Q101 The Alternative
Q101 (formerly on Chicago radio @ 101.1 FM) The Alternative - Chicago's New Rock Alternative - Everything Alternative - Chicago's Alternative - Gen X - Generation X
A game to fight for control of the minds of everyone on earth.
Meet Ingress, a new free mobile app and alternate reality game made by Google launching this week (on Android first, available as soon as it makes it through the Google Play release process).
How does one play?
Users can generate virtual energy needed to play the game by picking up units of “XM,” which are collected by traveling walking paths, like a real-world version of Pac-Man. Then they spend the energy going on missions around the world to “portals,” which are virtually associated with public art, libraries and other widely accessible places.
“The concept is something like World of Warcraft, where everyone in the world is playing the same game,” Hanke said. Players are on one of two teams: “The Enlightened,” who embrace the power, or “The Resistance,” who fight the power. Anyone can play from anywhere in the world, though in more densely played areas there will be more local competition for resources.
The game will be good for Google’s business from the beginning. That’s because of advertising. Ingress incorporates real physical stores and products in the game, and has brokered relationships with Hint Water, Zipcar, Jamba Juice and Chrome apparel and messenger bags.
And eventually, Google plans to make these real-world game tools available as a platform for developers to make their own.
READ MORE and Check it out:
http://allthingsd.com/20121115/google-launches-ingress-a-worldwide-mobile-alternate-reality-game/?mod=tech
Need someone to hold your package while at the mall, all while sucking down a free beverage and reclining on a comfy couch? Many malls around the country are promising Black Friday bargaineers a more white-glove experience.
All it can take is a few TV images of Black Friday deal-chasing—the unruly crowds, packed parking lots and frigid midnight lines—to drive many shoppers straight to the Web for their holiday shopping.
That is why this year shopping malls are testing new services and promotions to draw people back to stores for their day after Thanksgiving spending sprees. Malls are feeling the pressure to step up their services as fewer holiday shoppers are braving brick-and-mortar stores with their gift lists.
The strategy involves taking a page from the playbook of high-end retailers like Bloomingdale’s and Saks Fifth Avenue, which offer such concierge services (including storing your purchases) and perks year round.
As those companies have learned, mainstream mall shoppers who are drawn to these types of conveniences are likely to be bigger spenders in general. And they make attractive targets, says Kit Yarrow, a professor of psychology and marketing at Golden Gate University. “People tend to make more impulse and inspired purchases in person,” she says, “especially if they’ve been made to feel like a first-class shopper.”
Will the strategy work this year? It sure does make mall shopping on Black Friday seem a bit more appealing. There’s nothing worse than being weighed down by a heavy package. A shopper whose load has been lightened will be much happier and will spend more money. Now, for easing the line to see Santa…
READ MORE
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323551004578118960167007702.html?mod=WSJ_LifeStyle_Lifestyle_5
The bottom line: If you have something to hide, DON’T PUT IT ON FACEBOOK. Do not chat inappropriately. Do not post secrets. Do not THIS. Do not THAT. You never know if somehow your deepest secrets will “accidentally” become fodder for the masses to enjoy.
The social network has offered a growing array of options and settings to control privacy, particularly for what shows up on your own page, which Facebook now calls your ‘Timeline’.
But one thing you can’t control as well is what your friends post about you. Your best bet? Only post what you WANT people to think you are, not who you REALLY are. Sugarcoat it. Lie. Force the rated “G”. That way, when you run for Congress “they” will have nothing to get you on.
But have you totally protected yourself? Probably not. Maintaining your reputation and credibility as an upstanding citizen (if it matters to you) is not as easy as you might think. The Wall Street Journal has identified three loopholes you may not have thought of where leaks of your dark side could surface without your knowledge. Be educated. As for past transgressions, all you can do is hope and pray that your secrets remain, well, secret. Forevermore.
http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2012/10/12/three-facebook-privacy-loopholes/
Don’t come to watch The Dark Knight Rises and expect your spirits to be buoyed and your sadness lifted. Joe Morgenstern of the Wall Street Journal offers this review of the much awaited third film in a trilogy, ”The Dark Knight Rises”.
“The Dark Knight Rises” is notable for many things—thrilling chases, supercool vehicles, majestic vistas, an epic scale that hasn’t been achieved since “The Lord of the Rings,” a redemptive climax that brings an end, more or less, to a complex saga. The most stunning thing about the film, though—and this is said not by way of praise, but with anxious wonderment—is how depressing and truly doomy most of it is. Batman, played by a marvelous actor with a singular gift for depicting pain, suffers mortally. Drums beat incessantly—before, during and after a series of numbing, Neanderthal brawls between Batman and Bane. History takes a double beating from a script that reprocesses the storming of the Bastille into an attack by terrorist thugs.
Bruce can be forgiven the bleakness of his initial mood. His caped alter ego was unjustly blamed for the death of Gotham City’s district attorney, Harvey Dent, who was anything but the model citizen he’s become in public memory. Now the billionaire socialite has turned antisocial, a Howard Hughes-like hermit (minus the screwiness) licking his psychic wounds and living with the all-too-real injuries of former battles. But two threats conspire to end his solitude.
One of them is brought home—into his own home—by Anne Hathaway’s Selina Kyle, aka Catwoman. It’s intriguingly difficult to discern her motives, or loyalties, for most of the movie.
But the most proximate source of the threatening storm is Bane—an implacable, bemuscled villain who wears a mask over his disfigured face, and who speaks in muffled tones that make Darth Vader sound like an elocution teacher. (He’s not the only one with intelligibility problems; the movie’s use of bass frequencies to convey threat and evil does for dialogue what amped-up rock does for lyrics.) As played by the excellent Tom Hardy, who has porked up for the role and is essentially unrecognizable, Bane is not merely evil enough but ambitious enough to bring Batman back into action, since he plans nothing less than the city’s enslavement, if not its total destruction.
Dark comic books have always been around, but with a difference; as pictures and words on paper, they’ve allowed readers to choose their own degree of involvement. “The Dark Knight Rises” allows no choice.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303754904577530792153262270.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_editorsPicks_1
The latest reported national unemployment rate is 8.2%. Are you in that group and wondering just where you can find work?
Grab a pick axe and head to South Texas, Oklahoma, or North Dakota where you can mine for oil. Why mining? There have been vast improvements in how to extract difficult-to-reach shale oil, horizontal drilling and hydraulic “fracking,” which pumps water, sand and chemicals into the well at high pressure in order to break porous rock apart and release oil and gas.
If that doesn’t ignite your job search desires, Social Media is also a hotbed of employment. ”The social media movement is hot,” says investment blogger Andy Nyquist, “and it’s now just starting to take off.” Labor demand for computer and mathematical science workers jumped from 19,200 to 582,600 last month, according to recent data from the Conference Board helped by jobs for computer systems analysts, software engineers and systems engineers.
Other growth areas can be found here:
http://www.smartmoney.com/plan/careers/5-hot-sectors-for-job-seekers-1328289250503/#tabs
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