"Ingress, the Alternate/Augmented Reality (AR) game from Google's Niantic Labs, is a major evolution of mobile gaming. Apparently, it's also a good way to get arrested.
According to a post on Reddit (I know, I know - but stay with me on this), an Ingress player in Ohio was detained by police for his in-game actions. Specifically, he was "hacking a portal" near a police station. His phone had technical difficulties, which led him to linger by the portal/police station for a bit, catching the eye of local law enforcement and leading to the detention.
After the original post, other Ingress players responded with similar stories. One aroused suspicions by wandering around an empty parking lot at night. Another, trying to hack a portal next to an air traffic control station, had to run from the local sheriff. A third was called in for questioning after hacking a portal outside of a "high-traffic drug area.""
Flimmer's preliminary homepage includes the tagline "Earn Per View", and local media reports have quoted the company as saying it is "the first film portal where the user is rewarded for paying attention to the trailer". It all sounds a bit confusing, and Flimmer's press spokesman wasn't available for comment, so we'll just have to wildly guess that it's some kind of breakthrough in the evolution of the content industry. Or not.
Twitter plans to add experiences, including e-commerce, contests and sweepstakes
Twitter has also shown signs of wanting Twitter.com to be a destination where users linger instead of a portal that dispatches them elsewhere through outbound links.
"Sina (NSDQ: SINA) Weibo, the microblogging service operated by China's Sina portal company, is planning to launch in English in the U.S. in two to three months, bringing it in to competition with Twitter."
Amazon is taking a direct shot at the U.S. Post Office by launching their in-real-life locker box service as a delivery portal for the crap people buy on Amazon.com. They launched in Seattle in 7-Eleven stores, and have recently been spotted in Rite Aide and Gristedes in New York. This isn't an entirely new idea, as Best Buy and Walmart already allow in-store pick-ups of online purchases, but it finally solves the problem of where we can get out Twilight Saga books delivered without having to explain it to our roommates.
Today, app stores have become the a one-way street for developers. Over 45% of the respondents in our Developer Economics 2011 report used an app store as their primary route to the market, climbing nearly 30% since last year. At the same time, we found that the use of other distribution channels (own portal/website, 3rd party aggregators, via customers, Telco portals) has greatly decreased since last year's research.