Gaming via the cloud

More and more things are moving to the cloud. The hype around OnLive and their solution for “Cloud Gaming” reached a fever pitch in early 2009. By years end they had a beta running. The following is a demo by CEO Steve Perlman to students at Columbia. As more things move to the “cloud” it offers interesting opportunities for new forms of social interaction. The following vid is cued to the demo section. But there is interesting info throughout the vid and Perlman gives a nice overview of the platform and biz model.

Filtering the news and tv

This past week I came across two filtering / aggregation projects which were both developed within internal lab divisions – one from url shortening service Bit.ly and the other from Google.

Bitly.tv takes the 2 billion plus links that flow through the service and filters them to find trending vids. Based upon Bit.ly’s own bitrank algorithm which measures popularity, persistence and velocity in an attempt to predict what could go viral. I would imagine Bit.ly is swimming in interesting trending data that can be monetized in a variety of ways. This marks the first of a number of filtering projects that the company plans to rollout.

Living Stories is a collaboration between Google, the New York Times, and the Washington Post. An experiment to rethink the presentation of the news in an online environment. The effort aggregates a collection of stories surrounding a topic, presents a nice timeline view and attempts to harness a community discussion around the newsworthy topics. It’s early yet but you could see this merging at some point with google reader. I’d love the ability to trace linkage and timelines between news stories.

Storystreams

In the winter issue of Filmmaker Magazine, I talk about how data can be used to discover, curate and create stories. I’m fascinated by the concept of marring various real-time and social data to generate a type of “storystream.” A perfect example is “We Feel Fine,” which crawls the web looking for the phrases “I feel” and “I’m feeling.” But where We Feel Fine is a document of what is actually occurring online it represents more of a hybrid documentary then a “narrative.” In terms of narrative usage I’ll post later in more detail about some of things we’re developing around my newest transmedia / feature project HiM but for now I’d like to highlight another use of social data as a communication/story path for a game.

frontpage_sherlock

The recent release of a Sherlock Holmes’ version of TweetDeck represents an interesting usage of the streamreader. A streamreader similar to a feedreader is a way to aggregate your social feeds. The Sherlock Holmes skinned version of TweetDeck acts as a companion to the AQKA / Hide and Seek designed game 221b which leads players directly into the first scene of the film when it opens Christmas Day. The skinned TweetDeck is intended to be a simple way to keep up with updates and the conversation surrounding the game.