At today's Unite Conference, game dev platform provider Unity Technologies announced it will be releasing the latest build of its Unity Platform and making a previous version available at the low, low price of free.
All platforms allow developers to create games for PCs, Macs, Nintendo Wiis, and iPhones. The free version, formerly known as Unity Indie, was previously priced at $199. Broke and/or stingy devs are welcomed to download the platform here. The pro version of Unity's platform will continue to sell for around $1,500.
Some people believe that Augmented Reality (AR), the class of technologies that place images or data on top of other views of the physical world, could be the web browser of the future. AR has rocketed out of the research labs and is catching mass market interest fast - from mobile phones displaying restaurant reviews when you look through your phone's camera to next month's Esquire Magazine, which you'll be able to hold up to your webcam to see marker-based 3D "holograms" in your hands telling you jokes.
The International Symposium on Augmented and Extended Reality this month had major sponsors from all around the world, including Qualcomm, Volkswagon, Intel and Nokia. Despite all this energy, media darling startup Layar is reported to have raised...a mere $1 million investment from venture capitalists. Why are VCs not investing more in Augmented Reality? Here are three reasons why we think investment in this sector has been slow so far.
GMail is rolling out a new feature to some users that makes it easy to import contacts and archived emails from other email accounts, with other providers, into your Gmail account. The feature is powered by a 3rd party service called TrueSwitch and it really is a breeze. The feature was announced this Spring but the roll out has been slow and many users are seeing it for the first time today. Some still don't see it.
Users are required to give TrueSwitch (through a Gmail interface) the username and password for the old account, then import can take a few hours or days. I pulled in contacts from an old Hotmail account and am now waiting to have them arrive in my Gmail contacts list.
MapQuest continues to lose market share to Google Maps. While MapQuest started the year with a small lead, it's now 10% behind Google Maps. Today, MapQuest launched a few new features and a major update to its map design. MapQuest now features more readable maps, as well as enhanced terrain and vegetation data. The new maps also feature building footprints and main subway stops. It is unlikely, however, that these updates will be enough to fight back Google Maps' momentum.
The new version of Wordpress for iPhone just arrived in the App Store (iTunes link). While the first version was already quite usable, this update brings a number of new features and usability enhancements to the Wordpress experience on the iPhone. The new interface makes it easier to switch between comments, posts and pages. The comments interface now also displays Gravatars. Throughout the app, the Wordpress team has tweaked the interface and it's now easier to manage your blog from the iPhone.
Hitwise, a web traffic analytics firm that often publishes fun and interesting stats on issues of the day, looks today at how threatened Facebook's growth might be by Twitter. The company's conclusion: Twitter is no threat at all.
Traffic to Twitter is declining, Hitwise General Manager of Global Research Bill Tancer writes, while Facebook's growth continues to go through the roof. Facebook is approaching ubiquity, while Twitter's appeal is narrow and its average registered user is totally unengaged. "That being said," Tancer writes, "I still plan to tweet this entry."
Mobile ad firm AdMob has revealed the dramatic changes the mobile industry has seen in their latest Mobile Metrics Report, released just this morning. Believe it or not, it was only a year ago that the Motorola RAZR scored as the number one phone here in the U.S. while the iPhone was the only touchscreen device to even make the list of top ten handsets. Only a year later, and so much has changed. Now half of the top ten are touchscreen devices, six include Wi-Fi capabilities, and six have mobile application stores. And as you would expect, this new crop of super-powered phones are making heavy use of the mobile web.
Online retailer Amazon.com has just announced a new checkout system called "PayPhrase" which speeds up the process of making online purchases by allowing shoppers to enter a unique phrase and 4-digit PIN number to complete their transaction. Both the phrase and PIN are created in advance and are linked to a shipping address and preferred method of payment. After the initial set up, PayPhrase users are no longer required to sign in or fill out credit card information when shopping online.
Google Wave is a much hyped new Internet-based communications and collaboration platform. It was announced at the end of May, released as a 'Preview' product shortly after and 100,000 more invites were made available at the end of September.
Early users reported mixed feelings. But one month after Google Wave was opened to tens of thousands of people, how are people using it now? What use cases are being discovered? Let's start with the education sector. We'll explore other use cases in upcoming posts.
Connectify.me is a new service we just found out about. They've sussed out how to make any Windows 7 computer into a WiFi hotspot. Since we just installed Windows 7 on a spare laptop, we figured it was about time to make Windows do something cool, so we installed the app.
We were quite literally up and running with other devices connected in five minutes. In fact, this post is being published right now on a Connectify.me-powered connection. Windows 7 users have got to try this app. You never know when you'll get to save the day by letting other users share your Internet connection.
