The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘health’

Hello John Biggs - I would like to be the CrunchGear intern. At 28 years of age I’d probably be the oldest, creepiest intern that CrunchGear has ever hired

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Goodbye, CrunchGear.

Flash games on the Web are getting to be so quick and responsive . . . that they can recreate 30-year-old arcade games no problem. And that’s just fine with me because those are about the only video games where I can hold my own. Online video arcade OMGPOP’s latest game is a remake of Atari’s Missile Command on its 30th anniversary.

The OMGPOP version is true to the original except it adds a multiplayer twist. It’s pretty addictive and the social aspect makes it more fun. Just like at the old coin arcades, it was always better when you went with a couple of friends.

Like most OMGPOP games you can enter a live match with other players or invite your friends to meet you in a game room. You can sign in with Facebook Connect or AIM. OMGPOP matches you with players at about the same level as you. You can get more missiles, enlarge their impact radius, or increase your reload rate buy using your health points to buy better capabilities. If things are going really badly you can buy a nuke for 500 “coins.” You earn coins the more you play, but you can also pay for them straight out through PayPal or a credit card.

Selling virtual goods is OMGPOP’s main source of revenues. The site has about a dozen games. CEO Dan Porter (who used to be the president of Teach For America, TicketWeb before it sold to TicketMaster, and worked as a corporate VC for Virgin) says that about 2 to 5 percent of players end up actually paying for something. About 30 percent of its virtual goods revenues come from third-party offers from TrialPay, but they try to keep the scammier offers out. Porter says the site has 2.5 million members, and about 1 million monthly unique visitors. Most of those are high school and college students. The site is still small but has a loyal following. About 40 pecent of users visit the site more than 50 times a month.

I recently visited OMGPOP’s New York City offices, where Porter, founder Charles Forman, and game developer Will Chen gave me a preview of Missile Command in the video below. I also get Forman to weigh in on the HTML5 Vs. Flash debate. He says there is no way he could create the games on OMGPOP without Flash.

Last week, Yammer, the business-oriented microblogging platform that won TechCrunch50 2008, sent out invites to press inviting them to virtually attend a “major launch event” that will be broadcast through a WebEx meeting tomorrow morning. The company has also posted an invite to its blog, along with a not-so-subtle jab at its competitors: “Forget all that over-hyped chatter and annoying buzz, Yammer is releasing the next wave in Enterprise Microblogging“.

So what exactly is Yammer about to introduce? We’re hearing from one source that the company is planning to start allowing people to create networks that aren’t built around web domains. That may not sound like a big deal, but it would be a major change for Yammer, and one that could open it up to a huge number of new users.

Until now, in order to create a Yammer network you’ve needed to have email addresses associated with your own business domain name (say, jason@company.com) . This works great for sizable companies (everyone who has an email account on that domain is automatically placed into the correct network), but it’s a big limitation on who can actually use the service — plenty of businesses and organizations don’t have their own domain names.

Depending on how Yammer rolls this out, there could be countless uses for this.  Last summer, I wrote about how useful it would be to have a Yammer for families that would allow family members to easily share information in a centralized place (and get SMS alerts if something important came up).  Local groups could set up Yammer accounts to share information instead of relying on long Email chains, and so on. But Yammer wouldn’t be alone here — a recently launched startup called HipChat is already going after this broad market.

We’ll have more details tomorrow at 11 AM. And if you’re interested, the WebEx meeting is apparently open to the public.

First Google, now Foursquare. Hot on the heels of Google’s first Search television ad (run during the Super Bowl, no less), the location-based social network Foursquare is gearing up to do the same thing tonight.

In a tweet sent from their main Twitter account, the Foursquare team notes a “rumor” that an ad for their service will be running on Bravo tonight alongside the show Sheer Genius from 9 to 10 PM. But it’s not a rumor, we’ve seen the ad (and have embedded it below for your own viewing pleasure). It’s a 20-second spot made by Bravo for Foursquare to highlight their recently announced a partnership that allows the network to point out locations from its shows that let fans who use Foursquare (or their own Guides By Bravo app) go to them in the real world. This is believed to be one of the deals currently earning Foursquare some revenue.

While the company is making some revenue, it’s not yet profitable, and the focus remains on building the product and gaining users. Currently, Foursquare is closing in on 500,000 users, but with a cable television commercial, those numbers could soar.

The service is in the process of revamping its website and several of its mobile applications. A new version of the iPhone app, which launched one year ago at the SXSW conference will hopefully be ready in time for this year’s SXSW, we’re told.

You may recall that last year we poked fun at Pepsi for sending us a few cases of Aquafina water bottles. First of all, we’re a tech blog. Secondly, the point of the outreach was to showcase Aquafina’s new plastic bottles that apparently use much less plastic than the old ones. Of course, they sent God knows how many carbons into their air shipping us not one, but two crates of these things for no real reason. This year, the company has a better idea. Or rather, they think you do.

Pepsi is calling for you to submit ideas to their Refresh Project before the SXSW conference taking place in Austin, TX next month. During the conference, people both there and across the web would then vote on their favorite ideas (through their site, Twitter, Facebook, etc). The winner, announced on the last day of SXSW’s interactive portion (March 16), would get a spot grant to make their idea a reality. The Refresh Project for this month is currently giving away $1.3 million in funding, for example.

The Refresh Project traditionally breaks up ideas into the following categories: Health, Arts & Culture, Food & Shelter, The Planet, Neighborhoods, and Education. But for this SXSW event, Pepsi is looking for “digital pro-social” ideas. Not really sure what that means, but I assume it means they’re looking for something involving the Internet that can make the world a better place. At the very least, they’re looking for a better idea than shipping plastic water bottles to blogs.

Kidding aside, Pepsi is investing more than $20 million this year for fund ideas through this Refresh Project. Start thinking about some good ones to submit for SXSW next month.

With the East Coast and Midwest awaiting a monster snowstorm, popular weather forecasting site Accuweather, is rolling out a timely relaunch of its site. The site, which provides up-to-date local information on weather in the U.S., is launching a beta version of the site that includes a complete redesign and a few extra user-friendly features. The new version of the Accuweather is still in private beta but will be publicly launched to the public on February 15.

On the content side, the general theme for the new version of the site is “weather for your life,” with specialized and interactive weather forecasts for Weather and Health, Weather and Travel, Weather and Home and Garden, Weather and Outdoor Activity in your area. The health-related weather interest sections include Arthritis Pain Forecasts, Asthma Forecasts, Common Cold Forecasts, Flu Forecasts, Pollen Level Forecasts and more

In terms of everyday weather forecasts, the new site features hour-by-hour, 15-day forecasts, and next month forecasts. The site also has upgraded its multimedia offerings, with detailed videos fro meteorologists and a wide range of weather maps – including radar, satellite, severe weather, forecast maps, and more. The site will be adding 600 weather-related videos every day, with local video forecasts for over 100 U.S. cities.

The layout and design of the site itself is a lot cleaner and less cluttered. The older version of the site was a virtual mash-up of information, content and advertisements. The new version has larger numbers and text, is more spaced, and is all-together more friendly on the eyes. And I’m sure Accuweather is getting better feedback from advertisers on the layout, as the streamlined version is more complimentary to serving ads on the site.

In comparison to competitor and rival Weather.com, Accuweather’s site wins the contest in my opinion, with a nice balance of content and easy-to-use web features. According to Compete, Accuweather site saw 8 million unique visitors in December whereas Weather.com saw 33.5 million unique visitors in December. While Weather.com received more traffic, Accuweather’s forecasts are syndicated to over 175,000 media sites. And with the new redesign, Accuweather could become a more attractive destination for weather forecasts.

Last year, there was no shortage of developers who were complaining about Apple’s App Store. The situation got so heated that no less than Apple senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing, Phil Schiller, got personally involved with a number of developers having issues. Since then, the complaints seem to have died down quite a bit, but Apple is still on the case.

The company has started sending out a survey to iPhone developers asking about their experience with the program. While the long survey covers a range of things, the majority of the questions are about the application review process, and developers’ overall happiness with the program.

Examples of questions asked include:

Please rate your level of satisfaction with each of the following aspects of the Application submission process (using iTunes Connect).

Please rate your level of satisfaction with each of the following aspects of the application review process (using iTunes Connect).

Please rate your level of satisfaction with the length of time it takes to get updates available on the App Store.

Apple asks you to answer with: “Very dissatisfied,” “Somewhat dissatisfied,” “Neither satisfied nor dissatisfied,” “Somewhat satisfied,” “Very satisfied,” or “Don’t know.”

They also ask, “What one thing could Apple do to make the iPhone Developer Program better?” and give you a text box to write anything you want. A few months ago they certainly would have gotten some interesting responses there.

Sometime around the first of the year, Apple made some changes to the App Store approval process that drastically sped things up for many developers. In fact, a number of developers noted that approval process wait time went from two weeks (or worse) to just a couple of days in some situations. There have also been reports of improved communication from the app review team.

It seems likely that Apple staffed up its app review team and also provided them with better training and instructions over the past few months. Still, if the App Store continues to grow at its blistering pace, it’s hard to imagine that things won’t get bogged down again. So during this time of relative peace, it’s smart for Apple to survey its developers to fine tune the system.

There is a virtual cornucopia, so to speak, of games out there right now, readers. From Mass Effect 2 and Borderlands to Bayonetta and Dark Void , to the constant stream of demos, freeware, and indie games — it’s a good time to be a gamer. We chat about games throughout the day, but we’d like to hear from you guys

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What are you playing?

Remote monitoring systems for the elderly are nothing new , but Japanese conglomerate Marubeni ’s technology seems to be particularly advanced. And unlike you might think, it’s not based on robotics , but on a sensor system. It enables families and medical institutions to remotely check the health of older people around the clock – as long as the person in question keeps wearing a small sensor on the chest.

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New technology helps to remotely monitor the health of the elderly around the clock

Monocles are back, people! So says Fez from Ron and Fez , the Sirius XM radio program that spent a hot 10 minutes on this news story that says that monocles are back in fashion with young people. Time to get me some monocles! Look at the evolution of eyeglasses: nowadays, you don’t even to wear ‘em

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Retro: Monocles are making a comeback for some reason