I’m a lifelong shooter, starting with a BB rifle & pistol growing up and moving into pistol / shotgun / rifle in college.  I joined the Army, which added much in the way of personal and crew-served weapon systems training.  I routinely qualified expert grenade, sharpshooter / expert rifle, and sharpshooter pistol.  But post-Army / post-college, my shooting dried up.  I tried to make an annual range run with a friend or my wife, but often went a couple of years between shootings.

Last fall I watched the first 3 seasons of History’s Top Shot.  If you haven’t seen it, it’s a Survivor-styled reality show that pits two teams of eight contestants each against each other in elimination challenges.  The contestants are various shooters from around the US, from military to law enforcement to competitive shooters to amateur plinkers.  They live together in a house in California and shoot 3-day episodes, where each episode has a theme (i.e., “The Long Shot”), a team challenge, and an elimination challenge for the losing team.  There is the typical reality show drama, but the shooting challenges and the weapons featured make the show interesting.  By the end of the season, you see some very impressive shooting.

This gave me the itch to hit the range again in a big way.  My brother and I hit Wade’s in Bellevue over a couple of lunches.  We stayed within 9mm (cheaper than .45!) and shot USPs, Sigs, Brownings, S&Ws, Berettas (hello, old friend!) and Springfields.

I wasn’t satisfied – the itch grew.

I dug into competitive practical shooting – both International Defensive Pistol Association (IDPA) and US Practical Shooting Association (USPSA).  I watched a year’s worth of the PowerFactor Show, a video podcast hosted by three local practical shooter gurus.  I bought a holster, mag holder, and went to West Coast Armory for their Tuesday night IDPA pistol league.  No gun of my own yet, so I rented an M&P 9.

I was hooked.  I trolled various forums, read blogs, pestered experts with questions… I thought about shooting when I woke up and when I went to bed.  Hooked?  No, I was addicted.

So here we are in 2012.  I’m running a Smith & Wesson M&P 9 Pro in IDPA’s Stock Service Pistol division.  I shoot Thursday night USPSA league (even though I’m an IDPA focused shooter – Tuesday nights don’t work for me) and usually warm-up in the member bays with some drills.  I dry-fire at home to augment my trigger time and build physical coordination.

We test it all soon; my first IDPA match is Renton Fish & Game Club’s January match.  I can’t wait to set the baseline and see where this year takes me.  I’ve got my sights set on two matches per month all the way until the state championship match in July.

My name’s Jeremy and I’m an addict.

Comparison of video size, iPad and iPod Touch

As far as tech toys go, I’m a late adopter.  I like playing with free betas, but when it comes down to handing over money, I become very conservative.  I like at least one Service Pack on my new OS, a critical mass of my friends on social apps, a solid couple of months post-release on a massively multiplayer online game, and a stalwart recommendation from my IT friends for new hardware.  I delayed my purchase of my Xbox 360 for almost two years; then shortly after I bought it, they announced the big price drop with the addition of the Elite model (shoulda waited longer!)

But this time, I threw the dice and pre-ordered a 32 GB Wifi-only iPad.  I even threw in a Mac Bluetooth keyboard, the dock, and a case.  There’s no super feature that made this the penultimate gadget for me; my desires were based around a great experience with my iPod Touch, a slowly growing interest in e-books (much to the dismay of my library card) and the ability to have a “one-stop-shop lite” computing device.  I game some, I email a fair amount, I watch videos while I travel or work out (no more tiny iPod on the treadmill – huzzah!) and I’ve been using the iPod Kindle app when I fly.

For me, the iPad gives me a richer media consumption experience than the iPod Touch I’ve been using. To Kathy’s point, this is my primary expectation for the device. I create content on computers and (to a much lesser extent) my Blackberry.  For me, my Apple products are one-way entertainment tools, and I’m fine with that.  Call me Gizmodo’s Reluctant Pragmatist (except for the pooping part; that’s just gross) – my iPad is a gadget that I expect I’ll get a lot of use out of.

So in that light, here’s a quick rundown of my thoughts on the three ways I’ll use it most, based on a weekend’s worth of play testing.

As a games platform
I played a few iPad-specific games: Party Pad: Marble Mixer, Worms HD, Command & Conquer Red Alert, Diner Dash: Grilling Green, and Aurora Feint 3.  Generally speaking games that were re-engineered for the iPad were pretty slick.  The graphics were pretty good and the controls worked well with the larger touch interface.  C&C was a little clunky responding but there’s a hefty amount of PC / mouse bias that I have when it comes to real-time strategy games.

I also imported my existing crop of games from iTunes.  These non-optimized games launch in an iPhone-sized window, but all loaded faster than my iPod and performed well (if small).  Due to the cost of retrofitting games with higher resolution art I suspect that we won’t see any free updates, but will see re-releases.  Compare, for example, the popular iPhone game Flight Control, which is currently available for $0.99 in the App Store with a new iPad version, Flight Control HD, selling for $4.99.

Comparison of games, Diner Dash Grilling Green on iPad, Plants vs. Zombies on iPod

We’ve seen iPhone games lead the way for the smartphone category in the mobile games industry.  The iPad’s faster hardware and lush screen is going to spur another gold rush for devs.  Due to the maturity of the App Store, however, it will be a much more compressed race from heady launch date prices ($13?!) back down to the sub-$10 impulse buy range.

As a media platform
The iPad is an awesome media player.  I’m watching my videos in a much bigger window; I’m reading my e-books on a hard cover-size screen.  Photos look really nice (but have to be managed through iTunes – a minor annoyance).  The Netflix app is nice, but not a big seller for me – we stream already through the Xbox 360 to our TV; when I travel I can watch via the Web on my laptop.  I haven’t used the iPad for listening to music yet; the much smaller form factor of the iPod wins here, when it comes to portable music while working out.

As a productivity platform
So far I’m slightly disappointed outside of the email / calendar apps (both of which were nicely updated to capitalize on the larger screen).  Google Docs is read-only within Safari; since I haven’t been able to swallow $9.99 for each of the iWork apps (Keynote, Pages, Numbers), I don’t have a writing app outside of Notes yet.  That said, Notes isn’t bad, but it’s a very rudimentary text application.

Comparison of email client

But Apple’s Bluetooth keyboard does a lot to help speed up the typing process, which is a boon to productively using these apps; the virtual keyboard is a little too small for touch typing, but 3-4 fingers is pretty good.  Once my iPad case arrives, that will help even more by propping up the iPad at a better viewing angle.

Overall, I’m enjoying the iPad quite a bit. For me, as I expect it will be for many people, its niche is the home reference tablet (email browsing, quick Google searches, etc. – things that you don’t always want to boot up a computer for) and mobile entertainment device.

Originally posted at FlipTheMedia.com

Groundspeak Pitch – Snook

Shot on a Canon Vixia HG21 w/ Canon shotgun mic and Manfrotto tripod. Effects were camera-based.

Photo courtesy of Casual Games Association

Recently members of the casual games industry convened in Kyiv, Ukraine, for the 4th annual Casual Connect Kyiv conference.  The Casual Connect conference series is sponsored by the Casual Games Association and brings developers, publishers and distributors of casual games together for three days of presentations and meetings.  Other Casual Connect meetings occur throughout the year in Seattle and Western Europe (historically Amsterdam or Hamburg).

What makes the Kyiv show unique among the Casual Connects, however, is the attendee list.  More so than any other casual games conference, Casual Connect Kyiv has a very high percentage of developers in attendance.  Other shows have a higher percentage of publishers, distributers and ancillary business development personnel (covering areas like payment processing, marketing optimization and other distribution channels).  But Eastern Europe has recently emerged as a hub in the development of casual games. What four years ago was a region most known for “cloning” games (copying popular games with little variation) has become a global leader for developing top-selling original games.

This success is due to two factors:  easy accessibility of technically talented personnel and much lower costs of development.  These two factors have led to strong partnerships with U.S.-based publishers who in the last couple of years have become increasingly focused on developing games for lower budgets.  When the average cost of a Ukrainian game developer is roughly one-fifth that of a U.S. game developer, and when that Ukrainian developer usually has a graduate degree in computer science, it is easy to see how a game would benefit from being developed outside of North America.

However, for U.S. publishers it isn’t a simple matter of just picking any game studio abroad.  While programming skills are universally translatable, the creative side of game development (specifically game design, writing and art production) is influenced by where the game is developed.  As late as 2007 many games that came out of Eastern Europe and Russia tended to be logic-based games.  Also, the artistic style of these games was extremely ornate and almost Gothic, compared to the much simpler style of top-selling games in the Western market.  When you factored in in-game writing that was often stilted and clearly written by a non-native English speaker, as well as touchy geopolitical issues around racial and gender stereotypes, the overall effect became known by the unfortunate pejorative as “Renglish style” (for “Russian-English”).

Here is an example of a game from a Russian developer, circa January 2007:

Screenshot from Zodiac Tower, courtesy of GameHouse.com

While a game released the same month from an American developer looked much different:

Screenshot from Little Shop of Treasures, courtesy of GameHouse.com

To compensate for the effects of outsourcing, Western publishers had to spend time working with their developers abroad to ensure that the games they were creating had global appeal in story and writing, art direction and game design.  Generally speaking, the results were less than ideal at first, but over the past couple of years, Eastern European developers have greatly improved their craft.  Their creative abilities now match their technical abilities in the development of casual games.

In fact, Eastern Europe game developers have been so successful that at the Casual Connect Kyiv conference I found myself introduced time and again to a small studio out of Russia or Ukraine that, much to my surprise, had created game X for U.S. publisher Y.   The games were so well-done that I thought they had been built by the publisher’s own internal studio.

“Nearly half of Iran’s 46 million eligible voters are under age 30″

Elham Khatami’s article for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (Facebook brings big changes to Iran) and Rahimi & Gheytanchi’s article for openDemocracy.net (The Politics of Facebook in Iran) paint a fascinated picture of a nation entrenched in a power struggle between a ruling elite and the social-media-enabled masses. After reading about how Iran maintains such a tight grip in Internet access and permissable content with harsh measures (including death) for outed detractors or deviants (in the eyes of Iranian law), it puts citizen social media in a wholey different class from the US. Here we relish in our freedoms of expression and press, embracing the irregular, niche, and controversial. In Iran simply stating non-heterosexual preferences online can get you killed.

This background certainly casts Iran’s recent (February 2009) unblocking of Facebook in dubious light. Is this the work of an enlightened government seeking to get their young citizens involved in politics? Or is it merely a new tool in the government’s arsenal of tracking and intimidation? Rahimi and Gheytanchi certainly lean towards the latter. Their depiction of President Ahmedinejad’s moves to block the Facebook accounts of rival politicians Mir-Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi, coincidentally noted as Facebook outages, lends weight to that leaning.

MobileActive.org’s “Mobiles in Citizen Media” post is a poster-child for a pillar of the MCDM program.  The rise of amateur reporting and the tools which contribute to an amazing ease of access to an engaged audience has profoundly affective journalism.  This surge of content has torn apart a previously-untouchable medium and put massive news corporations out of business.

But as we’ve seen this quarter, the accessibility that mobile phones imparts is not just about conveying live reports of neighborhood micronews, but also as a means of transmitting critical health information on demand.  In the UN’s “Wireless Technology for Social Change” publication, one sees how SMS technology has given citizens around the world instant access to information previously limited to knowledge centers, like medical clinics.  While a doctor’s opinion is obviously preferable, users can now at least learn what the symptoms of a disease are.

As their San Francisco case study illustrates, utilizing an SM-based on-demand knowledge base allows users to access personal information, such as STD symptoms, in a time and place that affords them control over privacy.  This technique has let to a great education about communicable diseases to a much more widespread, at-risk population.  Similar case studies within the UN publication bolster this, as do conversations with health workers in various African nations.

It’s also fascinating to consider using these devices and medium as a means of countering harmful messaging in areas of conflict.  When looking at the stranglehold that the Pakistani and Afghani governments have on their media outlets, it is easy to see how the Taliban has had such an effective propaganda campaign through illegal radio stations.  Using similar tactics, the opposition could use mobile networks and devices to push an anti-Taliban message out to their citizens, independent of the state-controlled television and radio stations.

REFERENCES

MobileActive.org. (2008). Mobiles in citizen media. Retrieved: http://mobileactive.org/howtos/mobiles-citizen-media

Ramey, C. (2009). When radio meets mobile in Pakistan. Retrieved: http://mobileactive.org/when-radio-meets-mobile-pakistan

Kinkade, S., Verclas, K. (2008). Wireless Technology for Social Change.

One thing that really caught my eye was how the M-PESA project required some organizational juggling to offset the fact that the project wasn’t directly contributing to increasing shareholder value, therefore it was of dubious value for the organization.  The expected use case for humanity was obvious, but the business model was potentially at a direct conflict with the overall corporate direction.  Well, not completely in conflict, as the project was incubated and finally launched.  But still in enough conflict that the project had to be buried in R&D.

I’m running into similar roadblocks while researching my term project here at work.  We’re focused on developing and expanding our primary markets in a rough economic time; considering emerging markets is a distant second to that.  And that’s assuming that the emerging markets are solidly projected to contribute revenue.

What if the desire was to create something more humanitarian?  I guess that would be more a matter of proper alignment with a non-humanitarian org, than anything else.  But the conflict is still illustrated, and something that I’m curious to learn more about from our speakers on Saturday.  How do you balance betterment of people versus betterment of shareholder value?

REFERENCES

Khoja, Karim. Connecting a Nation: Roshan Brings Communication Services to Afghanistan. innovations. 2009.
Hughes, Nick and Lonie, Susie. M-PESA: Mobile Money for the ‘Unbanked’: Turning Cell phones into 24-Hour Tellers in Kenya. innovations. 2007.