The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘whatever-else’

Every so often you find a game so addicting that you can’t stop playing it. I’m that way with two games on the iPhone: Fieldrunners and Civ Revolution. Close runners up are iShoot (there are only so many times you can launch nukes) and now Crush the Castle.

Designed by Armor Games, CtC was originally a Flash game ported to the iPhone.

To play you load up a trebuchet with weapons (rocks, firebombs, whatever else) by tapping once. You tap again launch and then tap to release at some point in the arc. The items swing out into space and land at some point on a castle that is essentially made of beams. The beams react in a naturalistic way meaning they move as if they were real beams and you then crush little people underneath them. Rinse. Repeat.

There’s no doubt that President Obama’s White House has been using technology more than any other previous administration. The President has a Twitter account, is using YouTube in innovative ways and has even developed an iPhone app. The White House is releasing some impressive engagement numbers from this week’s State of the Union address.

The White House had a live stream of the speech that was embeddable on blogs or websites. Nearly 1.3 million people tuned into the WhiteHouse.gov’s live video feed of the speech, which is a ten-fold increase in traffic over the most popular live-streamed event. Unfortunately, the White House doesn’t have any concrete statistics on the number of unique streams of the speech from the new iPhone App, but says that nearly a terabyte of data was served to iPhones with the application during the event.

After the speech, over 50,000 people engaged in a live chat on Facebook. It was just the latest in our Open for Questions series where you can ask questions directly to the officials who work here at the White House. And the President will be holding a live video event next week on CitizenTube to answer questions that people submitted following this week’s address. So far, over 40,000 people have submitted 472,000 votes and 9,926 questions.

On the TV side of things, the President’s speech drew 48 million viewers. Of course, the live stream of the President’s inauguration drew a much greater audience, with 3.8 million viewers on the Ustream live feed. MSNBC reported over 18 million streams and CNN delivered over 25 million streams for the inauguration.

Social networking company Tagged.com has been awarded more than $200,000 in a default judgment against Erik Vogeler, who spammed thousands of Tagged members by sending them unsolicited messages with links to an adult dating website.

In a ruling issued earlier this week, a U.S. District Court Judge in the northern district of California found Vogeler guilty of sending messages to 6,079 Tagged users and assessed damages of $25 per violation for a total of $151,975. Court also ordered Vogeler to pay Tagged $50,000 in attorneys’ fees and to cease sending commercial emails through Tagged.com.

More information is expected to be shared on the Tagged blog soon.
Update: blog post is up.

Tagged, which has raised close to $14 million in venture capital to date, claims over 80 million registered users worldwide.

Ironically, the social networking company has itself been the subject of numerous customer complaints for sending deceptive bulk mail since its inception in 2004, and is regarded as a phishing and spamming site by some consumer anti-fraud advocates.

In November 2009, Tagged settled a court case with Texas and the New York Attorney General over its practices, coughing up $750,000 in penalties. As part of the settlement, Tagged has adopted privacy reforms and altered its invitation processes.

Tagged co-founder and CEO Greg Tseng was previously co-founder and CEO of Internet startup incubator Jumpstart Technologies, which in March 2006 was fined $900,000 for alleged violations of the CAN-SPAM Act, then the largest ever penalty for illegal spam.

The irony is strong with this one.

Apisphere, a startup that delivers location-aware technologies to mobile applications, has raised $4.6 million in funding according to an SEC filing. Apisphere creates mobile applications that use location-aware technologies to provide customized information to users.

For example, the startup created Apisphere for Outlook, a location aware plug-in for Microsoft’s Outlook that lets users to send and receive automatic messages on their mobile devices or GPS-enabled laptops based on their Outlook calendar and location. So when a meeting is scheduled in Outlook, the plug-in will provide relevant location-based information around the event including mapping, real-time traffic updates and geo-triggered voice and text messages for reminders on the go.

Apisphere has also created a plug-in for Salesforce’s CRM that allows users to receive contextually relevant information to send sales reps the most relevant, location-based information for the sales leads. So a sales rep could get client-specific information on the go when meeting a particular client.

AI is reporting that Best Buy will be offering insurance on the iPhone 3G S when it goes on sale next week.

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Head to Best Buy for your iPhone 3G S insurance needs

Back in the olden days I used to read Joey Devilla’s blog all the time. He was - and is - known as Accordion Guy and he produced consistently cool content. Well, I just stumbled on him again and found that he’s doing great, philosophical posts on tech. Take his examination of netbooks vs. smartphones, for example.

He compares netbooks and smartphones to two brands of fast food pie. Netbooks are sub-par pies made to look like a real slice of pie - you know you’re not getting good pie but the appearance of a pie shape and crust creates cognitive dissonance and makes you think you’re getting screwed (which, in most cases, you are - netbooks are sub-par notebooks and horrible “communication devices”). Smartphones are like McDonald’s pies in that they don’t look like pie - they look like a pared down and highly subjective vision of pie. You have everything in there - the filling, the crust, whatever else - but you know you’re not buying real pie and you can sit back and “enjoy” it on that level. Netbooks are faking it while smartphones have no pretensions of pie-like goodness. With me so far?

CrunchArcade indie game preview roundup Crunchdeals: Mini RC desk forklift Contest: Radius Atomic Bass earphones for your iPhone or whatever else has a 3.5mm port PAW FLASH DRIVE OK!

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Daily Crunch: Magical Pixie Land Edition