More Than Just Static Text

Over time, e-books on the iPhone will hopefully become more interesting than the current crop of apps. While today's hardware e-readers mimic traditional books, the next generation of e-readers will likely go beyond this and the iPhone is already in a position to lead the charge. Creative's forthcoming Zii MediaBook will offer some of this functionality. With iTunes LP, Apple also has a format that publishers could use to create richer e-book experiences. iTunes LPs aren't compatible with the iPhone and iPod touch, yet. It is likely only a matter of time before Apple brings this format to its mobile devices, though.

Created by gaming site Nimblebit's Ian Marsh, App Classics analyzes iTunes rating and sales information to determine which applications have remained popular over time. The apps that make the cut are then awarded either a gold, silver or bronze medal based on their status.

The interface to the site is similar to that of the social network for bookworms, Shelfari or the iPhone app Classics (iTunes link) which displays classic novels as books on a bookshelf. Like those, App Classics features a wooden bookshelf where the icons for the applications are displayed and labeled by name. A drop-down menu at the top lets you filter the shelves by category (games, business, social networking, etc.). The "Games" category is even sub-divided into further sections (strategy, board, card, etc.).

Video Reviews Rock, but Missing Apps Don't

Click on any of the apps and you'll be taken to the app's page where you're provided with information similar to that which the App Store provides - screenshots and descriptions.

However, the best part about the app subpages is the video reviews. Using videos pulled from YouTube, you can actually see the app in action. Watching YouTube videos is something many users often do before buying a new application - this just makes it easier. 

And, as it's rapidly becoming par for the course these days, you can also share your findings via Twitter and Facebook. 

So how does App Classics stand up in terms of selection? For the most part, OK. The apps featured on the site do seem to reflect those that are deserving of "classic" status, but there are some glaring omissions as well. For example, under social networking, Facebook isn't listed. Under news, there's no Wall Street Journal. Under weather, there's no Weather Bug. We find it hard to believe that these apps weren't worthy of inclusion - were the reviews really so bad?

We're Watching this One

It could be just a case of new launch bugs - after all, App Classics was only unveiled yesterday. Given time, they may work out these kinks so true "classics" don't get overlooked.

Again, this is another site that hasn't mastered the perfect formula, unfortunately, but definitely one whose concept and implementation is to be admired. We'll say it's worth watching for now, but it's not there just yet.

The 3DeeFriends app lets you view your Facebook photo albums and those belonging to your Facebook friends in 3D. Photos can be viewed either as an anaglyph, interlaced, side by side, or as a cross over 3D image.

2. 3DeeVUsion

3DVUsion is an application that lets you turn your own photos saved in the iPhone's photo library into 3D images. With the app, you can select a pair of images from the library for viewing.

3. 3Dee!oader

With 3Dee!oader, you can both manage your Flickr photos and view them in 3D. You can load images side-by-side and convert them on-the-fly to anaglyphs. You're also able to search, view, and manage your Flickr account from your iPhone and save Flickr photos for later viewing.

4. 3DeeCamera

The 3DeeCamera application lets you create 3D images using your built-in iPhone camera. You can take two side-by-side photos or choose two stereo-pairs from storage to create the 3D images by shifting, rotating, and scaling the image pairs.

5. Hunter 3Dee

Hunter 3Dee is a top-down space shooter iPhone game. It offers two zones and six levels of play, all of which are in 3D.

Bonus: Coming Soon - Carnival Craze

Canadian kids' broadcaster Family Channel, the Sheridan Visualization Design Institute, and Spatial View Inc. collaborated, through an Ontario Centres of Excellence OCE project, to create a glasses-free 3D mini game called Carnival Craze. The game is aimed at kids ages eight through fourteen. The application is currently undergoing the iTunes App Store approval process.

M.T. works for Urban Airship, a mobile company that most iPhone users will be touched by, but will never hear of. The company powers the new push notifications and in-app purchasing features for app-making client companies who can't or don't want to do all the heavy lifting themselves to implement these new capabilities of the mobile device. Three weeks ago Urban Airship was an idea and some code, a side project of one of the men who would become a co-founder. Yesterday Urban Airship helped Tapulous, its first customer and one of the biggest gaming companies on the iPhone, launch push notifications before almost anyone else.

Push and in-app sales were known to be in the works on the iPhone, they're the developer-fantasy equivalent of copy-and-paste or MMS for users. Push notifications, like when Tapulous now tells users who don't have the app running that they've been challenged to a music playing match by a friend, are something developers believe will increase ongoing engagement long after the initial download of an app. In-app sales will help monetize that engagement, something developers have found challenging after an initial flurry of sales, once they are lost in a sea of options in the app store and no longer making money sitting beside countless other apps on peoples' phones.

But developers did not expect to see the new version of the operating system with push and sales launching this week. That news came out at Apple's World Wide Developers Conference (WWDC) one week ago Monday.

Urban Airship was at the WWDC and they were ready. They worked 18 hour days getting the code ready to function, getting a booth ready and making the muffins they passed out to booth visitors. Half the team had been living off of two unique unemployment funds; the state of Oregon has a fund that pays unemployment to people whose employers close without paying them (the state then seeks to get the money back from the employer if they can) and Oregon is a voluntary participant in the Self Employment Assistance Program, which compensates the unemployed while they start their own businesses, so long as they are working at least 40 hours a week on it. All this work was going on while several members of the crew were shipping bacon to customers of Richardson and co-founder Scott Kveton's other recently launched company, an online bacon sales shop called Bacn. (No one said these were normal people.)

Meanwhile, in Palo Alto, upstart iPhone gaming company Tapulous was pondering what it meant to have a week and a half before 3.0 day. The company's primary game, called Tap Tap Revenge, is one of the hottest on the platform. It's a music and rhythm game, like Guitar Hero, but for your thumbs. The company knew it wanted to use the new push notifications to let users challenge each other to competitions, but could it be ready in a week and a half?

Then on Tuesday, Tapulous found out that the new version of its app needed to be submitted by Friday in order to be approved and available on 3.0 launch day. "I had about an hour on Tuesday afternoon to sort out whether this was something that could even be attempted," Jess Kahn, Engineering Director at Tapulous, wrote on the company's blog, "and subsequent to that, a deadline of end of day Wednesday to say definitively if we were going to be able to make the Friday midnight ship date."

"Not shipping wouldn't mean the end of the feature," Kahn wrote, "it'd simply leave Push Notifications in the sizable bucket of things we'd like to do for our next big release of Tap Tap Revenge. Shipping, however, would be of strategic interest and benefit to Tapulous, and so clearly, the pressure was on to get Push implemented, and in record time!"

That's when Tapulous got on the phone with Urban Airship. The two companies shared what they knew about the requirements and possibilities and at the end of the call, they decided to give it a shot together. The two teams had from Wednesday morning until Friday at midnight to integrate Urban Airship's infrastructure into the Tapulous software and make sure everything was solid enough to deliver what was expected to be a huge number of messages. "We knew this was the biggest opportunity we could get," MT Richardson says, "a defining moment for our company."

"By Thursday Tapulous was slamming the system with tests," Richardson recounts. "It was proving reliable but a bit slow, so we worked to optimize the technology while Tapulous worked on integrating it. They loved it. We implemented a few things that were on the roadmap but not done yet, we just bumped those things up by priority. We were able to do that because we were using things like Django and rapid development platforms."

The team of teams submitted the new version of Tapulous by the deadline on Friday night and by Saturday Urban Airship had in place a queue system on its servers that could handle large amounts of data. Urban Airship thought there were a few more days until everything went live, but then, Richardson says, "on Sunday we were working on the servers and all the sudden we saw a bunch of messages coming through. We thought it was Apple testing, but then we got a notification that next version of Tapulous was live and all the developers testing 3.0 were using the Tapulous challenges!"

Come Wednesday, Apple released 3.0 to the public and a huge crush of downloads challenged even Apple's servers. Urban Airship saw their push notification numbers skyrocket from Tapulous users but Richardson says it all went off without a hitch.

After the action, Tapulous wrote in an account of the harried dash: "It's as if we added that Push provider support to our back end, but without it taking three or more weeks, and without the risk that if we'd done something wrong, we'd be compromising the uptime of our existing systems and the products and features that depend upon them...Integration with Urban Airship was a breeze...The level of professionalism and support was the likes of which I have rarely seen."

Urban Airship isn't launched to the public yet, but will soon release a set of open source libraries for easy integration of their service with apps. It's all come together very quickly. Co-founder Steven Osborn had been working on the code for some time, but the implosion of identity provider Vidoop, where several of the Urban Airship team members worked, was the sign they needed to make the company come to life.

Through surprise unemployment, through muffins and bacon, through a big surprise that launch day was coming as fast as it was - the Urban Airship team made their infrastructure play happen, thus letting other developers integrate important new features faster than they could have themselves.

The coast isn't clear for Urban Airship yet. The company has to finish building out its developer interface, documentation and its business model ("It's probably going to be tiered pricing after an initial bulk of free messages for testing," Richardson told us). At least one other iPhone developer infrastructure company, PhoneGap, has struggled to get past Apple approval processes. And Urban Airship is aiming largely at small app developers who don't want to build out push and in-app sales themselves and who don't want to go with big app publishing companies - that might be a hard market to get a lot of money from.

Those concerns noted, Urban Airship has one big customer already. And they've got one heck of an adrenaline-fueled glow from their success this week.

The objective of the VideoTagGame is to collect time-based annotations of the video which could then enable the retrieval of relevant parts in a video when a search is performed, rather than returning the entire video itself. These annotations are collected in the context of a multi-player game.

How To Play

To play the VideoTagGame, participants must sign in with their Yahoo! ID and join a new game. There will always be at least three players in each game. After a 3-second countdown, the video will begin to play. As it plays, participants enter tags that correspond to the various parts of the video. When two players agree on a tag (that is, they enter the same tag), they each get points. The closer together the tags were entered, the more points are rewarded. After the video ends, participants can then watch as it plays again, this time with the tags overlaid on top of the video.

The game, like Google Image Labeler, can be both fun and challenging for those involved. Think it sounds easy? Don't be fooled - the other participants are often fast typers capable of of entering nearly a hundred tags during a couple minutes of footage.

The VideoTagGame is a fun time-waster for those who like to play online games. It's similar to the games at the site Gwap ("games with a purpose"), launched by Carnegie Mellon's School of Computer Science, as it uses "the human processor," too. Like the GWAP games, the end result of the VideoTagGame is the possibility of enabling new technology for searching within videos...or your name at the top of the scoreboard...whichever one sounds more exciting to you.

To keep up with the changing times, the new National Geographic Games division (NGG), will attempt to connect with people once again on the platforms of our modern age, including the Wii, Playstation 3, Nintendo DS, PC and Mac, the PS3 Network, and the iPhone. There will also be free Flash games online at nationalgeographic.com/channel. As always, the company's goal is to encourage people to explore their world, this time though, it's through play.

Lest you think these games will be wimpy attempts at educational experiences, it's worth nothing that Chris Mate, a former executive at Take2 Interactive, the company behind "Grand Theft Auto," will serve as VP and GM of the games venture. Hopefully, his history, which also includes Bethesda Softworks, will bring some spunk to the usually dry "learning is fun!" gaming experience.

The first game to launch will be "Herod's Lost Tomb," an online game which blends in content from both the December 2008 issue of National Geographic magazine as well as the National Geographic Channel feature broadcast on the biblical figure King Herod, architect of the ancient world.

This seems like a rather strange move by SpeedDate.com - after all, speed dating and playing Oregon Trail have very little in common. Oregon Trail currently has 11,248 active users, which doesn't make it one of the most popular Facebook apps, but it is surely going to be enough to get SpeedDate's Facebook application up and running. However, we assume that most users will be rather surprised to see a dating app instead of a game about wagons, hunting, and oxen.

Josh Lowensohn also points out that SpeedDate will provide users with opt-out instructions, but, besides maybe keeping a few thousand users, SpeedDate will most likely only get a lot of negative publicity out of this acquisition.

Note: There is also another Oregon Trail-like game on Facebook, Northwest Trail, which is far more popular and is not affected by this 'acquisition.'

While I still know nothing about game shows (I don't even have a TV at home), there is something intriguing about Amuso at a business model level. Amuso may be a good example of that rare breed of startup that is both viral and monetizable.

The rule of thumb is: "The more viral it is, the harder it is to monetize".

For example, Communication services such as Twitter and Hotmail are perfect for viral adoption but hard (not impossible, but hard) to monetize. They maybe great businesses, scale first and monetize later can be a great game plan if you have plenty of funding. But they are certainly hard to monetize.

What about Entertainment? YouTube is perfect for viral, but has monetization issues. Traditional entertainment is simple to monetize - you create something that people want and charge them for it - but is only viral as a bye-product of occasionally creating a great hit that everybody talks about.

Amuso says they are in the magic quadrant at the top right hand corner that is both viral and monetizable. Let's look at that a bit closer, poke around in the magic numbers.

How Amuso Works

In this case a picture says it all...

Parsing The Amuso Model

Here is the basic deal: user generated game shows.

COMPETE
Enter photo and video contests to show off your talent.
VOTE
Support your favorite entries and invite friends to come vote for yours.
WIN!
Win the most votes with your entries and take home the prizes!

Contestants want to get famous and make money from prizes. Who are they: Next Top Models, Pop Idols, Comedy Kings and more.

The "community" breaks down as follows:

10% Contestant
90% Members/Voters

Amuso takes a share of the prize money.

It Looks Like It Might Be Working

After only two months, Amuso has already attracted 100,000 monthly visitors, 20,000 registered contestants and paid out over $10,000 in cash prizes.

That is good traction by most start-up standards.

Investors Who Funded Skype

The founders are two ex-Yahoo!-ers, Jordi Bartomeu, CEO and Barak Rabinowitz. They told me that their investors had been investors in Skype. Which means that the investors have done well and understand how to get viral growth. For more on Skype investors see this old blog post from 2005.

Pirates Still Don't Care

While this is probably a smart move by Electronic Arts, it is important to realize that these protests were not just triggered by the details of the DRM scheme, but by the fact that the game was DRMed to begin with. If you downloaded a pirated version of the game, you never had to think about the DRM anyway because your cracked copy was always DRM free. In the end, schemes like this do nothing to deter piracy and only punish legitimate buyers. Pirates will always find a way around these schemes anyway.

Steam's technology would definitely be a good fit for Google, which, thanks to YouTube and other ventures, is getting more and more invovled in the content distribution business. On the other hand, though, while pushing out 30,000 Mbit of data is surely no easy feat, we can't help but wonder about why Google would need to acquire them. After all, if anybody has a lot of experience in distributing massive amounts of data, it would be Google itself.

Overall, even though the Inquirer cites "well placed sources," we can't help but wonder if this rumor will pan out to be true. Maybe Google will only take over the Steam part of Valve's business, or the two will announce some form of partnership.

However, if Google really wanted to get into the game distribution business, buying Valve would make perfect sense. Games are not only a growing business (though PC games, which Valve focuses on, are suffering greatly from piracy), but also a growing advertising platform. Having control over the distribution mechanism for these Games might just make sense for Google.

What Will Google Do?

If this rumor turns out to be true, do you think Google is going to keep the Steam storefront open? Also, given Google's record of acquiring technology and then having it linger in the back of a server farm for years (think GrandCentral or Jaiku), do you think Google is actually going to make much use of this technology?

For those that don't know, Spore is a game that tracks a world of creatures and the evolution of these creatures. The amount of hype that Spore has amassed is astounding. With a great story line and a ton of publicity, expectations are riding high. EA expects to sell over 2 million copies of Spore before the end of the year. To give users a taste of where things were headed, EA released SporeCreator. This could be viewed as a prequel for Spore. It allowed those who were impatiently waiting for Spore's debut to tinker with one of the game's main focuses: creating creatures. SporeCreator turned out to be a huge hit. Creator Will Wright only expected to get about 100,000 creations or so, yet over 2 million creatures have been created to-date. With such a successful beginning EA was seemed to have a guaranteed hit on their hands.

Bad Ratings, Worse Issues

Will Wright hoped that Spore would "change the way people look at games forever and change hopefully the perception people have of their own creativity." Yet this doesn't seem to be happening if recent reviews are any indication. Currently on Amazon, Spore has a rating of one and a half stars based on the reviews of over 500 people. Taking a closer look at these reviews explains that the biggest problem with Spore is that it isn't evolutionary in any way.

From a technical standpoint, a lot of fans have issues with EA's DRM system in Spore. The system requires users to activate the game over the internet with a limit of 3 activations. Any more than that and you'll have to call EA for help. The problem with this method is that EA requires proof of purchase of the Spore game in order to give you another activation code. This doesn't seem very evolutionary to us in any way. Microsoft anyone?

As for playing the game, we feel we hit the nail on the head when we stated that Spore is a "hugely ambitious follow up to The Sims game series." It was ambitious and a great try. However, we didn't find anything very appealing about the gameplay. Sure we can watch our creatures grow, but you can also do that with The Sims but with people instead of creatures. The graphics and visual effects may have been the closest EA came to "evolutionary" with Spore. Overall, the game itself suffers from being too simple Sims like. Spore is a serious lackluster.

What Needs to Change

There's a lot about Spore that needs to change. First off, DRM has to go. That's so old school EA. We understand you want your product to sell and not be pirated. However when issues such as the one in Europe pop-up, you need to rethink your strategy. Scrap the DRM.

Lastly, the game-play needs to change. Everything was going great with Spore creature creation tools. However interacting within the game is a drab. There isn't a challenge in Spore and it's far from evolutionary. Don't sand-box us. Give us something to work for. In the end, we feel Spore appeals to those who liked the Sims. It's too easy, too repetitive, and not complex enough for the rest of the world.

We'd tell you about it, but we'd rather you just go play it. Particularly if you're a Guitar Hero fan. Then take this opportunity to make a mental reminder to check out what Resig does and what Messina finds, too.

If you read our coverage of the awesome drag and drop widget building tool SproutBuilder, think of PlayCrafter as the same kind of tool but for game creation. Read on for one example game and a demo video.

Below is one of the games the site offers as an example of what you can build. It's fun to play. If you create a cool game in PlayCrafter, embed it someplace and leave a link in the comments below.

Zynga is quite similar to SGN, in that both companies mostly focus on games for social networks. Kongregate takes a different approach and makes its games available on its own site only. While this makes playing a game as simple as going to the Kongregate homepage, it also means that Kongregate doesn't have a built-in word-of-mouth marketing network to profit from.

With almost $40 million in money raised, Zynga and its VCs must be looking for a very high valuation for the company. Its main income sources are advertising and selling virtual goods to its players.

It's probably worth speculating that Zynga is going to use quite a lot of this venture money to branch out of the social networks games market and start developing for other platforms (such as cell phones) as well.

This investment from Bezos comes just a few months after SGN raised a $15 million Series A round led by Greylock Partners and the Founders Fund.

SGN is monetizing its games mostly through advertising, but also through subscriptions and sales of virtual goods. The company's properties have about 1 million daily users, enough to make it attractive for large advertisers.

Overall, users have installed SGN games over 50 million times and handed out over 70 million gifts. It is, of course, questionable how many of these 50 million apps are still active, but with 1 million daily users, SGN is definitely one of the larger players in the casual gaming market.

Casual gaming is clearly turning into a major platform for advertisers. While both Kongregate and SGN are mostly focused on the web, the large range of casual games already available on the iPhone and other mobile devices shows that there is a very large market for them.

At the same time, though, it seems quite a few users are also very willing to actually pay for these games - as long as the prices are reasonable. As more and more investors are looking for companies that are not fully dependent on advertising for their revenue, the casual gaming market is probably going to see more investments like Bezos' in the near future.