Archive for the ‘Games’ Category

Alpha Test Update: Achievements and more

February 2nd, 2012 Posted by Chris 0 Comments

In the last article, I told you a bit about our new Sources functionality. It was a serious change, that impacts most of the system’s components, but that’s not everything we’ve prepared for our next Alpha release.

I guess the title already told you what I’m going to reveal now. Achievements are the next feature we implemented in StormDriver, and I’d like to tell you both “how” and “why”.

Achievemets

It came to us recently, that we have all the ingredients necessary to create a great achievement system.  We have an established point mechanic. We have streams and notifications that let you know whenever something interesting happens globally or among your friends. We keep track of everything users do through StormDriver for the sake of various algorithms and statistics. We realized, that introducing achievements would be a logical next step.

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Posted in About Ping.it, Content Discovery, Design and Layout, Games, Internet Trends, Releases, Social Browsing, Technology, Uncategorized, Working at Ping.it |

The Final Caption Contest Results!

October 12th, 2011 Posted by Chris 0 Comments

That’s it, folks. When we started our first contest in early May, we didn’t suspect we’d have such a long and successful run, and that so many great people would join us along the way. Hopefully you all had some fun. And hopefully you know a bit more about StormDriver right now, which may come in handy considering the alpha version is just around the bend.

We will recap all of our six rounds, and we’ll give you the final poll results, but first there’s an important announcement we’d like to make. Yes, you’re right. It’s time for our final draw!

The mechanism of our draw was already explained, so let’s not go into details here. We have created a software routine that selected a random line from our database of over 7300 “lottery tickets”. We tested it on a test database for statistical accuracy, and then executed it on our real database with three witnesses. The winning ticket had ID number 612. And the owner is…

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Posted in Games, Internet Trends, Social Browsing, Uncategorized |

StormDriver Caption Contest: It’s the final countdown!

September 20th, 2011 Posted by Chris 0 Comments

Welcome! The picture you see on the right is the last in our series of StormDriver cartoons.  Yes, we’re also amazed at how quickly the time flies. Altogether, we had six rounds, six pictures, and hundreds of submissions – some of them very funny and smart.

Fortunately, while this is our last cartoon, it’s not yet the last round. After the voting is finished, we’ll launch our grand finale – a mid-noon shootout between six top contenders. Oh, did I mention we’ll also give away an iPad 2 to one lucky winner?

But before we get to that, let me invite you to ride with us for the last time. Head to our Facebook contest app, click “Get Started” and your caption might become one of the six featured in the finals! And if you have any problems coming up with a proper caption, just imagine this: you’re going to your favorite place for a delicious lunch, you order the most tasty thing on the menu, but what you receive is a heap of old cogs, bolts and some soylent green. Topped with industrial-grade engine oil.

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Posted in Design and Layout, Games, Internet Trends, Releases, Technology, Uncategorized |

Breaking out of the box

July 12th, 2011 Posted by Chris 59 Comments

I must say we’ve enjoyed the second round of  StormDriver contest even more than you did. We had a lot of fun reading through all the captions that were popping out like eyeballs on Itchy and Scratchy cartoon. If we were to pick the winners, we’d have a really hard time choosing from all the great ideas.

What surprised us most, is that the submitted captions were so varied. We had everything from humor, and nice marketing slogans (crowdsourced copywriting might be the way of the future), to cynical attention-grabs. It was all very nice, but many of you were wondering what all of it had to do with StormDriver.

Now, that the second round is finished, we can  lift the veil and let you know why we asked our cartoonist to draw this particular picture. Pacman with a pick-axe? What were we thinking?

Well, in the very beginning, when we were still defining what StormDriver is supposed to be, we had a vision of a user browsing the web. Even though you can go everywhere, you’re in fact closed in a box, in your own Pacman arena – you stroll around munching content, websites, social updates. There’s only you and a page on your screen. You never know what’s beyond the light blue walls of your meadow.

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Posted in About Ping.it, Collective Intelligence, Content Discovery, Design and Layout, Games, Internet Trends, Social Browsing, Technology, Working at Ping.it |

StormDriver Contest: Round Two

June 28th, 2011 Posted by StormDriver 144 Comments

We’re pleased to announce, that Round Two of our StormDriver Caption Contest has now started! It’s harder, better, faster, stronger, and you don’t have to be a veteran of the first round in order to participate! Just click HERE (or on  the image), let your creativity loose, and think of one cool caption for our cartoon. You can invite friends to vote for your proposal and help you win a 10$ Amazon voucher. You will also get a chance to win an iPad 2 in the final round of the contest, where wining cartoons and captions from all rounds will fight against each other.

If you’re a veteran, and you’ve been following our Facebook contest since Round One, we have some much-needed updates for you, to explain what happened in the past few weeks. First, the contest was removed because of the technical difficulties, and then – when we finally got it up and running again – the finish date passed, without as much as a whimper. Nothing really happened, and some people were kind enough to point it out. Don’t worry. We didn’t forget about you.

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Posted in Design and Layout, Games, Internet Trends, Releases |

The Tech Archive: Buxton’s Collection

May 10th, 2011 Posted by Chris 13 Comments

For every good design there’s at least a dozen of concepts that didn’t catch on. Nothing illustrates that better than a great online vintage gadget collection, published yesterday by Microsoft Research team. The collection is a brainchild of Bill Buxton, one of the principal Microsoft researchers, a guy who’s been through 30 years of continuous tech design. Awarded with three honorary doctorates and several professional awards, Bill also likes to gather things – the vintage, geeky kind of things, to be precise. Over the years, he has gathered an impressive collection of prototypes, probably the best I have seen online. Every exhibit has some nice, high-res photos, a description and sometimes even some PDF downloads of original leaflets or brochures, for added flavor.

Seriously. It’s like a candy store in there, but with gadgets instead of candy. And no risk of diabetes.

Bill Buxton said: “Look at the collection and then try and convince me that our slow rate of progress is due to a lack of technology rather than a lack of imagination”. It’s hard not to agree, most exhibits had plenty of imagination behind them. Perhaps too much for their own good. Here’s a short recount of our favorites with a short commentary (images courtesy of Microsoft). Be sure to visit the full gallery for much, much more.

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Posted in Design and Layout, Games, Internet Trends, Technology |

A brief history of the pixel trade

April 21st, 2011 Posted by Chris 1 Comment

It all started not so long ago, when one geek sold his MUD account to the other. Today, virtual economies are much larger than those of many countries – in 2010 people worldwide spent $7 billion real dollars buying pixels of various shapes and sizes. That’s more than GDP of Mongolia, Malta or Haiti.  And some of those pixels are really expensive. The highest amount paid for a virtual item is currently $635,000 dollars – that’s how much an anonymous person paid for the virtual night club on a virtual planet in massively multiplayer Entropia Universe game. I wonder if he got some virtual booze and virtual strippers to sweeten the deal?

There are professional pixel-investors, shady pixel brokers, there are sweatshops of people farming pixels in various games, there are players who devote their whole lives to having more pixels of certain shape and color than anyone else in the world. We have gone on a pixel feeding frenzy. New economies are popping out left and right, and virtual currencies of several imaginary worlds are easier to exchange for a dollar than those of many African countries.

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Posted in Games, Internet Trends, Privacy, Technology, Uncategorized |

Milking the cloud

April 1st, 2011 Posted by Chris 1 Comment

Not so long ago computing clouds were only talked about by strange mainframe guys (you know, the ones with plastic glasses, pocket-protectors, and their secret-mainframe-guy language) as well as some fad-chasing computer journalists. “Cloud’ was the new word, even though most things attributed to cloud computing existed before the term was invented, in form of VDI or distributed computing services. Now it seems that more and more cloud-based services trickle down to regular consumers.

For example, this week brought us the Amazon Cloud Player. If you haven’t heard about it yet, Amazon offers 5GB of music storage for free, upgradable to 20GB if you purchase any MP3’s through their store. If you have many devices capable of playing music, it might be something right up your alley – it will allow you to access your media locker with a smartphone, tablet, netbook, work PC or home PC. Amazon’s player is also intelligent enough to save your bandwidth by caching all files, so that you only have to stream them once on each device. Only iPhone users are left out, which is not surprising, considering fierce competition between Apple and Amazon in the digital music retail. To make things worse, iPhone fans still don’t have any cloud-based service, after Apple’s decision to close down LaLa. Fortunately, some clever folks took the matters into their own hands and provided a workaround.

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Posted in Content Discovery, Games, Internet Trends, Security, Technology, Uncategorized |