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A team of mobile and gaming industry experts have collaborated to create and launch Taapi, an entirely new type of social game that uses the power of gamers around the globe to save energy.

The game is the first global, mobile gaming platform that will have a significant impact on the real-world.  Available via iOS for iPhones, iPods and iPads, Android, and the web, Tappi awards players points for being the first to shut off unused lights.

So, how does it work?

People tap in to Taapi to provide blocks of time where their homes (and lights) are available to the game for shut off. When a home is tapped in, it’s lights are anonymously added to a ‘pool’ of other lights that are waiting to be turned off.

Meanwhile, gamers race to be the fastest to turn off lights from that pool as soon they become available.
Gamers get the satisfaction of knowing that they are turning off lights all over the world that are not being used.  All with just a tap.

Gamers will have the ability to choose challenge games, geographies, light types, or random selections while playing to get to turn lights off from the pool of waiting lights. Every light and location is completely secure. Lights in the pool waiting for turn off are anonymous and not individually identifiable in any way.

Taapi leverages crowdsourced players to act on unused lights that are available in the pool for shut-off and rewards both players and the households that use Taapi. By being on Taapi, homes will benefit from saving money on their energy bills and also get points for every minute their lights are available to the game.

If some players want to keep their home’s lights all to themselves-that works too. Households can use Taapi to control only their own lights and create a local Taapi group of players within their WiFi network. They still get points for using Taapi and a nifty home control panel in the app.

The Taapi team has brought some powerful partners into the energy-gaming spotlight with them. Amazon is slated to fulfill orders for the Taapi in-home products and smart-chip giant NXP will be providing chipsets.

Taapi is appealing to a range of developers by providing a full API to provide hooks that can programmatically act on Taapi's services.

The Taapi API will provide access to features such as:

• Adding new players
• Authenticating players
• Calling player stats
• Calling general country, energy, and date stats
• Initiating a race session
• Obtaining the stats for a unique race session
• Polling for available races

Taapi has selected Atlassian (http://atlassian.com) products for community support, Mashery (http://mashery.com) for API hosting and they have a built-in an OpenSocial container for developers to write gadgets for Taapi using the OpenSocial (http://opensocial.org) standard.

Taapi & OpenSocial

Taapi's OpenSocial container support will allow developers to quickly and easily write OpenSocial compliant gadgets that can call and serve a number of Taapi features like public Taapi use statistics, aggregated stats, individual users stats and game session availability.

The Taapi OpenSocial container will support gadget authentication via OAuth to enable personalized, contextual player information and interaction as well.  Players will be able to add approved gadgets to their instances of the Taapi game and extend Taapi's functionality.

For example, a developer could write a 'My Country' Taapi gadget to alert a player when a session in a specific country is available, authenticate them, opt them into the game session and tweet about their participation, all in that country's native language(s).

Taapi founder Carol Glennon states, "Support for an accelerated development process was one of our top goals for the Taapi platform. Enabling gadgets through our OpenSocial container makes it easy for developers to gain fast access to our API while writing cool gadgets that users can use in Taapi right away."

Taapi has already distributed in-home prototypes to create a seed pool of lights that can be acted upon by players and is expected to launch their mobile suite over the next few months.

Learn More!

Watch the Taapi movie
Visit Taapi for the latest news and updates
Get more information about Apache Rave and OpenSocial

Posted on behalf of Don Martelli, Chief Marketing Officer, Taapi, by Mark Weitzel, President, OpenSocial Foundation


About Taapi