Top 200 in Free iPad Entertainment May 2011

Back in May 2011 our 9,999,999 Crazy Fortune Cookies app was ranked top 200 in over 30 countries and was in the top 200 free iPad Entertainment apps in the USA.

With no advertising on our side of any kind it’s still in the top 1000 in 24 countries and top 500 in 2 countries. We have fallen out of the top 1000 in the USA but that’s ok. Most of the bad reviews on the app store warn people not to buy the app, but the app is free, so I imagine those reviews are from other angry Fortune Cookie app wannabe’s but who knows. Considering the only other major complaint is the grammar of the random text at times, I’d say overall we had great success with this app. Herb and I should probably do something with this but every time we start talking about it we start talking about our other projects. I guess we’ll get there one day.

You can check out our current daily ranking on AppAnnie:

http://www.appannie.com/app/9999999-crazy-fortune-cookies/ranking/

“When you want to succeed as bad as you want to breath, then you’ll be successful.”

See those people on the beach? While they’re relaxing, he’s doing drills. That’s how you become #1.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

“To avoid criticism say nothing, do nothing, be nothing.” – Aristotle

Recently I went to publish an introduction of myself on a forum and realized just how many years I’ve been ‘competing’ in video games. I won that first Track and Field tournament in the arcade back in 1983. I can’t believe that was 29 years ago. Yes, I’m getting old.

So I decided to list all my major gaming milestones in one post for anyone that’s interested:

- In 1996 I was the co-founder of Clan Havoc with Integra / Jason for Quake CTF – We placed 1st and 3rd in the first major Quake tournament, T1. Scroll down to the Clan Wars logo to read a bit about it.

- I later joined Clan Knightmare in nQuake, QW and Quake 2 DeathMatch – We were a consistent top 8 clan in North America and our hpb team went undefeated for well over a year when I was a starter.

- I placed 2nd in the Comcast/CompUSA/Heat.net Quake 2 FFA tourney and won roughly $1000 in prizes.

- Joined Clan Gib for Tribes – We were 1st in CAL but not many top level teams played.

- Asheron’s Call – Me and a few friends found that first Olthoi dungeon, walled them constantly and sold swords and armor on eBay and made some cash. That was around the same time that people were selling castles from all the duped gold they had in Ultima Online I believe.

- Clan Cosa Nostra for Day of Defeat – We were consistently 1st and 2nd in CAL-Invite and other leagues and played up until the wallhacks really became rampant.

- CoD2 – Joined a few friends from RDW in CAL-Invite, was a lot of fun for the short time we played.

- Guild Blackthornes for DaoC – A consistent top 10 PvP guild and alliance in DaoC for years. I also played WarhammerOnline with Blackthornes for the short time that that game was popular.

- After that I played in various games and tons of betas for fun. Eventually, like so many of us, I found WoW and spent way too many hours playing that. Ten hour days grinding WSG to get my Lieutenant General title back in the Warlord group days, all day Alterac Valley marathons with still no winner and who knows how many hours in Org in the auction house.

I’m not sure if I will try to play in tournaments in the future or not. Right now my sites are set on Diablo 3 and I’m really interested to see how the whole real money auction house plays out. I’ve been playing the beta and I’m really having a lot of fun with it so we shall see.

I spent some time this past year creating a few iPhone apps with Herb. The two apps I built are still on the app store, here are the links if you’d like to check them out: 9,999,999 Crazy Fortune Cookies and Beach Babes Wisdom.

Today Sean Dahlberg announced on the SWTOR forums that the game will be released sometime in Spring 2011. So I’m guessing it’ll be out before Christmas 2011?  Here’s the quote from the forum announcement:

“While we have not announced a specific date, we can confirm that we are targeting a spring 2011 release for Star Wars™: The Old Republic™. We’ve got a lot of exciting updates and reveals planned throughout 2010, including the first-ever hands-on testing for the game. It’s not too late to sign up to be a game tester, so go to www.swtor.com/tester and sign up today. We can’t wait to share more about the game with you as we progress through the year, so make sure you stay tuned to the official website for details.”

Check out the post and replies at the official SWTOR forums here.

Look back times of approximately 13 billion years.

A brief excerpt about this photo from HubbleSite:

“This is the deepest image of the universe ever taken in near-infrared light by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. The faintest and reddest objects (left inset) in the image are galaxies that correspond to “look-back times” of approximately 12.9 billion years to 13.1 billion years ago. No galaxies have been seen before at such early epochs. These galaxies are much smaller than the Milky Way galaxy and have populations of stars that are intrinsically very blue. This may indicate the galaxies are so primordial that they are deficient in heavier elements, and as a result, are quite free of the dust that reddens light through scattering.”

When they mention “look-back times”, they are talking about how long it takes for the light from those stars to reach us. So the light left those stars 13 billion years ago and we’re just seeing it now.

Read the full details and check out the image for yourself at HubbleSite.

Want a true look into the future? Want to learn one of the amazing things Nanotechnology can do for all of us?

Check out this video showing a Nanofactory capable of creating laptops with 1 billion CPU’s and perfect quality.

Reminds me of Star Trek with products on demand:

I wanted to listen to some Metallica, so I went to “MetallicaTV” on Youtube which is the official Youtube channel for Metallica.

When I got there I was immediately shown the message “Metallica – All Nightmare Long (Video) This video has been removed due to terms of use violation.”

Metallica wrote the song, created the video, but they can’t show it on their own Youtube channel.  Brilliant.

Lars – maybe you should sue yourself over this.

It’s true, Google has finally stepped in to start taking away profits from affiliates and putting them into their own pockets. This won’t come as a shock to many of you but this was the first time I had seen this in action on Google for myself.

I did a search on “garmin nuvi 780″, as I was looking to sell a few of these for the holiday season. When the results come in, the first two advertising results are straight from eCOST as you can see top right. At the bottom of the pic you can see where I went to make sure and yes, eCOST is a member of the Google Affiliate Network:

So what does this mean? If Google has a Google Affiliate Network partner that is selling a product you want to sell, you will never have the top advertising spot in advertsing search results as Google will be using that to sell the product for one of it’s partners.

Here is the letter Google sent out to their Google Affiliate Network Partners, looks like they’ve finally put all the pieces in place:

” Google Product Ads Beta

How are these ads ranked? will be testing to identify the most effective ad formats.

Ad Rank = Commission × Quality Score. The quality score takes into account the relevance of your product to the user’s query, conversion rate of the query and the matched product ad on Google, your account history, and other relevant factors.“