This is a demo of a TimePlay advergame for HP. It is completely cross-platform including iPhone, BlackBerry, Android and even feature phones.
Everyone has been to the movies and sat through those awful commercials and time wasters before the movie starts. Sometimes it’s an annoying split-second milk commercial, or a celebrity quiz asking you stuff about Tom Cruise’s life that is so boring and insignificant you want to stand up and leave. Well TimePlay is a really cool company that plans to change all that by bringing cross-platform entertainment to a big screen near you.
The company has a patent-protected platform that allows any smartphone from BlackBerry to iPhone and Android, all the way to feature phones, to connect together in a social gaming experience on a big screen. The above video is a demo from MobileAppMadness that shows one example of an HP advergame that everyone in the theater can play while they wait for the movie to start. Another cool game concept they’re developing with BitHeads involves dividing the theater into 2 teams, Red and Blue, and everyone throws Skittles at the screen that explode with color. The team with the most screen coverage wins (and perhaps wins cool rewards like coupons).
MobileMonday is a very relevant tech industry event that began with some Nokia employees in Helsinki, Finland in 2000, and has grown to over 100 chapters cities worldwide. Tonight, RIM is presenting at Toronto’s MobileMonday, and Tyler Lessard, VP BlackBerry Global Alliances and Developer Relations, will take the stage to talk about the Playbook, ecosystems, and developer programs for business professionals and developers. There will be RIM employees from the Developer Relations team as well as Roger’s Catalyst team on hand with presentation booths to answer questions attendees may have. Continue reading ‘RIM to Present PlayBook and Developer Programs at MobileMonday Toronto’
The Carbide Software team has recently released a new word search game called Word Sleuth. The game features over 30 categories and a total of over 8500 words to search for. Other features of the game include:
4 game modes, including classic word search and timed arcade style modes.
3 difficulty settings.
9 puzzle sizes, from 8×8 to 16×16.
Customizable board colors and patterns.
Support for touchscreen, trackball, trackpad, and keyboard controls.
We’ve seen the PlayBook several times being demoed but the boot screen hasn’t been shown off all that much. Considering how long it takes for a BlackBerry to start up, avid BlackBerry users are pretty keen on knowing how long it will take a PlayBook to boot. In recent demos of the PlayBook, we’ve heard the QNX team say that they’ve had the boot time for the PlayBook down to around 30 seconds but this Best Buy demo unit shows it takes 30 seconds plus another 30 seconds of intro video. A full minute is far too long for the PlayBook to start up. It takes the iPad 2 around 20 seconds to reboot and this is what RIM needs to set as their minimum. We’re hoping this boot time goes down significantly with updates and RIM also includes a loading bar so we know roughly how long to expect.
The app economy is growing at a pretty tremendous rate and one of the major innovations in the space is in-app purchasing. With in-app purchasing, users are downloading the apps for free, and purchasing upgrades or new features to the app. There’s a lot of cool stuff you can do with in-app purchasing like buy new levels in a game, buy virtual currencies or credits, or upgrade the app in a free-trial sense.
With in-app purchasing, developers will see far more downloads because there is no barrier to entry. With a free app, users can download the app and see whether it’s worth purchasing. Since there are far more opportunities to monetize the app, and users can choose what they want to pay for rather than put the money upfront, there will be more money spent and more satisfied users. We’re seeing a lot of growth with in-app purchases and my prediction is that this strategy is so successful, we’ll soon see the end of paid apps entirely. Continue reading ‘Prediction: Eventually All Applications Will be Free’
It started off as a day much like any other Thursday: I was sitting at my desk, sipping my caffeine-free raspberry tea, chowing down on a sorry excuse for a breakfast meal, when I was approached by an iPhone-weilding co-worker.
“OH. EM. GEE. HAVE YOU SEEN THIS GAME? IT’S AMAZING. IT JUST KILLED ANGRY BIRDS.”
Angry Birds, as you might have heard, took the world of iPhone gaming by storm, and had dominated the App Store for months on end. That is until Tiny Wings came along. While Tiny Wings is currently sitting in the number two spot on the App Store, the fact that a brand new, independently developed, foreign game had effectively ended Rovio’s tyranny was enough to convince me to try it out. Continue reading ‘BlackBerry Wish List: Tiny Wings by Andreas Illiger’
