On Thursday, I had the opportunity to sit down with Jay Clayton – the man behind "Online Games: New Media, Literature, and Narrative; a course taught primarily through Lord of The Rings Online – to talk about his thoughts on video games, literature, and the future of narrative fiction.
This painfully reductive video obtained by Wired represents what the movie and recording industries want our kids to know about copyright. It does a really nice job of making "share" sound like a bad word.
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Google, with support coming from the Comparative Constitutions Project have announced Constitute. This newly launched site provides access to digitized copies of the world’s constitutions. And as a side effect, also makes these same constitutions browsable and searchable. In fact, it was shown that you will be able to narrow searches down to specific topics […]
The failures outweigh the successes on Kickstarter, but the Ubooly is one of those that have done well thanks to the crowdfunding platform. This kid’s toy, created by Colorado-based husband and wife duo Carly Gloge and Isaac Squires, used an iPhone as its core and delivered interactive child-friendly personalized content in a plush, huggable package.
The Ubooly is back for a second dip at the Kickstarter well today, with the startup looking to fund version two of its product via a new campaign. The second-generation product keep the same look as its predecessor (with some new color options), since it hopes to build Ubooly into an iconic character, but seeks to add depth to the Ubooly software and jumpstart its international expansion efforts.
Version two includes modifications to make it compatible with Android smartphones, as well as a jumbo version for the iPad mini, and there are five new languages for the Ubooly software, each complete with speech recognition and downloadable add-on education packs. The new languages include Spanish, Italian, French, German and Japanese, and each localization is spearheaded by a local team on the ground in that country to help make it happen.
“The number one thing that was a big surprise in terms of requests from the first campaign was ‘Can I get Ubooly content translated into my language,’ or ‘Can Ubooly help my kind learn a new language,” Gloge explained in an interview with TC. “Bost Isaac and I are not bilingual… so that was something that was a little outside of our realm, but we recruited a number of international teachers.”
That has led them to be able to launch in these new European markets coming up in November, if all goes well, and in Japan later this year. Part of the funding will go towards hiring voice talent to vocalize additional international language content. Building an international brand is important to Ubooly’s larger goals, since it should help them solidify the Ubooly itself as something iconic. Gloge says the team was tempted by bigger companies looking to license their software for their own characters, but believed theirs had the power to be the next Mickey Mouse.
“We were definitely approached by companies that wanted to put their character on the Ubooly technology,” she said. “To our surprise, the community really loved the Ubooly characterv[…] One of our mentors is a former VP at Disney, and I thought she’d be the one to say we can’t compete against the bigger brands, but she said ‘You guys have something here, and you need to keep building out that character.’”
Eventually, Gloge sees the startup building a whole stable of characters, and has already introduced a snail companion for Ubooly, but for now the focus is on making their first character as recognizable as possible. A big part of that has to do with providing kids with engaging and continually updated content, which is why the Ubooly time regularly delivers content packs which can be uploaded direct to the app without and update. Now, thanks to iOS 7, those updates can be served in the background, which means every time a child sits down to play with Ubooly, they could be getting a smarter toy with more depth of content.
Ubooly raised $1.5 million in seed funding following their initial Kickstarter campaign from traditional investors, and is now looking to raise another $25,000 via this new crowdfunding effort. Pre-orders of the V2 Ubooly begin at the $30 backer level, and even $10 pledges earn contributors a Ubooly vinyl toy. The team says its new speech recognition software is even more intelligent than before, so the potential for this startup, which was already high, is likely higher still.
If you’ve never heard a trombone quartet, you’ve been missing a
spectacular music experience. There’s nothing like four talented trombone-crazy
musicians playing a classical or jazz piece together. It’s just – well,
it’s wild and infectious.. And the pBone, the world’s first full-size
trombone manufactured with ABS plastic, caught on so well that it became
the world’s best selling trombone last year partly because Bones Apart, a British trombone quartet, took it up as their cause, giving educational tours in British schools with their pBones.
If you’re interested in learning about MMORPGs – or the games industry as a whole – I’ve a spot of news for you. There’s a course that’ll teach you a great deal of what you want to know. It’s called Online Games: Literature, New Media, and Narrative; and it’s taught in Lord of the Rings Online.
Technology and engineering occupations comprise six of the top ten categories of jobs in demand in the United Kingdom, according to CareerBuilder and Economic Modeling Specialists.
With the competition for educated employees in the specialized field of
IT, those that have completed a university level computer science
degree will have a greater opportunity to secure a highly rewarding and
lucrative career, post graduation.
Amnesia: A Machine For Pigs – the long-awaited sequel to The Dark Descent – finally released yesterday. After playing, I got to thinking – it does some innovative things with the survival horror genre; it uses techniques that I think any video game designer would do well to note. Let’s look at those.
Meet Katakkuri-chan, the official mascot of Japan’s far-northern Asahikawa Prison! The cute, cheerful, smiling character is spearheading the jail’s efforts to warm up their chill and forbidding image. Maybe this is an idea other prisons can try, such as designing a canary wearing a striped jumpsuit to represent Alcatraz.
Google’s big list of open source projects just grew by one — the company has introduced a new online learning platform called MOOC.org. Despite the name, it’s not a website about cows — MOOC stands for “massive open online courses,” and it’s a product of the marriage between Mountain View and edX, an educational website by MIT and Harvard. However, while edX only features free courses from affiliated universities, MOOC.org will accept material submitted by other institutions, governments, businesses and even individuals. In short, just about anyone can pitch in — edX’s president even revealed that they want the site to eventually become the “YouTube for MOOCs.” The companies have yet to reveal how they’ll screen submitted courses for quality and how contributors can earn money, but we’ll likely find out when the site launches in mid-2014. Self-motivated folks eager to learn will have to hang out around libraries, campuses and TED talks until then.
[Image credit: University of Salford, Flickr]
Source: mooc.org, Google Research
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
