Fire-Wired Blog

This article was first published by  dmcityview.com One thing that denotes a city from a major metropolitan area is an extensive mass transit system. While Des Moines’ labor force may worry about our daily “rush minute,” cities like New York and Chicago have to worry about bus and rail schedules, not to mention full-on gridlock. Maybe Des Moines will someday grow large enough to warrant a rail system of some sort, but if a recent rash of ridesharing networks has anything to do with it, it may never be necessary. The real bane of traffic jams worldwide is single-rider vehicles, miles of four-door cars with only the driver’s seat occupied. Hoping to fill those seats with would-be carpoolers, social rideshare networks have popped up, thanks to smartphone applications such as Uber, Lyft and Sidecar. These applications enlist willing drivers to rent their vacant car seats to passengers. Rather than having to choose between braving roadway congestion or the horrors of public transit, ...

This article was first published by  dmcityview.com Somewhere in America a giddy tween-ager is right now being handed his or her first cell phone along with that parental warning: “Remember, once you post something online it is there forever.” Thankfully forever now has a pit stop, and it’s an application called Snapchat. While I won’t profess to be fully attuned to youth culture, I do know this: Snapchat is in: Facebook is out. For those even more out the loop, Snapchat is a social messaging service that allows users to send multimedia messages with a shelf time of 10 seconds or less. Basically, users can share content privately with their social circles without their entire Facebook network of friends seeing it (i.e. mom), and it will self-destruct protecting the user from potential fallout. Much has been made about the nefarious aspects of Snapchat: lewd photos, offensive or harassing content and the potential to bypass the self-destruct feature via screen capture. But in t...

This article was first published by  dmcityview.com Whenever a new website pops up and becomes super popular, eventually everyone asks the same question: How does this site make money? Usually sites first make it online with minor personal investments followed by private investors, but all investors want a return, and more likely than not that means advertisements. Though most people often tune out the ads, a festering type of advertisement can camouflage itself in the content a person actually cares about. This infestation is known as native advertisements. All Internet users have seen them hiding in plain sight — in search results, Facebook newsfeeds, Twitter feeds, even CNN’s main page — posts and links that look like normal content but are actually advertisements. Some say “sponsored” or “promoted,” but others are not so aptly defined. Google was even sued into fine-print labeling their native ads. Regardless, though, they often prove to work. Currently reaping roughly $2 b...

This article was first published by  dmcityview.com For gamers everywhere, Christmas has come early — the long-awaited next generation of gaming units has finally hit store shelves. Within 10 days of each other, both Sony’s Playstation 4 and Microsoft’s XBox One hit the market this past month and together opened up the console gaming world to a new echelon of button-mashing entertainment. While Playstation and XBox loyalists spend the coming weeks embroiled in heated arguments over whose platform is superior, let me save you from becoming collateral damage. Neither the Playstation 4 nor the XBox One is worthy of your time or money. There’s no denying the unbelievable player experience, realistic graphics, processing power, back catalogue of games or gamer mindshare that Sony and Microsoft have to work with. The trouble lies in the world these two platforms find themselves in — the mobile gaming and wireless world. The rising tide of mobile gaming is undeniable. More than on...