Ada on Startup Marketing (@adachen)

Amazon’s plan plan to tackle student textbooks has met with plenty of skepticism. Is tackling college students a successful strategy? I did some digging back in my old files to see whether or not the Kindle would have made sense when I was in college not so long ago. I kept fairly good records of how much money I spent each semester in college. Here’s what I spent in one year: Read the rest of this entry »

I play a looooott of Flash games, and thought I’d show off a few of my recent favorites.

Boombot

KABOOM! Blow up bombs to get the guy to the door. Simple enough, right? Riveting, slightly random and sometimes downright frustrating puzzles are addicting with the perfect progression of difficulty. I will warn you that the moment I started to play this game, it quickly sucked up an epic proportion of my free time to beat it. For some reason although dissimilar in type, the appeal is reminiscent to the game Totem Destroyers which grabbed me in the same way. Congrats to the folks at Ninja Kiwi for coming out with a game which rivals Bloons for addictive engagement.

Gemworks

A polished little puzzle game from the Candystand portal. This is a deceptively simple game of matching gems to create larger gems against a time limit. At a certain point, game play becomes much slower and strategic in the higher levels. Even though there’s no story line or plot, they threw in this odd little section where the points you earn are “cash” which buys you hotels, limos and jets to build a mini-empire. Despite the oddness of the addition, collecting things adds an oddly compelling impulse to keep on playing the game just to see what happens when you buy every single item possible. I haven’t done it yet despite multiple tries – let me know if you do!

Umbrita

This game is really fun. My first try to get through this game on a dry run was 3 minutes 12 seconds. How did you do? =) I did a bit of Googling and just realized thanks to FreeGamesNews that this is actually an installment of a Moss platform series by the developer Ian Adam.

Duck, Think Outside the Flock

The perfected result of Bart Bonte’s tinkering (you can easily see the progression from his past game Fields of Logic), Duck Think Outside the Flock was a relatively short but very riveting puzzle game. The basic rule for this game can most likely be summed up almost as simply as ‘What’s wrong with this picture?’ I like the rate at which the level of difficulty ramps up, and there’s a good balance between discovery and logical thinking. Turn up your speakers for the cute quacks.

Enjoy!

Not even a year out of the M$ campus, and I’ve adapted to a new life in SF accompanied by the usual mix of geeky accoutrements. Along with the Twitter account and flirtations with new technology, I’ve also managed to acquire an assortment of Apple products including a brand new MacBook (which I’ve affectionately named “AdaBook”) to replace the old faithful IBM ThinkPad T40 and an iPhone.

A week into my new iPhone experience, all of my apps spontaneously stop working! Don’t get me wrong, I love the user experience of the iPhone – it’s unbeatable – but multiple hard reboots and logging in and out of the iTunes store later, I eventually got it to work again. A quick Google search showed that I’m really not alone.

The latest development this week is that my MacBook has started cracking! It’s been chipping away at three points in the case. Two right at the edge of the inner joint (under the Macbook monitor logo) and one at the right palm rest. Photos below:

My MacBook is very gently used. It spends most of the day sleeping on the living room coffee table, and has only traveled a handful of times. I am not a student and don’t lug it around anywhere. I’ll try taking it into the Apple store this weekend and will report back to you what they say.

I definitely enjoy Apple products, but given the issues that I’m having with my month-old iPhone and eight month old MacBook, we’re not off to the most auspicious start. Anyone else having issues?

This past week I was able to spend some time at the Flashforward conference, held here in San Francisco at the Nob Hill Masonic Center.  Flashforward is a conference and showcase for the Flash design and development community. By my rough count, it brought together together a crowd of about 600-800 artists.

Some thoughts on Flashforward:

There was an inspiring keynote on the first day by Miha Pogacnik, a concert violinist whose talk focused on drawing the analogy of Bach’s Fugue in G Minor to life. He threw out a few interesting thoughts: normality is the worst thing for you, and question everything. I enjoyed the talk quite a bit, and it reminded me of a TED talk by Benjamin Zander on music and passion

At one point on the first day, Keith Peters asked for the crowd to raise their hands if they came from a computer science background.  Crickets, and a few hands.  From art and design? By far the vast majority of the room. The people in the room were all very different from the standard developer crowd, with the majority coming from interactive agencies.

Some cools links: flashscene.org – links to interesting Flash design/art demos, and also some picks from the Film Festival finalists: Contrapunctus Variations, Launchball, ensemble, and Twang – winner of the people’s choice award.
The Flashforward Film Festival, an awards show in various categories of Flash development, had lots of stunning content. A great deal of the finalists were commercial, but there was also some interesting indie work too. Along with a few highlights above, you can view all of the finalists here. It’s amazing to see the work that people are building in Flash. This is a short video I took of the Gaming showcase.