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Today, Barnes & Noble has been revealed to be the first-ever location where you can unlock the free Mighty Eagle character in Angry Birds Magic, the new game from franchise creators Rovio. The idea behind Angry Birds Magic is to use technology, like GPS and NFC (near field communication), to connect gamers with their surroundings in order to augment gameplay and unlock special location-based rewards.

OK, we've seen Linux and a GameBoy Color emulator running on JavaScript. What's next? The original DOOM, apparently. Alon Zakai has ported DOOM to the browser. You can play it here. It works in Firefox and Safari.

According to Zakai, "Loading and saving games do work, but only until you leave the page. TODO: Use IndexedDB for persistent storage."

Yesterday we told you about a JavaScript-based x86 emulator. Today we found a JavaScript and HTML5 based GameBoy Color emulator created by Grant Galitz. It can open ROMS from your local computer, or from the Web.

You can see it in action here, or download the source from GitHub.

Angry Birds has been ported from mobile phones to netbooks. The game is now available from all versions of Intel AppUp center, including those distributed by Best Buy, Best Buy Canada, Future Shop, Dixons, Walmart, Asus, Croma, HSN, New Egg and TigerDirect.

Angry Birds makes an interesting case study for developers porting applications from one interface to another. Previously, we covered Conceptualizing Your Ported Application on the Netbook Platform.

Microsoft is sponsoring Dev Unplugged, a contest for developers working on games and music applications in HTML5. "We believe that HTML5 and related technologies, in conjunction with faster and faster browsers, finally give developers the tools they need to create experiences that are as vivid, interactive and compelling as anything you have seen in native applications," writes Microsoft's Carter Rabasa. Several prizes are being offered, worth $40,000 in sum.

Hellboy creator Mike Mignola and the bands AWOLNATION and Ra Ra Riot are providing developers with starter content to use in entries.

The Institute for the Future's Foresight Engine (formerly known as Signtific Lab) is a platform to help large organizations or groups generate ideas by thinking about a variety of possible future scenarios. Participants communicate their thoughts in short, 140 character messages. These messages can be new ideas, thoughts on someone else's ideas, questions, etc. Players are rewarded for creating value with points and badges, the classic tropes of game mechanics. It's not terribly different from many enterprise innovation management platforms.

IFTF Research Manager Rachel Hatch says she can't disclose the names of corporate clients that have used the Foresight Engine for internal use. But Hatch shares some lessons learned from running these corproate forecasting games on her blog. These lessons can be applied to other applications of game mechanics in the workplace.

We covered the emerging trend of gamification - the application of game mechanics outside of games - in November. A few enterprise vendors, such as Moxie and Rypple, are starting to incorporate elements of gamification into products. Constellation Research analyst and co-founder R "Ray" Wang has identified five engagement factors for gamification in the enterprise: intrigue, reward, status, community and challenge. But aren't these common elements of a good workplace, with or without the idea of "gamification"?

GameSalad, the iOS game creation software, has been on a roll since it first launched in 2009. According to Gendai Games, the Austin-based company behind the software, GameSalad has grown to be the largest and fastest growing third-party development tool for iOS games with more than 3% of all iOS in the App Store created using the tool.

Now, in the general scheme of things, 3% may seem like a small number, but that means that nearly 1,500 games have been developed and made it into the App Store using their tool.

The Humble Bundle ended its second pay-what-you-want deal on Saturday. After running for just 11 days, the startup, newly backed by Y Combinator sold over $1.8 million in video games, outperforming the great success the first bundle had earlier this year.

The Humble Bundle lets customers choose the price they wanted to pay - anything from a penny up - to download a package of 5 indie video games. And even though they could have paid just a cent, the average customer spent $7.83 to download the bundle. Some companies, in order to have their names listed as top contributors on the Humble Bundle site, paid several thousand dollars for the bundle. (And for those keeping score at home, Linux users again paid twice as much as Windows users - $13.76 to $6.67.)

The first HTML5 Game Jam was held last month at both Google downtown San Francisco office SPIL Games's Hilversum, Netherlands. Participants spent just over 24 hours creating simple games with HTML5. Today, Google announced the winners on its Code Blog.

The games are all quite simple, but demonstrate how much can already be done with HTML5. Not to mention they were all created very quickly.