Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on November 07, 2006 by CyberNet.

I decided to try out the Virtual Earth 3D that Microsoft just started to offer and I can’t say that my experience blew me away. I went to the local.live.com like I was told to do and clicked on the 3D button. Oops, silly me, there isn’t Firefox support so I had to open it in Internet Explorer. Okay, not that big of a deal because I should have expected it.

So I had Internet Explorer open and clicked on the 3D button just to be prompted with a window to install some software. I thought I was viewing this in a browser so that I could get away from installing software? Heck, if I’m downloading something I would rather it be a program that I can use. I was still a little skeptical but played along to try out this “revolutionary” service.

I finished downloading the program and tried to install it on Windows Vista and it just wouldn’t do anything. The progress bar would never move so I ended up restarting my computer a few times, disabling a few programs from starting when Windows starts, and finally got it installed 45 minutes later! By this point I thought that this thing better make me drool.

Okay, I’m all set to go now. Where’s the first place that I go to on the map? Chicago…because it’s where I’m from. I figured that there  would be a limited number of cities available that are able to display 3D buildings but there are always the most popular ones like Chicago and New York City that get done first. As you can see in the Chicago skyline above I was terribly wrong.

After doing a little research I was able to find out that they only support San Francisco, Seattle, Boston, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Baltimore, Dallas, Fort Worth, Atlanta, Denver, Detroit, San Jose, Phoenix, and Houston. Despite my horrible experience with getting everything installed and setup the result was kinda cool. It is neat how they add the texture to the buildings but I just can’t get over not having New York City and Chicago in the mix of available cities.

Microsoft did find ways to make money off of doing this though. They have “billboards” that they display when you are looking at some of the 3D views and they actually fit pretty nicely inside the maps. One of the billboards that I saw was sitting on top of a building and looked almost like a real billboard. I think I was more intrigued trying to find the placement of the billboards than I was looking at the 3D buildings themselves.

Virtual Earth 3D is a cool service but it doesn’t live up to the praise that everyone has been giving it. Hopefully Microsoft expands their coverage to some of the larger and more prominent cities that people would love to see in 3D because this could be useful for tourism.

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on March 13, 2008 by CyberNet.

One of our faithful readers, Alex, noticed our underlying plea for an invite to the Dropbox service that we wrote about earlier today. While Dropbox has no formal way to invite a friend they do let you share a folder with others, and if they don’t have an account it will let them create one on-the-spot. So Alex shared a folder with us, and we were able to get an account!

Now we want to help spread some of the Dropbox love. There doesn’t appear to be any limitation on the number of people you can share a folder with, but we don’t want to be sending invites day in and day out. So we’ll send invites to the first 50 people who request them in the comments below.

All we need is your email address which you can specify in the email field (registered users can change their email address on the account page), or you can put it in the comment field if you don’t mind everyone seeing it. After we send out the 50 invites we’ll let everyone know in the comments, and hopefully some other individuals will take a few minutes to invite the others who weren’t fortunate enough to get in on the action.

Make sure you check your spam folder because it’s very much possible that it will be filtered as spam by your email service. We won’t be sending them out every minute or anything, and so you may have to wait a few hours to get your invite. We do sleep contrary to popular belief.

And remember, Dropbox is a Beta service so don’t yell at us if your computer blows up or grows mutant legs and walks away.

UPDATE: Bad news guys, it looks like Dropbox is currently limiting the number of people you can invite using this method. We were only able to send invites out to the first four commenters. I really apologize, but they didn’t state anywhere that they limited that. I would very much appreciate it if the people who do receive the invites contact me so that they can share the invites with some of the other people who were supposed to get them.

UPDATE 2: Okay, invites have been sent out to EVERYONE as of 8:30AM Central Time on March 14th. Don’t ask us how we did it, because we’re not proud of it. Just check the email address you provided (especially the spam folder) for the Dropbox invite.

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on August 03, 2011 by CyberNet.

I’m sure we’ve all quoted Mission Impossible at one time or another saying “This message will self destruct in…”. Your average Joe creating a message that can actually self destruct, on the other hand, may be a little more difficult. If you don’t mind going the digital route a service called Privnote is looking to accomplish exactly that though.

When you jump over to Privnote you’ll be presented with a large notepad where you can type out your note. You don’t need to sign up for an account or anything along those lines, which makes this all the better. After you create your note you’ll be given a link that you can share with someone, and that link is only viewable one time. After the user clicks on the link that particular note will cease to exist.

Unfortunately this is missing a few things. First, the creator should be able to specify how much time the user is given to read the note, and a countdown should get displayed while they are reading it. That adds a sense of urgency to the note. Second, there is nothing in place to prevent the person reading the note from copying it somewhere else where they can read it later.

I have a hard time thinking of a practical purpose for a service like this, but that doesn’t detract from some of the fun you can have using it with your friends.

Privnote Homepage

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on December 01, 2006 by CyberNet.

The news seems to be blanketed with coverage of AllofMP3.com over the past few weeks. All of the commotion and news can be setup in a nice repeating loop. I think this should cover everything in case you have missed something:

1. United States threatens Russia’s entrance into the World Trade Organization if they don’t shutdown allofmp3.com.
2. Russia agrees to shutdown allofmp3.com saying ”The United States and Russia agreed on the objective of shutting down websites that permit illegal distribution of music and other copyright works. The agreement names the Russia-based website allofmp3.com as an example of such a website.“
3. AllofMP3 sips their tea while they mock the United States for trying to shutdown their legal (in Russia that is) website.
4. Lather, rinse, and repeat (replacing the World Trade Organization with some other threat).

I think that sums things up pretty well, don’t you? From what I can see this whole thing is just going to be a constant battle between the two countries but nothing will ever come of it.

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on October 27, 2010 by CyberNet.

A few months ago we wrote about an awesome iPhone/iPad game called Solipskier that some of my friends put together. The developers realize how much some of you love stats, and have assembled two gorgeous infographics that breakdown the traffic and money they scooped up with the hit game.

The first infographic they posted was done in early October after they had a solid month’s worth of data from their players. Here you will see the result of them putting some “robots” inside the free Flash-based version of the game. In the first month they had 15 million plays, and only a mere 0.4% of the runs scored over 100 million points. They also go on to talk about the different ways people died in the game, areas that players need to work on the most, traffic sources (Stumbleupon tops the list), and more.

The second infographic they posted has all the juicy details. It covers the first two months that the game has been in the wild, and lays out how much money they’ve made thus far. The stats include money from both the Apple App Store as well as the Flash-based game. You’ll also be able to see a chart of how their App Store sales have progressed since the launch, and they point out what a big affect sites like Engadget had on their sales. Even more interesting, however, is their visual explanation of how the “bidding war” went on for the sponsorship of their Flash-based game.

An Android version of the game will be coming out shortly, and I can’t wait for them to tally up the stats on that one as well. In the mean time I was talking with the game creators and asked how they came up with the Solipskier name. The “skier” part was rather obvious, but I wasn’t sure about where “solip” came from. They apparently grabbed “solip” from a shortened version the word solipsism. According to Wikipedia solipsism “is the philosophical idea that only one’s own mind is sure to exist.” So basically it’s like living in a dream world that your own mind is making up. According to Mikengreg this is how it applies to the skier:

The implication is that the skier and his world just exists within his own head, and therefore he can create the world however he sees fit. So the obvious use for his infinite power is to make a mountain and do sweet tricks.

Fair enough. If you haven’t played the game you can jump on over to their homepage to play it for free, or you can grab the universal app for the iPhone/iPad for $2.99 in the App Store:

Solipskier Homepage (where you can play the free Flash-based version)
Solipskier iTunes Link ($2.99 to purchase as a universal iPhone/iPad game)

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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