Forget Park Place, I want to buy the Red Square
In case you have not hear about it, Monopoly is going global. According to Daily Mail UK, Google has been in contact with Hasbro to make a new Monopoly game that utilizes Google Maps.
With the release of the game, you will not only be able to buy the standard upgrades – House or Hotel, you will also be able to say, put a stadium on your pesky neighbors house. Don’t like your current office building? Buy the area, put up a skyscraper.
Not only will there be the standard modifications to the lots and upgrades, the chance cards will now give the option to build a prison or a garbage dump. The possibilities of where to put that are endless.
According the article:
Players start the free game with three million Monopoly dollars and can buy Downing Street for $231,000, while Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, where the White House stands, costs $2 million.
Rent is paid automatically each day, from $50,000 for a house to $100 million for a skyscraper.
I for one, look forward to playing. I have been waiting for a major change in the game for a very long time. Next one they need to do is Risk.
Categories: SW Tags: 100 million, age, are, as, can, chance cards, current office, daily mail uk, dailymail, downing street, FREE, free game, game, garbage, global mail, google, google maps, hasbro, long time, mail, monopoly, new monopoly game, News, news article, Office, online, online game, park place, pennsylvania avenue, Read, red square, skyscraper, START, the, title, Tree, uk news, use, you
Child Safe Searches
In the ever expanding integration of the Internet and kids lives, filtering out non age appropriate information from searches is often overlooked by parents.
Google did address this a while back with the Safe Search option. This, I must admit, is not one of their better implementations. With two mouse clicks, I can turn this feature off.
Enter DuckDuckGo.com.
Duck Duck Go is a new search engine with less garbage and better results. With less clicking forward and back between results, it is for anyone who wants to get information faster.
One of the first features I found when I visited their page was the ability to lock Safe Search on. They report that once it is clicked it can not be removed. I can not guarantee this as true, but I did do a few things that a young kid might do and sure enough it stuck with it.
Right on the main search page you have the ability to focus your search between standard search, information sites, and shopping sites. That can really help limit the results for common terms.
Some of the other features include: Detection of calculations, phone, tracking, car #s; zip, book, product codes; street and IP addresses, Category pages, and Keyboard shortcuts.
Will you get as many results as you do with your big search engines like Google or Bing? Most definitely not. But for child safe, targeted searches this is a good search engine the whole family can use.
My own son has started to use it and has been very happy with the ability to search just like mommy and daddy. We on the other hand don’t have to worry about what he will find with an innocent search.
