Hate to play devil's advocate, but it sounds somewhat similar to what Israel does with their airports, but leveraging technology to identify all details (and more than a human could reasonably do), rather than training individuals to do the same.
Methods, deployment (in terms of location) and data retention are obviously the distinguishing factors here.
>Hate to play devil's advocate, but it sounds somewhat similar to what Israel does
who said that Israel is human rights, non-racial/ethnical-discrimination, etc... champion?
Don't get me wrong - i'm not anti-Israel, i completely understand the necessity of the war they fighting for their survival. It is just that when you fight a war for your survival you don't have the luxury of championing human rights. Israel situation isn't an example to follow, it is a problem to be fixed when the war is over.
What I want to see is how the app market will pan out. I can only assume (and didn't previously consider) that this will not carry Google branding at all - that means the Android Market, Gmail, Maps, etc, apps will all be missing.
The Android Market would be the big loss here. Amazon seems to take more control over the selling of your product than you do once you submit to their Appstore, but if you want to show up on their tablets, you won't have a choice.
What matters is that the NEA now officially considers video games worthy of artistic merit, which is pretty damn cool.
Since the first I heard of this (apparent) debate, I wondered why artwork, music, and story were all works of art separately, but the three of them together with a form of interaction by a person was not. The consideration of video games as a form of art doesn't seem like a judgement to me, it seems more like a rationalization.
If the game is just a delivery mechanism for "art" (like the music or visual design or whatever), then the game itself is not art any more than an art gallery is art. I've always held that games can be art as games and not just as packages of visuals and audio. Because the act of playing the game can be affective. Like when you had to burn the companion cube in Portal. That kind of experience can't be conveyed in other forms of art.
Although Gruber is summing it up based on a developer's words, they do state this ridiculous data collection in their privacy policy (which is an implied agreement, based on your downloading of the app).
We also collect pictures, videos, comments, and actions you take through the App (“Content”), and information on your location. When our App is active, your Device provides periodic updates to our server of your location, which allows us to show you fresh Content based upon where you are at that moment. We share your Content with others. Sharing Content publicly with others from different locations is what this App is about. If you find this objectionable, please consider not using our App or Site.
Harmonix (creators of Guitar Hero, which they sold, and Rock Band) has a similar story. They created a handful of games over a decade or so, all music based, that never really caught on. When they released Guitar Hero and a few karaoke games, they did a little better than breaking even, and with the release of Guitar Hero 2 sales exploded.
Yep, I've worked here since 1996 (the company was founded in 1995) and we didn't release Guitar Hero until 2005 (actually, we didn't release a game at all until 2001, although we had done other music apps before). It was a total hockey stick curve.
I don't have familiarity enough with any of the titles to say I had actually heard of them until Donkey Kong Country. Then suddenly virtually every game by them I knew of and liked.
Blast Corps was hugely fun. Golden Eye... Banjo-Kazooie. Perfect Dark. Now recently Viva Pinata.
You must not have been a NES player. A bunch of their NES games were loads of fun: Marble Madness, R.C. Pro-Am, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, and probably their biggest NES success: Battletoads.
I moved to the Chicago area around a little over a year ago and this feature has been around at least that long.
It's also available by enabling the "Transit" layer under the "More..." button, and also the transit layer in the Maps application on Android (and presumably the iPhone).
It's an incredibly handy feature when you don't know the area and/or combined with the "Arrive By" option under Public Transit when getting directions.
I want to agree with you so badly (and to some extent, I suppose I do), but any time I consider the margin of users you could "safely" exclude, I consider the competitor who does not.
On the other hand, any time you consider spending dev cycles to accommodate a minor player in the mobile market, you can consider the competitor who instead makes their product better on the main platforms.
Methods, deployment (in terms of location) and data retention are obviously the distinguishing factors here.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1024850 for an article on it, from around two years ago.