Archive for May, 2007

This isn’t N-Gage-related but I thought it was too cool to pass up. Google released a street level, photographic overlay today, a beta feature that adds street-level photographs to its popular interactive mapping software.

Want to see where Ikona, Redrum, Congested and the rest of the Arena crew live, work and breathe? Follow this link to the Nokia office, click on the “STREET VIEW” button.

Then rotate the camera around until you see the big red brick building with the logo of another, cough cough, prominent gaming company. Here’s a short tutorial that shows you how the service works.

Only a few cities are covered right now, but you can see where this is going, give or take a few years. Lost somewhere? Pull out your mobile and follow the photographs home. =)

Just a quick reminder guys, you have one more day to submit your entries in for our Melting Pot II Caption Contest! The competition ends on Thursday, May 31 so get cracking!

We’ll announce the results on the Melting Pot II activity page.

All right Arena fans, you know the drill by now. We’re challenging you to create a funny caption for the picture below, as part of our Melting Pot Month II activity in the N-Gage Arena.

Successfully submitting your caption will earn you ten points on the Melting Pot II Scoreboard, while the funniest caption will get an additional ten points at the end of the month.

Here are the guidelines for this activity:

* Stay on topic! Only post caption entries on this thread, not general N-Gage comments.
* Keep it clean! All comments on this blog are moderated, so no profanity or user-bashing.
* English please! Your Melting Pot Caption Contest entry needs to be in English.
* Sign with your Arena username! Otherwise we can’t give you credit.
* One per customer! You can only enter once, so make your first shot your best one!

And here is the picture to comment on:

That’s it! To submit your caption, just hit add a comment.

SAMPLE:

“Hello, I’d like to order a taco for my taco!”

Submitted by ikona

As the captions are approved, they will be posted, and an updated list of successful caption submitters will be transmitted to Redrum for updating the scoreboard.

At the end of the month, Ikona will choose the funniest web caption and inform Redrum. That user will then receive ten additional points towards the May 2007 Melting Pot II activity.

Have fun!

Long-time Arena members may remember John “Vanityklaw” Kuner, one of our admins and formerly the boss of both Redrum and Ikona. He’s been on sabbatical from the N-Gage program since the Fall of 2006, working on a project that could be more important than videogames.

“What’s that?” you ask. “More important than videogames? Impossible! How can that be?”

We found it hard to believe too, until he started telling us about Project VIEW. This is a project that uses digital storytelling with camera phones for cross-cultural connections.

What that means in practice is helping people who normally wouldn’t get to interact face to face get to know each other through video. For example, imagine students in India exchanging video clips with students in Norway, describing their favorite places to eat.

This is a great way for people in different parts of the world get to know each other face to face, but without the intervening distortions of media or the expense of travel — sort of like Pen Pals for the Digital Age.

Project VIEW is part of the Digital Vision Program at Stanford University, a forum for social entrepreneurs to develop IT-based solutions in the areas of health, education, and finance for emerging markets.

If you’d like to learn more — or better yet, participate — visit the Project VIEW website.

Here is a sample from the project:

Click To Play

Picking up where the Guardian games blog left off yesterday, Brian Crescente over on Kotaku has a few good things to say about the new N-Gage application as well.

He says: “The service hits this autumn and I’m actually holding my breath. Weird.”

He also ‘gets it’ in terms of the new N-Gage being a software platform that works across multiple N-Gage ready devices:

In essence, Nokia wants to create a unified platform and back-end for Series 60 mobile phones that all developers can work on. Of course this is a business decision and very self-serving, but it’s also a great idea and much needed.”

There’s quite a few lively remarks in the comments section too, if a bit one-sided. Where did you go guys go, N-Gage fans?

Read the whole post here.

Greg Howson finds some kind words for the next generation of N-Gage in the Games Blog of the UK’s Guardian:

As someone who only plays mobile games as a last resort - and even then I usually give up in minutes - I was interested to see if N-Gage could offer something that would finally make mobile gaming live up to its incessant hype. And the demo I saw yesterday may well do that.

He goes on to discuss the merits of the N-Gage application, which you long-time readers of our site should be quite familiar with.

And if you’re not (shame on you), click around the rest of the Future Watch site and take a look at the preview videos and screen shots — they will give you a good idea of what he is talking about in regards to the online mobile community.