wildlife

NEW YORK--Four nonprofit organizations will be participating in a test of Facebook's "credits" platform, marketing and outreach director Randi Zuckerberg said on Friday morning at the Social Good Conference presented by social-media blog Mashable.

"I just received confirmation yesterday that...we're going to be reopening up charity gifts in the Gift Shop," said Zuckerberg (who is, yes, the sister of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg). "We are exploring ways for developers to use the Gift Shop to offer...virtual, real, and charity gifts."

This will be rolling out next week with four test … Read more

Enviro-Bear 2010 is part game, part joke, part art piece, and part game-design experiment, but it's also a bold and ridiculous app that's basically a Rorschach test for gamers. Unlike any other game, Enviro-Bear 2010 challenges you to play as a bear driving a car who's trying to run over and then scarf up enough food to hibernate in the last 5 minutes before winter.

Whether you love or hate Enviro-Bear 2010, a couple of things are certain: the interface is deliberately difficult (reflecting, one might suppose, the difficulty a real bear would experience driving a car) … Read more

So what kind of car are you going to get next? Perhaps, I might tempt your credulity by asking you to consider a new eco-car called the LEKO.

A Toyota? No, an IKEA.

A strange Web site has appeared, roulez-leko.com, on which a very relaxed, modern, eco-friendly chap, allegedly the great car designer Christophe Grozs, stands next to an apparent car draped with the word LEKO and the tagline "la voiture selon IKEA."

Yes, the car according to IKEA.

The LEKO (L'eco, get it?), allegedly has the backing of the World Wildlife Fund in France. Which might mean the fund has put money into the creation or that the car will have plastic panda-skin seats.

It also will save you untold (because unspecified) amounts of money on your expenditure. And it is humongously eco-friendly.

This is an ad, right?

If IKEA made a car, the doors might not fit quite perfectly into the body. Then you'd really have to work hard to use those tiny screwdrivers to make sure the engine didn't wobble. And just imagine the number of screws it would take to put in the cup holder.

There's the name too. Real IKEA product names never make sense. They always seem to resemble a fair to middling Scrabble hand--for example, KLIPPAN or LYCKSELE. LEKO is far too meaningful.… Read more

There's something deeply satisfying about creating a video, and in the spirit of discovery, National Geographic Digital Media has announced Wildlife Filmmaker, an online video mashup to make you look like a wildlife documenter.

At first glance this is a nice-looking package for targeted video creation--all stylish black with bold accents in a Flash application. Putting together fun film clips is dead easy when you drag National Geographic's video footage of a variety of animals from the clips library to the corresponding clip bin on the storyboard. Repeat with sound snippets, music themes, and captions you author in the Web application's tab. Then click "play" and try to choke back the lump of pride you experience watching little Susie's--or your own--masterpiece.

It's a fun trifle, but from a Web application perspective, Wildlife Filmmaker is flimsy. Footage is limited, and there doesn't appear to be a way to import your own sounds, music, or video clips. Also absent is a way to preview the visual and audio media before dragging it to the storyboard. Once there, the clips lock into time slots graduated at every 5 seconds. The unfortunate result in my film was a caption that spilled over the crux of the clip. I should also note that I couldn't delete unwanted captions from the caption creation tab.… Read more