What Makes This Appealing?

So; what makes SCVNGR so appealing? We’re all pretty bombarded with applications for our smart phone(s) — especially with the hottest trend being the geolocation market. The biggest difference that I see between SCVNGR and the two current trend setters (Foursquare and Gowalla) is (1) the user interface and (2) how long it keeps me looking at the app. The interface is very clean and I find it much faster than Foursquare. Granted one can argue that the current speed is due to its lack of users, thus not a heavily burdened network.

As is the default – It integrates with Facebook and Twitter and makes it easy to see what you’re Facebook friends have checked into under the “Friends Feed” section. I’ve been using it for a number of weeks and I’m very happy with it. It’s using Google Places to pull the venues. That’s a plus for me, I’m still not comfortable with Facebook hosting that kind of data.

What’s Wrong with It?

I did notice, while cruising the Places screen for more friends, that I was able to view the activities of total strangers. It looks like sharing is totally open out-of-the-box. If you go into the Settings menu, you can change it to only share with your friends. Besides THAT the only thing wrong with SCVNGR is that my friends don’t know about it. It’s hard enough for me to get my immediate circle of friends into geolocation, but to have them switch to another app after finally getting them into Foursquare is going to be challenging.

Features

Once you load the application there are a couple of features accessible from the home screen: Friend’s Feed, Profile, Friends, Badges, Places, Rewards, Treks, and Social Map. There’s also a notification bar at the very bottom of the home screen.

Friend’s Feed

SCVNGR interface displaying the Friend Feed's screen.

The Friend’s Feed is pretty self explanatory, it displays a list of your friend’s check-ins. It has two tabs: Recent and Popular. To be honest I’m not sure what the criteria is for a check-in to be “popular.” The neat thing about the Recent tab is it mixes both your SCVNGR and Facebook friends. You can’t interact with the FB feed, but it’s at least nice to see where your closest buddies are.

Profile

This section really doesn’t have anything special compared to other geolocation application. It’s more or less a dashboard of how many points you have, challenges you’ve done, places you’ve visited, how many badges you’ve acquired, and how many friends you have. Your avatar is pretty big so if you really like looking at yourself, they built a function to satisfy that craving.

Friends

The Friends screen has three tabs: Find, All friends, and Leaderboard. The Friends feature is where you can expand your friend’s list by finding people in your Facebook circle that have linked their accounts to SCVNGR. You can also do a simple search for a user or invite friends by allowing the app to post a message through other social media applications you may have installed on your phone. The Leaderboard screen is where the competitive nature of a person comes out to play. Once you have a couple of friends to play with you can then compare how many points/challenges you’ve acquired. It doesn’t reset every week like Foursquare, it’s simply an overall score. So; you can be at a slight disadvantage if you friend someone that has been heavily using SCVNGR.

Badges

If you’re familiar with social media apps, badges is an aspect that these companies/apps use to exploit our loyal and competitive nature. These badges are acquired after reaching a certain status or completing a number of challenges. These badges are drawn nice so they are easy-on-the-eyes. This screen will list all the badges you’ve acquired in a four-column fashion. You can click on individual badges to get a little more detail as to what the badge is about and when you received it. My only issue with this feature is the irony that the app supports a good amount of text in order to explain what the badge is about, but the actual explanation of the badge is vague and confusing. There are many badges that I’m still unclear WHY I’ve acquired them.

Places

This is the meat and potatoes of the application. This screen will initially load all venues within your intimidate area. If a venue doesn’t show up you can do a search to add it.

Make sure you use propercase before submitting a search. If the system doesn’t find that venue it will use your submission as the entry name.

When you choose a venue to check-in to that screen has three tabs: Challenges, Activity, and Info. The default challenges with every venue is: check-in, social check-in, say something, and snap a picture. Each challenge has a certain amount of points associated with it. The social check-in is a pretty cool challenge. You and another SCVNGR user can bump phones to get twice as many points for that check-in. The more challenges you do, the more points you acquire. Once you’ve gained a certain amount of points you can then add your own challenges. I’m not sure why, but I have yet to create a challenge for the available venues. My creativity on creating challenges has proven to be limited. :-/

Rewards

The Rewards screen has two tabs: My Rewards and Nearby. This feature incorporates the growing Groupon-inspired trend of offering discounts from vendors. I haven’t tried this feature, so I can only theorize how it actually works.

Treks

This feature I believe was inspired from Gowalla’s Trips. For example the “Best of Atlanta” trek lists 8 challenges for you to complete. Once you visit one of the venues in the list, such as Georgia Aquarium, the trek challenge is to click on “Fish Face”. This particular challenge is to impersonate a fish and take a picture of your ugly mug doing it. Stuff like that is pretty cool and will certainly keep you motivated to explore.

Social Map

I was very excited when I saw this feature. It reminded me of a third-party web site a friend took me to in order to see a visual history of his Foursquare check-ins. The Social Map screen displays a map, most likely powered by Google Maps with pins of avatars showing recent activities, maximum of up to 24 hours. I can see that it shows both mine and friends’ activities. It’s got a bug or two once you start sliding that time line around and zooming in and out of the map, but it’s got a lot of potential.

Other Reviews

Initially I didn’t plan to write a detailed review of this app. I had a real hard time finding a significant Android post so I filled the gap. Below are other blog posts I found that might give you another aspect of this very intriguing app. You can find my SCVNGR profile at the following link — www.scvngr.com/fergatron — let’s stalk each other, it’ll be fun.

• SCVNGR Review – Could This Be the Foursquare of Real Estate [Tech Savvy Agent] – Video, focuses on iPhone
• SCVNGR: A check-in app with a fun twist [Android and Me]
• SCVNGR Launches Sophisticated Rewards Program [Mashable]

I’m thirty-years old and in the year twenty-ten I finally experienced 3D in a movie theater! My wife was more in shock about it than you.

I’m glad to say that I’ve contributed to the blockbuster movie sales of James Cameron’s Avatar and experienced yet another great Tim Burton masterpiece, Alice in Wonderland. Two great movies and two totally different 3D experiences. Come; see me banter on about the “avatar experience” and the twisted add-on to a timeless classic.

James Cameron’s Avatar

The wife and I finally saw this ground-breaking movie. The movie was released December 10, 2009 and we saw it January 24, 2010. We were concerned that the movie would be pulled from the movie theater because it’s been out for so long. Boy were we wrong. The movie has already made billions of dollars world-wide. When we arrive at the IMAX Theater with only minutes to showtime, to our surprise, the movie was sold out!  We ended up getting tickets for the regular theater viewing (still in 3D).

This was my first ever 3D experience. I realized that I’m very fortunate to have my first experience be Avatar and not any of the other movies using the quirky 3D effects. Overall; I had a great time. People rag on about the story not being so deep and twisted, but I thought it was well played. I think Jame’s purpose was to not overwhelm people since the visual effects of the movie would already do that.

It took me a while for my eyes to adjust to the subtle 3D effects. After I got comfortable, I really lost myself into what was going on. Sure I could narrate the hero’s every move, but that’s just a product of us being so used to complex storyline.

Alice in Wonderland

The story in this movie is awesome! I loved the fact that they weren’t retelling “Alice’s Adventure in Wonderland.” The cast was well done and I will certainly buy this movie when it’s available in BluRay. The only thing I could have done without was the 3D effects. It actually took me out of the movie, the 3D effects kind of got in my way.

I’m too tired to really post a long drawn-out synopsis of both of these movies. Avatar is basically the model for doing a movie in 3D and Alice in Wonderland is not, plain and simple.

I’m a big Star Wars fan so there was no way I would miss this 3D-cartoon style premier of Star Wars: The Clone Wars presented by Cartoon Network.  Because of my life with little kids I haven’t seen the full-motion picture yet.  A lot of folks basically gave it the same rating as, “It was OK – you can wait for it to come out on DVD.”  This version, being shown on television, uses the same drawing style as the movie.  I’m not certain if Cartoon Network will run two half hour shows each week or end up showing one half hour show, but this premier had two shows, pretty sweet.

I’m unclear who’s idea it was, but they start the show off with a quote.  Really!? Do we need life lessons in the beginning of the show.  I guess because I’m older (29), I should probably know these things already.  So; I’m going to assume they are targeting those messages to the tweens that watch CN.  I was a bit confused at first when it started.  The announcer-guy sounded way too fake or “animated” for the Star Wars universe.  It reminded me of Starship Troopers.  At first I thought he was recapping for some tv show or newscast, but it seems to be the way their setting up the scene, weird, but I might be able to live with it.

What really pulls this show together, for me, are the droids and clones.  They’ve done a great job giving each drone and clone some personality.  The droid are funny, because of their lack of human emotion they go around carrying orders and seem to be having a great time doing it.  One droid was humming a tune while on his way to kill clones in an escape pod.  Cynical… I love it!  The clones, for the most part, have different hair styles and different personas.  Master Yoda made a good point about The Force being in and on all living creatures… so even though the clones are from one person they look different or as individuals through The Force.  Because the clones now have a human element to them I don’t want to see them die.  When a droid gets shot or cut in half, it’s comical… when a clone dies – a small part of me dies too (very dramatic, eh!?).  Oh and unlike the droids the clones seem very teachable.  Every episode it seems as though the clones learn a new lesson from their general.

Episode One

This episode was kind of slow, but good overall.  Master Yoda and three clones had to make their way to meet a king and gain his alliance to the republic.  While being hunted by Count Dooku‘s apprentice and a battalion of droids.  The clones learned some things from their general, it was comical that even they didn’t understand the profound things Master Yoda was saying, and in the end we got a full episode of Jedi action from tiny Yoda.

Episode Two

The second episode gave us a sneak peek into some of the prototypes for the ultimate weapon in the universe, that would eventually be engineered on the Death Star.  This time we saw a huge star cruiser and it was an ion cannon.  Very nice concept; fire this device to render ships and all electronic devices helpless, then go out and destroy what you want.  General Grievous was manning the ship and we saw him fail.  I thought Count Dooku would chop him up into pieces, but he didn’t.

This episode we saw more Jedi, and we also saw that Anakin had a padawan- a young girl named Ahsoka Tano.  It’s not her fault, but she looks like a little black girl with funny white/blue hair.  I think she’s fifteen, or that’s what her body type says to me.  It was weird seeing Anakin with a padawan and he seemed so cool and collective.  Too bad he ends up killing all the Jedi (in the future), what a jerk!

Overall; I am excited about this new series from Cartoon Network.  I put it on my Google Calendar and I don’t plan on missing anything.  The 3D drawing style is OK, I’m more interested in the content though.  It’s nice to have two female presence; on the dark side Asajj Ventress and on the light side Ahsoka Tano.  In the earlier cartoon series of the Clone Wars, General Grievous struck fear and kicked the mess out of the Jedi – the commercials paint a different picture in this time frame.  I’d like to see the Jedi put a whoopin’ on him this time.