While rumors swirl about an EA/Take-Two takeover, the company’s programmers are quietly working on a new MMORPG based on William Stryon’s book Sophie’s Choice. Set in post-war Brooklyn, the MMOPRG will introduce a new “moral” game engine that encourages nuanced thought and reactions to real-life scenarios. While you can never play as Sophie or Stingo, you can interact with their characters. The game will not touch upon the more controversial aspects of the book and movie but should instead focus on the lifestyles and mores of an era shattered by war and riddled with moral ambiguity. Jack Johnson will be supplying some of the soundtrack and Meryl Streep is slated to do some introductory voiceover work. More info as we get it.

Tim Huffman is a man with many stories, and one terrific company. At first blush, the company blends in with a lot of other video and audio purveyors on the Internet, offering paid downloads of music related video. What they’ve actually developed at iVideoSongs, though, is a unique blend of audio and video that provides not only entertainment value but a serious amount of utilitarian value as well.

Kristen reviewed the service back at DEMO in January:

The goal here is to teach you how to play music accurately, while still giving you the control over your music lessons. iVideoSongs is working with the content owners (i.e. record labels) to get DRM-free benefits that can be extended to the users. That means you can play lessons on your computer, your iPod, or wherever. Lessons can be purchased for about $4.99.

I sat down with CEO Tim Huffman, talked a bit about his personal history (it involves a Grammy!), and the unique and unintended aspects of his company’s work that have arisen since he’s started.

The embed is available below, or you can download the MP3 file directly here.

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David Zatz of Zatz Not Funny was kind enough to show me his AT&T BB 8820 running Slingplayer Mobile. There’s no launch date at the moment.

Filed under: Robots

Although Pleo just got upgraded to v1.0.2 earlier this month, UGOBE is taking the Life OS to 1.1 and adding a laundry list of features to boot. Initially available for install only through an SD card (download via USB should hit within a few weeks), the update enables your favorite dino pet to sit, sing a variety of melodies, call for attention, get sick (coughing / sneezing) and change attitudes based on how much attention it gets. As these things always go, there's also the promise of a few unannounced inclusions ("strange habits," as it were), and it should be noted that previous downloads -- Holiday, Love-struck, MySkit, Yapt, etc. -- will need to eventually be re-downloaded in new versions to be compatible with the Life OS 1.1 update. Give the read link some attention to check out the changes, and fire up the download while you're over there.

[Thanks, Caaahl]

 

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Filed under: Robots

Although Pleo just got upgraded to v1.0.2 earlier this month, UGOBE is taking the Life OS to 1.1 and adding a laundry list of features to boot. Initially available for install only through an SD card (download via USB should hit within a few weeks), the update enables your favorite dino pet to sit, sing a variety of melodies, call for attention, get sick (coughing / sneezing) and change attitudes based on how much attention it gets. As these things always go, there's also the promise of a few unannounced inclusions ("strange habits," as it were), and it should be noted that previous downloads -- Holiday, Love-struck, MySkit, Yapt, etc. -- will need to eventually be re-downloaded in new versions to be compatible with the Life OS 1.1 update. Give the read link some attention to check out the changes, and fire up the download while you're over there.

[Thanks, Caaahl]

 

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I think some LEDs decided to die on my new MBP. I haven’t restarted as I’m trying to get some work done, but anyone else experience this?

Mashup management service Mashery launched <a href="a new API for WhitePages.com today, allowing developers to fold extensive "people search" into almost any other application. Sample applications included in the release include tools to integrate WhitePages.com lookup into OutLook as a toolbar, a Javascript/Ruby on Rails reverse phone number lookup widget and an integration of location lookup and the Google Maps API.

Mashery says one of the primary goals of the new API is to enable telephone and address look-up to be added to social networks. While that might seem a little bit frightening, it might be even more so if the API weren't being carefully managed to prevent abuse. That's what Mashery does. A well managed WhitePages API could become an indispensable feature in any number of legitimate services.

After launching in November 2006, Mashery has ramped up to service a quickly growing number of customers. Mashery's Oren Michels says that while APIs are hot right now, companies quickly grow overwhelmed when they see how much work can be required to manage them correctly. Michels says the sales pipe and cycle have improved dramatically in recent months and the company has grown to include 15 employees. "We closed six customers in one week two weeks ago," Michels told us, "we had never closed six customers in one month before." We covered Mashery's funding announcement in September.

In addition to WhitePages.com, other Mashery clients tend to fall into the categories of video, real estate, music and people search. The company believes that the keys to mashup success include making free access to APIs available immediately, including at 3am when developers are looking at them, and offering sample applications as soon as the API is available. While many data-centric businesses engage in a game of cat and mouse to prevent 3rd parties from scraping their data - Michels says that opening a solid API is a superior, win-win strategy. I buy that, I like Mashery a lot.

For a more extensive conversation about the pros, cons and best practices of APIs, see our previous post APIs and Developer Platforms: A Discussion of the Pros and Cons. See also the Serena Business Mashup Platform, a related company that's just hit our radar.

A bunch of tech firms are asking the FCC to allow them to make use of valuable spectrum that is unused, but controlled by television broadcasters (who don't want to give it up). The FCC has been open to such an idea for many years. Broadcasters own a ridiculously large portion of spectrum, with large parts of it totally unused. The "white space" was designed to prevent interference by not letting anything work on spectrum anywhere near broadcast spectrum. However, many are pointing out that with today's technology, that spectrum could be put to use without any interference. Microsoft and Google have both been big proponents of opening up that white space for use. In order to help show that the interference bogeyman wasn't a real issue, they've sent prototype devices to the FCC to test. Unfortunately, they seem to have trouble keeping those devices in operation. Back in August the FCC noted that the device didn't work, and now a new device from Microsoft has also stopped working.

Now, to be totally clear, the problems with these devices have nothing to do with causing interference. The devices haven't been shown to cause interference -- just to have trouble working. But, of course, the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) quickly used these failures to slam the idea of freeing up the whitespace, even though there's still no evidence of interference. With the way the NAB has acted around this issue and the recent XM-Sirius merger debate, you have to conclude that the NAB thinks everyone out there is just completely stupid, and will believe any false or misleading statement it makes. Otherwise it makes no sense for the NAB to make the types of claims it makes on a regular basis. These devices are prototypes, and production devices will be totally different. Either way, the point is not whether the prototypes can keep working, but whether there's interference. That said, it would probably make sense for Microsoft to test these devices a bit more before tossing them over the wall to the FCC.

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A bunch of tech firms are asking the FCC to allow them to make use of valuable spectrum that is unused, but controlled by television broadcasters (who don't want to give it up). The FCC has been open to such an idea for many years. Broadcasters own a ridiculously large portion of spectrum, with large parts of it totally unused. The "white space" was designed to prevent interference by not letting anything work on spectrum anywhere near broadcast spectrum. However, many are pointing out that with today's technology, that spectrum could be put to use without any interference. Microsoft and Google have both been big proponents of opening up that white space for use. In order to help show that the interference bogeyman wasn't a real issue, they've sent prototype devices to the FCC to test. Unfortunately, they seem to have trouble keeping those devices in operation. Back in August the FCC noted that the device didn't work, and now a new device from Microsoft has also stopped working.

Now, to be totally clear, the problems with these devices have nothing to do with causing interference. The devices haven't been shown to cause interference -- just to have trouble working. But, of course, the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) quickly used these failures to slam the idea of freeing up the whitespace, even though there's still no evidence of interference. With the way the NAB has acted around this issue and the recent XM-Sirius merger debate, you have to conclude that the NAB thinks everyone out there is just completely stupid, and will believe any false or misleading statement it makes. Otherwise it makes no sense for the NAB to make the types of claims it makes on a regular basis. These devices are prototypes, and production devices will be totally different. Either way, the point is not whether the prototypes can keep working, but whether there's interference. That said, it would probably make sense for Microsoft to test these devices a bit more before tossing them over the wall to the FCC.

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Zoto is a highly regarded photo sharing site with lots of AJAX, social features and blogging plug-ins. It's been getting good write ups since Om Malik covered it in 2004. Late last year the company switched to a paid-only account model (like Smugmug) and last week it put the codebase up on the Google Code open source repository. Non-commercial use is free and commercial licenses are available.

Is this a sign of Zoto's immanent demise? Possibly, but in a world with lots of niche photo sharing sites, there may be no meta-lessons to learn here. At the very least, there's some very nice photo sharing software now available for use on your site.

In a 2006 comparison of photo sharing sites, our own Alex Iskold called Zoto "very well designed, [with] the most social web features." To be fair, the site's aesthetics could be improved, but perhaps you can do that now on your own server. It really is quite feature-rich.

In these "everything must be free" times, it's interesting that no one but the CEO has written about Zoto's latest move. It's move to a paid model was heavily criticized. Pete Cashmore, for example, wrote about it in a February 2007 post titled "How to Lose Your Users and Kill Your Web 2.0 Company: Zoto."

Open sourcing your software, asking for paid commercial use and offering users only paid accounts sounds like a reasonable business plan to me. Those steps alone are certainly not enough to kill a company. A lack of follow-through, marketing and community management could do that - and there are indications that Zoto is guilty of all three of those shortcomings. Maybe one of you brilliant cynics out there can do a better job with it on your own server.