According to the press release, “To play the "America's Next Top Model" game, players select a virtual representation of his/her favorite and least favorite contestants from the show. The main task is for users to interact with these selected virtual characters -- known as avatars -- as if they were real participants of the TV show. This means players must foster their avatar's modeling career through training and various challenges. The selection of the least favorable character allows players to play tricks on her”. The press release also talks about how users can send their virtual model to friend’s phones for a vacation. CBS says that “The game for the upcoming 2007 season will also have a viral, player-to-player component where users must send their avatar "on vacation" to a friend's cell phone, thus ceasing to take care of their own character for a while".This is me not passing judgment.
In the U.S., the game will be available to Cingular and Sprint users depending on their cell phone. Consumers can download the game by going to either www.cwtv.com, www.botme.com or by sending a text message to a five-digit number advertised via commercials during the show. Artificial Life will also develop several mobile games over a license period of two years as part of the agreement with CBS. It will cost an initial price of US $5.99 to download the game.
The purpose, of course, is to accelerate learning for kids as governments give away these computers. And they seem to get a lot for their $100, same source as above:
One does not think of community pencils—kids have their own. They are tools to think with, sufficiently inexpensive to be used for work and play, drawing, writing, and mathematics. A computer can be the same, but far more powerful. Furthermore, there are many reasons it is important for a child to own something—like a football, doll, or book—not the least of which being that these belongings will be well-maintained through love and care.
So Argentina, Brazil, and Nigeria should get ready. By the way, some should still address the digital divide in this country. There are children in this country in poor areas who could benefit from the same program.
The proposed $100 machine will be a Linux-based, with a dual-mode display—both a full-color, transmissive DVD mode, and a second display option that is black and white reflective and sunlight-readable at 3× the resolution. The laptop will have a 500MHz processor and 128MB of DRAM, with 500MB of Flash memory; it will not have a hard disk, but it will have four USB ports. The laptops will have wireless broadband that, among other things, allows them to work as a mesh network; each laptop will be able to talk to its nearest neighbors, creating an ad hoc, local area network. The laptops will use innovative power (including wind-up) and will be able to do most everything except store huge amounts of data.
Meanwhile IDC is forecasting that the number of cellphone users in the US purchasing mobile games will grow more than 16 percent annually to nearly 50 million customers by 2010.
IDC says a recent survey found that 11 percent of respondents purchased at least one game for their wireless device in the third quarter of 2006, spending an average of $US13.00 on wireless games.
Cellufun, LLC, a one year old provider of free real-time multiplayer games for cellphones hit 1.5 million unique visitors in December. Meanwhile IDC is forecasting boom times for US providers of subscription-based mobile games.
According to Cellufun CEO, Arthur Goikhman, "A bit more than a year ago, when we rolled out our first game, we were getting 300 mobile game downloads a day. Today, we're getting as many as 20,000 a day. We are serving as much game content as any major wireless carrier, and are on track for 1.5 million visitors and 10 million page views for December 2006."
