People everywhere are excited for MLB’s Opening Day. It is a day when everyone has a clean slate. Everyone has an even shot (at least the media gives that impression.)

We all know the owners and players are in this to get paid. Well once again, loyal reader Dan writes in with an Opening Day gem to give Techlife readers their shot at a payday. (Pete Rose, this one’s for you!) I was a bit skeptical at first, but it’s free money and fun too. Nearly as good as fun at the old ballpark.

CentSports is a new kind of social gaming site where you risk nothing but can win real money. First off the site gifts you $.10 to bet on sports. Lose that and get another gift of $.10 and so on. (Yep, they are unlimited in their generosity.) Start winning and you can cash out as soon as you reach $10. Sound to good to be true? Sounds more like spam you might get, right? Trust Techlife it isn’t. It is actually a lot of fun

Do you like hardwoods, frozen ponds or field of dreams? CentSports has NCAA, the NCAA Tournament, the NIT Tourney plus the full slate of NBA games. They also have NHL hockey and starting today they have baseball’s MLB all ready for Opening Day action. They are planning on adding soccer and bringing back boxing and tennis. (Apparently those pesky tennis players will retire mid-match which screws up the betting a little.)

As a person with little knowledge of sports betting it is a lot of fun to learn on someone else’s dime (pun intended). They have all the standard bets including point spread, money line, over/under and let you parlay or combine these bets to get higher payouts.

The best part is the social aspect of the site. You can see what others bet, invite friends, publicly chat about each bet made and send private notes too.

How can CentSports fund the payouts? Advertising. They have a unique feature after placing a bet you will get the chance to see an ad which can give you bonus cash if you win. (Hint: Always hold out for near the top tier of the bonus.) There are other ads scattered around the site as well.

Overall: If you like sports and are too chicken to try using your own money, you can’t lose. Literally! CentSports is sports gambling for the rest of us. No skill required.

I hope you try it out and see if you can beat me, I was up to nearly $2. Let us know in the comments what your user name is and we can add you to our friend list on the site.

A winter wind whips a lone rider on his trusty sled. With only a small hat and a candy cane scarf his entire existence is to ride the line. Can he keep it up? Will he make it? Only you will determine it. Only you can make the flight of the Line Rider.

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It’s been a while since Techlife has brought us another in the series of Friends of Line Rider. Can you tell we missed the little guy? Today we find ourselves enjoying Line Rider Zada v1.3.

A modded Line Rider version with everything that is missing in the first Line Rider. Use the eraser, speedups and zoom for a better Line Rider experience.that is Zada!

Line Rider Zada is really quite the fun afternoon and perfect for adults and kids alike.

Techlife’s recent Songza article has had some reader’s emailing about Internet Radio. FM radio has always been about commercials, DJs, and maybe a bit of wacky news. Listeners are now getting to play radio station owner with a few great radio station options. Techlife has been using two free options lately.

Pandora is of Techlife favorites of internet radio, but sadly it has been losing global audience with constant country restrictions. The idea is simple offer a customizable radio station that helps program songs based on other songs and artists you already told it you like (or don’t like.) They use a fancy rating system, called the Music Genome Project that is often discussed in depth. We have been using Pandora for years and really enjoy how easy it is to use. Pandora is great for exploring lots of new music. One issue I had with Pandora was I might have customized my station to much, I often would hear a few songs repeat in the same day.

Slacker is a newer entry into the internet radio business. It too offers a simple interface where you can quickly setup a station, add artists you like and start listening. It is a bit less featured than Pandora right now but it is easier to ensure the people you like you get to hear. They do less adding new artists music and play a bit deeper cuts from artists you know. I also like all the comedy Slacker has in its library. Slacker has a mobile media player, like an iPod, that allows you to take the custom station options with you. Techlife has not yet had a chance to review this hardware.

Overall: If you are looking to have a new radio experience give either or both options a try. They are both easy to use and certainly are a nice change from “my music library.”

Bonus: If you are really technically savvy, run a Jinzora Media Server and Do-It-Yourself broadcast your own music collection. A friend is doing this and it is nice to be able to explore their music collection all just using a simple web browser.

Techlife has been rocking recently to an easy-to-use music search engine, Songza. Type in an artist or song title and get a choice of various versions of songs that might be what you were searching for.

Google simplifies searching for web content. Songza simplifies searching for audio content. Part of the trouble of audio search is text descriptions might not do justice to what you want to hear so Songza has a flash player that allows you to listen and keep searching. They also use crowdsourcing, which means you can help clarify if a song is what you wanted, and rate it thumbs up or thumbs down which helps make Songza better the next time around.

With Songza’s elegantly simple interface, great search, the ability to build a playlist without even giving them your name or a login, an audio player, crowdsourcing, various sharing options and vast library it is interesting to see where it goes next. Songza’s free, doesn’t ask for any information and right now is really advertising free except for a link to buy the music you are listening.

My only complaint is the very rudimentary music player. I would like to see a fast forward or reverse capability, as other sites that search video, like Techlife TV, offer this.

Overall: Give Songza a Grammy for technical achievement. Songza may sound simple, because it is. But when simple is done right it rocks.

A reader emailed me MapsofWar.com and I was intrigued. But the mystery only starts with the amazing visuals spanning 5,000 years of religion or imperialism.

Many clients I work with ask me to visually simplify complex problems and we use various techniques to deliver stunning solutions. Maps of War has used history as the backdrop for an artist who’s medium is Flash and large data sets. Techlife interviewed the creator and artist of Maps of War, who wished to remain anonymous.

Techlife: MoW is a dynamic project, why did you create the first MoW? Which one is it?

Maps of War: The first map was Imperial History of the Middle East. This map was the original idea I wanted to share with everyone, and the overall site was created to showcase it.

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Techlife has just learned that XGen Studios is now a developer for the WiiWare program.  Might Stick Arena or Stick Arena Ballistick be released for the Wii one day? We were pretty shocked too. Nintendo has a developer program with the Wii, known as WiiWare for smaller developers to build content for the platform. Combined with all we know about Stick Arena‘s long awaited title, it appears a multi-platform release might be in the works at some point. While we can’t confirm this, a recent press release from XGen says:

XGen Studios is developing an original title for Nintendo’s upcoming WiiWareâ„¢ service…

It goes on to say:

…inspired by an existing cult classic from the studio, and will allow up to 4 simultaneous players while leveraging the unique capabilities of the Wii Remoteâ„¢…

and

…classic game play enjoyed by Millions is coming to your living room in the form of a new title with compelling additions…

and finally

…jump-in, jump-out casual style appeals to a broad audience for both quick and extended play sessions…

Reading between the lines it would appear that we are in a for a treat. The real question is will the 6.3 million Wii owners be able to interact with the PC gamers, I would think they won’t. But your username might port between the two, allowing a character to travel with you. Imagine playing Stick Arena Ballistick on your Wii online and on your PC online.  Once we all are playing Ballistick on the PC, imagine having a party and Grandma slices Uncle Charlie, only to find herself on the end of a barrage of gunfire.  Brings a whole new meaning to “The war at home.”

And in other Stick Arena Ballistick News…there is an impatient group of loyal Techlife readers who have logged over 700 comments about how excited they are for Ballistick. For all of them, I want to give them a heads up, an exciting announcement is coming shortly. We are targetting next week on Techlife and TechlifeTV the news. As a teaser, we have confirmed that there are 6 new weapons for Ballistick. For a bit of fun, we are going to release their initials…

• CG
• LS
• TH
• FT
• CS
• RG

Got any guesses? Let the comments begin!

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Loyal Techlife reader Alan wrote in asking if we knew of a solution to run a simple office pool about when the CEO’s wife was going to give birth. This is actually a really good problem and we jumped in with two feet.

Alan shook off our first two attempts which involved loyal stand-by Google Docs and their spreadsheet application. I suggested he create a spreadsheet, invite everyone in the office to share it, have them add their guess for dates and times. I also suggested Google Calendar. He could create a shared calendar and everyone could input their dates and times. As I said, Alan was pushing for something better. That’s when I remembered Doodle.

Doodle is a free service that is designed to do one thing very well, schedule people to a single event. It really shines when those people don’t use the same shared calendar. Doodle was created by Michael Näf and Paul Sevinç and their company Inturico Engineering out of Zurich, Switzerland.

Since the launch they have been written up by 43folders among others. Development is constantly continuing, Doodle is available in 16 languages and also has a polling tool. It is a simple site and the Techlife friends have used it to organize parties, a trip to a winery, and a fantasy football draft, as well as the boring and mundane meetings and conference calls.

The reaction from first-timers usually is, “So easy. I am going to use it for the next meeting.”

In Alan’s case he would need to just “schedule an event.” Give it a title, most likely, When will the CEO’s wife give birth? Add a description like, enter you name and check the date, and drop $5 off at my desk. Each person’s name may only have one checkbox checked.

The best thing to do is try Doodle so we created a poll to help you get started. Visit our poll to answer, and leave a comment below about how you have used Doodle.

Leonardo da Vinci was a master of hidden messages and code. The label of genius could be applied easily. But how would Leonardo cope in today’s world of the interconnected web? Techlife has uncovered a few gems that would make Leonardo da Vinci drool.First one of Leonardo’s favorite things is codes and hidden messages. And what better way to show that off than this:

Ë™sʃıɐɯǝ ʍǝɟ ɐ ɥʇıʍ Êžsɐʇ-ıʇʃnɯ oʇ pǝǝu I ‘ɐsı⅂ ɐuoW ǝɥʇ ʇuıɐd puɐ ʇıs I s∀

BoingBoing was clever when they brought Leonardo this trick, originally from here. But another idea Leonardo would like is the collaborative nature of people improving on other people’s work. This developer took it one step farther and added capitalization, to allow upside down or flipped text that looks nearly 100% accurate based on unicode.

da Vinci would also love the organic search of the internet, and while researching his upside down text, he might have found Local Font List from the same programmer who added capitalization to the flip text. This unique utility can show all the fonts on your computer using your browser and flash. It works for Windows, Mac and Linux.

The screen shot is a great help to understanding this. Those are some of the fonts on one of the Techlife machines. Local Font List even includes a “print” button to get a useful list of all of the available fonts.

Finally da Vinici was a master linguist. He loved wordplay and using words in code and creatively. Friend of Techlife TV, Chirag Mehta, a modern day Renaissance Man himself, would probably have loved to show off Tip of My Tongue to da Vinci.

This online web application can help decipher partial words that begin or end with letters, help unscramble a word, find synonyms all in real time. Try it today and see the cool, way it starts filtering based on what you type.

My request would be to see Chirag develop this same interface for Wikipedia.

Do you have any cool Leonardo da Vinci web tools? Tell us in the comments.

Google has achieved the “Field of Dreams Effect”. Simply put, this effect coined by Techlife, means there is no longer a preceding qualifier to the famous phrase by author W.P. Kinsella’s character of the “Baseball Announcer” in the book Shoeless Joe and the movie Field of Dreams:

If you build it, he will come.

Techlife’s “Field of Dreams Effect” states:

“Build it and they will.”

Purposely left open ended, this phrase intends to cover both people who build (in this case Googlers) who build cause they can, and users or customers (Google’s users) who will use what Google has built, because it exists.

Google Image Labeler is one of these creations, hatched using some licensed technology from Carnegie Mellon University. Google wanted to improve the results from the Google Image Search tool, and realized that using the power of “us” they could improve their results dramatically. They created a social game, where the blindly pair up two people for 2:00 minutes and let you race to match terms about random images that show up.

It is easy, free and rather addicting. For those of you social context types, you could be helping improve search results for a global audience. For you cynical types no question it is a sweatshop and you get paid in points redeemable for nothing. For you gamers, it is a highly addictive free game where the goal is to be cooperative with your partner to gain the most points.

Techlife previously covered Guess the Google, a very addictive game also based on Google Image Search. Which do you like better? Tell us.

In 1984 Sierra On-Line released King’s Quest I: Quest for the Throne. (Bonus: The link contains a playable remake on today’s computers, that has been downloaded 190,000 times.) It was a new kind of adventure game with a great story, amazing visuals (for the time) and a bit of humor thrown in for good measure. The player was dropped into the middle of a story, in the middle of a world they had no real connection with other than knowing it was a game. After many sequels and genre’s, the games only live in fan’s minds.

Techlife just finished playing a game that has a great story, amazing visuals and a bit of humor, but also has a great musical score, and an enjoyable interface from Amanita Design. Samarost1 and Samarost2 are free point and click, puzzle games built in Flash. If you get hooked they offer a downloadable extended Samarost2 for just $6.90USD. This company from Brno, in the Czech Republic was founded in 2003 by Jakob Dvorsky.

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Amanita Design has done a few other great projects like Samorost, check out The Quest for the Rest a commission for The Polyphonic Spree. And their upcoming game Machinarium looks really amazing and already is getting a following.

Thanks to one of my editors of all people, who pointed out Samorost1 and Samorost2. (Suck up alert) Any editors that are looking for a great syndicated column for their publication, please contact me. We welcome submissions from anyone, even editors. Send them to techlife [at] dkworldwide [dot] com.

Are you into data? Here’s a funny story, Techlife covered Nick Douglas’s Look Shiny and his first show. Then we covered Taylor McKnight and Chirag Mehta’s awesome mashup Chime.TV. (We have our own channel, Techlife TV – check it out sometime.) So why are these two things related? Good question. In a recent post Nick posted about really cool site, ZipSkinny, a site that provides extensive demographic information by zipcode compiled form the US Census from 2000. Nick in his usual humor filled manner, was commenting at how poor some of the neighborhoods he knows happen to be. And to make this a small world, he mentions Taylor. So in reading all of this I learned about ZipSkinny (thanks Nick) and I learned Taylor and Nick are friends (thanks both of you.)

While ZipSkinny.com has the typical disclaimer that the site should not be used for serious decision making, such as moving or opening a business, and how some data is incomplete or has such a small sample size it can not be considered reliable, this site is a goldmine. It really has taken data exploration to new levels. If you are in real estate, a realtor, or looking to buy a home it is at least a place to start.

With data points such as:

• Population
• Density
• Educational Achievement
• Marital Status
• Household Income with brackets
• Occupation
• Unemployment/Poverty
• Age
• Racial Diversity
• Male/Female with age brackets
• Map of the zip code

And features such as:

• Zip code to US comparison
• Zip code to nearyb Zip code comparison
• Zip code to state to US comparison
• Top 100 zip codes in the state or US by any of the data points
• Ability to compare up to 20 codes side by side data

I think the most interesting thing about ZipSkinny, the lack of credit. Who built it? Anyone know?

Everyone has their favorite games. Techlife recently has been addicted to Casual Collective’s Multi-Player Desktop Tower Defense (invites available here). Good games have that effect. WoW or World of Warcraft fans take their addiction to new levels.

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But one of the best games of all time is XGen Studio’s Stick Arena. Skye Boyes, friend of Techlife, is one of the creator’s XGen’s popular 4 person flash game. We interviewed Skye to talk about gaming, Stick Arena and Ballistick their newest game, that has been a long time coming. Skye was kind of enough to provide us three exclusive game images of Ballistick. Nearly a year ago XGen posted this trailer of Ballistick to wet the appetites of Stick Arena fans. So the real question is: When is Ballistick coming? Read on to find out.

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Techlife readers know I am big fan of Google Docs. Even Google knows. It is a great tool for collaboration. I also use a Sidekick from Tmobile, and today those worlds collide with the introduction of Google Docs Mobile. Google Docs for your mobile device, also works on such smart phone platforms as iPhone, Blackberry or Windows Mobile but as this reviewer says it is really Google Docs Mobile Viewer.

On the Sidekick you need to enable Javascript, which is common enough. The main page where all my recent docs reside is a great adaptation for the mobile device. It really lets me see the important things quite easily. That is where the goodness ends. The only somewhat manageable document type is a word processor to view mobile. The spreadsheet gives such a small view that it is really unusable and their brand new presentation tool does not work.

Now we all know that Google will evolve this toolset, as they are prone to do. And with the recent announcement of the gPhone being produced, it is clear their next area of growth is mobile. This offering could have been in the labs a few more weeks because my initial excitement was quickly replaced with disappointment at only having “real” access to my word processing documents and here’s the biggest surprise. No edits!

They opted to leave out the capability to edit in this early alpha beta release, which is a big disappointment. What mobile have you tried it out with?

Thanks to Lifehacker for the post.

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Our readers are really the best. Where else would we get Penguin Baseball? A reader sent in this flash game gem, where you take batting practice, except replace Barry Bonds, Albert Pujols, Alex Rodriguez or Prince Fielder with your favorite abominable snowman, the Yeti. Cute lovable penguins jump from a cliff (pitch themselves) and you take aim.

From what I can see there are two types of power hits. The moon shot gets you at most 490. The more line drive takes the svelte penguin aerodynamics and really can increase your score. Our reader said, “It took awhile and I think I am still missing something, but beat 593!” My best was 587. What can you do?

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I often use Google Docs for collaboration with teams who are not uber-geeks tech savvy. Examples include clients, family, fantasy football partners, and charity work. Most of these folks don’t know what RSS or an RSS Reader is at all. They would be happy to subscribe via email though to a document that was going to be important, but today Google doesn’t offer that feature.

As tech leaders (people who read Techlife) I have a simple tool for you to use that might help educate your collaborative group. Funny enough this tool is low tech. Teach your group to “Share”. Here is a copy of an email I send using Google Docs after creating a new document, it helps foster the collaborative work environment that makes Google Docs a great tool. Please feel free to copy and paste this email and send it using the share tab in Google Docs. Your teams will thank you.

I know some of you might not have used Google Docs very much so let me point out another feature/downfall.There is no automated notification of someone’s working on the documents. Meaning you won’t get any emails if people make major/minor changes.

But there is a tab in the upper right hand corner “Share”, click on that and then click on “Email collaborators” which will let you send an email like this one. With anything you want in the body including a pointer to what has changed.

I look forward to seeing your work.

Encourage your teams and collaborators to use Google Docs for documents that need multiple eyes. It will help the whole team. The Google Docs Tip of sharing, with an announcement via email will help keep everyone aware of the document’s changes even without RSS.

This great video featured on Techlife TV sums up the Google Docs experience, “Google Docs in Plain English” by CommonCraft’s Sachi and Lee LeFever.
[youtube]eRqUE6IHTEA[/youtube]

Do you have any good Google Docs tips? Post them.

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