not thought to display an unbiased view of the news; on the contrary, it is thought to ironically accentuate the bias of it.)
Music has always been an investment but what if in the end you could have more than just an mp3 you can’t burn or a cd sleeve that takes up to much space? Here is a way that artists and fans come together to break down the walls of the Top Hundred Billboards around the world. Simply shop around for a band that you are into. Purchase a piece of their digital stock (could be as little as $10). Than lay back and have a few (thousand) beers and hope that that artist is hotter than fire. Once that bands stock totals $50,000 they are given studio time to record a professional CD that gets mailed to you when produced.
After the cd’s are released the tracks are uploaded online for users to download for free. Every time someone downloads the song you actually accumulate some of the overall profits. In the end you’re a few cents richer and a playlist deeper.
Website: http://www.sellaband.com/
Similar concept different service: http://www.burnlounge.com/
Netflix has finally come to terms with the fact that overnight delivery is just not going to cut it in this world of instant gratification and will begin to offer current subscibers movie download privledges. Services like apple’s itunes, aol’s in2tv, and abc’s full-video streaming are just some of the many that have adjusted to the major shift in how people consume entertainment. It’s going to be great to see the cost of lcd/plasmas continue to gradually decline as the computer becomes the new”errr” entertainment console. I dread the day when my PIP feature is a mere tool to pull up a powerpoint presentation in slideshow. In the meantime, I’ll just cross my fingers and hope i’m one of the 250,000 Netflix subscribers to recieve the beta version of this free new service.
Imagine that. Americans haven’t gotten lazier as time has gone by they have gotten smarter about being lazier.
Sales-262932149 (@craigslist.org) is one of those innovative services that makes you say “i wish i thought of that”. Their service is simple, anytime you want to post something on craigslist but don’t want to spend all day in front of a computer you shoot them an e-mail. No more “submit”, “accept” and “refresh”.
All you have to do is simply beam over your greens through Paypal and let them know what times you would like your postings to appear and which forums to put them on.Being unemployed never sounded so good. Now if only we could get the interview process out of the way.
