Facebook virtual currency now real

by Ian Kennedy on September 1, 2010

in Commerce

USA Today reports that Facebook Credits will be available as gift cards at Target.

The new Facebook gift cards will be available in values of $15, $25 and $50 at all of Target’s 1,750 retail stores and at Target.com. Two or three more national retailers will start selling the cards in coming months.

The article goes on to report that cards for online games such as Farmville are already available and that the overall market for gift cards was $80.6 billion last year.

I wonder how the gift card economy works. Does facebook get to book revenues for gift card sales before they are re-deemed? How are gift card sales classified for taxes? If you sell gift cards in other currencies, does the gift card revenue get counted towards the US GDP?

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Pokémon Breeding and the Masuda Method

by Ian Kennedy on August 29, 2010

in Games

The depths of Pokémon gamer knowledge are beyond my reach. My kids, on the other hand, have gone deep and are using the internet to expand their learning further. I helped connect their Nintendo DS to Wifi so they can explore virtual worlds. Now they are connecting with other players around the world to trade characters. We have conversations around their gaming world but I am totally lost at sea.

Today, my son pointed me to Serebii.net which is, as far as I can tell, the wikipedia for the Pokémon fan. Here’s an entry for Shiny Pokémon and how one might obtain one.

You have probably heard or seen a picture of them. Pokémon that are different colors than normally seen with. An example of that could be a Metagross with a silver coating and a golden X on it, a dark green Zubat, or a black Rayquaza. The Torchic you may have obtained from Professor Birch may be a lighter colored orange and you may think the game is glitched up, but it isn’t. As you can imagine, these occurences are very, very rare. Not very many people even have a shiny Pokémon to begin with. So how do you get them?

It depends on very, very good luck to get a shiny Pokémon. You can find shiny Pokémon in the wild, in eggs, and in the battle tower, which is basically everyplace you can catch a Pokémon save for the Battle Tower in which you won’t be able to catch the shinys there. Needless to say, you wont be very lucky if a shiny ends up there. People have said that you can also meet a shiny when in your first battle against the wild Poochyena and Wally’s Ralts as well. Basically, like I said, it revolves around how lucky you are. Now the bad thing is that the odds of finding a shiny Pokémon in the wild are 1 in 8,192 battles…all the time, meaning after 8,191 battles it’ll still be 1 in 8,192 and not a dead cert that you will get one i.e. not 1 in 1 battles. If you already have a shiny Pokémon and think you’ll have a higher chance of getting another shiny if you breed with it, think again. It’s still going to have the same odds.

Now you’d think with a Pokémon this rare, it has to have good Individual Values and such. That’s no longer the case. Shiny Pokémon are always going to end up with the same odds of good stats as normal Pokémon. They used to have set IV’s in the Metal generation, but not in this one.

In the fourth generation, a variety of things have changed in order to allow for the obtaining of Shiny Pokémon. First is a method commonly known as the Masuda Method, named after the game developer and the person who revealed it; Junichi Masuda. This method has you breed two Pokémon. However, one of the Pokémon must be of a different nationality than your game (such as a Japanese Pokémon on an English game). This will lower the chances of hatching a shiny Pokémon from 1 in 8,192 to 1 in 2,048 cutting it by 75%.

The second method of obtaining shiny Pokémon is through the method called “chaining”. This method has you carry on a chain on the PokéRadar. As you battle the Pokémon and your chain increases, the chances of seeing a Shiny Pokémon also increases up until you’re on the 40th chain where it levels out. Continue the chain and you may see the grass glow instead of shaking. If this occurs, there is a shiny Pokémon there. To get this far, I suggest you use many Repels so your chains are less likely to be broken.

And that’s everything on Shiny Pokémon.

Got that? Good, ’cause you never know the next time an 11 year-old is going to quiz you next.

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Miss Universe National Costumes

August 28, 2010 Humor

I had no idea that there was a National Costume portion of the Miss Universe pageant. I need to tune in next time. Excellent collection of snarky one-liners over at Tom & Lorenzo’s blog. Part One & Part Two.

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Getting Down Finnish Style

August 27, 2010 Finland

Hope you all had a chance to tune into Radio Helsinki at 4:30 pm and boogie down. For some virtual fun, click play on all three links below at the same time.

It’s all part of Happy Helsinki and the Helsinki Festival.

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EdgeRank, the Facebook Newsfeed Algorithm

August 25, 2010 Timeshifting

Michael Berstein, a researcher at MIT, posts a snapshot of the algorithm used to calculate what is shown to you in the Facebook Top News feed.

The algo is called EdgeRank and he describes it as such:
I’ll cut through the math using words. Whenever somebody interacts with a news feed item, they create an edge to that [...]

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Fun with Foursquare

August 24, 2010 Maps

The visualization below was built in 48 hours using the FourSquare API.

Ian Kennedy’s Foursquare by WeePlaces.com.
A video of the global view, posted it on Vimeo, and posted it below.

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Back to Blogging?

August 23, 2010 Blogs

Paul Carr – Thnks Fr Th Mmrs: The Rise Of Microblogging, The Death Of Posterity
by constantly micro-broadcasting everything, we’ve ended up macro-remembering almost nothing.
Leo Laporte – Buzz Kill
I was shouting into a vast echo chamber where no one could hear me because they were too busy shouting themselves. All this time I’ve been pumping content into [...]

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What to do in Tokyo?

August 4, 2010 Japan

An old friend is visiting Tokyo and asked for recommendations. I often get this kind of question (I lived there for 10 years and am half-Japanese)  so for future reference, to point people in the future (and a place to park any follow up suggestions in the comments) I’ll put my recommendations here in this [...]

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Cheesecake for Breakfast

August 2, 2010 Travel

I just got back from two weeks vacation in Paris with the Izumi and the kids. We opted to spend all our time in one place and rented an apartment so that we could soak in the rhythms of daily life in the city at our own pace. As an American from Silicon Valley, two [...]

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Google and Intergalatic Law

July 14, 2010 Browsers

What happens when you open Google in a non-standard browser like Opera Mini? You get the following snippet.
Sorry, but this browser does not support web word-processing.
Please see our system requirements page for a list of supported browsers.
If you are working to fix problems with a specific browser and would like to bypass this check, just [...]

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