Episode 155 – Holiday Potluck

Gearing up for the festive season, Michael and Michael serve up a veritable smorgasbord of holiday potluck delights. Starting with well, um, leftovers from last week, Fitbit has indeed acquired the technology, software assets and intellectual property of Pebble and many of the people from Pebble will be joining Fitbit to continue their work on wearable technology. This brings up an interesting point on the nature of cloud services and the integration with physical devices — that one without the other does not work, as products and services are becoming more and more intertwined. Moving on to appetizers, Cortana now … Continue reading

Episode 154 – Heroic Wearable Brain Robots

Michael and Michael share their insight on games for good, specifically on games that have an additional benefit to the fun of playing them.  Sea Hero Quest is a game sponsored by Deutsche Telekom together with University College London, University of East Anglia and Alzheimer’s Research to help with early diagnosis of dementia.  Michael and Michael discuss the possibilities of a software layer which could be placed on top of (or alongside) other games that could capture similar data points for researchers. The pair then turn to wearables, and the interesting way that mobile and Internet of Things devices can … Continue reading

Episode 109 – Phone Floppers

Michael and Michael get together this week to muse over how students can address college debt via gaming, thanks to a link from co-host Phaedra. We also look at how the Internet Archive is saving games from digital extinction, while reminiscing about some of our favorite old-school games. This brings us to a deeper discussion on how newer games with server components and digital rights management, may be disabling this preservation to continue. We end-up musing about use cases for Apple’s upcoming Watch announcement and how the smart-watch ecosystem may become yet another lock in play for the mobile ecosystem. … Continue reading