David Emery OnlineExtendNY - New York City Extended
The Manhattan Grid extended to every point on earth
So awesome.
I’m on 63,741 st and 10,869 Ave. Taxi fair to Williamsburg might be a bit much from here though.
Visit ➔Sting’s iPad app cost “in the low seven figures” to develop
Earlier this week, we reported on the launch of Sting 25, an iPad app celebrating Sting’s solo career. But how much did it cost to make? More than one million dollars. This is according to the Wall Street Journal.
The app itself – if you’re a Sting fan – is pretty nice, but over $1million to develop is just plain ridiculous. A quick glance at the credits – which is several pages long – tells you why: when you involve big agencies, they’re very good at spending your money.
I find it interesting that Chevrolet and AmEx feel they are getting enough value from having their logos slapped on the splash page to finance such an endevour (assuming that is that they’re together stumping the cost). By then, sponsorship is the only way to go if you’re spending that much money on an app like this as you sure as hell aren’t going to sell 100,000 copies at $9.99.
Visit ➔Google+ Launches Pages, Opens Floodgates For Brands (And Everything Else)
And then there’s the feature that leads to my biggest gripe: Pages have both a +1 button and an ‘Add to Circles’ button. The latter is what permits the Page to start sending you updates. And the +1 button? It does essentially nothing, at least as far as users are concerned.
It’s not exactly surprising that Google have launched brand pages for Google+ but I do find it pretty surprising that they seem so bandy thought through. They seem to be the bare minimum that they could have launched with, which would be fine if there wasn’t a very developed alternative dominating the market already.
I have my concerns as well over the inevitable land grab that will happen as soon as everyone can make these brand pages; one of the big things they’re pushing is the integration with Google search, but I really don’t want a Google+ brand page showing up as one of the top results for one of our artists (as it’s almost the last place I’d want people to go) – to the point that actually, maybe it’s worth steering clear for that reason alone.
Checking my Google+ feed now shows the last post as being from 4 days ago, and if I go 10 posts down it’s almost a month ago. I have pretty much the same set of people loaded into it as I do on Facebook, and the latest activity there is 2 minutes ago. I do wonder where Google is going to go with this…
Visit ➔Grand Theft Auto V Trailer
The Grand Theft Auto series is probably my favourite set of games released by any single developer; not so much for the violence, but for the storytelling and amazing open world gameplay (without tying it down to anything tedious like levelling up or any of that rubbish).
This trailer for GTA V (which is confusing the 7th full GTA game, confusingly) looks pretty amazing to me; yes, it’s not exactly a radical departure – I know some people are disappointed it’s not in a new setting, maybe one outside US – but for me that’s not the point; the location will be actually different, with different things to find, but most importantly with a different story (and it does look like a different take this time, as it’s seems to be eschewing the “work up from the bottom” storyline the last few have employed).
I’ve written previously about how games are their own art form, and I think the GTA series is one of the perfect examples of that. Interactive storytelling, without skimping either on the “interactive” or the story.
Visit ➔St. Vincent 4AD Session
Recording these songs live for the first time, St Vincent has performed four tracks from Strange Mercy for the tenth visual installment in the 4AD Session series.
This is super awesome (click through for the full 4 track session):
Visit ➔The Horrors at the Roundhouse
More on Flickr here.
Thom Yorke at the Boiler Room
More on Flickr here.
