About Me 0013: Making Money With Options

Let’s face it: These days, most of us have more than enough stuff.

Instead of buying more gadgets and do-dads for your loved ones and friends, have you considered making a charitable donation in their names instead? Or handing out charitable gift cards?

Since the best, feel-goodiest part of gift-giving is knowing you brightened someone else’s day, it makes sense to give your gifts to those who are truly in need — and your recipients might agree with that sentiment, too.

If you’d like to buck the consumerist tradition while still keeping the joy of seasonal gift-giving, there are more than a few alternatives. Best of all, they’re available online and are great choices if your gift-selection deliberations have left you with little time on your hands.

Here’s our list of easy online charitable gift-giving options, including charitable gift cards. We at VentureBeat hope you’ll consider making charitable causes part of your gift-giving plans now and throughout the year.

Donors Choose gift cards

Donors Choose is a project aimed at the needs of underprivileged classrooms and students. These gift cards can be loaded up with the amount of your choosing, then sent to the recipient who can decide where the funds should go. For example, they can choose a classroom to donate to based on location or subject material. The cards can be mailed, emailed or printed at home.

Unicef inspired gifts

Unicef’s mission is to save children’s lives through simple improvements such as vaccinations, proper nutrition and clean water. The United Nation’s organization has created gift categories on its site ranging from emergency help to immunizations to education. When you select a gift, you can dedicate it to a friend or loved one, who will then receive a card. Winter Child Survival Packs and Child Survival Food Packs are particularly appreciated around the winter holidays.

American Cancer Society donations

Through the Cancer.org website, you can make a charitable donation to honor or remember a friend, family member or loved one. You can choose for your donation to be used to benefit cancer research, a number of specific cancer types (such as breast cancer) or just send it to wherever the funds are most needed.

charity: water gifts

If clean water is something you’re passionate about, check into the gifts available from charity: water. The organization offers print-at-home cards, a pack of 10 cards to send in the mail or deliver in person, and personalized cards with DVDs and wristbands. All of the proceeds from the purchases are used to fund clean water projects.

World Vision gift for children

World Vision will help you select a gift, mostly focused on the needs of children, for people in needy or underdeveloped communities. This could be as simple as $22 for school supplies or as much as $100 for a woman’s small business or a well to provide clean water. When you select your gifts, you will be sent special cards including a picture and information about the impact that gift will have on those receiving it.

Salvation Army tributes

The ubiquitous Salvation Army bell ringers are going high tech this year, taking donations with Square credit card readers and smartphones. Bell-ringers outside the grocery store are only one way Salvation Army raises money for its many projects during the holidays. Salvation Army, which focuses on helping the homeless and destitute, allows you to honor a loved one when making a donation through its website. If you so choose, Salvation Army can send a special letter to your honoree.

Doctors Without Borders tribute gifts

Medical emergencies happen everywhere, all the time — especially during natural disasters and political unrest. Doctors Without Borders attempts to respond to those in greatest need with fewest resources. Through the organization’s tribute gifts, you can choose to send an e-card or a mailed letter to let your loved one know about the gift.

Oxfam America Unwrapped

For gift-giving, Oxfam will allow you to choose items such as mosquito nets, a dozen chicks or a school meal to be donated to those who suffer from poverty and hunger. The friend or loved on on your shopping list will get a card (via mail or email, or you can print it out yourself) with details about the gift.

Razoo giving cards

For these flexible gift cards, you choose the amount of the total donation, then print or email a card to the recipient. He or she can then choose a nonprofit organization to receive the funds. Another Razoo tool is the Holiday Wish, which allows you to raise funds for your favorite cause through a simple page that can be shared via email and social sites.

Habitat for Humanity Gifts from the heart

Habitat for Humanity is an organization that focuses on building safe, affordable housing for the homeless and at-risk. Through its website, the group lets you make a donation in someone’s name. When making your donation, just choose to have a card mailed or emailed to your gift recipient and choose the occasion of the gift.

I’m a big fan of top-down arcade racers. The short tracks, speed boosts, and tight races create a kind of intensity that I find hard to replicate in other, more traditional racing games. Enter Mini Motor Racing [$1.99 / HD], the latest from The Binary Mill, and a good example of why I love top-down racers. Everything from the visuals to the great presentation and large amount of content outweigh the physics issues and occasional stability problems, making this a highly recommended game for racer fans.

The first thing you’ll notice when you jump into a race in Mini Motor Racing is the high quality visuals. Both the vehicle models as well as the actual tracks look great and it all runs at a fast framerate. Added touches like weather conditions (the rain looks great) do a good job making the game come alive. In addition, Mini Motor Racing also features a rocking soundtrack that I thought added to the feel of the game. All of these elements combine for a smooth and engaging presentation that simply adds to the overall experience while playing.

Gameplay-wise, Mini Motor Racing plays great and features tons of content to keep you playing for quite a while. Like most racers, each race is a quest to finish first, with the higher your position, the more money you earn. That money can in turn be used to upgrade your vehicle, giving you a better chance to beat later cups and tracks. While upgrades go a long way towards track success, a lot of the strategy in Mini Motor Racing involves memorizing track patterns and understanding the intricacies of the physics of each map. Of course, you could always just spend some money on IAP cash and immediately upgrade the hell out of your racer.

Mini Motor Racing includes both a quickplay and career mode. The career mode features the vast majority of the content and has dozens of maps separated out into quite a few cups. True, a lot of the tracks are reused with mirroring or different weather conditions, but the game does a great job altering camera angles to make each version look adequately different. This is one of the few racing games I’ve played where I didn’t feel like I was playing the same maps over and over again with little change. There’s also a multiplayer mode, but it is restricted to local play currently (something I hope is addressed in future updates).

One of the biggest elements that can make or break any racing title is its controls. Thankfully, Mini Motor Racing looks to address any potential control issues with a wide variety of options. The default control method is the ‘wheel’ which places a small steering wheel in a corner of the screen that you drag to steer. Other options include simple left/right toggle options and the slider, which is a control method I still can’t get used to. Each control scheme works well enough meaning that it’s really up to the player to choose the one that feels the most comfortable (although I felt the wheel offered the most precise control out of all of them). Regardless, it’s nice to play an arcade racer that offers a variety of controls that work.

While there are plenty of reasons to love Mini Motor Racing, there are a few issues that hold the game back from perfection. While the physics engine adds personality to the gameplay, there are some occasions in which your vehicle will interact with the environment in ways that don’t make sense. This is exasperated somewhat when you get to later levels and the AI begins headhunting for your vehicle, slamming you into walls and into other cars which makes it very hard to take first place. In addition, there have been reports of instability in earlier iPhone/touch and iPad generations, causing lots of crashes. While I personally haven’t had these issues on my 4S, the problems seemed widespread enough to mention. Luckily, The Binary Mill has already begun to address these issues, with a recent update expanding the width of certain tracks as well as addressing the stability problems.

Despite these issues, I love Mini Motor Racing and feel that it’s a worthy candidate for being one of the better arcade racers currently on the App Store. Not only are the gameplay elements sound, there’s tons of worthy maps and content that’ll keep you coming back. Furthermore, recent updates to the game show that the developers are willing to put the effort necessary to smooth out any issues. Simply put, if you’re a fan of top-down racers, definitely check out Mini Motor Racing.

About Me 0013

Monday, December 26, 2011

Making Money With Options

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