Areae makes the 2008 OnHollywood 100

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Jun 062008
 

The 2008 OnHollywood 100 | AlwaysOn

We proudly present this year’s OnHollywood 100. With this list of top private companies, AlwaysOn’s editors and our panel of industry experts introduce a new generation of game-changing players in the digital entertainment industries.

These 100 companies have emerged in an exciting year in the world of entertainment–a year in which the old business models came crumbling down as writers took to the picket lines, musicians ditched their record labels, and breakout creative artists turned to venture capital for funding.

The OnHollywood 100 companies are fueling this disruption and creating new business models to fit evolving trends in consumer habits and content creation.

Zon: Chinese language learning MMO

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Jun 042008
 

This is cool: an MMO devoted to language learning via full immersion.

Welcome to Zon! | Enter Zon

Zon is an unique interactive massively multiplayer online role playing game for learning Mandarin Chinese.

By interacting in the Zon environment you will be exposed to Chinese language and cultural knowledge in a new and exciting way. Everything that you do in the game is another chance to learn new words, phrases and cultural info about China. Never before has learning Chinese been more fun.

Not at all the first time this has been tried, of course; at SOE we supported a few college campuses that were doing full-immersion language learning via EQ2, for example.

Building the human algorithm

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Jun 042008
 

Some academics (including Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, author of the excellent Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means) have been doing analysis of human movements based on where people are making cell phone calls from.

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Mobile phones expose human habits

The results showed that most people’s movements follow a precise mathematical relationship – known as a power law.

“That was the first surprise,” he told BBC News.

Is it really a surprise anymore when something happens to have a power-law distribution?

In any case, it does seem like we are inching ever closer to Asimov’s psychohistory. Given enough data, why wouldn’t we be able to build predictive algorithms for large-scale human populations and social trends?

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