Archives 2009

I’ve had this in my inbox… for a presentation on a whole series of “Twitter Saves Lives” type scenarios.   For those who remember the tragic events of 9/11, we all know, if we had Twitter in those days, communication would have spread like wild-fire and countless lives would have been saved when Cell networks went down, but SMS stayed up.

This has been said for lives being saved and communication on Twitter during EarthQuakes and other situations, but here is a direct story of how lives were saved recently with Lost Skiers’.

Twitter, Google Maps Used To Track Down Two Missing Skiers – from TechCrunch

by Robin Wauters on March 3, 2009

Update: Tragically, one of the skiers, Rob Williams, was not able to be saved. Our thoughts go out to his family.

Yesterday, a group of technology entrepreneurs from the UK on a skiing vacation in the Swiss Alps (Verbier) lost two of their party around 4 PM CET. Other members of the group put out arequest on Twitter in order to learn the numbers of their mobile phones, so they could use the signals to track them down.

According to follow-up tweets, one person (Jason) was rescued using a combination of GPS, Google Maps to determine longitude and latitude, and the signals returned from his iPhone, but another one (Rob) was still missing as the two had apparently been split up. It’s been 7 to 10 hours since the last Twitter messages at this point, so unfortunately we can only hope and not confirm if Rob has been found by now.

Below are a number of screenshots with Twitter messages from some of the group, includingAlex Hoye (CEO of digital marketing agency Latitude, Michael Acton Smith from Mind Candy,Joshua Marsh and Hermione Way (TechFluff.tv) Michelle Dewbs (winner of The Apprentice).

Let’s hope everything is alright. We’re frantically tracking Twitter to learn more, and we’re not the only ones.

(Hat tip to Google Maps Mania)

Hats off to those who took advantage of the medium, and TechCrunch for covering it.  And it just goes to show, Twitter is a community of people who want to share information, but also share in the lives of others, often including saving lives whether it is something as direct as freezing cold or even losing ones job and needing to find a new way.

This isn’t the first time Twitter has helped save someone’s life, and it won’t be the last.

I did a quick search on this (before writing this) and didn’t find anything so I thought “Maybe I’m not the only one wondering about the special loot, Collections and the Vault on Mafia Wars!

Extra! Extra! New Post! – Zynga Mafia Wars – How to win a fight, best weapons, armor and vehicles

First: Special Jobs!

If you’ve been playing Mafia wars at all (I blame Jeff and Aviva for asking me to join)  You will notice there are tiers of skill-sets in the Jobs you are to pull off.

And as you go through these ranks you’ll eventually finish out at level 3 with 3 Stars!

So, what good does this do? What’s the purpose behind actually finishing all this BS on these levels?  Well, here are your winnings!

	This gives you +4% damage dealt in fights. (I thought it was just +4, didn’t even notice the %, omfg!)
	-7% damage received in fights
	A 30 second reduction on your health regen timer
	A 5% discount on property purchases

Additional collectables, based upon comments by Johnny! And Special thanks to Keith for providing the images!

	a 30 second reduction on your stamina regen timer
	a 5% discount on property repairs
	A 30 second reduction on your energy regen timer
	a 5% bonus on job experience
	2x the energy regenerated per regen period

Once you’ve gotten past that… you’ll eventually find yourself winning various prizes while you do your jobs and missions.  The list will look similar to this: (These are your collections)

Eventually while you develop your collection, you’ll obtain 7 of a single type, and you can then vault it.   The two things I’ve vaulted look like this:

If you cannot make that out, that is +6 energy, +2 energy and +5 defense.. all for playing the game in general.

So, nothing special otherwise has been revealed.

Okay – Some updates! Also if you happen to have the entries which are missing, let me know and I’ll be sure to update the list here!

I’ve also included what I have so far as Cuba stuff, and the other added NY things!

Also, the new Cuban Business Model is interesting

Be sure to invest your money in cuban businesses early and sell often if it nears filling up, because money is very difficult to come by in Cuba, even the top missions pay out at around a 3k max.

Though, here is a little ‘tip’ for those of who you get bored of constantly fighting and having to search/click.   Right click on an opponent who has a listing which you can defeat.  Copy the url, then open a new tab,  paste it, and keep click/entering on the url until you need to visit the hospital or are out of Stamina.   Yes, I am lame, but hey a lot of stamina gets boring!

Let me know if this is helpful, and when I come across other cool revelations I’ll list what those are here.

Also, if you’d like to join my Mafia in Mafia wars, or be my friend on Facebook in general, feel free to add me ;)

Also, if you’re on twitter, I love friends there too :) @cxi on twitter!

And for more information, check out my updated post

What’s new in Zynga’s Mafia Wars

Extra! Extra! New Post! – Zynga Mafia Wars – How to win a fight, best weapons, armor and vehicles

Wow, Seattle is a long walk from Chicago, so I wasn’t able to attend!

But that doesn’t mean I couldn’t be involved!

However in hind-sight I do want to be able to catch up on the resources, and I know others will, so here is a listing of some resources which were available and accessible for the CloudCamp Seattle event!

For those of you who are on Twitter, there was definitely some activity out there on the Tweetosphere!  Lots of activity on the hashtag #cloudcamp which was actively hit up by these folks as well. – @DanielleMORRILL @SecureSun @krishnan @mediaphyter @bmw

Special thanks to @DanielleMORRILL and @bmw for the live feed and moderation as well :)

The links! The links!  Some must visit links are…

Video Feed from the back of the room (This has direct links to the video :))

A similar feed on that was found here

Danielle Morrill’s live feed during Cloud Camps

Special thanks to  :)

And ofcourse, :)

You ever wake up to look at your tweet and come across this type of completely insincere DM?

This would be great if my name were infact John, but it isn’t.  And this is sheer spam!

Well, @jesse has taken SocialToo to a new level by taking responsibility to not promote the sending of DM Spam.  As Twitter grows at the exponential rates it is, vehicles to manage this relationship between real sincere users and fake autobots had to be taken somewhere.   I’m glad to see Jesse step up on this issue.   @louisgray has great coverage of this as well, as an advisor to the Socialtoo team and other boards, his knowledge and skill really provides context for these type of situations.

One of the greatest pieces of this, is as Jesse puts it:

In addition, starting today, while you will no longer have need for blocking SocialToo users’ automated DMs, we encourage you to invite all your friends to come check the same option you were using to block SocialToo DMs, and we’ll block other sites that do automated-dms. If you provide your Twitter username and password (this is required because other services require it – it will be via OAuth in the near future) and check the box, “Turn off automatic Direct Messages from other services?“, we’ll set you up to block DMs from as many services that do this as we can, automatically.

So, if you don’t like to get Auto-DM Spam, whether it WAS from Socialtoo, or from other third party services – subscribing to SocialToo, a responsible social service is the way to go.

I wish you all the best on this, and John you can remove your own Bubble of Spam like this ;)

Thanks TechCrunch for bringing us the Cloud Computing Round Table this Friday afternoon!

When it was announced that this cloud event was going to go on, those of us who couldn’t be there were concerned about our ability to catch it.

But in the passion and the inspiration of the Cloud and industry, they were able to get it streamed so folks like me in Chicago and folks across the world (to the tune of ~1500 watchers) were able to catch this great event.

A number of companies were showing off their products in the beginning and the clear winners were Veodia and Diomede Storage

Veodia—Video recording through the cloud.

Diomede Storage—Cheap, green storage with power-saving technologies at one tenth the cost of Amazon S3. Or so they claim..

They were judged, appropriately by this panel of judges:

Dan’l Lewin, Corporate Vice President, Microsoft
George Zachary, partner, Charles River Ventures
Geoff Ralston, CEO LaLa
David Bernstein, VP/General Manager, Cisco
David Kralik, Silicon Valley office Director of Newt Gingrich

And the interaction and discussion which ensued was enjoyed by all.  They did go easy and hard on some of the folks, but that is the game.

In all, the whole event was pretty active on Twitter as well with #tccloud as well as regular discussion and conversation.  Some of the more active folks discussing the event were myself, @cxi, @ashley_martin, @neerajKA, @missrogue, and @tekoppele

The ustream.tv livechat was pretty active as well! But none of us cached that for posterity!

One of the major questions was – Will this information be available for watching later, and the answer is Yes! The Cloud Computing Round Table is available here to watch.

So, if you were able to catch it, excellent! If not, I encourage you to watch it after the fact.

The panelists had some great talking points, and the discussions albeit very light were informative to the parties watching.

Special thanks to the Round Table of folks:

Vic Gundotra, VP Engineering, Google
Amitabh Srivastava, Corporate VP, Windows Azure
Lew Tucker, CTO, Cloud Computing, Sun Microsystems
Scott Dietzen, SVP Communications Products, Yahoo
Paul Buchheit, Co-founder, FriendFeed; creator of Gmail
Werner Vogels, CTO Amazon
Mike Schroepfer, VP of Engineering, Facebook
Gina Bianchini, CEO, Ning
John Engates, CTO, Rackspace

Marc Benioff, CEO, Salesforce.com

Thanks all of you who participated in the discussions… and I swear I’ll launch that Cloud blog when I have some free time… I just need 15 minutes ;)