Archives for 2010

1. VentureBeat (USA) – Watch out, Disney, Fantage doubles its growth for kids virtual world. “Virtual worlds for kids have been volatile during the recession. Some have come and gone. Some have declined. So it’s worth noting that Fantage, a virtual world for kids who like playing games and staging fashion shows, has doubled its audience in the past year. The Fort Lee, N.J.-based company now has 3.3 million unique visitors a month, compared to 1.5 million nearly a year ago. To date, it has had 7.7 million registered users, compared to 3 million a year ago. That’s pretty good growth at a time when the competition for the attention of kids is growing.”

2. Sydney Morning Herald (Australia) – Will games take over our lives? “In the film Mary Poppins, a scene in the nursery has the children distraught at the drudgery of tidying up. Naturally their nanny uses the moment to impart a life lesson. “In every job that must be done there is an element of fun,” she tells them. “You find the fun, and snap-the job’s a game.” It’s a trick most every parent has used: pureed vegetables arrive at an infant’s mouth via a spoon airplane, long car trips include “the quiet game,” and yard work Olympics determine who can gather the most weeds. In coming years, the idea of using games to increase good behaviour and happiness is going to explode into adult life, as insights and technology associated with videogames make their way into the larger culture.”

3. Wall Street Journal (USA) – On the Web, Children Face Intensive Tracking. “A Wall Street Journal investigation into online privacy has found that popular children’s websites install more tracking technologies on personal computers than do the top websites aimed at adults. The Journal examined 50 sites popular with U.S. teens and children to see what tracking tools they installed on a test computer. As a group, the sites placed 4,123 “cookies,” “beacons” and other pieces of tracking technology. That is 30% more than were found in an analysis of the 50 most popular U.S. sites overall, which are generally aimed at adults. The most prolific site: Snazzyspace.com, which helps teens customize their social-networking pages, installed 248 tracking tools. Its operator described the site as a “hobby” and said the tracking tools come from advertisers.”

4. Virtual Worlds News (USA) – Smith & Tinker Reinvent Nanovor. “Developer Smith & Tinker is launching a revamped version of its Nanovor offering from last year. The new version, called Nanovor Evolution, will be a full-featured browser-based virtual world. The toy arm of the franchise will be discontinued in favor of a Nanovor app for iOS that leverages the collection of Nanovor virtual insect robots that a player accumulates while dueling other players in the virtual world. Players’ Nanovor collections will be stored in the cloud. Where the original version of Nanovor emphasized the collecting and battling aspects of the franchise, Nanovor Evolution introduces customizable avatars, hub lobbies where users can interact in a virtual environment, and action mini-games that users can play to earn a new time-based virtual currency called Jolt Points. In Nanovor Evolution, users will be able to purchase new Nanovors and avatar customization pieces using both cash-based Nanocash and Jolt Points.”

5. Inside Facebook (USA) – Announcing Inside Virtual Goods: Tracking the US Virtual Goods Market 2010 – 2011. “With an up-to-$750 million acquisition of Playdom by Disney, an up-to-$400 million acquisition of Playfish by Electronic Arts, the acquisition of Tapulous by Disney, and hundreds of millions of dollars in venture investments, virtual goods are impacting businesses across the media landscape. Virtual goods, and the companies that create them, may be bringing the largest disruption entertainment, communication, and e-commerce infrastructure businesses have seen in years.”

6. CBC News (Canada) – Battle to preserve online anonymity rages in video game community. “Micah Whipple may not be a familiar name to the online masses, but in the World of Warcraft sphere, there’s no greater symbol of the need for privacy. The young man became a scapegoat for gamer outrage earlier this year when the owner of the massive multiplayer game announced it would require users to post their real names in official forums. The stated reason for the dramatic change: to oust “trolls” who were disrupting the chatrooms. A community manager who interacts with players, Whipple decided to show support for the new company policy and wrote a short post under his forum moniker, Bashiok, that revealed his true name. “Micah Whipple, at your service,” it said.”

7. The Guardian (UK) – PlayStation Move. “When Sony’s Move motion-sensing input system was unveiled, it attracted a certain amount of derision – it was accused of being a pale rip-off of the Wii remote, and of being clunky in comparison with Microsoft’s high-tech Kinect. Which just goes to show how first impressions can be misleading. It’s true that technologically speaking, Move is about as sexy as Norah Batty’s wrinkly stockings, but astoundingly, it makes much more sense as a purchase than Kinect. The main reason is that it actually works, whereas Microsoft’s attempts to keep Kinect’s price down means that it suffers terribly from terminal lag between your gestures and its response.”

8. Wall Street Journal (USA) – Microsoft Bullish on Kinect. “Microsoft Corp. is targeting global sales of more than three million units of its new Kinect motion-sensor gaming accessory for its Xbox 360 console in the first two months after the Nov. 4 launch in the U.S., providing a much needed holiday sales boost to the slumping overall market for videogames. In an interview ahead of this week’s Tokyo Game Show, Microsoft’s top videogame executive, Don Mattrick, said he expects Kinect will propel the company to have its “biggest holidays ever.” Mr. Mattrick said he expects Kinect, a camera and sensor technology which allows users to play videogames on the Xbox 360 through gestures and verbal commands, to eclipse the industry’s three million unit threshold by the end of the year.”

9. The Age (Australia) – Such a Tragic Waste of Life. “I have always been a little suspicious of social networking. When Facebook was introduced, I at first enjoyed the novelty of keeping up with friends and looking at happy snaps. Then Facebook got nicknames like Stalkbook and Creepbook. For lazy communicators, it’s a sinister kind of genius. Then Twitter came along. Letting others know your thoughts in 140 characters or fewer is perfect for short attention spans. I embraced it. Now I sometimes think I should write even less. With these two sites well and truly entrenched, I’d like to remind you of another world that had everyone talking back in 2005 called Second Life. In this virtual world, users could create a new persona for themselves and interact with others doing the same. For Brian in accounts who, on his night off, loved the idea of being half-Twilight-wolf, half-Arnold-Schwarzenegger in chaps, Second Life was a revelation. To me, it all felt (and I don’t want to offend anyone who still regularly plonks their ugg boots in there), well, a little unnecessary.”

(Note: click here for a great rebuttal of Warhurst’s article)

10. Sydney Morning Herald (Australia) – Eviction game hits a nerve in China. “It may lack the sophistication and addictive power of Farmville or World of Warcraft. But an online game in which a family fights off a demolition crew with slippers and bullets has hooked Chinese internet users. The Big Battle: Nail House Versus Demolition Team has triumphed not through playability, but by tapping into anger about forced relocations. ”Nail houses” are the last homes left standing in areas slated for clearance, so called because they stick out when all around them have been demolished. Owners resist because they do not want to move or think that compensation is unfairly low, but wrecking crews often retaliate with tactics from cutting off power and water to violence.”

1. Department of Defense (USA) – Government Invites Public to Solve Challenges. “The federal government has a lot of problems to solve, and a new website it launched this week will give average citizens a forum to discuss and potentially solve those problems while vying for rewards for the best solutions. Bev Godwin, director of the U.S. General Services Administration’s Center for New Media and Citizen Engagement; Brandon Kessler, founder and CEO of ChallengePost; and Tami Griffith, science and technology manager for the U.S. Army Research Laboratory’s Simulation and Training Technology Center, discussed the new site — Challenge.gov — during a “DoD Live” bloggers roundtable yesterday. Godwin oversees the site for the government. Kessler’s company designs and builds “challenge” sites for different clients. Challenge.gov is an extension of President Barack Obama’s Strategy for American Innovation, which opens government solutions to the general public.”

2. The Independent (UK) – Comment: The Virtual World Conference is the shape of things to come. “On 15 September, the Open University, in collaboration with the Serious Games Institute, will host a 24-hour conference. Opening in Hong Kong, the focus will shift to Europe as the eastern evening meets the UK morning, handing over at our sundown for a final eight hours on the US western coast. Despite crossing many time zones during the day, conference chairs and delegates will meet at a single location, and never have to leave the comfort of their own armchairs.”

3. Christian Science Monitor (USA) – A virtual world that breaks real barriers. “Thus far in the relatively short existence of online worlds and virtual communities, less than flattering stories typically float to the surface. The Internet is rife with tales of bad behavior: antisocial “trolls” posting inflammatory messages; players addicted to fantasy role-playing games; and marriages ruined by spouses staying up half the night to flirt in virtual spaces, even proposing marriage to people they’ve never met in the flesh. Given the power of negative thinking, it’s worth repeating: Not all that happens within the digital realms of monsters, quests, and virtual dollars is evil. Much of the zombie-shooting amounts to people having fun or finding an escape. But some online communities embrace a more lofty mission. They’re forging new relationships across the chasms of nationality, religion, and language – long the unrealized dream of some who hoped the Internet could bring us closer.”

4. Sydney Morning Herald (Australia) – Go with the flow. “I am a sucker for physics simulations, especially in games. The last half a decade or so has brought us advances such as Havok, PhysX, and Euphoria, all of them technologies that help to make our virtual worlds a little more believable. The only thing I love more than physics in general is liquid simulation, and right now is a good time to be a fan of virtual fluid dynamics. Three games are on the horizon that play with realistic liquid simulation in very different ways. Probably the first we will get the chance to play will be Hydrophobia, a 3D survival adventure that takes place aboard a slowly sinking ocean liner. The game’s developer, Dark Energy, has spent three years just programming an engine that can model realistic water movement.”

5. Virtual Worlds News (USA) – Sulake Reports Best Half-Year Results To Date. “Virtual worlds publisher Sulake announced its best half-year performance in the company’s history, earning approximately $37.9 million in revenue. This is a 20% increase year-over-year. Sulake credits the jump in revenue to reducing costs, improving operations, and a continued focus on development of its Habbo Hotel virtual world. Sulake expects its revenue growth to continue in the future.”

6. NewScientist (USA) – Avatars learn gestures to match your tone of voice. “Avatars in virtual worlds provide a richer way than email or chat to communicate online, but despite better graphics and sound quality, they still can’t rival in-person meetings. Now new software may help virtual characters appear more lifelike by imbuing them with realistic body language. Rather than assign physical gestures based on the literal meaning of a person’s spoken words, the program focuses on prosody, the combination of vocal rhythm, intonation and stress. To assemble a library of gestures associated with prosody features, Sergey Levine and Vladlen Koltun at Stanford University, California, used a motion-capture studio to digitise the movements that an actor made as he spoke.”

7. Computerworld (USA) – Second Life should be more iPhone-like, says CEO Philip Rosedale. “One of Second Life’s biggest problems, says CEO Philip Rosedale, is that it’s not enough like an iPhone. From the moment you open the box on an iPhone, it’s fun to use, and in playing, you learn how to use it. The whole process is pleasurable. Second Life is nothing like that, learning to use it is a long process, and painful for many people. I talked with Rosedale three weeks ago, when he’d been back as CEO of Linden Lab for two months. Rosedale is founder and chairman of Linden Lab, the company that created and operates Second Life. He stepped down as CEO two years ago, and returns to find the company battered and troubled.”

8. The Toronto Star (Canada) – Techno-porn: how the sex industry drives mainstream technology. “Patchen Barss might well have called his first book Hard Drive. After all, the central thesis of The Erotic Engine is that pornography has almost always powered human communication, all the way from dirty cave paintings to Google. The cover shows a couple of computer mice in a compromising position, an illustration reflective of the wit the 40-year-old Toronto author has brought to his research. Today, the international pornography industry is estimated to be a $25-billion business, and, technologically, it’s driving all sorts of things that nobody would ever connect with one-handed typing.”

9. 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.”

10. Hypergrid Business (Hong Kong) – Sex world recruits Emerald team. “The adult-themed Utherverse virtual world platform is in discussions with former developers of the controversial Emerald Viewer for Second Life, the company announced. Prior to recent scandals involving an alleged distributed denial of service attack, privacy violations, and a Second Life ban this Wednesday, the Emerald viewer was primarily known for a nicer user interface than Second Life’s own official viewers — and for its “breast physics.” But bouncing boobies wasn’t the only factor that caught Utherverse’s attention.”