Google latitude is an interesting app available at least on Nokia phones that allows you to see where your friends are according to their mobile phone. At the moment it’s limited just to your gmail friends but expand to include more.
What makes this application interesting in the near future is that as more of the early adopting friends of yours install this app you’ll see which city they’re in quite easily. If the friends are in a public space then you can get more accurate directions.
I stopped playing Ingress a few years ago because of how much time it requires. I have started going on Ingress walks again – a 12km path to level 13 in yesterday’s case, because I’m combining the daily walk that I would do anyway, with listening to podcasts and audiobooks, anyway.
By walking and listening to audiobooks and podcasts I am constantly learning about new things. Recently I’ve been listening to current affairs podcasts, I listened to 13 minutes to the moon, I listened to podcasts about the Swiss Watch Industry and more. Every walk is a journey in learning. I also learn about the fifty objects that made the world and more.
I also listen to books when I walk. These aren’t the most inspiring of books but four of them were free, as part of the books I get by being an audible member via Audible originals. Every walk I go on is an opportunity to learn, without feeling that I am not as productive as I could be.
According to my blog stats, I should have lead with writing about the game Ingress, which I took a break from for years, because of how much time it takes to level up, especially when you live in the countryside.
Luckily as time has progressed so has the ability to suggest and have new portals approved. A 12-kilometre walk had three or four portals. Now it has twenty or thirty. This means that during a walk in the countryside it is worth playing Ingress. Going to a polluted city is no longer required. Even country bumpkins like me can play and progress.
By having portals in the countryside it also opens up the prospect of Ingress bike rides. Last week I cycled from Nyon to Rolle, and from Rolle I went up into the vineyards and I destroyed and captured portals. My health benefited because it was a 40km bike ride with four hundred meters of climbing in between vineyards and some of these climbs are steep.
That’s where you see that cycling in Spain has its advantages. I cycled up steep inclines without suffering or worrying I wouldn’t make it. I also cycled up those steep inclines clipped in. I don’t feel comfortable with cycling up steep hills when clipped in because I’m afraid that if I lose power in my legs I will lose forward momentum, not be able to unclip and fall.
Having said this the swiss hills are nothing compared to the Cumbre Del Sol climb. As you cycle up from Mercadona there is one bit of road that is so steep that you can’t start up again. I know because I made the mistake of stopping there and had to walk a hundred meters or so before I found a portion flat enough to start up again.
In Switzerland, you almost never find such gradients on roads, for the simple reason that it snows and water freezes. Snowploughs and other machines need to go up and down Swiss roads.
To get to level 13 I participated in an Ingress Saturday for the first time in years and I participated in two fielding events, to get one of the medals I was lacking the first time, and for the Didact Field Challenge medal currently taking place.
This month I visited 735 unique portals, discovered one portal, collected 4.7 million XM, walked 117 kilometres (low because most of my walking is without playing ingress) and more. I could bore you with the stats but I’d bore myself too. I also spent three weeks in Geneva as part of a favour for a friend so during my daily walks I got back in the habit of playing Ingress.
I don’t make time to play Ingress. I take advantage that my walks and bike rides take me by Ingress portals and play. By combining Ingress with cycling I go down many more roads than I would otherwise go down. I explore villages that I have no reason to stop in. I treat cycling as a journey, rather than a challenge to get segment personal records. I slow down., to experience the locations. It results in me having a more relaxed bike ride.
Ingress walks are also interesting because local people, who know about features that could be portals suggest them, and as a result, we see a portal off to the side of where we’re going, and we investigate. We capture the portal but we also increase our mental map of the area where we are walking.
Ingress, for a while, was a game for people who lived in town and cities. If you lived in the countryside you had to make time to play. Today Ingress can be played in short bursts and yield better results. It has been from a “chronophage” (waste of time/time consuming)activity, as french speakers would call it, to being, for lack of a better word, integral to our daily activities.
The Return on Investment of time, and distance traveled, to play Ingress, even in the countryside has decreased to the point where it is feasible to level up, without devoting half a day. One hour yields the same result.
The Twitterstorm is a description of an event where hundreds of 140 character messages are sent at the same time. The most recent example of this occurrence is the one that took place when news of Jaiku being swallowed by google broke. Both Twitter and Jaiku are similar. They both give you 140 characters to express yourself and they can both be taken with you.
When Jaiku was sold to Google the Twitter community has been wondering what’s next for them. That is true, at least for those who are not heavy users of twitter. For the more passive user Jaiku is more appealing because it’s got more bells and whistles. Twitter relies on your ability to express what is on your mind exclusively through text. Tinyurl does make the task a little simpler.
What made the storm so interesting is how over a period of just a few minutes hundreds of SMS could be received should you turn on twitter tracking as I did. I was been bombarded by messages at a tremendous rate. Everyone wanted to be able to say that they twittered the event. They did. Twitter didn’t go down.
Jaiku did though, after all there’s nothing more attractive than a website that’s just become part of the Googleverse. It’s fun to see these new media events. That’s right BAMS students. Do media events still occur? Yep, and the Twitterstorm around Jaiku is one of them.
We shall see many more of them as big stories break.
Whilst a friend was filming with a high speed camera i was streaming the event live from my phone via Qik. I noticed they improved a couple of important things. The first is that video files are now saved and readable without conversion. The second fact is that you now have an RSS feed, makes aggregation easier. I’ve added two or three of those feeds to itunes so the content can be accessed more easily.
And there are a few more on Qik which I’ll let you get to yourself.
Transport Tycoon, the popular game, is now available as a portable application file. This means that you can install it on a USB key and play the game from anywhere. This comes alongside the openTTD which is an open source movement to keep the game around for us to enjoy.
The aim of the game is to create a transport empire using, trains, trucks, buses, planes and boats. As you build more networks so you gain more money and your services can expand. It is a management game to help you see the hours away in your free time.
There are a number of reasons which make Pokemon Go popular. I believe that the Ingress User base plays a key role, that marketing had an effect and that curiousity also played an important role.
Big user base
Ingress has a large and vibrant community of players. These players are so passionate about this game that they are willing to walk 30 or more kilometres a day whilst staring at their phone. They are ready to climb to the peaks of some mountains and brave rain, sleet, snow, high winds, mud, heat and the cold. How many of us have had our fingers go numb as a result of playing ingress after all. That passion for the game was seen by children and Ingress playing parents let their children play. The children found it fun and so when they heard that Pokemon Go was coming out they automatically wanted to use this game.
This adds a second dimension. Parents who enjoy playing Ingress are likely to have more than one mobile phone and more than one data sim. These parents are ready to give a mobile phone and sim card to their children. These children are then likely to play with friends. Yesterday evening when I was with Ingress players they had already switched to Pokemon Go and they kept commenting on the number of children they saw already playing the game.
Remember that we live in a globalised society. Whether you live in France, Belgium, Germany, Australia or the United States you will have heard about Ingress, about Pokemon Go and you will have been curious to try the new game
Curiousity
The beauty of modern society is that we live in a globalised discussion environment where things that capture the imagination are discussed and spread at the speed of light, or at least very close to it. This means that when a game is made available in one country every other country is curious to try it. Curiousity made me download the game. We will see how long the interest lasts.
Marketing
Marketing plays a role to get new members engaged in to the community that already exists. Marketing is now global, not local. When you market to one market the world takes note. Content is geo-blocked but not adverts. Marketing creates the demand. Problem solving satisfies the demand, unofficially.
Dedication
The Ingress community is a tight-knit and dedicated community. The game originated in the US but as Europeans, Africans, Asians, Latin Americans and the international community played this game so they laid down the grown work for the game to be engaging for people everywhere. The more portals are within easy walking distance the more engaged you will be. The more convenient they make the game the more likely you are to play on.
I write this as a person who downloaded Ingress, played for a few minutes two or three years ago and then left it. It was only when A First Saturday was organised in Lausanne and that I saw how many people were in the community that I decided to give more time to the game. We speak about word of mouth and virality via Social Media. The community simply shifted from one game to the next at a global level.
Summary
Ingress by Niantic is a popular game with a close-knit and dedicated community of gamers. These gamers have shared their passion for one game and are now shifting towards Pokemon Go. Using portals as Pokestop has saved Niantic thousands of hours of work. No need to recreate hundreds of points, no need to approve them. Everything except server capacity is ready for this game to become global.
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You can select to specify where you are by city and country if you like. You have quite a bit of control. I have found a bug though. Sometimes it displays that I'm in another city and country than where I actually am.
For a moment it thought I was in England and in Holland. Haven't changed country though.
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You can select to specify where you are by city and country if you like. You have quite a bit of control. I have found a bug though. Sometimes it displays that I'm in another city and country than where I actually am.
For a moment it thought I was in England and in Holland. Haven't changed country though.