Episode 89 – Augmented Driving

This week, the Michaels focus on how Google’s various properties could all come together for some really cool game play. We also have a surprise at the end of the show! Listen all the way to the end for a surprise. We discuss the possibilities of what Ingress is really doing as you play. Does the collection of XM change the world? Is there an upcoming cool update to have Ingress and Waze come together? Did you see some cool road-muching during the World Cup? Michael M. tells about the game that was happening in Hungary, while Michael R. did … Continue reading

Episode 88 – War Games

This week the Michael’s are together again, after a quick holiday break. A fun and exciting show based on a bit of a journey from the Security Now podcast and Steve Gibson’s discussion of the website IP Vikings. We have loads of fun viewing attacking on the internet in real time,while discussing bots, botnets, eliza and personal assistants. We then look at some really cool personal assistant apps, and how you can game your contacts. What games are you playing? Show links: Norse Corp Ip Viking – Real-time Map of Internet Attacks 61% of all Web Traffic is Bots EasilyDo … Continue reading

Episode 87 – Squeezing out some value

Attempting to get back into a bit of a pattern for recording shows, we return with the Michaels to talk about tech, games and innovation. We go deep on how social networks are being gamed to provide deep data for businesses to sell to you. Is it appropriate for developers to leverage social games to pull data from users for advertising or nefarious purposes? Has Microsoft gotten it write with Cortana? Has FourSquare lost it’s game with Swarm? Do you accept random friend requests in your social checkin applications? Does sharing everything solve the problem? (Are we really that naive … Continue reading

Episode 86 – App Granularity & Gamification

Sandy, Phaedra and Michael R. are traveling, on vacation or otherwise engaged in important work, so Michael M. takes a shot at a solo show to explore some thinking on how a number of major apps are breaking down their function into smaller bite sized bits and deploying them as individual apps. Examples of this are FourSquare, with its Swarm app, Facebook, with the Messenger app, alongside some of the recent acquisitions like Instragam and WhatsApp. Linking to the Gamification theme of this podcast, Michael muses on how this application functionality breakdown allows for smaller component pieces of functionality can … Continue reading