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uVme: the next YouTube?

Gary — Sat, 18 Aug 2007 19:40:47 +0000

Online games of skill? Win prizes online based upon ability rather than chance? Win money without gambling? $14,000,000 USD being spent on this per day? You want in on it? You want to get a cut? Hmmm… doesn’t sound like your ordinary pyramid scheme, or trapezoid scheme for that matter. uVme is here.

So my tiny brains tells me that they build the games. People pay to play these games against others. The winner, based upon their skill, gets to win cash. And if they find the games via your website you get some money too. It’s like Google AdWords for the online skill games industry.

I’m almost certain that their exit strategy is to be bought. They’re almost dangling the prospect of Google entering another online marketplace infront of Fortress Mountain View.

I think the concept is sound. For long time as a kid playing arcade games I thought “I should win some real money for doing what I just did on that game”. I used to be able to complete SideArms on one 10p, I finished Double Dragon without being hit once, I even finished the first stage of Turbo Outrun with the steering wheel broken. Such feats shouldn’t go unrewarded. Can you imagine playing Xbox Live Arcade for real money, or even for Live points rather than just for the kudos of having a good gamer score? Hmmm… maybe not.

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Macs, .Mac, in the words of Janice from Friends “Oh My God”

Gary — Wed, 08 Aug 2007 14:46:39 +0000

So today I got an email from Apple telling me that the .Mac service has been updated and upgraded.

Dear .Mac member:

We’d like you to know about some exciting changes to your .Mac service. Read below to see how .Mac gives you new ways to share, more online storage, larger email attachments, and better control over spam in webmail.

You can now easily share photos and movies directly from iPhoto ‘08 and iMovie ‘08. Friends and family can see your photo albums in a variety of views. With your permission, they can download photos suitable for 16-by-20-inch prints and contribute photos by browser upload or email. To create a Web Gallery you will need iPhoto ‘08 version 7.0.1.

10x the storage. To make room for your photos and movies, your .Mac online storage will increase as follows:

Basic memberships will have a total of 10 GB of combined email and file storage.

Family Packs will have a total of 20 GB (10 GB for the master account, 2.5 GB for each sub-account).

If you upgraded to 2 GB, you will have a total of 20 GB of storage; if you upgraded to 4 GB, you will have a total of 30 GB.

You should see the storage increase in your account by August 14th.

Improved iWeb site hosting. Using iWeb ‘08, you can embed dynamic web widgets like Google Maps, Google AdSense, Web Gallery albums, or HTML snippets in your .Mac site. You’ll also find new themes and one-click theme-switching. And if you have your own personal domain, new settings in iWeb ‘08 let you assign it to your .Mac site.

Larger email attachments. You can now send and receive larger email attachments—up to 20 MB.

Improved webmail spam filtering. .Mac Mail also helps you better manage unwanted email with enhanced junk mail identification and sorting in webmail. To activate this new feature, just turn it on in your webmail preferences—go to www.mac.com, click Mail, and select Preferences in the upper right.

We hope these improvements help you get even more from your .Mac membership. And, as always, thank you for being a .Mac member.

Sincerely,

The .Mac Team

About time. After nearly 5 years of small mailboxes, spam filtering only on the Mail client and generally dull features all available free somewhere else this new update is very well received by yours truly.

iLife and iWorks have seen an ‘08 update also. But it was the second mail I received that beheld a complete picture of loveliness. The new iMac is, well, a pretty piece of kit.

And even the UK Apple website has seen the treatment that the US one received at the launch of the iPhone.

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Roger that

Gary — Sun, 08 Jul 2007 19:41:47 +0000

So Roger Federer has matched the five straight Wimbledon wins of Bjorn ‘the’ Borg. It was a tremendous final to watch. I just think that Nadal will come back even better next year though.

Elsewhere Lewis Hamilton couldn’t win the British Grand Prix. Never mind. All I can say to Lewis is that all the fame and potential fortune coming your way will probably be well deserved. In fact when Martin Brundle interviewed our last World sport megastar, David Beckham, I though “Lewis, you’ll do a much better job of being famous than he will”. When asked by Brundle “You’ve driven some high performance cars David, how about taking one of these for a spin?” pointing at Jenson Button’s F1 car, Beckham responded “No way, I couldn’t get the insurance.. maybe someone could take me ’round the track in one.” Duh… David, F1 cars only have one freakin’ seat you Muppet. Concentrate on getting England qualification for Euro 2008, mate.

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So Zelda is best game ever huh?

Gary — Thu, 05 Jul 2007 19:59:21 +0000

Reported all over the Net recently, Edge magazine have named The Legend of Zelda - Ocarina of Time as the best video game ever. Yes the game is totally awesome. I didn’t play it much myself when it came out, but my friend Rich played it to death. In fact the game does hold a special resonance with Richard and myself as it involves one of the first times that I met his girlfriend, and now wife, Anja. Rich went to get ready one particular time when I visited him in his flat in Nottingham and he left Anja playing Zelda on his N64. Anja, not really knowing me at the time and a bit shy decided to use the game as an ice-breaker. “Shall I show you how to fish?” she asked. The rest is history.

If a game inspires someone to do what you’ll see in the following video, then it’s special by my book anyway you look at it.

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Wall Street Journal iPhone review

Gary — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 19:11:08 +0000

Watch the video here.

No 3G, as has been said a good few times, is a big issue for this ‘mobile’ device. That said, the interface looks so beautiful that… oh no… my reality is being distorted. Must…. have…. one….

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Autobots transform and rolls of cash

Gary — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 18:48:29 +0000

I found this article on the Wired blog to be particularly entertaining. Mainly for the reason that I was one of those kids in 1985 that begged, sang and cajoled my parents (mainly my Mum, my Dad had no say over what money was spent on) that I needed Transformers. I’d collected Star Wars figures up to 1985 and boy I’d had a fab time with them. But Transformers, as a toy atleast, we’re simply amazing. I got Sideswipe (a red Lamborghini Countach) for my eleventh birthday in 1985. I still have the toy today. It’s a bit beat up. Had I not played with it for hundreds of hours going on dozens of adventures it would be probably worth a tidy sum.

The thing is about the Wired article is that it now explains to me as an adult what the marketing people at Hasbro were thinking when Transformers hit the stores. I can honestly say that they trapped me big style. I never owned more than fifteen Transformers, compared to the seventy or so Star Wars figures, but their complexity and delicacy was what drew me to them. “Let me see if I can transform it”, was always the first thing you’d say to a friend who got a new one. It’s like today’s equivalent of “I’m going to construct this IKEA four-hundred piece cabinet without looking at the instructions”.

What brought a smile to my face as I read the article were the things I used to do to convince my Mum to spend my Dad’s hard earned cash on these things. When Zoids hit the scene I simply had to have the largest one resembling Godzilla called, imaginatively, Zoidzilla. I distinctly remember singing “Wouldn’t it be good have have a Zoidzilla” to the tune of “Wouldn’t it be good” by Nik Kershaw walking around the house. It was far more annoying than simply saying “Please can I have a Zoidzilla” over and over repeatedly.

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40 years of the ATM

Gary — Mon, 25 Jun 2007 10:04:58 +0000

The BBC, that most British of Broadcasting Corporations, reports today that the ‘hole in the wall’ cash dispenser is fourty years old. It’s inventor John Shepherd-Barron, 82, explains that the reason we use four digit PIN’s is because of his wife Caroline. John was citing his six digit Army number as a figure her could remember.

“Over the kitchen table, she said she could only remember four figures, so because of her, four figures became the world standard,” he laughs.

Despite the success of Mr Shepherd-Barron’s invention, first installed in a branch of Barclay’s on High Enfield Street, London, my parents never use one. Even when they got a card they left it at home, preferring to get over the counter service. That said, my Dad knows more about Teletext than I know about the Internet I think.

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The man in the hat

Gary — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 20:50:38 +0000

OMG. I was so happy to see this picture on the Indiana Jones website

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Transformers stop-motion shorts

Gary — Fri, 15 Jun 2007 13:29:11 +0000

No, not that kind of shorts. While aimlessly wandering YouTube I came across this little gem from TFShorts:

I must admit stop-motion video of toys takes me back a few years when a friend of mine ‘Dido’ (no not that Dido, he was called Dido because his surname was Dyson, and no not that Dyson) made some videos of his Star Wars figures. They were not stop motion as such as he used to film them with his Cine 8 camera. The small series of films, I saw about 3, involved the adventures of Han, Luke and Lobot. Yes Lobot. No idea why. Then again this is the same person that tried to convince me that he’d got his hands on the Klaatu figure (very hard to get hold of where I was brought up back in 1985) by showing me the figure from his bedroom window. Straining to see the green faced figure I came to the conclusion he was telling porkies. He had painted the face of an Action Force figure green and wrapped a piece of brown carpet around the figure’s waist.

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Unified Communications - now all the better

Gary — Fri, 25 May 2007 22:42:48 +0000

So after two days of intense presentations, discussion and debate I’m sat in the BA lounge in Seattle writing up my thoughts.

Microsoft have been incredibly open. When I say Microsoft, I mean the Unified communications team. Because Microsoft, as many know, is a bunch of separate companies who happen to share the same campus. If Microsoft are going to succeed in this area they need to start behaving like one company. For mobile Office Communicator to work and be adopted by businesses they’ve got to make sure that the Windows Mobile platforms of the future can be managed like a desktop can be. For the services that Microsoft are going to offer to be adopted they’ve got to make sure that reliance, security and redundancy are all in place and can be trusted. Microsoft know this and they’ve been told this again over this last few days, lets just hope they can cut through their internal divisions and deliver.

So the Wave 14 versions of Office Communicator and Live Meeting look as though they’re going a long way to carving their niche (that’s niche without the ‘eesh’ and with an ‘itch’) just has email has. Many people have commented that their organisations pump around more IM’s than email messages. For many companies IM is something that they can’t live without.

The comments I made to Microsoft like “you need to spend money on taking features out and making this all more simple” were applauded by their UX (user experience) people, and frowned upon by those who just want to put cool features in. “Take a leaf out of 37signals book” I said. Needless to say many business cards were exchanged. Microsoft’s platform in this space looks impressive, let’s hope that their ISV partners can live up to it and can deliver quality.

So just as I’m getting over the jet lag (heaven knows how the guy who came from Melbourne coped) I’m on my way back to blighty. The trip was enlightening for me and very useful for Microsoft guys by the sounds of it. I think I’ve made some new friends…

Oh.. and for the record Mark both myself and a chap from HP made sure that PowerShell was mentioned about six times.

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