Rabidgremlin's
Soapbox

In my last post I joked about see games on billboards in games, turns out that EA already does this and Obama is using them to spread his vote-for-change message.

Obama has ads in 18 different games including Guitar Hero 3 , The Incredible Hulk, NASCAR 09, NBA Live 08 , NFL Tour and Burnout Paradise.

In Burnout Paradise the ads simple appear along the side of the road as you go whizzing by, all very sneaky and subliminal:

This isn't the first time Obama's campaign has used non-traditional media, earlier this month, his campaign placed VoteForChange ads on users' home pages of the social networking site Facebook.com.

Two interesting bits of news from Google today. The first is adsense for games which allows game developers to place Google ads inside games.

Only flash games are currently supported and there are some fairly hefty entry requirements for early adopters:

• Game plays: Minimum 500,000 per day
• Game types: Web-based Flash only
• Integration: Must be technically capable of SDK integration
• Traffic source: Must be 80% US & UK Traffic
• Content: Family safe and targeted at users age 13 and up
• Distribution: Must be able to report embed destination and have control over where games are distributed

I’m having visions of playing Counterstrike and seeing dynamic ads on bullet-ridden billboards in the future…

The second bit of Google news is their first images from the new satellite GeoEye-1 which will be used to update Google maps and Google Earth imagery. Apparently GeoEye-1 is the world highest resolution commercial sattelite with a resolution of 50cm ! Google sightseeing should get really interesting now and those naked sunbathers better have satellite position timetable handy.

I really struggle to wrap my head around economics sometimes and the US (or is it a global) economic crisis is all pretty confusing (and crazy with the $700 billion dollar bail out bill getting the go ahead).

Newsweek has an good article on who is to blame, basically it highlights that there is no one specific but rather a number of guilty parties:

1. The Federal Reserve, which slashed interest rates after the dot-com bubble burst, making credit cheap.
2. Home buyers, who took advantage of easy credit to bid up the prices of homes excessively.
3. Congress, which continues to support a mortgage tax deduction that gives consumers a tax incentive to buy more expensive houses.
4. Real estate agents, most of whom work for the sellers rather than the buyers and who earned higher commissions from selling more expensive homes.
5. The Clinton administration, which pushed for less stringent credit and downpayment requirements for working- and middle-class families.
6. Mortgage brokers, who offered less-credit-worthy home buyers subprime, adjustable rate loans with low initial payments, but exploding interest rates.
7. Former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, who in 2004, near the peak of the housing bubble, encouraged Americans to take out adjustable rate mortgages.
8. Wall Street firms, who paid too little attention to the quality of the risky loans that they bundled into Mortgage Backed Securities (MBS), and issued bonds using those securities as collateral.
9. The Bush administration, which failed to provide needed government oversight of the increasingly dicey mortgage-backed securities market.
10. An obscure accounting rule called mark-to-market, which can have the paradoxical result of making assets be worth less on paper than they are in reality during times of panic.
11. Collective delusion, or a belief on the part of all parties that home prices would keep rising forever, no matter how high or how fast they had already gone up.

No’s 2 and 11 are interesting in that we see some of this in the New Zealand housing market particularly in Auckland.

I wonder how this will all pan out? Not well I suspect given some of our local headlines:

• How the financial crisis is hitting mortgages
• Credit squeeze robs economy of its lifeblood
• National could have trouble over tax cuts (I have always been suspicious of exactly where National was going to find all that extra cash to give such big tax cuts)

Perhaps the only “good thing” is that cheese is going to become cheaper :)

“Beached as Bro”

And techno styles

Urrggh, its that time of the year again when daylight savings kicks in. Unfortunately my very clever N73 has the wrong change over dates so for the next few weeks it will think that New Zealand is at GMT+12 instead of GMT+13 !

For most people this will not be a problem, you just set clock an hour early, but if you synchronise your phone with PC (for instance with Outlook) then all your appointments will be an hour out.

Nokia did put out a patch at the start of last year but unfortunately it still gets the NZ switch over wrong :(

I tried taking the installer for the patch apart and it seems to just copy a new timzone database (a .dbz) file onto the phone but try as I might I cannot find any documentation on this file, so a quick hack looks to be out of the question.

In the mean time I have found that the best way to solve the problem is set the timezone for the phone to be Tonga which is GMT+13. This solves any synchronisation issues and in a few weeks you can set the timezone back to Auckland.

Its really annoying that Nokia doesn’t just issue a new patch, I suppose they just don’t care about us in little ol New Zealand (sniff) but since this issue will affect all their high-end phones (N70, N73, N95 etc) which are used a lot by business users you would think they would get off their butts and do something. Sigh.

It’s Googles 10th birthday and they have put together a neat little timeline showing major milestones during their history.

I was particularly impressed with how their home page has evolved over the last 10 years, nice and simple all the time with just minor tweaks and content changes along the way, all hiding more and more features.

With heavy guitar music and much fanfare the first Google Android handset has been released by T-Mobile.

The device looks pretty nice (but not iPhone sexy) and has a ton of features. It will go on sale on the 22 October and retail for $179 US.

Initial reviews are mixed but I suspect that this New York Times article hits close to the truth:

“If the HTC’s new G1 cellphone, featuring Google’s Android software, were introduced two years ago, jaws would drop. But Apple’s iPhone already won the wows that go to the first small phone that is truly good at Web browsing.”

and

“my initial take is that the G1 is the PC to the iPhone’s Macintosh…“

Playing with the Android emulator I always suspected that that last quote would be true, still it will be interesting to see how it all goes on the 22nd.

Also released is the final 1.0 SDK and a hint that the beta Android Market will go live on the 22nd when the G1 goes on sale. Guess I’ll have to get cracking with finishing off Bubbles!

Update: Gizmoda has a very good hands on review of the G1 with lots of pictures and video. Check it out.

Well things seem to be heating up in the Android world…

First off the new version of the SDK (0.9) became available. The APIs have undergone some rather radical changes since m15 but apparently they should be mostly stable now. Its going to take some serious work to get Bubbles! up and running again.

Next all sorts of leaks about the first Android handset (the HTC Dream) starting popping up on the Internet. Gizmodo have some spy pictures of the phone, it looks good but not iPhone sexy. I think the slide out qwerty keyboard is a good idea but it doesn’t help the devices looks.

Google also posted some information about their content distribution system which will be the Android equivalent of the iPhone’s App Store.

“Developers will be able to make their content available on an open service hosted by Google that features a feedback and rating system similar to YouTube. We chose the term “market” rather than “store” because we feel that developers should have an open and unobstructed environment to make their content available. Similar to YouTube, content can debut in the marketplace after only three simple steps: register as a merchant, upload and describe your content and publish it.”

It certainly seems that getting an Android application out into the wild will be far easier (and less expensive) then an iPhone application.

And lastly, today the Android team posted the Android Developer Challenge Winners gallery showcasing the final 50 apps and the winning apps. Some pretty interesting application here.

Its going to be interesting to see how Android and the HTC Dream do against the iPhone tsunami.

Ooooooo, Just found a link to the new Google Chrome browser on my Google home page.

Its pretty cool, very lightweight and very very fast. It even has as “stats for nerds” link on it’s task manager which gives heaps of detail on memory and CPU usage. The internals of the browser are pretty interesting as are the reasons for building a new browser.

Had a couple of issues with some sites and a few pages that seemed to be showing old content! Also gmail doesn’t work it seems to hangup when redirecting to the login page and it doesn’t remember my user name and password for my corporate proxy. Still not bad for a beta.

Check out http://www.google.com/chrome

For the first time in human history the Arctic can now be circumnavigated.

Satellite pictures taken last week show that the north-west and north-east passages have opened up due to the retreating polar cap.

Not so good !