Tagnic is the new reputation game of the Twitterverse. Trade +tags in tweets, receive feedback from your followers, and earn badges to display proudly on your profile.

To start playing, login using your Twitter account at http://playtagnic.com and the Badge Badger (@tagnic) will follow you. Tweet +word @anyone or @anything and that word will show up on their Tagnic profile! For example: @tagnic wow, this game is +amazing!

Tagnic is made by Socialbomb in NYC and is in public beta. We’d love to hear what you think! Send to feedback@socialbomb.com or tweet @tagnic.

Paparazzi is a game about fame, photography, and catching your friends in the act.

Celebrities and Paparazzi. Earn points by taking photographs of your friends and by having your photo taken. The more photos you are involved in—as a subject or photographer—the more valuable you become.

Location, Location, Location. Earn even more points by taking photos in “hot spots”—places where other players have already taken a lot of pictures.

Whether you want to be Lady Gaga or Patrick McMullan, be the right person in the right place at the right time and watch your score escalate you to stardom!

Paparazzi launched for iPhone and Facebook at SxSW Interactive 2009 — now available in the iTunes store! Check out the site for more info.

The festival is, in their words:

SCRAPCYCLE is a noise show and one-night exhibition.

……it’s an experiment in giving a scrap-material an exchange-value, an attempt to foster the local scrap-material exchange community, and a forum for art and music created from scrap-materials.

I’ll be doing a modified Concrete Crickets installation, as many of the originals were lost at Bent Festival of last year (when you make things that look like garbage, occasionally they get thrown out), and I’ll be in the company of some of my favorite artists and performers, including Loud Objects, Torino:Margolis, Lovid, and a pile of amazing others. If you’re out in Brooklyn on Friday night, 11/21, come by!

The tutorial went really well, and was a blast to do.  We went through the basics of how and why one might interface with microcontrollers, and then took the class on a quick tour of the Arduino platform from both hardware and software sides.  The participants learned how to make their boards blink LED’s, read switches and potentiometers, and communicate over the serial port, making etch-a-sketches on their laptops as a final project.  The group was fantastic, and by the end of the session were already adding their own touches and starting their next projects.

The official summary is here, and MAKE Magazine gave us a nice lil’ shout too.  I so love O’Reilly conferences.

(photo swiped from CNET)

While we were out there, we ran by Facebook’s F8 event as well, which was a blast (and quite informative, seeing the launch of their Connect platform and all). PC World was running around covering the event, and happened to ask yours truly about their news.  It was a crazy little event, and I was stoked to see it.

Now, we’re back in NYC and back to work — expect news from us on excellent SB happenings in the very near future.

Throw down your blanket! Will you end the day surrounded by friends and eating a delicious meal, or will you be invaded by ants and left stranded and hungry on the edge of the party?

Competitive picnicking is a large multiplayer game of trading items and claiming territories, set on a big lawn on a sunny summer day and using food as game pieces. Players come to the picnic with the basic ingredients for lunch and play a culinary variant of go fish to assemble the highest-scoring snacks and sandwiches.

Competitive Picnicking debuted at Come Out and Play 2008, and was run again at the Adelaide Film Festival 2009.

(Photo courtesy of NYU Stern)

What this means is not just a nice chunk of change to kick-start our business, but also a virtual pod and access to the Berkley Center’s network of faculty and professional experts. We’re of course thrilled, and can’t wait to get to work on our first games (as soon as we finish our theses, of course).

(Photo by Anaid Gomez Ortigoza)

We owe a million thanks to everyone at ITP who’s helped us along the course of the past year with this, especially Red Burns for giving us the opportunity to try out a wacko idea like this and see it throuh, Tom Igoe, Clay Shirky and Amit Pitaru in whose classes we developed the original prototypes, Marianne Petit and Nancy Hechinger for their amazing guidance and support, everyone who came to watch and cheer us on before and after, and the zillions of fellow students who convinced us we could actually do this.

So — much more to come!

Installations go up on April 24th and come down after the 26th, so come on by and check them out any time between then — and come see a show or catch a workshop. As they say on their site, “If you have the least bit of curiosity about electronics or electronic music, or if you’ve ever just wanted to rip your toys apart, this festival is for you.” It should be a pile of fun — hope to see you there!

Then I had the great pleasure of installing the Crickets at Conflux, and when I watched people interact with them on the street, the greatest side-effect happened: people would pause, look around, and then start to notice other things that had nothing to do with my little beeping boxes. As one passer-by noted, he could hear the cricket songs — but he was also now hearing about 20 things he’d never noticed prior as well. That, to me, was the ultimate win and was something I wanted to really focus on for my thesis.

So, the logical step was to take what worked with the crickets (small size, easy portability, relative inexpensiveness) and turn it on its side so that instead of watching you and making noise when you weren’t around, these new devices would listen to the world around them and let you know what you might be missing in a simple and calming display.

What I’m working on now are little city-embeddable sensor blocks — awareness outposts that will live in cities and report back findings in a very simple way. What I’ve started with are simple units that listen to the sound levels around them, and reflect that volume in the intensity of the light they shine. What I’m hoping to do is call attention to not only the big sound events that happen to city-dwellers every day (cabs, car horns, sirens, jackhammers, etc.) but also the more subtle or constant things (human conversations, subway rides, household machines, loud music) that do just as much to mentally and physically exhaust us but that we don’t categorize in that way at all.

So far I have a first-run prototype done up and I’ve done a bunch of user tests, and the feedback has been extremely positive. Most people initially treated the monitor like a little pet, which I didn’t count on, but works well for the concept. The first breadboarded prototype was a bit ugly, and didn’t get the message across at all — people just couldn’t relate. However, the second version is much smaller, cleaner, and easily anthropomorphizing so people formed attachments to it almost immediately. At first this worried me, but what I saw was that people would then carry it around, and after they’d gotten past speaking into the mic in baby-talk (which *everybody* did), they’d start speaking normally again and going about their previous activities.

However, every time they’d speak or a door would slam, the monitor would spike in brightness, and they’d look at me and ask if it was really that loud. Of course, the answer is yes, but we’re very good at ignoring things we hear every day. Then this “eureka!” look would come over their faces, and they’d start using the object to test other volumes — and that’s the win right there.

The platform was intentionally designed to be expandable with just a screwdriver and a cable, so the next step (currently under way) is to make breakout boards that attach under each unit — a data logger (that records to micro SD cards), an Xbee/Xport unit, a GPS unit, etc.

This is all obviously very much a work in progress, but I’ll have to present it in early May, so expect a much more thorough update in the very near future.

I’ll be presenting Socialbomb with Adam and Scott at the ETech ArtsFair, running a full game on the show floor and babbling endlessly about delocalized gaming and proximity-focused sensors, and… oh, sorry, I tend to rant. In short, it should be a blast. Going to be at ETech? Come find us and play a game!

See you there!

Photo by Joo Youn Paek.

From the flyer:

Sculpting Voice is a night of performances exploring how voice can be shaped, destroyed, orchestrated and processed to build space.

A voice is as unique as a fingerprint and speaks in both presence and absence. In an evening of performances ranging from the sublime to the
insane, performers will use human voice to shape audio, video, theater, dance and origami. Performers will include R. Luke DuBois,
Lesley Flanigan, Andrew Schneider, Joo Youn Paek, Adam Parrish, Nick Hasty, Nancy Garcia, Eric Beug, Christopher McDonald, Mike Dory, and Dafna Naphtali

Lesley and I chose to make our performance a conversation between two distinct voices: her Speaker Synth project and my bass guitar. She warmed the synth up, exhibited a range of tones, and then set up a repeating loop. I did the same, first exploring the range of the bass and then settling into a groove. The performance mutated a bit as we went back and forth, finally closing with us both fading the loops out. It came out even better than I’d have hoped, and I’m looking forward to doing so again.

Photo by Pollie Barden.

It was a beautiful evening of sounds quiet and loud, calm and energetic, usual and decidedly un. Lesley has said she’ll be doing other shows like this, which I look forward to! In the meantime, Lesley and I have agreed to do the same type of set at BENT festival, so watch for us there as well.