1. Rochester Post-Bulletin (USA) – Mayo Clinic expands in the virtual world. “Mayo Clinic has opened a new, virtual bookstore in the imaginary world called Second Life, one of many online realms that increasingly are taking on real-life importance. Mayo first opened a Second Life Gonda Building in December 2009. But now you can walk into the Mayo bookstore by signing onto secondlife.com and naming an avatar — an online caricature of yourself. It’s sort of like an avatar from the popular movie of the same name. With an avatar, you become part of the the virtual world. “Virtual Worlds hold great opportunities to grow Mayo Clinic offerings and reach out and interact with patients and non-patients in new ways, regardless of geography and in real time,” says a poster placed on an easel outside the Second Life Gonda Building.”
2. Gamasutra (USA) – US Buyer Completes Purchase Of Realtime Worlds’ MyWorld. “An anonymous US buyer has completed the purchase of Project MyWorld, the 3D virtual world platform in development by recently collapsed studio, Realtime Worlds, according to a report by Develop. However, it is still not understood whether the buyer has purchased just the MyWorld IP and game build, or will be taking on the remaining staff on the project in order to form a new spin-off studio. The news comes a fortnight after it was announced that Realtime had hired back 23 developers who had previously been laid off days before the company went into administration.”
3. Memeburn (USA) – Immersive journalism uses virtual gaming platforms to tell stories. “Ernest Wilson, the dean of the University of Southern California Annenberg School of Communications and Journalism, put it like this: “What if, after receiving the home and garden section in the morning, the reader could walk right into the section and visit a garden?” This bucolic vision reflects one potential scenario for what we at the Annenberg school are calling “immersive journalism,” a new genre that utilises gaming platforms and virtual environments to convey news, documentary and non-fiction stories.”
4. io9 (USA) – Scenes from a 3-D, augmented reality metropolis. “Keiichi Matsuda creates incredible short films that depict an augmented reality city where synthetic information clouds are grafted onto brick’n’mortar material spaces. Here are two of his futureshock videos. Matsuda created this first 3D video, “Augmented (hyper)Reality: Augmented City,” for his final year at the Bartlett School of Architecture in London.”
5. Canada.com (Canada) – Children wield outsized economic clout. “At age nine, the sandy-haired boy from Markham, Ont., is already a savvy shopper of electronics. When his mother told him the Nintendo DSi game he wanted was too expensive, he pursued a new strategy. He told family and friends to forgo birthday and Christmas presents and buy him gift cards to put toward the new device. Now he saves for the accompanying games – most recently Super Mario Galaxy 2. Next on his wish list: the iPod Touch. “My aunt has one and lets me play with it when she visits,” he says. Jackie Macdonald-Bartkiw, Andrew’s mom, figures that by Christmastime, he will be lobbying for more gift cards to buy his own touch technology. “I’m amazed at his patience . . . and persistence.”
6. Reuters (Canada) – Gameworld: Tween players impacting online game development. “A booming market of tweens is changing the landscape of online games.
This audience of boys and girls aged 8 to 11 has game publishers launching new games like Disney Online’s “World of Cars Online” and Sony Online Entertainment’s “Star Wars: Clone Wars Adventures.” As these tweens grow older, they are also fueling the success of established online games like Blizzard Entertainment’s “World of Warcraft” and Zynga’s “Farmville.” In 2007, when children’s marketing research firm KidSay asked boys what virtual worlds or online games they had visited in the past two weeks, 35 percent of boys aged 8 to 11 replied “none.”
7. Philadelphia Inquirer (USA) – Online support for significant others of military personnel overseas. “he first thing Tatiana Simpson did after her boyfriend proposed to her in a phone call from Iraq was to log on to Facebook. “Right after it happened, I posted. I had to tell them,” Simpson, 17, of Sewell, said of her social-networking friends. Simpson says the Facebook page Army Girlfriends: For All the Girls Waiting Back Home is her favorite among the forums she uses to connect with others who are dating members of the military. Simpson, who doesn’t know anyone locally who is dating a service member, relies on the site for advice. “The girls on Facebook are so easy to talk to, because you’re going through the same thing they’re going through,” she said. Like others, she has found support on Facebook from those who share her situation – the strain of having a boyfriend in the military, and often in a war zone. First-time deployments can unleash emotions and questions that are addressed in more than 1,000 Facebook forums. The military provides support groups, which helps, but most are limited to spouses and families of service members.”
8. CNN (USA) – Who says video games aren’t art? “According to Merriam-Webster, the word “art” can be defined as “the conscious use of skill and creative imagination, especially in the production of aesthetic objects.” The Oxford Dictionary says art is “the expression or application of creative skill and imagination, typically in visual form such as painting or sculpture, producing works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power.” So why do so many critics — most notably Roger Ebert earlier this year — still assert that video games, the best of which rank among today’s most visually arresting and touching experiences, don’t fit these definitions? (To be fair, Ebert later amended his comments, saying, “I should not have written that entry without being more familiar with the actual experience of video games.”
9. The Next Web (Dubai) – Beladcom to build a Virtual Planet in Entropia Universe for Arabs. “Jordanian game development firm Beladcom signed a deal with Swedish software company MindArk to create an online virtual world with content specifically tailored toward Arab audiences. Beladcom will be building a virtual planet within MindArk’s Entropia Universe, which is a highly advanced 3D online virtual universe, to create a virtual gaming environment with high quality entertainment, social networking, and work simulation and learning tools.”
10. VentureBeat (USA) – LOLapps thrives as under-the-radar Facebook social game maker. “You probably haven’t heard of LOLapps, the maker of social games on Facebook. But the company has quietly become one of the leaders of the pack among hot social game companies that are still independent. The San Francisco company has more than 100 million users. But almost nobody has kept track of that. On AppData, which measures Facebook traffic, LOLapps is listed as having about 10 million monthly active users, which doesn’t even put it the top-10 developer list. But if you consider the 100 million number, only Zynga and CrowdStar are in the same ballpark. The undercounting happens for a simple reason. The company’s two top apps, Gift Creator and Quiz Creator, have many more users than are shown in the official stats. That’s because users create their own quizzes and gifts with those apps, and are then counted as the developers of apps; LOLapps doesn’t get credited or recognized when its users create apps that spread virally on Facebook. In that sense, LOLapps is a lot like CrowdStar, another leading Facebook social game company whose quiz games don’t get counted much.”
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