Thoughts in Time

Just got this from a friend… Massive Multi-Player Real World Games (MMRWG) are going mainstream through Amp’d mobile…

PhoneTag coming to Amp’d Mobile

PhoneTag is coming to Amp’d Mobile. The upstart MVNO which targets young users is working with LivePlanet, the company behind Project Greenlight, to release the multiplayer game that combines video action and real life to its users.

PhoneTag uses location-based capabilities, mapping and messaging to create the game. Players have to capture a specific target by getting close to it without getting captured by another player. It’s a war of attrition – the last player standing wins. Players will be able to enter games set up by Amp’d, set up private games for their friends, or enter tournaments.

Users will pay a flat monthly fee that hasn’t yet been determined. LivePlanet will be looking at in-game advertising opportunities to generate additional revenue. They will also be looking to license it to other carriers.

The game will be released in the second quarter of this year.

A couple weeks ago, I attended a brief talk by Rob Glaser, fellow Yalie and founder of Real Networks. When asked where he saw opportunities, Rob outlined two areas.

1. Create businesses that take advantage of the fact that the “net generation” views the online world differently than those who grew up without the internet. i.e. It’s not clear to the older CEO of Viacom why something like MySpace.com would grow so quickly because he would never post all about his life online.

2. Ubiquitous wifi will create new opportunities.

I have a friend who’s business is in the ubiquitous wifi space- Radiuz (kind of a p2p wifi business…) the struggle is the business model.

I’ve been thinking about opportunities that ubiquitous wifi might create. One interesting area is Big Urban Gaming. I’ve seen some ideas around using cell phones and semacodes, but nothing ultra sophisticated.

It seems like there would be really neat opportunities to create games that occur both in the real built environment and online. Especially multplayer games. Obviously, this works best in urban environments, but that’s where our population is centered anyway.

It’ll be interesting to see if in the future, massive multiplayer real world games or “big urban games” catch on. We all may be running around with our cell phones, origami’s or psp’s playing a massive game of capture the flag….

So… I login to Amazon the other day to make a purchase, and am confronted with “my very own plog” or “personal web log” as Amazon explains it to me. I did a web search to see if Plog had been used this way more generally. There are people on Technorati who use the terms plog and blog almost interchangeably. The question is, as Amazon now exposes this term to the world, will it become as common a part of the lexicon as “blog”… will it surge passed “vlog” in popularity? Only time will tell… Just for fun I purchased “BizPlog.com.” I figure if the term becomes popular, someone might like that domain .

I’ve been travelling a lot. In the last ~6 weeks I have had 2 days at home on the week-end hmm…. 0 times… It’s nice to be at home. I also have some fun stuff to post about.