Erik's shared items
We write this for you, the tired, the weak and the weary, the dogged attendees of the South By South West festival in Austin this weekend. We know that you're exhausted, but it's not from the booze, the parties or the product pitches - it's the endless location based check-ins. If only someone had solved this in time, right?
From what we can tell, the folks over at Brightkite have the solution with Check.in, but have yet to release it to the achey-thumbed, smart-phoned masses.
Sponsor
According to the splash page we found at Check.in, the app, which looks to be for both iPhone and Android, will be the "one checkin to rule them all".
"Check.in takes the hassle out of checking in on multiple services," the page reads. And at the bottom, we're told that the service is "made by Martin May, Brady Becker, and Jordan Harband of Brightkite after sever check-in fatigue."
When you take a closer look at the sole image on the page, which depicts a Check.in app on both iPhone and Android, we can see that the service appears to handle check-ins for Foursquare, Gowalla and Brightkite, and we would assume others are on the way. But we have to wonder how it would check in to Gowalla, as the company's API is currently read-only.
Check.in would be the first of its kind in the market and would surely co-opt a large amount of traffic and make the "severe check-in fatigue" that much more manageable.
When we first wrote about this at the beginning of the month, the only response we received was "no comment". We asked again today, but have yet to receive any comment. We've also asked the folks over at Gowalla and they had this to say:
"We currently do not allow write access to our API. For now we're excited to see creative use of the read API while we continue to polish our own native clients."
If this service is in the pipeline to be released soon, it looks like Gowalla would not be included in the check-in service and that would be a shame. It's only Friday and there are a number of days left to SXSW Interactive, AKA "Nerdfest 2010", but wouldn't it be that much more enjoyable if you didn't have to spend the first 10 minutes any time you arrived somewhere new checking in?
With that said, we have to wonder how much we would lose out on the features now offered by these services. Will Check.in also offer tips, photos, check-in commenting and all of that or will it just let us broadcast our location? For now, we'll just have to wonder, but either way, fear not, a solution looks to be on the way.
Discuss
SXSWi (the South by Southwest Interactive conference) is certainly our favorite track of the SXSW experience, but it’s not the only portion of the festival taking place this weekend. Film goers are out en masse in Austin too, and directors — both big and small — are using the event to showcase their films. Or in some cases, using it to show off preview of their films.
Texas-native Robert Rodriguez (whose Troublemaker Studios is based in Austin) showcased the first preview of July’s Predators, his newest movie, last night.
Predators stars Adrien Brody and Topher Grace in what is essentially a reboot of the storied franchise. Rodriguez, a fan of the original series, produced and contributed to the screenplay. Fox already has a Predators website, complete with Twitter and Facebook integration.
The preview that was shown at SXSW is already online and you can watch it here:
Knowing Rodriguez’s love of digital filmmaking and his Predator fandom, we fully expect to see a digital — possibly even viral — campaign for the film, especially as we edge closer to release. The full trailer will be online on March 18th.
So, are you excited about Predators? Let us know in the comments!
Reviews: Facebook, Twitter
Tags: movie trailers, Movies, Predators, sxsw, sxsw2010, sxswi
Paper Football 3D 1.0
Category: Sports
Price: Free (iTunes)
Description:★★★★★
CLASSIC PAPER-FOOTBALL ACTION in 3D
★★★★★
Sequel to the #1 sports app in the AppStore, Paper Football 3D brings the acclaimed and popular classic into true 3D glory.
Flick the paper football back and forth across the table in the ultimate test of finger dominance - or play kick mode and launch the paper football into the air again and again... until your own nerves break you!
✓ BEAUTIFUL STYLIZED 3D ENVIRONMENT
Head back to school – toon style – as we bring paper football into the classroom! Admire the rich artistic detail and tongue-in-cheek humor of our interior decoration… and gasp as the camera swings around to give you a glimpse of the cityscape beyond.
✓ SUPER-SMOOTH INPUT
No more frustration with inconsistent input from the touch screen! Paper Football 3D was given the TLC it needed to ensure that What You Flick is What You Get – every time.
✓ UNBREAKABLE FRAMERATE
We promise 30fps… and we deliver! Even on older devices, Paper Football 3D offers gameplay without jitter or annoying interruption.
✓ WORLD-CLASS PHYSICS
Get all the crazy collisions and 'on-the-line' decisions with world-class Unity Engine Ageia PhysX™.
✓ PLAY AGAINST A FRIEND or AI
Using a single device, play either a single-player match against a computer AI or, if you have company, challenge your friend to a two-player match.
✓ SOAK UP THE MINUTES in KICK MODE
Classic Kick Mode returns, but this time with the all-important streak record that not only updates to local high-scores, but can also be submitted globally along with your best match-play score and margin.
★★★★★
MOST ADDICTING GAMEPLAY EVER
★★★★★
So much fun, you won't want to put it down.
Paper Football 3D
28.8 million people used the Facebook iPhone app in the last month.
That's about a third of the 75+ million iPhone and iPod touch devices that have been shipped so far -- a huge percentage of phones. Most super-successful iPhone apps only have a fraction of Facebook's users.
That also represents about 7% of Facebook's roughly 400 million users.
Next up: Facebook will figure out how to add location-based services to its app, and maybe even add ads to it.
Source: Facebook
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- STAT OF THE DAY: Forget Email, Facebook Is Where People Share Content
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Aol launched Lifestream, a social aggregator and publisher, as part of their AIM platform at TechCrunch50 Last Fall. Since then it has gained nearly 2 million users, say Aol. Based on that success Aol is now launching Lifestream as a standalone product at lifestream.aol.com.
Like Friendfeed, Lifestream aggregates a number of third party social networks – Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Foursquare, Delicious, Digg, Flickr, YouTube, etc., so if you follow a Lifestream user you’ll see all of the content that user publishes on those networks, and Lifestream automatically pulls in content from people you already follow on those various social networks, so you don’t have to create yet another new friend list. Lifestream isn’t yet integrated with Google Buzz, but Aol says it may be coming soon.
Users can filter out content from specific networks if they like, on a per user or broad basis. A way to think about this – “noise cancellation for social networks.”
Lifestream also lets users publish back to social networks. Status updates posted to Lifestream can be posted back to Facebook, Myspace and/or Twitter. Lifestream also optionally notes your location in your status updates via GPS on mobile devices, or you can manually add it instead.
That’s not it though. Users can sign in to Lifestream using their Facebook account via Facebook Connect, making it unnecessary to remember separate account and credentials for the site.
You also have a variety of choices in how you use Lifestream. You can access it via the website, an AIR application, or via iPhone and Android applications. As I said above, the mobile applications are particularly useful because they auto-note your location for easy check-ins, and you can post pictures you take from the phone.
That mobile version of the product is what excites me most. You can see where your friends are checking into on, say, Foursquare, click through to a place page and then go there yourself and check in. And Lifestream allows you to follow places just like people, so you can see whenever someone checks in to your local cafe or bar. That ability to follow places is probably the single best reason to use Lifestream.
The Lifestream product is simple, intuitive and really, really useful. Frankly it’s what Google Buzz should have been – both an independent social network on its own, but very deep integration into all of the other social networks you are likely to use daily. It’s nice to see actual innovation coming out of Aol.
NoMix Toilet. Photo: Flickr
Technological Innovations in the Bathroom? You Bet!
Being green is all about solving problems and grabbing overlooked opportunities. It turns out that there's such a double-win in most bathrooms around the world; if we had "NoMix" toilets that separate urine from solid waste, municipal wastewater plants would have a significantly easier task (and produce more methane to generate electricity), and we could much more easily extract precious nutrients like phosphorus and nitrogen for use as fertilizer (instead of using fossil fuels). So what's stopping us from going NoMix?...Read the full story on TreeHugger
