Tuesday, October 31, 2006 - Posts

Google Acquires JotSpot

We're writing to let you know that Google has acquired JotSpot. We believe this is great news for our users. More importantly, we want to reassure you that you'll continue to have uninterrupted access to your account. Both Google and JotSpot are committed to supporting our customers, and we understand that users have invested a lot in our products. In the near-term, we're focused on migrating JotSpot to Google's systems and datacenters. We'll work hard to make that move as seamless as possible so that customers won't be inconvenienced.

Why is Google acquiring JotSpot?

Google shares JotSpot's vision for helping people collaborate, share and work together online. JotSpot's team and technology are a strong fit with existing Google products like Google Docs & Spreadsheets and Google Groups.

What does this mean for JotSpot customers?

We believe that joining Google will accelerate our team's vision of offering users the best collaboration platform on the web. Google shares that vision and presents us with the world's best environment for delivering on it. We'll be taking advantage of Google's world-class systems infrastructure and operations expertise to ensure that access to your JotSpot is fast and reliable. We can't share any of our plans publicly just yet, but we can tell you that we're incredibly excited about the possibilities. We can't think of a better company to have been acquired by.

I was one of their first beta testers, it's a great Wiki and I wish them the best of luck - We’re Googlers now

My Spot Got.Jot.com was in hibernation, but I just loged-on and they welcomed me back!

See a demo of what JotSpot sold to Google today

Massively Multiplayer Game Design

Jack Emmert, Lead Designer of Cryptic Studios gave the day two Keynote at the Serious Games Summit .

One of the most fascinating aspects to massively multiplayer games like City of Heroes is the amazing user behaviors that take place inside hugely social online worlds. Whether collaboration, leadership, or peer-to-peer education, researchers everywhere are documenting and discussing the social phenomenon of online games. This is great, but if we're going to use MMP design ideas and technologies to create new styles of education, collaborative environments and leadership training, we need to look at how these games actually instill and support these behaviors. Many of the core behaviors that fascinate people about online worlds did not just emerge of out thin air.

In this talk Jack Emmert, the lead designer of City of Heroes, details what goes into the refined design of hit multiplayer games and the specific approaches games in the multiplayer space use to foster collaborative and other behaviors that many recognize as the foundation of next-generation knowledge worker skill set.

Serious Gamers

Ben Sawyer in his talk Serious Stuff Gamers Do at the Serious Games Summit demonstrated that there is something extraordinary going here.

We are witnessing the germination of something huge and exciting as gamers take on the world. See the video of his talk by clicking on the photo..

Windows Media Player 11

Microsoft Releases Windows Media Player 11 for Windows XP

I've been running a beta Windows Media Player on my XP machines for half a year without any problems, so now we have the release candidate ready to DOWNLOAD NOW.

I remember when Windows Media Player 10 was released, I had a three hour advance notice and a blogger in Italy linked to my blog and I think all of Italy came through my blog that day to grab the link to the Windows Media Home. Godalo....