ugachaka :: Jacob was here

Boomshine Flash Game

Game’s creator here.

I have posted about ARGs here before, but I wanted to link over to my new blog at wannabeMogul.com where I just put together a lengthy post about the ARG and viral marketing campaign for The Dark Knight by 42 Entertainment, the same guys who did ILoveBees for Halo 2, and the mysterious death of Heath Ledger.

The viral marketing campaign is intense for this movie, and the death of Heath Ledger almost made me suspect it was going to get even more outrageous.

I have often pondered as Seth Godin did why more money isn’t saved by the consumer when they choose to make a purchase online rather than in a physical store.

When you purchase an item online rather than in a store, you could argue that you are saving the company the expense of stocking the item and hiring an employee to check you out and bag the item. If you are already covering the cost of shipping, shouldn’t there be more savings?

The same goes for online rentals. In reality, it’s just a file server spitting out the file to you, so why pay as much as you do a service like Blockbuster–or even Netflix–who stocks and distributes a physical copy of the media from a staffed distribution center? Even counting costs associated with producing and serving the file over the Internet and rights payments, Apple has to be making more money off each rental than Blockbuster.

Is Apple just trying to prevent a complete breakdown of the rental industry by pricing their rental service close to what is actually charged by Blockbuster or are they simply looking to make as much money as possible while they can?

Bloglines has put together a list of the top 1000 blogs. I had no idea how some that I read regularly ranked among the world’s best. Check it out and see where your blog or the bloggers you admire ranked.

For one, I didn’t realize that Mark Cuban’s Blog Maverick was as highly read as it is–ranking it at 114–or that the Dilbert blog feed was ranked so high–number 2.

Interesting to check out. Add some links if you want to fill up your feed reader.

via BizInformer via Duct Tape Marketing

If you are still in the dark about RSS readers, Small Business Trends linked to a little video that could help you understand it all.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0klgLsSxGsU[/youtube]

I am a huge fan of ONnetworks and all their HD-produced podcasts. My love stems mostly from two of their programs: The 5 Minute Drill for my fantasy football addiction and Play Value for an entertaining “Best Week Ever”-style doc on the history of videogames from the very beginnings of Nintendo. The podcast follows along nicely with a book I am currently reading called Game Over on the history of videogames. You can check it out at the link below.

Game Over Press Start To Continue

Check out the latest edition of the video cast below, and be sure to check out all the Play Value episodes to feel smarter about your own knowledge of the videogame industry.

Amazon is putting together a mountain of deals for their Black Friday sale. You can see all of them here.

Amazon runs a vote to see which deal it’s customers would prefer for Black Friday, and an incredible deal on Wiis is among the possible options right now. If the deal is voted as the best, you will be able to snag a Wii for just $79 on Black Friday!

• 1,000 Nintendo Wii Game Systems (see prices on Customers Vote page)
• 500 Panasonic 7.5MP Digital SLR Cameras, $499 (*normally $1,149.95)
• 1,000 Razor E100 Electric Scooters for $29 (*normally $89.99)
• 500 TiVo HD Digital Video Recorders, $89 (*normally $253.48)
• 500 Magellan Maestro 3140 Portable Auto GPS Systems, $99 (*normally $247.00)
• 200 Samsung 46” 1080p LCD HDTVs, $719 (*normally $1,899.98)

Supposedly, they will have 1000 Wiis on Black Friday to sell along with a nice chunk of stock in TiVo boxes ($89) and Samsung HDTVs ($719).

Check out the voting here and cast your vote to catch a Wii at a bargain price–or the electronic item of your choice on the list.

 I stumbled across this post by Mark Fletcher about his passion for the IBM keyboard of old.  Although I can’t find the same obsession myself, I am very particular about keyboards that I use.  Right now, I have a Logitech MX 5000 Bluetooth with the laser mouse.  It was nice when I got it, but lately, I have found myself lusting after something like the diNovo Edge with those soft laptop-like keys.  I think something like that might be more nice to my hands–I tend to type very hard and fast.  I’m  a go-getter like that.  My Logitech desktop hasn’t been working the greatest with Vista as of late, but maybe I can learn to love it again.  My passion for laptop-like keyboards is probably just because I was on my laptop for the last 2 weeks waiting for some bad RAM to be replaced on the ol’ desktop.

Unfortunately, I can’t possibly justify in my head buying such a keyboard for that much.

It makes me think though. I have the same obsession with certain kinds of pens.  I like the heavy liquid ink flow types–keep your ballpoints away.  I wonder if it is all part of the same trend.

Twittervision. I am not sure where I came upon this link now…probably one of my various RSS feeds, digg surfs or podcasts. I just bookmarked it in Firefox at the time and have since come back to it two or three times to see what the latest developments are.

At first, it was just a cool way to visually see where all the public twitters were in real time. It makes Twitter–which for all its great attributes is a pretty bland site for decorative content–into a more visual experience. Then I noticed this link at the bottom that took me to the really cool feature–Flickrvision.

I can’t say that I have signed up and tried out the site myself. I am not a big photosharer on the Web more than just the occasional flickr album to share photos with friends. From the looks of it, it is a cool little system for sharing photos with friends and vicariously living in other locales.

I have played around with the RSS fees through the Google screensaver and wish there were more ways to take advantage of RSS feeds of photos. This app is a very nice addition to the mix.

Imagine journalistic coverage of the next Katrina or tsunami if this app is in existence. Rather than wait for news and sights on the Web, you could watch a flood of photos in real time to see what was happening and have them marked on the map. You could track the spread of a hurricane across the state through those members taking photos and uploading them.

If someone was truly ingenious, they could develop a way to place a snippet of this system of just one part of the map into a news story online instead of a photo. As the readers find the story, they could see updated shots of the lastest news story and get a greater, deeper feel for the story. The captions can even be added by actual citizens who are uploading the photo and could narrate the story as it happens. A really cutting-edge interactive news service should jump on this bandwagon. All that you would really need would be some kind of tagging system to categorize the feeds coming into your story.

Another possible use could be live photo feeds from actual soldiers in Iraq or other foreign engagements. Granted, the news wouldn’t really be able to get access to all of these photos, but the military could have some Metal Gear Solid kind of real-time mass army control going on if they could get some system like developed.

The app seems pretty heavy on my computer, which usually runs pretty well, but the photos right now are pretty weak as far as content–mostly just family albums and posed pictures that should be on cuteoverload.com. Nothing live and controversial. Just wait til the paparazzi gets a celebrity tracker like this put together. You could see where Paris and Britney Spears are doing simultaneously wherever they happen to be getting arrested around the globe.

Can’t wait to see what people could actually use this for in the event of the next worldwide news event.

As some of you may NOT realize, before Mark Cuban was famous for his moves on Dancing with the Stars, he was (and is) a sort of Internet celebrity. Not the YouTube kind. The kind that had a great idea and followed his intuition to walk away pre-Internet bust and go on to own the Dallas Mavericks (and make them awesome, by the way).

He recently posted up some older posts about his life pre-Internet fame and fortune, and although I have read his back story before, I found his take on everything extremely candid and inspirational.

The up and coming of Mark Cuban:

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

…and after you get through those, keep reading his Success and Motivation posts. Golden.

Makes me want to pursue my own ideas sooner rather than later.