If that sounds like a bum deal to you, that's because it really is. Compared to Major League Baseball, a pioneer in online sports streaming, the NFL package sounds just awful. As a New York Yankees fan living outside of their local market, I rely on baseball's MLB.TV service to keep tabs on my favorite team. With MLB.TV for under $100 per season I can watch any out of market game streamed live, or watch full archives of completed games for the entire season, including edited/condensed games which show only the outcome of every at bat.

On the otherhand, because of the NFL's exclusive $700+ million per year deal with DirecTV (which runs through 2010) I have to be a subscriber to the satellite service to get access to out of market games. The cost is more than 3 times that of MLB.TV, and the service requires that I have a Windows machine and run IE. Yuck.

Compared to other major North American sports leagues the NFL has been the most protective of its online video (the NBA even has a YouTube channel, for example, while the NFL doesn't allow any outside site to show game clips of more than 45 seconds and requires that they are removed within 24 hours), and their exclusive deal with DirecTV has more or less crippled their ability to offer a compelling online video package.

Update: I just thought of another reason this service seems like a bad idea: if you're already paying for the TV package, why do you even need the online service? I guess, maybe, to watch it at work... but who really works on Sundays (when all out of market games would be played -- Monday and late-season Saturday or holiday games are nationally televised)? It just doesn't make sense. If anyone is considering paying for this service, please let us know in the comments why it appeals to you.

How it works: in this particular game you can choose to play the role of any of 4 different players: Google, Amazon, Microsoft, a Market Analyst. Then you can either predict what will happen, or voice your opinion about what should happen. Or both. If for example you choose to play as Google, you can predict that Google will open up the languages beyond Python. If you voice an opinion, you are guided by several "advisors" - in this case we have RWW, CNET and Dave Winer. The difference between predicting and voicing an opinion is that you may not necessarily agree with what you predict Google will do, so you can then cast your opinion about what you think Google ought to do!

This is the first in a series of games that we'll run over the next few months on ReadWriteWeb. If you have ideas for other games, please let us know in the comments below.

Disclosure: one of our writers, Sean Ammirati, is on the Impact Games advisory board.

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.

In a statement released today, CEO David Helgason said, "With the explosive growth in new platforms and performance improvement in our Unity suite of products, we believe that there are no technical hurdles remaining for high quality interactive content everywhere.

"Now we are removing financial hurdles as well. Unity is mature enough and easy enough to use that it can be the entry point for those developers taking their first steps with the technology."

With the 2.6 release of the platform, Unity provides full support for external versioning tools such as Subversion, Perforce, or any other version control system. Unity has also added Visual Studio integration and can automatically sync a VS project to source code so all scripts are in the solution and IntelliSense is configured.

Today, Google announced the launch of Google AdSense for Games, a flavor of AdSense built on Google's AdScape Media acquisition that allows advertisers and content producers to place ads within the content of online games.

But, that's a familiar position for Google.

The service, currently in beta, offers a variety of traditional AdSense ad units:

"As a beta user of AdSense for Games, you can display video ads, image ads, or text ads within your online games to earn revenue. You'll be able to show these ads in placements you define, such as interstitial frames before a game, after a level change, or when a game is over."

What's more, there are already a number of well-known companies participating, like Konami, mochimedia, and Zynga, which took on an additional $29 million in funding in July. Titles highlighted include Dance Dance Revolution, Yu-Gi-Oh, and Karaoke Revolution to name a few.

But just how well integrated are the ads? Google has provided the following demonstration of the service in action:

Content providers who are interested in participating in the program may apply if they have a minimum of 500,000 game plays with 80% of their traffic from the U.S. or the U.K.

Entering a market where Yahoo! and Microsoft already have a firm foothold is not out of character for Google. Nor is succeeding with that strategy. Clearly, it's a position from which they've managed to win, time and time again. It will be interesting to see if Google's series of come-from-behind victories remains consistent in the world of online gaming.

To keep up with the changing times, the new National Geographic Games division (NGG), will attempt to connect with people once again on the platforms of our modern age, including the Wii, Playstation 3, Nintendo DS, PC and Mac, the PS3 Network, and the iPhone. There will also be free Flash games online at nationalgeographic.com/channel. As always, the company's goal is to encourage people to explore their world, this time though, it's through play.

Lest you think these games will be wimpy attempts at educational experiences, it's worth nothing that Chris Mate, a former executive at Take2 Interactive, the company behind "Grand Theft Auto," will serve as VP and GM of the games venture. Hopefully, his history, which also includes Bethesda Softworks, will bring some spunk to the usually dry "learning is fun!" gaming experience.

The first game to launch will be "Herod's Lost Tomb," an online game which blends in content from both the December 2008 issue of National Geographic magazine as well as the National Geographic Channel feature broadcast on the biblical figure King Herod, architect of the ancient world.

Following weather apps, there comes Facebook. The app earned second place with 25% of users reporting they accessed the Facebook iPhone app regularly. It's possible that it won't be too long before Facebook beats out weather for first place, though. The application is growing in popularity, adding nearly 1 million active users per month, and is at 30 million actives worldwide. It was also recently recognized by Apple as the #1 All Time Free App in the iPhone app store.

Next, after Facebook, comes the games. 20% of iPhone users reported games as the apps they used the most often. 10% reported music-related apps, and then the apps that followed dropped down to single-digit percentages.

What may be most interesting about this study, though, is that it found people are seeking out apps for download by themselves instead of relying on recommendations from family and friends. According to the report, 60% of both iPhone and other smartphone users said they found the apps they wanted to download on their own. "It's surprising to see people actually spending time to self-discover," said Danielle Nohe, director of telecom and media-related research for Compete. That just goes to show these modern-day smartphones are really personal computers after all, aren't they?

Without having made a game ourselves yet, we can only guess that it will still be fairly challenging to make a fun and addictive game, as we have seen plenty of games made the 'old fashioned way' that aren't all that great. But with the rapid development time and greater accessibility that GameSalad offers, we can see it becoming popular for making more niche games, say for example a custom game for a friend's birthday, or a game that celebrates an event, like a company anniversary.

Steam's technology would definitely be a good fit for Google, which, thanks to YouTube and other ventures, is getting more and more invovled in the content distribution business. On the other hand, though, while pushing out 30,000 Mbit of data is surely no easy feat, we can't help but wonder about why Google would need to acquire them. After all, if anybody has a lot of experience in distributing massive amounts of data, it would be Google itself.

Overall, even though the Inquirer cites "well placed sources," we can't help but wonder if this rumor will pan out to be true. Maybe Google will only take over the Steam part of Valve's business, or the two will announce some form of partnership.

However, if Google really wanted to get into the game distribution business, buying Valve would make perfect sense. Games are not only a growing business (though PC games, which Valve focuses on, are suffering greatly from piracy), but also a growing advertising platform. Having control over the distribution mechanism for these Games might just make sense for Google.

What Will Google Do?

If this rumor turns out to be true, do you think Google is going to keep the Steam storefront open? Also, given Google's record of acquiring technology and then having it linger in the back of a server farm for years (think GrandCentral or Jaiku), do you think Google is actually going to make much use of this technology?

About 75% of Super Rewards' income is currently derived from advertising offers, while the other 25% come from direct sales of in-game points that bypass the advertising solution. Super Rewards has about 40 million users worldwide, a majority of which can be found in English-speaking countries. Super Rewards currently features about 3,000 different offers in its database.

Developers can now implement the Super Rewards system relatively easily into their own games and apps. For relatively simple applications, this can be as easy as copying and pasting Super Rewards code into their own programs. While Bailey couldn't quite divulge all the details in the agreements that the company has signed with developers, he stressed that Super Rewards would take less than the 30% cut that Apple currently gets from apps sold in the App Store.

Walking a Fine Line

Overall, this looks like an interesting solution for developers to monetize their games and social network apps, though they will clearly have to walk a fine line between creating a compelling reason for users to engage with advertisers, and looking like they are exploiting their users and annoying them with ads and offers from Super Rewards. Some of the games are obviously also targeted at younger kids, which could potentially introduce a number of ethical problems for developers who want to implement Super Rewards in their apps.

This investment from Bezos comes just a few months after SGN raised a $15 million Series A round led by Greylock Partners and the Founders Fund.

SGN is monetizing its games mostly through advertising, but also through subscriptions and sales of virtual goods. The company's properties have about 1 million daily users, enough to make it attractive for large advertisers.

Overall, users have installed SGN games over 50 million times and handed out over 70 million gifts. It is, of course, questionable how many of these 50 million apps are still active, but with 1 million daily users, SGN is definitely one of the larger players in the casual gaming market.

Casual gaming is clearly turning into a major platform for advertisers. While both Kongregate and SGN are mostly focused on the web, the large range of casual games already available on the iPhone and other mobile devices shows that there is a very large market for them.

At the same time, though, it seems quite a few users are also very willing to actually pay for these games - as long as the prices are reasonable. As more and more investors are looking for companies that are not fully dependent on advertising for their revenue, the casual gaming market is probably going to see more investments like Bezos' in the near future.

Zynga is quite similar to SGN, in that both companies mostly focus on games for social networks. Kongregate takes a different approach and makes its games available on its own site only. While this makes playing a game as simple as going to the Kongregate homepage, it also means that Kongregate doesn't have a built-in word-of-mouth marketing network to profit from.

With almost $40 million in money raised, Zynga and its VCs must be looking for a very high valuation for the company. Its main income sources are advertising and selling virtual goods to its players.

It's probably worth speculating that Zynga is going to use quite a lot of this venture money to branch out of the social networks games market and start developing for other platforms (such as cell phones) as well.

Google, of course, also shows thumbnails for YouTube clips in its search results, but clicking on these will take you to YouTube and won't open the video player right on the page.

Yahoo says that it wants to make it easier for developers to make use of SearchMonkey. SearchMonkey is an extremely powerful tool, but it can also be very hard to use for somebody who doesn't have the technical knowledge required to create a SearchMonkey app. Thanks to this new feature, even novice webmasters will now be able to embed some of the most popular forms of content on Yahoo's search results page.

As we have said before, Yahoo continues to develop new and innovative ways to enhance its search, but so far, this hasn't made too much of a dent in Google's market share. Breaking Google's momentum will be very hard for any player in the search engine market, but if anything, Yahoo is clearly showing that it is not willing to throw in the towel just yet.

Earlier this month on the Guardian's Games blog, blogger Aleks Krotoski posed the question, would social networking be helpful for online games? The response from the handful of commenters was mostly, "yes." So is Koinup onto something here? After all, people will invest hours into making social networking profiles for their pets, so why not for their avatars?

So the quetions becomes, is there enough crossover in those games that people want a social network that can keep all their game media in one place? My guess is that there is certainly cross-over from game to game, but you'll have to cover more than just 4 games to exploit that. The number of people who play both Second Life and World of Warcraft might be smaller than the number of people playing both World of Warcraft and Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, for example.

Clearly, though, gamers are interested in social networking. That Warcraft can sustain multiple social networks is evidence of that (oh, and the WoW MySpace page has 125,000 friends). What does Koinup offer in terms of a social networking experience?

Generally, their service is fairly standard. Profiles, comment walls, and other standard social networking fare are wrapped around features allowing easy sharing of screenshots and in game videos, as well a unique slideshow creation feature intended for users to create step-by-step walk-throughs but is not really being used for that purpose. Instead it seems mostly to be used for showing off in game sex scenes (NSFW) or creating comics that make little to no sense.

Koinup does have some nice mashup features, like the ability to add Flickr photostreams or Twitter feeds to your profile. There is one thing Koinup appears to be missing that any gaming social network probably needs: the ability to see who's online in the game and find playing partners (which is something I wish GameSpy would do across all of the games in its porfolio).]]>Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/koinup_social_network_for_virtual_worlds.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/koinup_social_network_for_virtual_worlds.php Startups Wed, 26 Sep 2007 11:39:41 -0800 Josh Catone Cell phones, PDAs, and other mobile devices are generally on the "do not use" list when it comes to the classroom. Teachers ban them. Students put them on silent and tap away. But instead of fighting the students' addiction to their phones, could the devices instead be used for learning purposes? Eric Klopfer, MIT professor and director of MIT's Scheller Teacher Education Program, thinks so and has recently authored a new book about mobile learning to argue for their use in education.

On Smart Mobs, Judy Breck points to a new book by the MIT Press called Augmented Learning by Klopfer. In the book, Klopfer makes a new argument for the untapped potential of mobile learning games which would use the strengths of a mobile platform - that is, "its portability, context sensitivity, connectivity, and ubiquity." These features, he says, would make it ideal for learning games from elementary school all the way through college.

The games themselves could be participatory, involving interaction with other players, or augmented reality, meaning set in a virtual world and they could be produced at a much lower cost than traditional PC or console games.

What's most important about them, though, besides their ability to solidify information the students were introduced to through traditional methods, is that the games help teach "21st century skills" like the ability to "tackle complex problems and acquire information in just-in-time fashion." In other words, start training the kids young for their future hyper-connected, multi-tasking, digital lives.

Klopfer believes that mobile learning, or m-learning as he calls it, is just another means of e-learning, and one that just moves off the internet-connected PC to the more common mobile device.

For students, teachers, researchers, and game designers, the book may be a compelling read since it delves into the design, research, and implementation of how mobile learning games could work in the classroom.

Issues With M-Learning

Although mobile phones are nearly ubiquitous these days, introducing mobile learning into the classroom as early as elementary school, may be a bit too soon for some parents, who don't believe their kids should tote cell phone at age 8 or, if they do, then it's a phone designed to call mom and dad and/or 911 only.

Even as children get older, there are still the issues of various mobile plans and the cost of data use - details that the students may not be aware of, racking up charges that parents won't be happy about all because the child's teacher told them to break out their phones for today's lesson.

Finally, the digital divide between the "haves" and "have-nots" would become more apparent in a classroom if students had to provide their own phones. Imagine the privileged kids pullinig out their iPhones, others pulling out ancient clamshells, and still others having to raise their hands because they are without.

Still, the idea has merit - it's definitely an interesting take on e-learning, but there are definitely challenges to its real-world use that must be overcome first.

High-traffic Flash-based gaming communities like Lumosity, Newgrounds and PopCap Games will be some of the first groups to utilize Flash's Low Level Virtual Machine compiler infrastructure. If these groups really do find the Flash customization as easy as it sounds, Adobe will be opening the floodgates to casual gaming. PopCap's titles alone have been downloaded more than 1 billion times by consumers worldwide. With reduced development time, it will be interesting to see the fortunes amassed by gaming houses. Some of the light games that have already been created using CS5 include Chroma Circuit, Fickleblox and Just Letters.