Our Geek Space

Trojan Chicken, a young company aimed at the creation and development of high quality, content-rich videogames. As business partners we are planning several developments together.

We want to share their new development for XO Computers; the game called D.E.D. Uruguay.

Best of lucks guys !

The game. Is an adventure in which the player takes the role of a detective, and has to travel around the country capturing thieves who are stealing part of the national heritage. Players will have to solve puzzles using their knowledge of mathematics and language in order to obtain clues. Afterwards, they will have to associate the obtained clues using their knowledge of history and geography, in order to find the place where the thief is hidden. After finding the hideout, the player will chase after the thief until he is finally caught and imprisoned. This game was inspired by a successful game of the 80s named Carmen San Diego.

Their purpose is to revitalize this kind of videogames in our community, providing schoolchildren with entertaining activities in which simultaneously help them in their learning process of local culture, history and other knowledge that will contribute to their personal development.

See this video … a tour by the game !

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One of our business partners, SouthLabs, has just published the following video on their flagship product, SharePlus. It’s iPad/iPhone client app for Microsoft’s SharePoint. They tell me they are about to release version 2.0 anyday now.

Gabriel (Gabo) and Daniel are the owners of this new company.
They are a young startup not very different from ourselves,

Gabo is a great friend of mine and an excellent professional. Best of lucks guys !

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This past june 24 Moove-it won the contest “Best ideas for Ceibal 2010” organized by Rayuela and the Ceibal Plan (One laptop per child), presenting its idea “Together with Ceibal”.

Follow this link to read the official information (spanish) Rayuela Web site of Best ideas

Moove-it was selected by the Ceibal Plan as the company who will develop the first social network for more than 400.000 students of primary and high school.
The idea is to build a web-based tool which will allow students and teachers to interact inside and also outside the classroom. The platform will provide virtual classrooms where teachers can work directly with their groups using all the benefits of the Web, Internet and XOs. Students will also be able to use the tool to meet each other, share their interests or even play together.

This video shows a brief idea of what the “Ceibal Plan” is.

It feels really good to be part of something like this!

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Currently we are the developing team of blahsports. Since January 2010 we have been developing several new functionalities and administrating the whole Site.

Blahsports – www.blahsports.com

Blahsports is a social content website. As a user, you participate in determining all site’s content by providing, selecting, sharing, and discussing articles, pictures and videos that you like and feel that would be interesting to other people.

see the site …

Blah and technology

This project is based on PHP, codeigniter (www.codeigniter.com), Python and MYSQL.
It uses RSS and Web crowller application developed in Python to share all the sports content of a hundred sites.
We create a tag module which searches and identifies the language, sports and a set of tags for each content. For instance, if the content is “Forlan plays very well against Mexico” then the module will find out that the text is about Soccer, Forlan, Mexico and that the main language is English.

blah and a marketing campaign

We are making a marketing campaign to acquire and activate users.  We have a Maradona t-shirt as a prize for the winner among all the registered users … see the site … http://maradona.blahsports.com

This application was developed based on rails.

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After the victory again Mexico (1 x 0) Uruguay pass to the next stage of the Soccer World Cup.

We share some pictures …

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Virtualmart – This is a package of solutions (components, plugins and modules) to create online shopping web sites with Joomla . It provides many tools to make an e-commerce solution.

Joomla – CMS (Content Management System) Open Source based in Php and mysql.

We are building a couple of sites using this combination: www.uruguaycompras.net and deportes.universia.edu.uy (coming soon).

In our opinion Virtualmart (VM) is the most complete open source solution to build this kind of sites. After installing Joomla we add the component and a lot of modules and plugins (see the instructions: http://virtuemart.net/documentation/User_Manual/Installation.html)
After that you can configure your virtualmart solution with different ways of payments (e.g. paypal, on delivery, etc.), different providers, different currencies, different vendors and so on.
VM has a complete back-end administrator to manage all the information and all the shopping process.

This picture shows the administrator panel.

From our experience, VM has two problems without solution until now. We expect to solve these issues and share this stuff to all the community.
The problems are:

• multi vendor management – this module is in alpha version to developers. You cannot manage two or more providers. For Instance: we have a site for a reseller company and they sell products of different vendors. VM solution doesn’t consider this situation.
• multi currency solution – VM allows to manage as many currencies as you want (more than 100 for default, and you can also add others if you want). But in the checkout process and in all the shop gallery you don’t have the possibility to show more than one currency.

We expect that in the next two weeks we could have another post sharing these solutions.

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We showed the first prototype of the game developed for the “Plan Ceibal” (www.ceibal.org.uy). The game is web based and specially designed for children using a XO computer.

Plan Ceibal

The One Laptop Per Child Association, Inc. (OLPC) is a U.S. non-profit organization set up to oversee the creation of an affordable educational device for use in the developing world. Its mission is “to create educational opportunities for the world’s poorest children by providing each child with a rugged, low-cost, low-power, connected laptop with content and software designed for collaborative, joyful, self-empowered learning.”

“Uruguay is the first country in accept the challenge”

Worldbank.org – Uruguay’s Plan Ceibal: The world’s most ambitious roll-out of educational technologies?

The Game

Moove-IT and El Abrojo (a Uruguayan Social Organization who works with poor children) are working in the development of an online game for the XO computers.

This game is financed by the IMM (Government of Montevideo) and his main objective is promote good habits between children. This tool is an online game in which the children works with themes relative to the daily environment care. Each child works in groups with their classmates and also with other schools in any location of the country.

They will be able to: build houses, create commercial areas, create rural areas, maintain clean the neighborhood, and manage parks, among others things.

The points are generated by answering simple questions and doing simple tests. The tests and the answers are validated by the collective. This means that players themselves determine whether an answer is correct or not.

Here you have an initial slide of the game with some screenshots. (The slide is in Spanish)

We will put this Game on production in April 20, 2010

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Rock and roll nene !!!

With Ariel, Gejo and Pablo (CEO of moove-it and two friends) we went to Buenos Aires to see AC&DC in the stadium of River Plate. Web of AC&DC: www.acdc.com

Here we share some pictures from inside.

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As Saul Klein wrote on his blog, the Open Coffee Show is:

“an attempt to establish recognized, open and regular meeting places where entrepreneurs can meet with investors (and anyone else who fancies coming along) in a totally informal setting.”

This initiative was “imported” to Uruguay by my friend and partner Conrado Viña.  Nowadays is an interesting place to meet interesting people with great ideas.

If you are in Uruguay you cannot miss the annual event!

Open Coffe Show Annual Event

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