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Ericsson Unveils Wind-Powered Cell Tower
Telecommunications provider Ericsson is putting some wind power into its network with a new radio communications tower unveiled today. The Swedish telecom partnered with turbine maker Vertical Wind AB and Uppsala University to incorporate a vertical-axis wind turbine into the tower that houses radio base stations and antennas. The tower is now undergoing trials to see if the design will enable low-cost mobile communications to spread throughout remote regions with minimal environmental impact.
The rig is a conceptual riff on Ericsson’s energy-lean Tower Tube design. Ericsson claims it has greatly reduced the station’s power demand, eliminating the need for feeders and cooling systems and slashing energy consumption up to 40 percent. It’s not clear how much of the tower’s energy needs will be fulfilled by the turbine, but due to wind’s intermittent nature, it will likely need to be grid-connected to ensure a stable signal, although it could use an energy storage system in far-flung locals.
This project is part of Ericsson’s ongoing Communications Expander campaign, under which the company is boosting efficiency and using solar and wind energy to power its network whenever possible. Aside from the environmental benefits, Ericsson says this will cut operation costs and make telecommunications available to more people in more parts of the world. For the full story, head over to Earth2Tech.
New Version of Desktop Tower Defense Released
A new version of the popular and wildly addictive Desktop Tower Defense has been released.
The new version includes new Ink, Snap & Boost Towers, New Morph & Dark Creeps, New Trickle, Random, 15 Tower & Splash/No Splash modes, 10K mode is now 100 levels. The Bash tower is improved and the interface has been overhauled.
The new version delivers a more complex game that provides new challenges for regular users.
I’m siding with Jason Kottke on the changes: a lot of the changes make the game more complex without delivering more fun; trying to succeed with a number of the new features is plain difficult and literally means having to relearn the best way of playing the game. The in-game advertising with the letter K appearing on creeps referring to a sponsor is intrusive and a step too far. Many will enjoy the new challenges of Desktop Tower Defense, but for others it will lose its appeal.
Previous TechCrunch coverage here.
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Desktop Tower Defense Played 15 Million Times
Desktop Tower Defense, the addictive and evil game that Jeremy Zawodny wrote about and which subsequently led to me losing several working days to “testing,” has been played 15 million times since launching in March. So says the creator, Paul Preece, to the WSJ today.
Preece, who’s started his own company to create more games, says that up to 4,000 people are playing at any one time.
Preece, whatever you create next, I hope I never hear about it.
Click here to play the game, and write off the rest of your day.
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Desktop Tower Defense Creates Startup
Paul Preece, the designer of the wildly addictive Desktop Tower Defense has quit his day job and is teaming up with David Litsky; the designer of FlashElementTD to develop online games full time.
Desktop Tower Defense currently ranks at just over 6,000 on Alexa. According to a report at Gigaom the game had 4 million unique visitors on 20 million page views in April.
Michael Arrington has written previously about the addictive nature of the simple yet compelling game. It has spurred competitions, hacks and a large loyal following.
Preece and Litsky have set up a blog to document the new company. At the time of writing the front page included a sneak peak at the new towers to be included in the next version of Desktop Tower Defense.
(via Kottke)
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Desktop Tower Defense Should Be Banned
Desktop Tower Defense illustrates that you don’t need fancy graphics or big budgets to build highly addictive online games. In Desktop Tower Defence, all of the main graphics are hand drawn.
I first discovered this on Jeremy Zawodny’s blog, where he warned “The lack of posting here in the second half of this week (especially to my linkblog) has been a direct result of attempting to beat this highly addictive game. Whatever you do, please DO NOT click the link and start playing that game. You may find yourself in the very same time warp that I did…”
So of course I clicked on the link and have been “testing” the game ever since. It’s free and Flash based, and very simple. Bad guys come at you in a highly predictable way. You build defenses that take them out. If any get through, you lose a life. I’ve gotten to level 72. Can’t get past it.
Until this, Kdice was my addictive online game of choice. Now, I have them both open in separate browser tabs.
If you do get hooked, and want some advice on how to get up into the higher levels, watch this YouTube video.
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News | Tower Records for sale after bankruptcy confirmed - NMA
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