VIDEO: Duudle Game Action

Download Duudle from Windows Marketplace

About Duudle

Duudle is an easy and social connected/online game. You get a word and 30 seconds to draw it. Your duudle is then pushed to your opponents and is replayed exactly as your drew it. Your opponents shall guess the word as fast as possible. The faster they guess right the more points both they and you get. Then it’s the next players turn to draw and you guess. Duudle is turn based meaning you can play whenever you like. You get a notification when it’s your turn, simply action when you want it!

Getting started is easy. Signup with your Facebook account and all your friends that play Duudle will show up instantly. Or simply sign up with your email address. Challenge your friends, family or colleagues. Or, if you can’t get enough action, play as many random games as you like. Duudle games are turn based and can be played over a long period of time (or short) by players anywhere. Players have up to 72 hours to complete their turn.

Be warned, its fun and addictive! Download it now for Windows Phone 7 from Windows Marketplace.

FREEMIUM

Duudle is a free game (as in ad based Freemium). The free version shows ads. Users that upgrade and buy the premium version get no ads. The trial version of the premium download in the Windows Marketplace never expires and is actually the same as the Free version. That is, users can play free forever and get ads or users can upgrade and get no ads.

Screenshots

Head over the Windows Marketplace and you’ll find eight nice screenies there.

About Hackathon 2011

Nokia hosted the Hackathon 2011 at Nokia World in London in October. The VISIARC team won the grand prize: fame, glory and a check for the multiplayer Duudle game.

• Nokia blog Winner announcement
• Nokia Developer News Announcement
• wpcentral article with a 5 min video shot directly after the Hackathon

Hackathon backgrounder video:

Now we look forward to our Duudle game to be released and to bring some Xmas joy and fun!

In the News & Hackathon Videos

Check out the Hackathon video shot by Channel9 (including an interview directly after the award ceremony, with three very happy but also very tired fellows):

“Our opinion? This game will be huge. It has a great UI, the gameplay is totally unique and it has what you folks want, turn-based multiplayer action.” wpcentral

Hackathon backgrounder video:

More info about the Hackathon:

• Nokia blog Winner announcement
• Nokia Developer News Announcement
• wpcentral article with the 5 min video above

19:41 CET, Sunday August 7, 2011, a lightning strikes out a transformer in Dublin, Ireland. The lightning sparks a fire and explosion, and propagates into Amazon’s data center where its backup generators fail, that normally kicks in automatically. An Amazon cloud power outage is a fact. And out goes the Mobile Documents service as well. You could expect that a top-notch modern data center should be able to withstand a thunder storm. No problem you may think, the center will soon get power and Amazon can restart their instances.

02:06 CET, Monday August 8, 2011, Amazon recommends re-launching instances in different availability zones, that is not in the affected EU-WEST-1 region’s facility.

This Monday morning when we wake up and check our system in Amazon’s Web Services Console and we discover that our live instance that was running is locked, meaning we cannot re-launch it. Ok, so we turn to our backups (snapshots) that we take regularly of all instances and volumes of the entire Mobile Documents systems. We’re stunned to find that for some critical backups are just gone, 18 days of backups for some of the volumes has just vanished. The latest backup for these dates July 20, which means it’s a bad idea to revert too, a terrible idea. Perhaps these backups are just offline and will be made available soon. So we wait for more information from Amazon as the get there data center powered up and alive again.

08:04 CET, Tuesday August 9, 2011, we check the Amazon Health Dashboard and find out (under the Europe tab and Ireland Elastic Cloud Compute):

In some cases EC2 instances or EBS servers lost power before writes to their volumes were completely consistent. Because of this, in some cases we will provide customers with a recovery snapshot instead of restoring their volume so they can validate the health of their volumes before returning them to service. We will contact those customers with information about their recovery snapshot.

Ok, so this explains why our live system instance is locked, it’s wrecked. Not surprisingly, as a push email service with hundreds of thousands of subscribers in every corner of the world means it of course is busy 24/7 and more or less is constantly writing to disk. Ok, so let’s fall back on the backups we think, let’s wait until we get them back. Then things get worse.

11:12 CET, Tuesday August 9, 2011, we receive an email. In detail Amazon explains the “impossible”:

Separately, and independent from the power issue in the affected availability zone, we’ve discovered an error in the EBS software that cleans up unused snapshots. During a recent run of this EBS software in the EU-West Region, one or more blocks in a number of EBS snapshots were incorrectly deleted. The root cause was a software error that caused the snapshot references to a subset of blocks to be missed during the reference counting process. This process compares the blocks scheduled for deletion to the blocks referenced in customer snapshots. As a result of the software error, the EBS snapshot management system in the EU-West Region incorrectly thought some of the blocks were no longer being used and deleted them. We’ve addressed the error in the EBS snapshot system to prevent it from recurring.

We have now disabled all of your snapshots that contain these missing blocks. You can determine which of your snapshots were affected via the AWS Management Console or the DescribeSnapshots API call. The status for any affected snapshots will be shown as “error”.

It then dawns upon us. Not only are 18 days of backups for some volumes gone, they’re deleted, and if not enough the majority of the remaining snapshots have been corrupted by Amazon’s backup system. Most our backups glares back at us in red screaming out “error”.

We now have one last resort, try to recover the instance that was live when the disaster struck, the one that is wrecked and that is locked. So we ask for it to see what can be done. Tuesday evening we get access to it. Indeed it’s inconsistent, we can’t boot it and attempts to read and dump the data fails. It’s a wreck.

01:26 CET, Wednesday August 10, 2011, Amazon have created copies of affected snapshots and recommends to run recovery tools. We do and it’s not very helpful, our data is just still trashed.

Normally, a lightning doesn’t lead to a power outage of a data center. Normally, we would have booted up the system from backups (snapshots) first thing Monday morning. When Thursday morning arrives we’ve spent all Wednesday night to Thursday doing some data forensics. Successfully we were able to recover all critical business data. We could also validate that we got it all back. However, the system is a mess of bits and pieces and now the work starts to get all subsystems alive again. By the Thursday evening we have all primary functions started and even more today, Friday, when I’m writing this blog post.

This is the story what happened and need I say, one of the worst weeks in the history of Mobile Documents. We’ve throughout the week been trying to keep everyone updated on Twitter. Thanks for all support. To all of you that use and like Mobile Documents, we’re just very, very sorry. Several days of service outage is unacceptable. If you read this far I hope you understand that we’ve done what we could and that two separate things that both shall be impossible have created the disastrous situation that we’ve spent the entire week to recover from.

There are still accounts that are affected. These will be fully recovered and functional early the next week. If you have an affected account you will get an email. No email and your account is ok.

Is there a lesson to be learned? – There are two.

Lesson one: Regarding clouds, no data center is safe. You need to keep your live data in at least to geographically disparate locations so that you can failover.

Lesson two: Don’t trust any backup system or sugar-coated words of suppliers. (We have regularly utilized and recovered data from snapshots without problems during the beta testing period. Yet when situation became critical, the backups were simply not there. Bad luck, yes indeed.)

We’ve learnt and we’re motivated to create an even more resilient system, and we’ll be really paranoid when creating the scenarios it shall withstand.

There is exciting stuff in the pipe and we hope that you will continue giving us your support. So we’re happy to let you know that we’re about to lift the beta on some parts of the Mobile Documents quite soon, (no date disclosed).

Thank you all that help us with your feedback. It’s really welcome. Keep it coming. We read everything and listen.

Background: VISIARC Selected as a Red Herring Top 100 Europe Tech Startup

Red Herring announced its Top 100 award in recognition of the leading private companies from Europe, celebrating these startups’ innovations and technologies across their respective industries, this week in Amsterdam, The netherlands.

Red Herring’s Top 100 Europe list has become a mark of distinction for identifying promising new companies and entrepreneurs. Red Herring editors were among the first to recognize that companies such as Facebook, Twitter, Google, Yahoo, Skype, Salesforce.com, YouTube, and eBay would change the way we live and work.

“Choosing the companies with the strongest potential was by no means a small feat,” said Alex Vieux, publisher and CEO of Red Herring. “After rigorous contemplation and discussion, we narrowed our list down from hundreds of candidates from across Europe to the Top 100 Winners. We believe VISIARC embodies the vision, drive and innovation that define a successful entrepreneurial venture. VISIARC should be proud of its accomplishment, as the competition was very strong.”

Red Herring’s editorial staff evaluated the companies on both quantitative and qualitative criteria, such as financial performance, technology innovation, management quality, strategy, and market penetration. This assessment of potential is complemented by a review of the track record and standing of startups relative to their sector peers, allowing Red Herring to see past the “buzz” and make the list a valuable instrument of discovery and advocacy for the most promising new business models in Europe.

Mobile Documents Email Widget Framework Integration for Symbian^3

(For 0.9.19 and later builds, check “About” in the options menu. Phones supporting this at date of publishing are: Nokia N8, C7, E7 & C6-01 (but notice, not C6-00). Home screen widgets will soon also be made availble on some Symbian S60 5th Edt smartphones, such as the Nokia N97 & N97 mini.)

Mobile Documents is activley being developed, and we believe that apps should not need manuals. But sometimes certain features may yet be hard to find or understand. This is our first walkthrough tutorial. If you like it and want us to publish more tutorials on other topics, please let us know. Leave a comment or send an email to support@mobiledocuments.com. Enough, here’s how to set up a Mobile Documents home screen widget through Nokia’s native email widget framework, step-by-step:

1. Install Mobile Documents (0.9.19)

Mobile Documents installed and multiple mailboxes have been set up. Each email account is now ready to be added as a home screen email widget.

Notice. You need to add the email accounts before you can add it as a home screen email widget.

2. Long-Press Home Screen to Enter Edit Home Screen Mode and Add Widget

Add widget in edit home screen mode. Room for three email accounts here.

Notice. You may need to remove an existing widget first to make room for a new one. (There are three home screens per default, and you just swipe left or right to switch between them. But you cannot do that in edit home screen mode. In this mode you need to use the dedicated three-dot-button at the bottom to toggle between them.)

3. Select Mail Widget

Select Mail widget.

Notice. You might look for Mobile Documents here, but in reality selecting the native Mail is the thing to do, deceivingly straight-forward.

4. Choose Mailbox

Select Mobile Documents mailbox for each widget that you add.

Notice. All mailboxes that you might have set up with both Mobile Documents and Nokia Messaging turns up here. That means that you might see duplicates. Don’t worry if you select the wrong one. You can always delete it and then go back here and select the other. You will notice which app you enter when you tap on the widget. Don’t worry, it’s safe and you can have the same email account set up in both Mobile Documents and Nokia Messaging (the built-in email client) at the same time.

5. Done and You’re Done

Done and your added widgets will appear on your home screen just as native mail widgets would.

After you’re done, your home screen may look like the screenshot to the left. Perhaps you would like to add the Mobile Documents app shortcut as well. How to do that is very similar and you can figure it out yourself.

Enjoy the widgets!

Mobile Documents from VISIARC - MUST-HAVE APP OF THE YEAR 2010 WINNER - We feel very honored to first be picked as a nominee, and then to be voted the winner by you Nokia users, thanks.

Want to try Mobile Documents (in beta):

• Download (0.9.18) from the Ovi store available for almost all Nokia Symbian S60 phones, runs on Symbian^3 but not optimized.
• Download (0.9.19) from Nokia Beta Labs optimized for Symbian^3 (only for Nokia N8, C6-01, C7-00 & E7-00 )
• Download from Android market (just search for “mobile documents or visiarc”)

Or watch video on Nokia Beta Labs blog, the latest release video.

We’re very excited to work with Nokia and the Beta Labs team. As you know, we always ask for feedback and now we get the forums and other tools to really get issues, ideas and feedback organized. Mobile Documents is the next generation email and solves the #1 problem in mobile email, heavy attachments. With our unique cloud-boosted approach to emails, attachments and documents we’re the first and only to enable real mobile email and mobile document sharing. But it’s more, it’s something you need to experience for yourself, so try the beta and let us know what you think. You got a Nokia Symbian^3 phone, head to Nokia Beta Labs. You can also read our Nokia guest blog post.

Two New Major Features

There are two major new features included in this release, a handful other features for you to discover plus many minor issues that’ve been resolved. The two major news are presented below.

Mobile Documents Multi-Touch Viewer for Symbian^3: Here's a 71 MP image from an email attachment viewed on a Nokia N8 while making a phone call.

PINCH ZOOM. Mobile Documents allows you to zoom in and pan on any image, PDF or Office Document. With the new fast multi-touch optimized viewer for Symbian^3, it’s taken to a new level. No image is too large, no document too heavy to be streamed and viewed.

Mobile Documents Notification Framework Integration for Symbian^3: Have as many Home Screen Widgets as you like and decide if you like popups and/or tones for new emails and/or shared documents.

NOTIFICATIONS. Mobile Documents now intgerates with the native notification framework on your Symbian^3 phone. You’re in control. You decide how and when you want to be notified.

This release is available from Nokia beta Labs, get it from here (download install file, version 0.9.19).

Opening a whopping 71 megapixel image on a mobile hasn’t been done before, most likely. Real soon a Symbian^3 Mobile Documents release featuring multi-touch will hit the Ovi store as well. The E7 will be an excellent messaging tool for Mobile Documents with its big screen sizeable qwerty keyboard.

“It was quite a long process to wade through the entries for the Mobilize 2010 LaunchPad, but these 10 companies stand out for their innovation and executable ideas,” said GigaOm editor Stacey Higginbotham, co-chair of Mobilize 2010 alongside GigaOM Net

It’ll be very exciting to present our cloud-boosted Email 2.0 technology to the leading minds in the mobile industry. Meet us there.

Stay tuned!

Read the GigaOm Winner Announcement Press Release

The new BETA features Free email, Exchange support, Auto-Start and more.

First, we now support Microsoft Exchange natively, meaning that 80% of companies and organizations can use Mobile Documents.

Second, we now step into the Freemium model of operating. The good news is that we now offer unlimted number of free email accounts, (until now we offered only two).

The new release is available from m.mobiledocuments.com if you’d like to try it out on your mobile. If you already are a Mobile Documents user, you will be notified via the update server once you start Mobile Documents on your mobile. (It will be made available from on Ovi store, PlayNow Arena and GetJar soon as as it clears QA on each.)

New major features summary:

• Microsoft Exchange, native support
• Unlimited Free Email Accounts
• Auto Start
• Faster & Nicer Email Reader
• Imporved Document Reader

In addition there are miscellaneous performance optimizations, stability improvements, connectivity enhancements, graphics and other minor updates and fixes.

Microsoft Exchange: Native Support

Microsoft Exchange with folder support allows fine-tuning of push notifications

Mobile Documents now offers native support for Microsoft Exchange 2007 and later. Easily set up and define notification for folders, i.e. other than the inbox. An important mail from your boss, you might want to get a notification. An unimportant mailing list, should just be made available for later reading but without notification.

Freemium: Unlimited Email Accounts

Free and premium push mail will be offered. During the beta all is free.

Mobile Documents supports an unlimited number of Free email accounts. Until now we only allowed two email accounts overall. From now and onwards free email services such as Gmail, Yahoo!, Ovi, GMX and other are free on Mobile Documents too. You can have up to two Premium accounts for free throughout the beta as well. After the beta you will have to pay for premium accounts. But Mobile Documents is easy to use and will be easy to afford as well. Microsoft Exchange and email addresses requiring non-free template settings will be charged Premium for. Free accounts will remain free, as in gratis!

Auto Start

Enable auto-start to make sure you always get your emails.

Convenient auto start feature is now released. Never again miss any push notifications of new emails bacause you forgot to launch Mobile Documents after you rebooted your mobile. The app wakes up when you turn on your mobile. There is a setting to disable if you still want to start manually, and it will honor your roaming settings. If your roaming it will not connect and push your email, until you stop roaming again of course.

Email Reader

Faster, more legible and more easily accessible tools such as star.

Reading email is now faster and you got more options made readily available where you want them the most. The legibility of email is improved and you now find quick navigation buttons to go to the bottom and top again. Starring and unstarring a mail is also made available in the reader. Now you can expand and compact the header using more and less.

Document Reader

Read free flowing text and interact with text in a PDF via touch-up.

As you know Mobile Documents distinguishes between viewing a layouted document and just reading the raw extracted and reformated text. This read mode is fast and convenient for reading longer texts and documents, while the view mode is better for getting and overview and viewing grphics and images. Now the reader’s legibility and usability is improved. Also try the volume controls to shift pages.

Mobile Documents Story in Pictures

Read the Mobile Documents Booklet (PDF)

Read the Mobile Documents booklet (PDF for 0.9.17).

Enjoy!