Saturday, June 19, 2010

Forget 2009 - Here's How Facebook Will Make Its Money In 2019

sheryl sandberg vogue
We hear Facebook expects revenues to reach $1.5 billion to $2 billion this year.

Here are the businesses the COO Sheryl Sandberg (pictured) hopes will get Facebook to $10 billion or $20 billion in five years…

Search ads – All these "Like" button are building a hierarchy of Web pages, similar to Pagerank.

Facebook Credits in games – Thanks to hugely popular games like Zynga's Farmville, this could already be a third of Facebook's revenues in 2010.

Pay with Facebook on third-party ecommerce sites – If your credit card is already in the system, why not just click "Pay With Facebook" instead of going through the hassle of a check-out process?

Local coupons – Facebook is about to get a check-in feature. Groupon is showing that local businesses will buy coupons if they will draw a crowd.

Brand advertising on Facebook.com – Brands like Facebook ads because they drive traffic to Facebook pages.  If user "Likes" a Facebook page, that page owner can them spam them almost at will.

Brand advertising off Facebook.com – Almost 100 million Facebook users log-in to third-party sites using their Facebook IDs through the program that used to be called Facebook Connect. Facebook knows more about these visitors to third-party sites then the third-parties themselves. This puts Facebook in a position to either sell ads for those third-party sites, or to sell anonymized data to those third-parties sites, so they can themselves sell better-targeted  ads.
resource: sfgate.com

Sunday, April 4, 2010

Final Four is Down to Two: Butler vs Duke for National Title

INDIANAPOLIS (AP) - Every good Hollywood film needs an underdog and a villain.
With Butler and Duke playing each other, Monday's national title game has all the makings of a blockbuster.
Tiny Butler (33-4) is one victory away from finishing off its version of "Hoosiers," taking down some of college basketball's biggest names in its magical run. But it hasn't faced a team quite like Duke (34-5), three-time national champions whose name is all over the NCAA tournament record book - and who fans just love to hate.
This is Butler's first appearance in the title game, the 10th for Duke.

Saturday, February 20, 2010

I Want It Now! The Fierce Urgency of Videogaming’s Future

 GameLife | Wired.com

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LAS VEGAS — Videogame execs say impatient gamers increasingly act like Veruca Salt from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory — they want their games now, Daddy, and if you don’t give them what they want, they’ll find somebody who will.
“People have no patience,” said Steve Perlman, CEO of OnLive, a company that is currently beta-testing a service that streams high-def games directly into homes without the need for consoles. “What they want is all media, and they want it instantly delivered.”
OnLive isn’t the only one trumpeting gamers’ need for speed at the DICE Summit here this week.
“We lose players on the loading bar,” said Brian Reynolds, chief game designer at Zynga, maker of the hit Facebook game FarmVille. Virtual vegetable farmers are so anxious to get playing that if the game takes too long to get going, they’ll close the browser window, he said.
The 20th-century notion of waiting around to watch shows when they air on television, or saving up to buy CDs, is quickly becoming antiquated as technology makes it easy to consume movies, TV and music on demand. As game development and distribution methods evolve, the same trends are changing the way the videogame industry works.


Gamers can expect to play rapidly updated games on a growing array of devices, from iPhones and Android mobiles to Apple’s upcoming iPad. Everyone’s already expecting the death of the disc, but if on-demand gaming takes off, it could kill traditional digital delivery, too: Who’s got time to download a whole game?
In his DICE keynote address Wednesday to kick off the annual confab of game industry executives, Steve Wadsworth, president of Disney’s interactive division (pictured top), said his company’s massively multiplayer online kiddie worlds like Club Penguin are “the digital equivalent of Walt’s theme parks.” But while “kids are happy to come to (Disneyland) and spend hours in line for Space Mountain, they’ve got a very short threshold when it comes to interactive media,” he said. “They want what they want, when they want it.”
Disney's online world <cite>Club Penguin</cite> makes a habit of giving gamers what they want.
Disney's online world Club Penguin makes a habit of rapidly responding to gamers' requests.
Today’s teens can barely wrap their heads around the old distribution model: Close to half of children’s television viewing is either time-shifted or done on a mobile device, Wadsworth said. They expect that everything is always available.

Min Kim, vice president of Nexon America, maker of the popular free-to-play MMORPG MapleStory, has noticed the same thing. “(My friend) was trying to explain the Munchkins from Wizard of Oz to his kids, and the kids are just saying, ‘Let’s look it up on YouTube.’ They want everything, like, right now,” he said.

The Race for Pink Puffles

That presumption of on-demand fulfillment means game developers need to become more responsive to consumers’ requests. When Disney acquired Club Penguin for an unheard-of $700 million in 2007, it was surprised to find that customer service representatives made up a majority of the workforce at the company. “They’d spend 20 to 30 minutes on the phone with the kids who play the game, listening to their ideas for making it better,” Wadsworth said. The designers could then take the kids’ ideas and act on them, changing the game instantly to make it the experience that the customers asked for.
“If enough Club Penguin players sent e-mails saying they wanted pink Puffles, then the Club Penguin team added pink Puffles. Fast,” he said.
This ran counter to Disney’s philosophy, which was to avoid taking unsolicited ideas, according to Wadsworth. It wasn’t engaging its other MMO audiences in the same way. “It didn’t matter how many Toontown players were telling us if they wanted a new blue Doodle, we never knew about it,” he said. “We changed our entire approach to customer support and service.”
Nexon America’s Kim says his company closely monitors its customer base and structures MapleStory and other games around what fans are doing and what they want. “I don’t think a lot of players know how much influence they have,” he said. When Nexon noticed some players abandoning MapleStory after playing for just a few hours, it relaxed the game’s difficulty curve to make the title stickier.
<em>Image courtesy Portalarium</em>
With titles like Sweet @$! Poker, Richard Garriott hopes to bring sophisticated graphics to Facebook games.
Image courtesy Portalarium
Not every social game designer believes in ceding such development control to players.
“I don’t agree with the statement of, ‘If the users demand a big sword, you’ve got to go make a big sword,’” said game designer Richard Garriott. “You have to listen to your constituents … but they are not game designers.”
As the creator of the role-playing series Ultima, Garriott was one of the first big-name game creators. His later efforts, the MMOs Ultima Online and Tabula Rasa, weren’t as successful. Now he’s launching a social games company called Portalarium, which will bring higher-powered games to platforms like Facebook.
“A lot of the traditional developers here are ignoring the (social gaming) space because they think it’s beneath them,” he said. They’re missing the forest for the trees: Even casual gamers playing simple games on MySpace would like to have smoother graphics, better user interfaces, Garriott said. For example, a Portalarium game called Sweet @$! Poker is built not with Flash but with the Crytek engine, he said.
The OnLive welcome screen offers on-demand options for videogamers.
The OnLive welcome screen offers on-demand options for videogamers.
Meanwhile, OnLive’s Perlman is betting that the instant-gratification mechanism of Facebook games will work for existing big-budget, hard-core games.
The OnLive microconsole and controller might free gamers from bulky consoles.<br /><em>Images courtesy OnLive</em>
The OnLive microconsole and controller might free gamers from bulky consoles.
Images courtesy OnLive
OnLive will let gamers use a small module about the size of a deck of playing cards to play games like Mirror’s Edge and Prince of Persia. Controller inputs are sent over a broadband connection to a dedicated server farm, which sends the video to any screen in the house — your TV, your PC, even your iPad. All without needing to buy additional hardware or download software.
“Are we going to introduce an $800 or $1,000 console and expect people to flock to this thing?” said Perlman. “We need to find a way to eliminate pricey hardware. We need to focus consumers on the game, not the … Xbox.”
Perlman has a dog in the fight, but in his DICE presentation Thursday, he backed up his big statements with hard data. About a quarter of all downloaded media was consumed in real-time, streaming formats in 2009, he said, more than double 2008’s figure.


If games are moving the same direction, then the future of game consoles could very well be no console at all — just a universe of streaming games, all available at the instant whims, and tweaked to the latest desires of an increasingly capricious public.

Tuesday, February 2, 2010

How to Burn Wii Games | Wii Laptop

By Jonh Doyle

Want to know how to burn Wii games? But, you've got a problem... You have no knowledge about how to burn Wii games, right? Well, I do know how to copy, backup and how to burn wii games, but you should understand that you will demand to have a Wii burning games software.

You see, every game that you got has any sorts of protection code so you can't copy, backup or burn it. However, you also recognize that your games can get broken really promptly. So, you desire to burn and make a copy from it, right?

To decrypt that security code, you will demand to take the Easy Backup Wizard. This software program essentially takes out all the security so the way is clear for you to copy, backup and burn your Wii games.

How To Burn Your Wii Games?

So, to get your Wii games burned, you will need to take 4 things that you are able to use immediately.

1 - You must get the Easy Backup Wizard.
2 - A DVD burner.
3 - An empty disk to burn the backup files on.
4 - An original game from the Wii.

Therefore, when you've got all of this, then you will need to do 5 things of the procedure of how to burn wii games.

1 - Get the original game disk into your computer's DVD drive.
2 - Start up the Easy Backup Wizard, and load the game.
3 - Make an image file or a backup file from the original game.
4 - Remove the original game, and start putting in an empty DVD disk.
5 - Simply drag all the backup files to your burner computer software, and burn it.

Once this procedure of how to burn Wii games has been completed, then you can say that you've successfully copied, backed up and burned a Wii game!

About the Author:





















Wii Laptop is a great idea letting Wii geeks to play their favorite games even when they’re on the road. Perhaps a Wii laptop is hard to search in the market for the time being. But there are some alternative there that you can always make your Wii into a portable game machine that you can bring along wherever you go.

Here you go, an 7-inch LCD monitor is being sold by Chinavasion, the CVSN-901 LCD monitor is designed to fit quite well as a display by attaching it at the back of your Wii game box. The display carries a 7-inch 480 x 234 resolution, comes with built-in stereo speakers, auxiliary stereo AV connection, adjustments for contrast / brightness / etc. Besides, it also has a fan grill hole which lets the heat trapped in the Wii easily escape, so it won’t overheat.

The CVSN-901 LCD monitor also comes with a reverse/up/down picture control, giving you flexibility to fix the picture in case that you wanna mount this on the war or on the roof of your car, or you want to fold the screen down. This 7-inch monitor allows you to hook it up to other devices such as a DVD or other media players as it’s equipped with extra AV ports as well as some USB peripherals.
The display can either take power via the normal Wii power cable or you can plug it to your car’s cigarette lighter socket as it’s included with a cigarette lighter adapter.

Thursday, January 28, 2010

Tripadvisor's 2010 Dirtiest Hotels

TripAdvisor's 2010 Top 10 Dirtiest Hotels
See more filthy finds worldwide.

Dirtiest Hotels - United States

(based on TripAdvisor traveler reviews)

Friday, January 15, 2010

Cheap car from India the Tata Nano could cost $8,000 in US


The world's cheapest car is being readied for sale in the U.S., but by the time India's Tata Nano is retrofitted to meet emissions and safety standards, it won't be that cheap.

Tata Technologies Ltd., the global engineering arm of the Tata group conglomerate, brought the tiny car to Detroit as a publicity stunt for the engineering group.

Tata officials, while maintaining that they couldn't speak for Tata Motors, maker of the $2,500 Nano, said they were involved with the Nano from concept until it launched last July in Mumbai.

They wouldn't say when the Nano might arrive in the U.S. or how much it might cost here, although Ratan Tata, chairman of the group of Tata companies, has said it should be ready for U.S. distribution in about three years.

Tata Motors already has made a European version of the four-seat car that will cost about $8,000 when it debuts in 2011, and a Tata Technologies official said privately that the U.S. version is expected to have a comparable price. The official did not want to be identified because the price has not been made public.

Warren Harris, Tata Technologies president, would only say that the price would be more than the roughly $2,500 charged in India.

"The structural changes that would need to be made, the changes that would be required as far as emissions are concerned, and some of the features that would be appropriate to add to the vehicle for the North American market, obviously that would drive up the price point," he said.

Tata Technologies could be involved in bringing the car up to U.S. standards, said Tony Jones, associate vice president of the global automotive practice.

Before it can be sold here, the car's two-cylinder, 623cc engine would have to be engineered to meet stronger U.S. pollution standards, he said. Airbags would have to be added, the roof strengthened and the front bumper lengthened to meet U.S. requirements to limit damage in a 5-mph crash.

The Spartan interior, with flat bucket seats, three knobs, a horizontal switch and a steering wheel, also would have to be changed to comply with U.S. safety standards that limit movement of passengers not wearing seat belts.

Jones said the Nano Europa has airbags and has passed European safety tests with flying colors.

The Nano, with 12-inch diameter tires, electric windows in the front and crank windows in the back, gets 50 mpg on the highway and has a top speed of 65 mph.

If the $8,000 price tag holds true, it would cost far less than the $9,970 Hyundai Accent, currently the car with the lowest base sticker price in the U.S., according to the Edmunds.com automotive Web site. The price excludes shipping.
resource:  http://autos.yahoo.com/articles/autos_content_landing_pages/1273/cheap-car-from-india-could-cost-8000-in-us/

Thursday, January 14, 2010

2010 could be the year for 3D with 3-dimensional at-home TV

 USATODAY.com

LAS VEGAS — The flat, familiar, two-dimensional television image at the center of your home theater is about to take on the lifelike illusion of depth. At least that's the way the future looks through the spectacles of Hollywood studios, TV networks and consumer electronics manufacturers as they prepare to launch a massive effort to bring 3D from the silver screen into your living room.

"2010 will be the year in which 3D is brought to the home," DreamWorks Animation CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg says. He's so bullish on the technology that he's committed his studio to make 3D versions of all of its future movies.
Now there's a stampede to 3D TV. Vizio just announced a 47-inch 3D-capable set for $1,999. Consumers will spend $17 billion on 3D TVs in 2018, research firm DisplaySearch forecasts. And manufacturers — and entertainment producers — are scrambling to tie themselves to the technology as it takes center stage at the massive Consumer Electronics Show, which opens here Thursday.
Discovery, Sony and Imax said Tuesday that they'll jointly create the first full-time 3D cable channel, which could be available as early as the end of this year.
It initially will be heavy with science and nature programs from Discovery and Imax. The mix will change as the partners produce, and license, 3D versions of general entertainment movies and shows.
"Two years ago, people were still saying that 3D (TV) probably won't work," says Sony CEO Howard Stringer. "The momentum of 3D in the last six months alone has been quite striking. And even though there are not hundreds of movies (in 3D), there's a kind of rolling rhythm to this. The more success we have, the easier it is for us to upgrade movies to 3D, and there are events that can be exciting, like 3D concerts and video games."
This week, ESPN announced plans to launch an all-sports 3D network on June 11, starting with World Cup soccer and eventually including the Summer X Games (extreme sports) and college basketball and college football. ESPN 3D will have at least 85 live 3D sporting events, the Disney-owned network promises.
Billionaire Mark Cuban says his cable channel HDNet will soon shoot most of its prime-time and weekend shows in 3D. The top-quality versions will initially appear on cable and satellite on-demand services.
"We hope to really grow this part of our business," Cuban told USA TODAY in an e-mail. "There won't be a ton of 3D ready sets out for a while, but that's OK. As we grow our content base, the market will come to us."
Cuban is also owner of the NBA's Dallas Mavericks. Some NBA games will appear on the new ESPN 3D channel.
"3D is like putting somebody in the Jack Nicholson (courtside) seat," says Steve Hellmuth, the NBA's executive director for technology and operations.
The NFL is also experimenting with 3D. The Dallas Cowboys issued 80,000 pairs of 3D glasses at a home game this season so fans could watch a few plays on a 72-foot-high Mitsubishi video board.
The push for 3D in the home goes beyond TV. Acer and Asus have unveiled computers that display 3D. There's broad interest in 3D video games.
"Everybody is excited about the potential of moving 3D onto virtually every platform that has video in it," Katzenberg says.
 You'll need a brand new TV, though, to watch shows in 3D. Cable, satellite and phone company TV customers also may need a new set-top box.
Panasonic, Sony, Samsung, Mitsubishi, Vizio and LG are among the manufacturers poised to unveil 3D-capable televisions and Blu-ray players this week at CES.
Some analysts say the new sets will be a hit. By 2014, 45% of all U.S. households will have a TV that can handle 3D, up from just 3% this year, research firm Futuresource Consulting forecasts.
The Consumer Electronics Association estimates that nearly 2.2 million 3D TVs will be sold this year.
Movies have helped to prime potential buyers. About one in four adults surveyed online recently have seen a 3D movie or event in the past year, the CEA says. And 53% said they want to watch 3D television shows at home. One in four said they plan to buy a 3D TV within the next three years.
Following the migration from black-and-white to color, and analog to digital high definition, "3D is the final frontier for television," says Panasonic Vice President Bob Perry.
For now the various 3D technologies all involve wearing glasses. You're typically watching two separate images; the technology tricks your eyes into seeing depth. Efforts are underway to permit you to watch 3D without glasses, but it'll likely take years before the technology is ready for prime time.
With profit margins that are thinner than a flat screen, it's no wonder TV manufacturers are banking on 3D as a way to get consumers to open their wallets. Still, it may be difficult to persuade people to embrace 3D. The critical challenges include:
Selling the technology. Many consumers only recently bought a new HDTV and Blu-ray player. So they might not be exactly thrilled about replacing those models so soon, especially if it costs a lot to do so.
In-Stat analyst Michelle Abraham found that 25% of consumers would not pay extra for a 3D TV over a non-3D TV. Another 43% indicated they'd only pay a premium of less than $200. Just 11% would spend $400 to $999 extra and only $3% would plunk down an additional $1,000 or more.
TV manufacturers aren't expected to price sets in the stratosphere, compared, say, with when HDTVs first became available. "You won't need to take out a mortgage or home-equity loan," says Panasonic's Perry.
But 3D will go into higher-price sets, at least initially.
And some of the latest 3D glasses aren't cheap. For example, high-tech XpanD glasses cost about $50, and you'll probably need a pair for each family member. You can probably expect TV makers or third parties to sell glasses in bundles.
Retailers and TV makers are left with another problem: how to show off 3D in stores. For example, it may prove difficult for stores to hang on to the pricey glasses shoppers will use to judge the pictures, and to keep them clean. "We have to make sure we have a good consumer experience at retail," says John Revie, senior vice president for visual display marketing at Samsung.
As the half-billion dollar epic Avatar has shown, it can be expensive to produce 3D movies. Broadcasting live sporting events also isn't cheap. ESPN, for example, has to hire a whole new crew and set of announcers to broadcast in 3D.
How such costs get passed to the consumer remains to be seen. It's unclear whether your TV provider will charge a premium to watch a 3D channel or pay-per-view event, or give it away to drum up interest in the new technology.
Content. 3D televisions are only as useful as the material you have to watch on them, of course. Pieces of the content puzzle are coming together, albeit slowly, with movies, sports and possibly concerts leading the charge.
The industry is buoyed by the appetite consumers have shown for 3D movies at the local multiplex, even at the cost of a few extra bucks per ticket. "They all thought it was more than worth it," Katzenberg says. "Everybody is winning in this."
But gee-whiz 3D effects aren't enough.
"You can no longer take a bad movie, add 3D and make it passable," says Rick Heineman a vice president of RealD in Beverly Hills. "Instead of trying to thrill people by putting the movie in their lap, you use 3D to draw them inside the movie." RealD recently integrated its technology in products from Samsung, Sony, JVC and others.
Hollywood is set to release a slew of new 3D flicks in the coming months. Katzenberg says Avatar, made in 3D from the rival Fox studio, is the "afterburner to push this (3D) rocket ship into orbit."
Last month, the Blu-ray Disc Association adopted an industry standard that studios can use to release 3D fare on the popular discs, possibly beginning this summer at yet-to-be-determined prices. The discs will be backward-compatible, so you'll be able to play them on conventional Blu-ray players, too, albeit in regular HD, not 3D. And the newly agreed-upon 3D "specification" allows every Blu-ray 3D product and movie to deliver the high-definition "1080p" standard to each eye.
"We don't have six ways to do 3D Blu-ray. We have one," says Andy Parsons, the chairman of the association.
Hollywood may go back to the future to come up with fresh 3D content. The studios are testing the waters to see which older films that were released in 2D could be converted to 3D, as Disney is doing with the Toy Storyfranchise. You can only imagine what The Wizard of Oz or Indiana Jones might look like in 3D.
VIDEO: Baig, Graham explore hot new 3D televisions at CES
But the 2D to 3D process "is not perfect, and (it's) labor intensive," says Ahmad Ouri, chief marketing officer of Technicolor. Ouri believes the conversion process will take off if 3D Blu-ray discs prove to be a hit.
HDTV didn't happen overnight, and neither will 3D TV. But 3D TV has one huge thing going for it. As Maria Costeira, CEO of 3D glasses maker XpanD, puts it, "Life is in 3D."

Wednesday, January 13, 2010

Netflix finally streaming its way onto Wii

thetechhearld.com by Stevie Smith - Jan 13 2010, 09:45

The PS3's 'instant-streaming' disc. Image: MNgilen/Flickr.

The PS3's 'instant-streaming' disc. Image: MNgilen/Flickr.

Nintendo may be somewhat reticent to offer up anything but staunch denials regarding the much talked about Wii HD console, but the Japanese videogame giant is at least still looking to push the hugely popular platform in other ways. Specifically, the motion-sensing home console will soon be playing host to Netflix.
Already a core point of attraction on the Microsoft Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 (PS3), the long-awaited arrival of Netflix will see Wii owners able to enjoy a wealth of streamed video entertainment for as little as $9 USD per month.

“Our growth in the last two years has been propelled in large part by our investments in streaming content and in the streaming platform,” outlined Netflix chief executive officer Reed Hastings in a New York Times report.
“When the Wii application ships, it’s going to really open up a large additional opportunity,” he added, no doubt referencing the 26 million Wii consoles that have been sold across the United States.

The Wii version of Netflix will not be integrated in the same seamless fashion as when Microsoft embraced the service, but rather in the same way Sony recently adopted it. This means users will need to insert a special “instant-streaming” DVD into their systems every time they wish to access Netflix movies and TV shows on the Wii.


The disc, although likely to be an annoyance, will be dispatched to Netflix users at no additional cost. While both Nintendo and Netflix have been unwilling to issue a concrete launch date for the service, it’s expected to arrive during the spring.