Posts Tagged 'Google Wave'

Virgin’s Zombie Nation

You might well think there’s enough funny looking folk around already, but if you want to add more to your landscape, then try Virgin Trains new online game Don’t Go Zombie. It’s powered by Google Street View and is interactive with Facebook, just tap in your post code, start roaming the streets and ‘get ready to rescue the dead… tired’. Your task is to reach your destination whilst getting the car-driving ‘wretched ones’ to the safety of a Virgin train using your super-powered ticket machine. These lost souls are frustrated drivers who have been ‘zombiefied’ by good old traffic jams, stress, and lack of toilets. But watch out for the zombies who can also leave you permanently zombiefied. All is not lost though, you can invite your Facebook friends to rescue you, and have your profile picture turned into a zombie avatar until you’re saved. Richard Branson himself is reported to be being immortalized as a zombie later this month. Great sound effects, we just wish ticket machines really did make those peow peow noises…

Wave goodbye to Google Wave

We bid farewell to the Google Wave project, which has been called to an end with Lead Wave Developer Urs Hölzle stating in a Google blog post “Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked.” Once hailed as a potential replacement to email the web-based collaboration tool had big ambitions from the offset. We too we’re excited by its possibilities when we tested it out in beta last September. It wasn’t short of innovative features, character-by-character live typing, the simultaneous sharing of information and images and collaborative editing – this is pretty neat stuff. Though all these whizzy features may have ultimately been its downfall proving too daunting for many users to get to grips with. It’s not all bad news though, Wave took collaboration to a new level and while it may no longer exist as a standalone product many of the technological innovations it spawned are being used to enhance its existing products.

If you hadn’t heard of Newport before last week…

…we’re sure you have now. Newport (Ymerodraeth State of Mind), a YouTube viral covering Jay Z and Alicia Keys recent chart topper Empire State of Mind, replaces the New York inspired lyrics to describe the Welsh city of Newport with lines such as “When you’re in Newport. Chips, cheese, curry makes you feel brand new, washed down with a Special Brew.” The video was the brain child of first time film maker MJ Delaney, who got the idea for the video hanging out on the sofa with her boyfriend, singing alternative lyrics ‘for a laugh’. Since graduating from Oxford in 2007, MJ, who has relatives in Newport, has been getting by doing research work and made the film in a day with £100. But she has since had offers to create more music promos and even to release the song.  Demonstrating the power and influence of social media; it had over 1.5 million hits on YouTube, was covered by the BBC and the ITV News at 10, has apparently been seen by Jay Z himself, and led to the rapper Alex Warren’s impending audition for the next X-Men movie. But surely the highest accolade was Alex and his co-star singer Terema Wainwright, who nabbed the role after coming to her audition dressed as Alicia Keys, being invited to the reopening of the Newport Transporter Bridge.
The hit internet video was removed from YouTube on Tuesday, apparently due to a copyright dispute with EMI but has been followed up by yet another parody from Welsh exports Goldie Looking Chain.