Games
Games
#ff #EmpireAve @chrisvoss @BobWarren @kimgarst @lizstrauss @MySOdotCom @GayeCrispin @Annehthomas @davidsanger
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 12/02/2011 - 21:22After a long, busy, tiring week, I figured I'd do a really quick and simple Follow Friday post. This week, I'm listing eight players on Empire Avenue that I hold over 35,000 Eaves worth of shares in.
They are priced from around 177 Eaves per share to 334 Eaves per share. Currently, the most shares I can hold in any player is 200, and five of the eight I hold 200 shares in. Most of them can and do own 600 shares of my stock on Empire Avenue.
These players are the blue chip stocks of Empire Avenue, and if your new to Empire Avenue, I'd encourage you to at least pick up a couple shares of each of them.
One player that I want to particularly highlight, however is @davidsanger. A little over a week ago, his share price started diving. Today, he posted
"thanks to shareholders sticking with me during family medical emergency, will be back on track soon and spending all these eaves piling up".
If you play the game because you value making meaningful connections with others on social media, it would be a good time to step in and buy some of David's share as a means of showing support to him.
If, on the other hand, you are simply in the game to maximize the value of your portfolio, this would probably be a good time to invest in him, since the drop in share price is most likely just temporary. I expect his share price will climb soon, partly because of increased activity and partly people buying him as he invests some of the eaves that have piled up. If your a new investor, there is a good chance he'll buy a bunch of your shares if you buy his.
Whatever your reason for playing, David is probably a great buy right now, and the rest of the blue chips are also well worth following
Empire Avenue
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 08/14/2011 - 18:36On Friday, I wrote a blog post highlighting some of the people that I’ve connected with via Empire Avenue. Today, @gihangamos posted on one of the boards that they would buy large positions in Empire Avenue for anyone who followed them on Twitter and Tweeted about it. I joined in and he invested in my shares on Empire Avenue. I used some of the proceeds from his investment to invest in him, which is a fairly common thing to do on Empire Avenue. Then I headed off about my day.
This evening, I came home and found that many other people had invested in my shares on Empire Avenue and I’ve had a major increase in my share price, as well as receiving a lot of funds to invest in others. So, I’ve spent a bit of time increasing my investments. This led to more investments in my shares, and further increases in my values.
Now, my guests have returned, so I’ll stop and be social face to face and check in later.
QR Code Adoption
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 04/07/2011 - 21:14Lee Odden over at ToPrankBlog put up a blog post today, Will QR Codes Gain Mass Adoption?.
His post ends,
as creative and interesting QR codes are, I’m a bit skeptical in terms of mass adoption. For some reason, I can’t imagine consumer behavior changing to start scanning codes for things when they could just search or enter a URL. There’s also the technology that needs to be adopted by more devices.
Granted, I was a bit skeptical of Foursquare and Twitter too, but also Google Wave and Second Life.
What do you think?
My regular readers will recall that I've talked a lot about QR codes, as well as Google Wave and Second Life. So, I wrote a fairly long comment, that stands pretty well as a blog post of its own:
I am an innovator/early adopter in the technology adoption lifecycle, so I've always been a fan of new sites and new technology, whether it be Foursquare, Twitter, or Second Life and Google Wave, so it should come as no surprise that I'm QR Code believer.
First, however, let me offer a brief digression about Second Life and Google Wave. I don't believe either of those ideas failed. What failed was the companies efforts to promote it. I've spent a lot of time in Second Life and alway felt it was seriously mismanaged. I started talking a lot back then about the importance of open source virtual worlds, and just as we see Second Life dwindling, we are seeing more and more interest in OpenSim, an open source version of Second Life servers. While I have less for criticisms of Google, I find it interesting that while Google has stopped promoting Google Wave, they handed to code over to Apache, and there folks working on various open source Apache Wave servers. (I've run both OpenSim and Apache Wave servers).
Okay. Back to QR Codes. People need a reason to scan a barcode, whether it is a one dimensional or two dimensional bar code. In supermarkets, where UPC codes have been around for a many years, and during the early years, were rarely scanned, it is only in recent years we have gotten to the point of consumers scanning bar codes as they check out. They get something in return, a shorter wait in the checkout line. (At least in theory).
If people will scan UPC codes for some value, they will scan QR codes if value is presented to them. I've seen small specialized cases where that value exists: Scanning a QR Code at a museum to get information about a painting. More information for those who scan QR codes. I've heard stories of people scanning QR Codes in Japan to request taxis pick them up at a taxi stand. Better service for those who scan QR codes. I've heard stories of QR codes on Real Estate ads as a more efficient way of asking for information about a house for sale, but I haven't seen that and don't have details. That said, the QR Codes that I've scanned in magazine articles have not provided me any benefit.
So, will QR Codes make it? Yeah, when some creative people find ways of using them to provide value to customers that they can also profit off of, and I'm sure there are some creative people out there that can pull it off.
From CityVille to WikiLeaks
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 12/12/2010 - 15:53I’ve always been interested in the positive aspects of computer games. In previous years, I’ve covered Games for Change on my blog. I’ve spent a bit of time in virtual worlds, from the text based MOOs to Second Life and OpenSim. I’ve kicked around OpenCobalt a little and explored virtual worlds from my cellphone.
Part of what I like about things like MOOs, OpenSim and OpenCobalt is that they are worlds that the users can construct themselves, and I believe that this sort of construction has some great educational potential. It is part of what went into what I’ve always told my kids about being allowed to play any computer game that they could write.
I’ve also been very interested in the potential of virtual worlds for therapeutic purposes. Recently, the New York Times ran an article In Cybertherapy, Avatars Assist With Healing. It captures some of the potential for virtual worlds in therapy. The article mentions the CyberTherapy 2011 conference next June in Canada. It looks like an interesting conference and I’m starting to read through some of the material to see if people I know will be presenting.
On the other hand, I’ve been less interested in social gaming. FarmVille just hasn’t captured my attention. What did capture my attention, however, was a request from a friend of Facebook to join CityVille.
Carlos Miranda Levy sent me the invite. is currently Social Entrepreneur in Residence at National University of Singapore. He has also been Information Society Development Consultant at the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean and a 2004-2005 Google Fellow with the Digital Vision Program at Stanford University. His bio at the Digital Vision Program describes him as follows
Carlos Miranda Levy is an Information Technologies Consultant with wide experience on developing ICT strategies for development, education and e-government. A social entrepreneur, developer, and founder of a network of Latin American virtual communities and local, educational, environmental, and cultural websites, Carlos was selected by CNN in 2000 as one of Latin America's Internet 20 most influential people. He has undertaken extensive research and work with educators, education, and human development.
It was enough to make me sit up and take notice. Is Zynga moving its social games in the direction of games for change and social entrepreneurship? Could something similar be done for the health care industry?
If I could find a way to play CityVille without it sucking up all my time and productivity and without it spamming my Facebook wall, I just might check it out.
Yet let me end this off with a very different twist. I’ve been reading a bit of the discussion about WikiLeaks. The best comment I’ve found so far came Josh Wilson. Josh compared the whole story line of Wikileaks with stories coming straight out of Neal Stephenson or William Gibson. Josh talks about cyberwarfare going on. It led me back to thinking about the old movie War Games.
“Shall we play a game?”
“Love to, How about WikiLeaks?”
“Wouldn't you prefer a nice game of CityVille?”
“Later. Let's play WikiLeaks”
Squeak, Scratch and Etoys on Ubuntu and Maemo
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 11/28/2010 - 18:56When my older daughters were young, I told them they could play any game on the computer that they could write. While I did not make this a strict hard and fast rule, we did take it somewhat seriously at it helped establish a more creative approach to the use of computer games.
Back then, I had them programming in Logo. Now, my youngest daughter has asked for a Nintendo DS and a cellphone for Christmas. I’ve told her the same thing about writing her own programs, so today, we spent a bit of time working in Scratch on her Ubuntu based laptop.
For some background: Scratch:
is a programming language that makes it easy to create your own interactive stories, animations, games, music, and art -- and share your creations on the web.
As young people create and share Scratch projects, they learn important mathematical and computational ideas, while also learning to think creatively, reason systematically, and work collaboratively.
It runs nicely on just about every platform, and I’ve been running it on Ubuntu as well as on my Nokia N900 cellphone for some time.
I started my daughter off with simple logo type program commands. Soon, she was drawing triangles, squares, hexagons, circles, and designs that I used to create with a spirograph when I was a kid.
We moved on to exploring a few other bits of programming and hit a few walls. The sound wasn’t working and some of the simple commands did not seem to do anything, so I figured maybe it is time to make sure that everything is up to date.
Scratch runs in a Squeak virtual machine. “Squeak is a highly portable, open-source Smalltalk with powerful multimedia facilities.” I had been running Squeak 3.9 on my various machines, and Squeak 4.1 is now out. So, I’ve started my upgrade to Squeak 4.1.
There is a good blog post on upgrading Squeak on Ubuntu machines that I used as my guide. In my case I downloaded the deb file and installed it that way on my Ubuntu machines. However, the debian package page suggested adding the repository to apt/sources.list.
I figured maybe I would try this for my N900, however, after adding the repository containing squeak, the update manager asked if I wanted to update just about every package on my system, including Ruby, Python, gstreamer and who knows what else. So, I backed out of that upgrade.
Trying to install just the package, it told me that I needed at least libc6 2.7 and libuuid1 2.16 as well as a few other packages. So, I didn’t install it and stayed with the older version of Squeak on my N900. I did rebuild that version, as well as make some attempts at building a newer version of Squeak, but ran into difficulties, so I’m saving that for a later blog post.
On the Ubuntu laptops, the upgrade went smoothly and I then followed Getting Squeak 4.1 on Ubuntu to upgrade to the latest version. This also went very smoothly on both machines.
Yet this did not solve the problems, so I downloaded the latest Scratch image. This runs nicely on all my machines and has solved all the outstanding issues on Ubuntu. The N900 install will probably take a bit more work.
More soon...
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