Lionhead studios have just launched 'Kingmaker', a mobile application that uses your GPS data to mark locations as 'owned' by you. You work on behalf of one of two teams, and receive gold coins to be spent within the game, every time you log a location in the application.

http://www.fable3kingmaker.com/Default.aspx

From a technology point of view this is an interesting example of many different platforms all converging to drive people towards pre ordering and buying a game.

The initial interaction is through several different mobile platforms (iPhone, Android, Blackberry and Windows 7 mobile). Each GPS 'tagging' posts to social media platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter, and the virtual gold is credit to your account. The account itself is an Xbox 360 account (windows live account), which will interface with the game, and you're in-game character ends out with the gold you have accrued.

It's an interesting proposition, and is trying to integrate several differing data platforms into one cohesive direction. It really is joined up thinking.

If you are running Microsoft SQL server you may already be familiar with how the database file system can enlarge itself to astronomical proportions. There are 'Auto shrink' and 'Auto grow' options, but these are really not recommended for production environments.

So how do you go about determining how much space is being used by actual data IE records, and how much is being used by log files etc? This article will show you how to run a query that will return the size of all the tables in your database, and highlight a TSQL command that will clean up the file storage of a database.

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Two recent news stories have brought to light the dangers of what data people are happy to put online, without really considering the wider implications.

The both stories have different antagonists, and both highlight the very real world dangers of storing data online, whether its on a social platform like Facebook, or a more traditionally unseen platform like a database.

The moral of both stories is clear: Once something is 'online', it is online, and there is no taking it back.

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