Peter Chun

A long weekend usually means less news, but for those looking for a new and quite often attractive take on news, the ongoing battle for geek chick supremacy offers a bountiful choice.

Webb Alert

Michael discribed Morgan Webb’s daily tech show as “a winner” and even stays up till 2am to catch new episodes. Occasional mens mag model Morgan Webb delivers tech related news from across the world. Our August 2007 review here.

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Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Blue Note recording artist Priscilla Ahn will take the New York City LIVE@FYI stage on Monday, March 24th at 2:00 p.m. EST with host Jon Johnnidis as she delves into her new album "Good Day" sponsored by Chipotle Mexican Grill.

The live feed on www.liveatfyi.com will actually start at 1p.m. EST with interviews of Max Haot from Mogulus, Paul Kontonis from For Your Imagination and host Jon Johnnidis by  Johan Farid Khairuddin, the newest Asia Pacific UN Youth Ambassador and Malaysian radio and satellite celebrity.

All studio guests of LIVE@FYI will get to sample delicious fudge from Brooklyn Fudge with special thanks to Amanda Jones.

LIVE@FYI is a live web series on Mogulus and produced by For Your Imagination which showcases the best and most promising bands and artists the music industry has to offer. Whether it’s an unsigned solo performer, a YouTube video sensation, or household name, LIVE@FYI will instantly bring a unique and exciting live performance to a global online audience.

Many college students (but few others) will recognize the Risk-like game known as Turf that pits thousands of students against each other in a weeks-long online wargame that is similar to the board game Risk, but uses the college campus as the map.

What started off as a for-fun experiment by Yale student Gabe Smedresman in January 2007 resulted in a game that went on for over a month and involved over 3,300 Yale students (more than 25% of the student body).

But now that original game of Turf has spawned two separate and funded startups to push the game as a business. Smedresman joined with Harvard students Andrew Fong, Matt O’Brien, and Hugo Van Vuuren to found Kirkland North, a Y Combinator backed startup (screen shot of their game is above). Meanwhile, a rival company has launched that was founded by some of the players of Smedresman’s original game, called GoCrossCampus.

A New York Times article today written by Brad Stone profiles GoCrossCampus and suggested the founders invented the game and said “The game, a riff on classic territorial-conquest board games like Risk, may be the next Internet phenomenon to emerge from the computers of college students.” There was no mention of Kirkland North or Smedresman’s original work in that article.

Kirland North contacted the NYT, they say, to set the record straight. Stone then wrote a new article on the NYT’s Bits blog with the additional information supplied by Kirkland North.

The Kirkland North guys are obviously irate over what they see as a blatant rip-off of their idea. In a phone conversation, Van Vuuren said that the GoCrossCampus guys are not engineers and had to outsource the development of the game, using Turf as a guide. The code base is inferior, he said, and of the 20 games that have been run on the GoCrossCampus platform, half have had technical failures (GoCrossCampus has not yet responded to my request for comment) (Update: see below). Van Vuuren says their platform is stable and has had no problems in the six games they’ve run since last year. A recent Stanford game, he says, had 2,500 players, with more than 1/3 of undergraduates playing.

And there is yet more drama - the original NYT’s article on GoCrossCampus had a prominent quote from Google product manager Jonathan Rochelle, who “views it as similar to software like Google Calendar and Google Docs — tools that enhance real-world collaboration,” and “Next month, Google will bring GoCrossCampus to its New York office, pitting sales departments against engineering groups over a map of the company’s Manhattan campus.”

But it turns out that Gabe Smedresman is actually a full time Google employee. The fact that Google is planning to run his rivals’ game at their New York office must not sit well with him at all.

Of course, Hasbro, the owners of the original Risk game, will have something to say about the real inventor of the game, so neither company may have much moral ground beneath their feet.

See also our coverage of Kdice, a simple synchronous multiplayer version of Risk.

Update: I spoke to a somewhat bewildered GoCrossCampus co-founder Brad Hargreaves (who’s currently on spring break). He says that the GoCrossCampus code base was developed completely separately from the original Turf game, and that they made repeated offers to Smedresman to join their founding team, which he declined. He also says that at the time they spoke to the New York Times, which was last month, they had no idea Smedresman intended to start his own rival startup. Hargreaves also disputes KirklandNorth’s assertion that the GoCrossCampus founders aren’t engineers - two of the founders are engineers, he says. Finally, Hargreaves says that their technical hiccups were all in the first two games that they ran; all subsequent games, he says, have run smoothly.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Here are some of the jobs posted to CrunchBoard over the past week:

• VP Operations and Finance
  Zivity, San Francisco CA
• Director, Product Management
  Fox Interactive Media, Beverly Hills CA
• Technical Product Manager
  Brightcove, Cambridge MA
• Senior Product Manager
  Photobucket, San Francisco CA
• Senior Developers (PHP/MySQL)
  Playlist.com, Palo Alto CA
• Senior Web Engineer
  MyStrands, New York City NY
• Sales Representative
  Keibi Technologies, San Francisco CA
• Interactive Programmer
  McKinney, Durham NC
• Applications Developer - J2EE, Websphere
  Scholastic, New York City NY
• Lead Programmer
  Drizzoo, State College

International readers can check out our British and French job boards as well.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Think you are good at trading stocks? Here’s a good Friday afternoon time waster for those of you who prefer more grown-up games than you can find on Mytopia.

Test your trading skills at Inspectd. The site, which has been around for a while, shows you a historical stock chart with nothing more than the price and the moving average. You are given $100,000 in fake money and you have to decide whether to buy, skip, or sell based on nothing other than the price. Once you decide, it tells you the name of the stock, what it actually did over the next 20 days, and adjusts your account accordingly.

It is pretty addictive, and cheaper than day trading with real money.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

There is a new casual gaming network in town that’s got some serious cross-platform chops. Don’t be fooled by the cutesy graphics. Today, Mytopia is simultaneously launching across Facebook, Bebo, MySpace (currently pending approval) and its own Website with eight games (Chess, Backgammon, Sudoku, Dominoes, Bingo, Spades, Hearts, Video Poker). On Monday, it will release the same games across the major Web and desktop widgets: iGoogle Gadgets, Apple Dashboard Widgets, Yahoo Widgets and Windows Vista Toolbar Widgets.

Here’s the thing: the games work across all of these platforms. You can be on Facebook playing cards with one friend on MySpace and another on Bebo. And you can control what people on each network see about you. For instance, you can present your real profile to your friends on Facebook, and a different Mytopia avatar to everyone else. These are the sort of apps that could one day break Facebook’s, or any social network’s, hold on its members.

Mytopia was founded by a young Israeli American, Guy Ben-Artzi, and his sister Galia Ben-Artzi. They grew up in Silicon Valley, but now split their time between the U.S. and Israel. Nearly all the company’s engineers are in Israel. Guy wants to bring the computing architecture and game-play behind massively multiplayer online (MMO) games like World of Warcraft to casual games with broader appeal. Guy explains:

What we have done over the past year is look at all the massive multiplayers and tried to analyze what makes those sticky and social. What is great about all of these massive multiplayers is you have people playing in guilds and trading with each other. We are building the MMO backend minus the 3D perspective and hard core genre.

Mytopia games include the ability to join teams, compete in matches, send in-game messages, win points for different skill levels, collect virtual currency and trade in-game items with other players. The company plans to explore different ways to make money including in-game sponsorships, premium subscriptions, and micro-transactions linked to game items and the in-game economy.

In May, the startup plans to open up its casual gaming platform to other developers. By delivering this write-once, deploy-anywhere capability, it hopes to challenge other social gaming networks with platform ambitions such as Zynga and SGN. This should be fun to watch.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Check out the detail pics of the upcoming 08 summer release Nike Dunk High SB “Thrashin” ..

Check here - Dunktionary

New Sequoia-backed visual search engine SearchMe is just starting to send invitations to their private beta, which launched last week. The company says there are 30,000 people now on the waiting list. But if you want to get in now, just click here and enter your email. The first 1,000 people get in immediately.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Univ presents a couple of events this week. A Night Sale. A “Best Of…” of classic Alphanumeric mixtapes. A breakdance showcase.

Be sure to check out the Robust Flavor blog often for your websurfing needs.

Source: Robust Flavor Blog

Check the flyers after the jump…
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Don’t mess with March Madness. CBS Sports is learning that lesson the hard way on Facebook, where a major backlash is happening over its NCAA basketball bracket application. Yes, this is the same application that was allowed to spam users’ friends with more invites than other Facebook apps. The app—which lets you pick which basketball teams you think will win March Madness, track your progress, and compare with friends—isn’t working properly. For instance, yesterday it didn’t know that Texas A&M won against BYU. We were alerted to this problem by Jake Pease, a student at the University of Florida, who wrote in an e-mail:

I just wanted to report on the issues I’ve seen with the CBSSports Facebook app that has users peeved on the forums. . . . As some of you may know, A&M won their game today against BYU. Alas, Facebook says otherwise, with A&M coming up in red.

On top of this, if you refresh your bracket a few times, you’ll see different calculations for your current score.

People commenting on the CBSSports app are saying some pretty harsh things about the app. I can’t blame them. This is supposed to be an application that awards $10,000. If they can’t get the math right enough to tell me my score, how can I know they’re picking the right person? Come on CBS, didn’t your coders actually test the program before you deployed it?

Fail.

This is a serious issue for college students and other sports fans following the tournament. There is a lot of beer money at stake, not to mention that chance at $10,000 CBS Sports is offering to anyone whose picks end up in the top 10 percent. But it is an even more serious issue for CBS Sports. It is failing in a very public way. This is the risk big brands take when they put an app on Facebook. It had better work or else the world will hear about it. Below are some more comments from irate Facebook members who add the application to their pages:

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.