Just GIG IT! Nas CoSigns New Facebook Game

John Acunto, CEO and Co-Founder of GIG IT asked me to “Gig-IT”. I had to admit that I had no clue what he was talking about, but that didn’t last for long. As I spoke with he and his team behind the new Facebook game it became increasingly clear that this could be the next Big Facebook game. With the mantra “This aint no Farm” firmly embedded in my psyche I stepped forward into the light.

First, there’s the game play. It’s quite simple really. You book a GiG for your client. Your client just happens to be the likes of Flo Ryder, Rick Ross, and even Nas. You book the venue, you choose the sponsors, you can even choose what your artist wears. Now here is the cool part – you can choose your artist’s songs they will perform based on your own song list. Not only that, but you can plan everything that happens on stage including lighting, pyrotechnics  and the like. When you get good – you can have your friends watch the concert you put on in REAL TIME! You can save your best performances and share them with the world for up to two weeks. Check below for the starting list of artists in the game, most of whom were at the launch party last night. You can see the awesome pics in the gallery below as well. There were appearances by Jamie Foxx, Busta Rhymes, La La Vasquez, Nas, Talib Kwele, 2 Chainz, and many, many, many more.

I mentioned to John that he should add the ability to skin your own likeness in the game so you could appear as one of your favorite artist’s crew. I think that would be hot!

The app utilizes Youtube for saving the videos that you make and you can view them on your mobile device. The game is based on ratings so you better do a good job or you’ll have your friends raggin’ on you. I interviewed B-Real from Cypress Hill who said this wasn’t the first time he was in a game and that in the old Maddens you could put in a cheat code and get him on your squad! I thought that was an interesting little fact, but it really goes to show how far music – especially hip-hop – and technology have come.

I’ll definitely be checking this game once it drops this year and I’ll keep you posted on new news. For now, check the little clip of Elle Varner tearing down the house!

Game Artist List:

1. Flo rida
2. Neyo
3. Tyga
4. Slaughter house
5. Sean Kingston
6. MGK
7. Fabolous
8. Miguel
9. 2chainz
10. Nas
11. Rick Ross

Images:


					

VJay: The Video Mixer App for the iPad

If your into mixing music and videos, here’s a nice little app that you might be interested in. It’s called VJay – which is appropriate, but still sounds funny. It’s set up in pretty much the exact same way two turntables would be set up in a DJ App, except there are two videos instead. The makers, algoriddim, know what their doing as they’ve been around the bend a time or two. They created the DJay app for iPhone, and iPad and their up to their usual schennanegans with this latest app.

I got the chance to play with it for a little while and there is quite a bit you can do with this puppy. Apparently it’s the first of it’s kind giving its users the ability to mix music videos rather than just .mp3s. A few of the cool things you can do are of course fading the music as well as the images together as you move from one video to the other. There are different graphic options for fading from one video to the other like “Cube”, “Swap”, “Grid”, and few more. Changing those options determine how the fade will work. Block for example transitions like a turning cube.

Not only can you que up videos, you can also que up different songs as well. So that’s four separate things going on at the same time potentially. Two different tracks with two different videos, unless of course the videos have their own audio. You can loop a portion of the audio at 2 or 4 beats and you can also choose different cool effects that effect the video in real-time. Some of those effects are “strobe”, “twirl”, “crush” and “fisheye”. Strobe causes the video to pulsate with light instantly giving you migraine. Twirl is a mini tornado in the middle of the video. Crush pixelates the video so that you look like you are playing a video game straight from the 80s and fisheye is a bouncing ball under the video.

You can record your best moments for playback at a later date, and the video toggles to full screen when you want it to. It’s quite a bit of functionality and if you want it, it’ll cost you $10 bucks. You can create really cool music videos if you put in the time and energy, however, I instantly thought of one really cool use case scenario. I saw this cool band call “Kung Fu Masters” and they play jazz while kung fu movie clips and anime play in the background. You can check them here, but I think this app would totally be cool for you creative types out there who think up cool stuff like that. If your looking for a great tool, I recommend it. You can download the VJay app right here.

App That Helps You Rap!

See what I did there? Anyway, came across this pretty cool app in the Google Play Store called AutoRap by Smule – the makers of the “I am T-Pain” App from a while ago. Their quest is to equip sucker MCs from their bad habits by auto correcting their raps and putting it to music.

You can record yourself and share with your friends as well as change the beat to lyrics you just made. You can save all your raps locally on your device to peruse at your leisure. It’s definitely not a cure for bad rapping, but it is pretty fun with a group of people.

[Smule by way of Engadget]

Underwear in a Bunch over iPhone App

Was sent an article from the NYDailyNews.com about adult apps that feature Asian Women. Not having an iPhone myself, I can’t really say that I’ve played around with some of the applications mentioned in the article, however, the author makes a good point that a lot of men miss.

I’m not going to go into the usual humdrum of how men treat women as sexual objects as their are extensive articles on that subject. I just think its really interesting how we as a society are are taking our sexism to new levels with technology!

We are at the point were we snack on information like Doritos. Stick with me I’m going somewhere.  Our appetite for bite sized packets of information that we can digest in a few minutes or less is beginning to grow, while our attention spans are waning. I am beginning to think this is having an effect on how we perceive information. For example, the title “Asian Boobs” would reek of sexism as well as racism in a society that took a longer time to process information. However, in this society where I can read 5 newspapers on my cell phone in the 45 minute commute to work, I don’t really have time to process the information as good or bad. It just exists. I either like it or I don’t. That is a real title for an iPhone App by the way,  and its got the writer of this article really mad. Can’t say that I blame her. I wished she were a little more broad in her topic, and I felt it was a little too one-sided, (so I shouldn’t date Asians cause that shows I have Asian Fever?)  but a good read none-the-less.

Now to my male readers – it would seem that we should be more enlightened than our great-grandparents and even our parents in matters of racism and sexism, but are we living up to the hype? Because such apps are accepted as normal and because they take up so little of our time, do we gloss over glaring forms of prejudice simply because it doesn’t take up more than 5 minutes of our day? Coming back to the Doritos analogy, can “snack apps” and or “snack pieces of information” be detrimental to our 21st Century enlightenment if we aren’t careful in much the same way as junk food can be to our health without moderation?