Flash News Mashup - May 1, 2009

I am going to pay homage to my good friends at 8BitRocket by doing a little mashup of my own (basically I don't have time to write my own content right now, but have stumbled across a lot of good content from other people lately). If you haven't checked out 8Bit, you need to buzz over there. They have a vast amount of tutorials, games, and news about Gaming... Flash and Silverlight. My favorite tho, is their weekly mashup... I always find a few gems in there I normally wouldn't stumble across.

So here goes my take in the order of when I found it...

Windosill: I stumbled across this gem on Jayisgames... which is an excellent site and a must view for any aspiring game dev. But anyways, back to WindoSill. It is part art, part game, part toy. As a whole it is an extremely polished and enjoyable experience. That in its own merit is worthy of a plug, but I would also like to touch on how they are trying to monetize it. They strayed from the typical game portal/sponsorship/ad model and went with a free demo that can be upgraded to the full version for 3 bucks. I wasn't planning on paying three, but after the first few levels I was more than happy to shell out the money. Obviously not everyone will feel the same way as me and they will have many people play it for no return. I would be interested to know how this model will work for them compared to tossing it on kongregate and the rest. I think the trick will be getting the number of hits without the portal's help. If they could get the million hits a portal might provide then I think they would blow away the money they could have made from ads. But if they just get hits from word of mouth and low PR then I am not sure they will do as well as hoped.

PlayMegaPhone: digital signage and touch screen displays are becoming extremely popular in the commercial sector. You'll be seeing them in Wal-Mart, Kroger, Bus-Stops, ext. This is great in its own right, but PlayMegaPhone has taken it to a new level. Without installing anything on your phone you can interact with these screens via your phone. Not only that, you can do so along side people around you. You got to check out the videos to see what I am talking about, but the possibilities this opens up are extremely exciting. Especially for game enthusiasts like myself. As a side note, Colin Moock announced his new company at FITC which has an exclusive partnership with Play MegaPhone...

BitchWhoCodes recently wrote a letter to her student which is a must read. As with most of her writing, it is funny, insightful, and to the point.

Amy from DrawingsInMotion sent me some hilarious code comments via stackoverflow. My favorite: "// drunk, fix later". Brilliant.

With my recent join to Twitter, I found Rands's post on the Art of the Tweet to be very insightful. He has a talent for obtaining a deeper understanding of trivial actions and then explaining them in a way that comes across as common sense. I tend to end his articles with "Why did I not think of that?". In hindsight its because I didn't think... I just went through the act of Twittering and didn't sit back and look at what makes Twitter valuable to the people who get tricked into following me.

And finally, I found this one on 8Bit's mashup. Nonoba is offering a new service called GameRise which seems to be the is the Ning of Game Portals. Very interesting. I'm a big fan of Ning. I first joined Seth Godin's Triiibes, then started Flash Indianapolis, and finally found myself on SmallerIndiana. I am looking forward to seeing a bunch of game portals pop up. Specifically ones that are targeted towards specific demographics and genres... Such as a Retro-8Bit-Arcade... wonder who would do that? ;)