games - ReadWriteWeb

$1m in 1 Day: Meet Double Fine, the New Kings of Kickstarter

Marshall Kirkpatrick — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 15:09:25 -0800

Late last night Jane McGonigal, the most respected authority in the world of gamification, Tweeted that she'd pitched in to support the creation of a new point and click adventure game from respected game development shop Double Fine. That was the first trickle I saw of what quickly became a flood of support for the Double Fine Adventure project on Kickstarter.

Long popular for their work building games with major studios, the Double Fine team decided they wanted to self-produce and document the creation of an old-fashioned point and click adventure game. They are probably just a few hours away from breaking $1 million raised from backers on Kickstarter, they are already the new record holders for the fastest to raise so much and to receive backing from so many individual funders. Update: Adding tens of thousands of dollars every 15 minutes, the project just passed $1m.

]]> "[This] is kind of a big deal," wrote game journalist Jim Squires at Gamezebo this morning.

"Not just for Double Fine, but for Kickstarter and the industry as a whole. Can you imagine what the gaming world would look like if big developers like this could raise the funds needed to get to market without a publisher? Sure it's worked for indies, but we're talking Tim Schaefer here. Between Tim and Ron Gilbert (also now with Double Fine), these are the people that defined the LucasArts era of adventure games."

In other words, this is a case of the famous getting more famous on a new platform - directly with their own fame instead of with a traditional publisher's help. The same was true of LunaTik, the previous Kickstarter champ. Cool stories, but the democratization of fundraising thus deserves to be understood with a grain of salt.

Game blog Joystiq reported:

"'I can confirm that there's not been a project that has raised as much as this one in such a short timeframe,' [a Kickstarter] spokesperson revealed. Kickstarter says it does not keep a running tally finalized projects, but its listing of 'Most Funded' ventures shows a number of concepts that came close to the one million dollar mark, since 2009.

"The Kickstarter spokesperson also confirmed that Double Fine's project 'now has more backers than any other project on the site.' The current total of backers sits at over 17,000." [It's now up to 25k+]

The Gamification of Game Creation

I don't know as much about gaming as either of the two writers above, but I'm learning about gamification. The Gamification.org wiki lists a number of game dynamics that I think are at play in this, if not every, Kickstarter campaign.

Epic Meaning to the fundraising Quest, because funders are challenging authority and changing the world.
The challenge to big game publishers and their conventional wisdom that point-and-click adventure games are dead confers what Gamification experts call Epic Meaning to the (in this case highly accelerated) fundraising Quest, because funders are challenging authority and changing the world. The Achievements and Reward Schedules that all Kickstarter campaigns are encouraged to include are aided by the Urgent Optimism created by the record-breaking pace of this campaign in particular, the strong reputation of the team being backed, the relatively immediate gratification of games themselves and the fact that a David vs Goliath story always has some amount of urgency to it.
There is clearly a Countdown and participants are racing it with a combination of Ownership, Community Collaboration and Virality. Finally, the Kickstarter updates in general and the video documentation of this game's creation both fit within what Gamification analysts call Cascading Information Theory. "The theory," the Gamification.org wiki explains, "that information should be released in the minimum possible snippets to gain the appropriate level of understanding at each point during a game narrative."

Put all that within the context of a known brand (the game makers themselves), the well-executed but still-fresh infrastructure of Kickstarter and the end result of a game that is easy to afford ($15 gets you a download on Steam when it's done), and you've got a recipe for some gamified game creation. In this case, record levels of game creation.

As Jane McGonigal tweeted to Double Fine's Tim Schaefer this afternoon, "@TimOfLegend You're making us all feel like we're a part of something historic ^_^"
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How Amazon's Kindle Fire is About to One-Up Handheld Gaming Systems

John Paul Titlow — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 15:30:00 -0800

With less than a week to go before Amazon starts shipping its Kindle Fire tablet, the company today announced the inclusion of several more Android apps. The list of new additions includes Netflix, Pandora, Facebook, Twitter and many other hugely popular apps.

Quite a few of the applications Amazon announced today are games. Apps from Zynga, EA, Rovio and a number of other mobile game makers are going to be included on the Kindle Fire, which substantially expands the catalog of games available on the device.

]]> With everybody chattering on about what impact the Kindle Fire might have on other tablets like the iPad and Barnes and Noble's new Nook, it's easy to overlook another class of devices that may face disruption by Amazon: handheld gaming consoles.

iOS and Android: Already Disrupting the Video Game Market

In fact, this disruption is already well underway. Android and iOS have collectively begun to devour the lunch of established video game hardware manufacturers like Sony and Nintendo, according to a new report from Flurry Analytics.

Smartphones and tablets running iOS and Android will together account for nearly 60% of video game industry revenue in 2011. That percentage has in the last two years and the growth shows no sign of slowing down.

Evidently, the proliferation of tablets, smartphones and iPods, coupled with the growth of inexpensive mobile games is chiseling away at the old model of consumers spending $40 or $50 for a new game on a system from Nintendo, Sony or Microsoft.

Nintendo has already felt the heat from these trends. After it launched its much-hyped 3D handheld gaming system earlier this year, lukewarm sales forced the company to slash its price. They've also dropped prices on many of the games that were initially available for their Wii console.

Enter Amazon and, probably to a lesser extent, Barnes and Noble. The two companies are about to start shipping multi-purpose, Android-powered, touchscreen tablet devices that are priced competitively. Amazon's offering will be available in over 16,000 U.S. retail stores. Neither device will single-handedly knock the iPad from its dominant position, but the availability of two entry-level tablets at half the iPad's cost is sure to propel the growth of the tablet market overall. Analysts have predicted that Amazon could sell anywhere from 2-5 million Kindle Fires before 2011 is over.

If you think mobile games are doing well now, just wait until tablets reach 80 million U.S. consumers, something Forrester expects to happen by 2015. By then we can reasonably expect smartphone penetration to much higher than it is today as well.

Meanwhile, if these new devices from Amazon and Barnes and Noble do particularly well, Apple may be forced to reconsider its $500 starting price tag when it launches the iPad 3 in early-to-mid 2012.

No matter how you slice it, we're going to see huge growth in tablet adoption a year from now. In addition to reading, social networking and watching plenty of video, the devices are going to continue to be used quite heavily for gaming, something Sony and Nintendo are surely aware of.

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Ex-Twitter VP Jason Goldman Funds Startup That Turns Legacy Content Into Mobile Games

Marshall Kirkpatrick — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 11:23:06 -0800

Mobile quiz startup Qrank will announce next week that it has raised a seed round of funding, including an investment from early Twitter VP of Product Jason Goldman. Qrank is building out a platform that will let any organization with a backlog of content use it to create smart, fast-paced mobile trivia games. The games incorporate social networks, location, chat and other social features. It sounds awesome.

Goldman is one of five investors in a convertible note of $350,000, ReadWriteWeb has learned and the company has confirmed. The company will use the funding to build a self-service platform, acquire more high-profile customers and complete an analytics dashboard. The existing consumer app gets high marks for responsiveness and user engagement. Can Qrank extend that formula out across the mobile web?

]]> I'm not a big game player, but I like Qrank. It's a game that treats me like an intelligent adult, but also incorporates a fast pace and immediate on-boarding into the experience. The default game's questions are thought provoking, the design is nice, the experience is fast paced and social. It's good.

I'd love to see how the platform could turn a body of content from ReadWriteWeb, or from a set of known websites about a common topic, into a social quiz game.

Launched 18 months ago by Austin, Texas based Ricochet Labs, the startup has been working with Goldman as an advisor since June. Also advising the company is Ross Fubini of Kapor Capital. CEO Rodney Gibbs previously built and sold a game development company called Fizz Factor.

Goldman is widely understood to have been essential to the creation of Twitter's early product. He left the company last December and joined Twitter co-founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone at Obvious Corp, now an investment group for social good minded startups. Obvious's first investment was a stealth startup called Lift, which we published the first details about in August.

Goldman invested in Qrank independent of Obvious. Joining him are Sam Shank,
Trip Levis, Wild Basin Investments and Chris Sherman.

Then Redmonk analyst Michael Coté called Qrank one of Austin's most interesting startups last year, especially from a business model perspective.

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Zynga Launches CityVille on Google Plus

Jon Mitchell — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 08:45:00 -0800

Zynga, maker of popular Facebook games like Farmville and Mafia Wars, has announced today that CityVille will be its first social building game on Google Plus. Zynga Poker launched with the rest of the Google Plus game platform in August, but this is Zynga's first Google game in the mold of their virally successful Facebook titles.

Zynga has over 146 million users of its social games, but they're almost entirely on Facebook. But as we reported in July 2010, Google quietly invested over $100 million in the gaming company, ensuring that major Zynga titles on the Google platform were only a matter of time.

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Zynga is Building its Empire

CityVille - like FarmVille meets Sim City - already boasts over 72 million players on Facebook (and that's down from a peak of over 100 million), which is 30 million more people than there are on Google Plus altogether, according to the latest estimates. Suffice it to say, it will be a long time before Google Plus can provide users at Facebook's scale.

But Facebook could use the competition, and game producers like Zynga are all too happy to help create it. Zynga has expressed dissatisfaction with the terms of its relationship with Facebook for a long time, and it has channeled its rapid growth into more than one partnership outside Facebook, including Yahoo, MSN Game Portal, and of course Google.

The Potential of Google Games

Google, for its part, has been building features for a game platform for a year or longer, and analysts believe that Google Plus games represent an enormous opportunity for the company and game developers alike. As Tricia Duryee at AllThingsD reported in July, Google may spur that opportunity along by undercutting Facebook on in-app fees and other costs for developers.

Google Plus already has some titles that compete with Zynga's big genres, including a mythical city-building game called City of Wonder and an organized crime game called Crime City, but Zynga is the big name in social gaming, and today's announcement brings the game style that made it successful to Google Plus.

Have you played any Google Plus games? Tell us which ones in the comments.

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Google Plus Games Arrive to Challenge Facebook

Jon Mitchell — Thu, 11 Aug 2011 13:24:00 -0800

Here come the Google Plus games. Google has announced a big move toward mainstream adoption today, integrating Web-based games within the brand new social network. "We want to make playing games online just as fun, and just as meaningful, as playing in real life," the announcement says. Titles include Angry Birds, Bejeweled Blitz, Zynga Poker and Sudoku. Google has launched a new Google Plus Platform Blog to help encourage more.

Google seems a bit concerned about the distraction factor, though, and it wants to make sure these games don't get in the way of your +1ing, sharing and other important Google Plus business. "Games in Google Plus are there when you want them and gone when you don't," the announcement says. "If you're not interested in games, it's easy to ignore them."

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In every respect, from letting in members to developing mobile apps, the Google Plus project has been careful in its progress. A hasty implementation of games, or one that would cause a backlash, would be a major setback, and this announcement is worded to soothe that concern. But games have been expected since the launch of Google Plus (or earlier) and despite the company's refusal to comment, multiple hints have been found in code and help documents.

As we reported last year, Google has quietly invested as much as $200 million in social game developer Zynga, maker of such illustrious titles as Farmville and Mafia Wars. Zynga's business, while huge, has been almost entirely dependent on Facebook so far. As GigaOm's Ryan Kim points out, Google Plus won't have top Zynga titles like Cityville and Farmville because they're exclusive to Facebook, but $200 million is sure to land Plus some fresh new titles of its own.

Game On Between Google Plus and Facebook

Games are an important feature for a social network that wants to compete with Facebook for users' attention, not to mention its gaming business. "There is terrific potential for games on Google Plus," Billy Pidgeon, a game analyst at M2 Research, told VentureBeat games specialist Dean Takahashi in a report on developer anticipation of games on Google Plus two weeks ago. "Opening up gaming on other social networks gives other publishers more opportunity to compete outside the Zynga-Facebook matrix, and can also help Zynga escape dependence on Facebook." Takahashi wrote that he spoke to a number of game developers who were confident that Games on Plus would launch soon and that it "would change the game industry" when it does.

The battle for game developer attention is likely to be heated. Tricia Duryee reported late last month at All Things D that multiple sources told her Google would try to undercut Facebook by charging developers a lower fee for things like in-app sales.

Mike Swift, a writer at the San Jose Mercury News (Silicon Valley's paper of record), says that Facebook has already issued a call for a press conference on the topic of gaming tomorrow.

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More Signs of Google Plus Games Coming Soon: How Will G+ Gaming Differ From Facebook?

Audrey Watters — Fri, 22 Jul 2011 12:48:04 -0800

Since the release of Google's new social network, there's been a lot of speculation about when and if Google Plus would get a gaming component. Early inquiry into the site's code certainly hinted at the possibility, and now more signs have been uncovered.

Slashgear reports that the Games Stream has been confirmed, pointing to wording on the Google Plus Help pages - now removed - that referenced games and potentially a separate stream for finding game-related updates.

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That news may come as a relief for some of Google Plus's early adopters, many of whom cited their preference for Google Plus over Facebook, as the former is a Farmville-free zone, if you will.

Of course, Facebook users do have the option to hide the updates that come from their friends' gaming habits. You can remove updates from individual games from your feed entirely or, of course, you can opt to just hide those friends whose Facebook activities seem to be solely comprised of casual gaming. But this option isn't obvious to everyone, and many users still complain of these sorts of messages overwhelming their News Feed. By opting to create a separate stream for game-related updates, Google Plus may make this less of an issue for its users.

The News Feed and Games' Viral Spread

But the flood of gaming updates contributed to the viral spread of many games on Facebook (and in turn, helped Facebook itself become one of the Web's most popular destinations). Without that easy virality of the News Feed "spam" on Google Plus, game developers may find it more challenging to woo new players.

But the lack of immediate viral channels isn't necessarily a bad thing for game developers, and it could be an opportunity to rethink some of the mechanics of social gaming that have become intertwined with Facebook. Perhaps we'll see new types of games developed for Google Plus. Or perhaps we'll see many of the same games, simply ported over to a new social destination.

Bringing Game Developers to Google Plus

One thing that might woo game developers to Google Plus would be better financial rewards for them. According to AllThingsD's Tricia Duryee, Google may be planning to offer game developers a better deal than Facebook does, taking a smaller cut than the 30% of revenues that's been the industry standard. As she notes, Google just launched an in-apps payment option this week, a key piece that's now in place for developers to be able to monetize their Web apps.

There's no official word from Google on a launch of a Games feature for Google Plus, but many signs are pointing to a feature that would be quite different from that of Facebook's. The balancing act for Google Plus will be to have the Games help make the site a destination for people to return regularly while not chasing away those users who find the absence of casual gaming a welcome relief.

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Angry Birds Magic Connects Game to Real World, Starting at Barnes & Noble

Sarah Perez — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 06:58:48 -0800

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.

]]> How to Unlock the Mighty Eagle at Barnes & Noble

With GPS, when gamers play Angry Birds Magic in certain locations, "magic happens," explained Ramine Darabiha, Product Manger for the game at ReadWriteWeb's 2WAY Summit earlier this month. But not every location will be magic, he said, only those that "make sense" for the brand.

That's why B&N is the first location to be transformed into a "Magic Place," as these special locations are called. It can promote Angry Birds both on its Nook Color e-reader and within its store, through merchandise displays.

In order to unlock the free Mighty Eagle character, gamers have to play Angry Birds Magic on the Barnes & Noble Nook Color while visiting one of the company's 700 bookstores across the U.S. The Nook version of the game is available for $2.99 in the Nook's app store and can be played over B&N's free in-store Wi-Fi.

In addition, B&N will capitalize on their new partnership by offering Angry Birds-themed games, toys and other merchandise for sale and will offer free stickers and temporary tattoos to Angry Birds fans who visit the store.

More to Come, via NFC

This is just the first of many partnerships for Rovio. Other rewards will be enabled through the use of NFC, a short-range wireless frequency that enables data transfers over short distances. With NFC, you just tap or wave your phone over a sticker, tag, poster, object in order to enable a connection.

For NFC work, it has to either be built into the phone itself, or added on afterwards, via a case or microSD card. However, for its use with Angry Birds, it's possible that you could simply place an NFC sticker on your phone to let the "magic" to happen.

Rovio previously said that the NFC features would be limited at first to Nokia's devices, but would roll out to all other NFC-enabled phones soon. Currently, this is a short list, including Google's Nexus S, some variants of the Samsung Galaxy S II and the upcoming BlackBerry Bold phones (9900/9930), among others.

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Democratizing Development: GameSalad Helps Amateurs Create 1,500 iOS Games

Mike Melanson — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 15:25:17 -0800

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.

]]> For some, apps like GameSalad offer a new version of the American Dream, where anything is possible and all you need to succeed is a good idea. Earlier this week, VentureBeat wrote about an eighth grader who used a similar tool to create a simple game and knock Angry Birds out of the top free spot in the App store.

Since its launch in late 2009, GameSalad has seen many people try for the same, with more than 107,000 downloads. Last month, GameSalad users created nearly 300 apps, making up more than 6% of game submissions to the App Store. In January, the company says, GameSalad-created apps could account for more than 10% of all game submissions.

"We're committed to bringing the tools of game creation to everyone," said GameSalad CEO Steve Felter. "The last two months demonstrate that we're well on our way to democratizing game development."

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Geocaching Claims 2X Participants as Foursquare, Launches New Android App

Marshall Kirkpatrick — Tue, 21 Sep 2010 09:23:22 -0800

Geocaching, the game of finding objects hidden around the world using a GPS device, is believed to have 5 million participants worldwide, according to leading commercial portal Geocaching.com. That company released a new geocaching app for Android this morning, with a price tag of $9.99.

With more than 5 million participants, Geocaching.com calls the practice "the most popular location-based game on Earth." That's a number not for one particular company, but an estimate of all the geocaching participants across different platforms. Still, the game is typically thought of as a pretty nerdy pass-time, but it remains twice as big as the much hyped location startup Foursquare. Are we Foursquare fans missing out on something?

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While Foursquare in particular has garnered a huge amount of media attention, it is just one of many different types of location-based services. As a service based on social sharing of your location, it may be less appealing to many people than are other service that leverage, but don't share, where you are. Location based social networks may be more difficult for people to understand, as well.

Foursquare relaunched yesterday with a new emphasis on features that could be described as geofencing: an option to receive push notifications from trusted sources or to-do items when you check-in within a certain proximity of associated locations. That's an important differentiator between the startup and the new Facebook Places. Might Foursquare implement a geocaching-type feature as well?

One thing's for certain, these new location-based social games are more interesting, more innovative and more compelling for technology-focused press to talk about than old fashioned (10 year old) geocaching. More people appear interested in playing geocaching so far, though.

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Apple Approved: iSwifter Lets You Play Popular Flash Games on the iPad

Frederic Lardinois — Thu, 16 Sep 2010 09:00:00 -0800

Even though Apple still refuses to allow Flash on the iOS platform, there is now a way to play at least some popular Flash-based games on the iPad. Apple just approved iSwifter (iTunes link), a free app that bypasses Apple's Flash embargo by simply streaming the games to your iPad, similar to what OnLive does with PC games. Games run on a central server and the iPad app basically works like a remote desktop client and relays the user's input back to the server.

]]> Before you get too excited, it's important to note that the app currently only features a very limited set of games from Yahoo! Games, AOL Games.com, Facebook and Kongregate. The team plans to add more games over time, though, and announce more partnerships with other Flash-gaming portals, too.

We were able to give the app a try before launch. While it's great to be able to play these games on the iPad now and while iSwifter's application is quite well designed, it's hard not to notice that the apps don't play directly on the iPad. As with many remote desktop apps, there is often a slight delay between clicks and you can easily notice how the app sometimes struggles to refresh the screen fast enough.

For the most part, this doesn't really matter right now, as the available games tend to be puzzle games (Screw the Nut, Book of Treasures, etc.) that don't need a very fast screen refresh rate to be playable. This does, however, limit the platform's usefulness for more action-oriented games. Currently, the available games also don't need any keyboard input to be playable, but it remains to be seen how well iSwifter will be able to cope with more complex apps that rely on more complex commands than just a mouse click.

For now, iSwifter is only available for the iPad and only works over WiFi networks. The company plans to add support for 3G networks soon and launch iPhone and Android apps in the near future.

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Is Playtime the Road to Bigtime for Augmented Reality?

Chris Cameron — Fri, 10 Sep 2010 12:00:00 -0800

Science fiction author and Wired blogger Bruce Sterling passed along the interesting augmented reality video embedded below. It's an iPhone app from the Japanese company Sazanami called Amazing3D that lets users augment still photographs with playful 3D objects which they can then interact with. While it's not the most amazing example of augmented reality (actually it is pretty fun to play with), it did remind me that there have been several great kid-friendly AR applications developed recently. As augmented reality evolves and finds its most successful niche markets, toys, games and children could be some of the most efficient avenues to success.

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The app, which is obviously geared toward a younger audience, reminded me of some interesting AR apps aimed at children (I wish I could remember them all). One that comes to mind is whistleBox's "Do Crew" augmented cartoons - a series of video stories that include interactive AR games. The games aren't merely "lean forward" experiences on the desktop, they actually get kids up on their feet moving around and being active (much like the Nintendo Wii, or Kinect on the Xbox).

Other great augmented reality examples have been aimed at younger markets as well, including LEGO's in-store project. A kiosk equipped with a camera and a screen lets shoppers (read: kids) hold model sets up to the camera in order to see a 3D representation of the finished project live on their box. Additional projects have brought augmented reality to baseball cards and game cards - bringing athletes and mythic creatures to life.

While at Qualcomm's Uplinq conference in San Diego earlier this summer, I met Andrew Cheeseman of Mattel who was on hand to demonstrate an augmented version of a classic game - Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots. Cheeseman told me that Mattel believes augmented reality is going to be a huge hit in the toy industry - and I agree. He also made the very good point that new technologies like AR help introduce fresh generations of kids to older games (like the aforementioned Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots).

So is playtime augmented reality's ticket to bigtime? It's likely that the younger demographics are certainly going to play a big role in the proliferation of the technology, but it probably won't be the only successful sector. Hi-tech as already been making great use of the technology in automobile factories and in the military, and the healthcare industry could certainly be a terrific platform as well.

But never underestimate the power of needy kids when they set their sights on fun new toys. Just ask George Lucas how that's going.

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Google's Game Developer Advocate Leaves After Less Than 6 Months

Marshall Kirkpatrick — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 09:54:18 -0800

Mark DeLoura, developer advocate at Games at Google, has announced that he's leaving the company after just 5 months there. DeLoura, a veteran of the gaming industry and past lead engineer at Nintendo for five years at the end of the 90's, hasn't revealed his plans yet for what he'll do next. "I enjoyed working with many of the people there [at Google]," he wrote, "but it was not the perfect fit for me."

In announcing his departure, DeLoura wrote in a blog post about the progress Games at Google has shown to date in building apps in the browser and enabling greater developer flexibility.

]]> DeLoura is the second high-profile developer advocate Google has lost this Summer. Last month, Android developer marketing lead Sun Hu Kim jumped ship to join Twitter.

The loss of DeLoura seems particularly notable, though, as Games at Google is still a big, unfulfilled promise. From a social software, developer community and technical perspective, not to mention profit, Google is getting ready to make a big push in gaming. Google invested more than $100 million this Summer in Zynga, makers of Farmville and other mind-numbing fare, for example. Rallying and supporting a thriving developer ecosystem, the job DeLoura was hired for, will be key to the larger gaming effort.

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Bing Makes it Easier to Find Music, Games, Movies and TV Shows

Frederic Lardinois — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 09:15:16 -0800

Last night, Microsoft's Bing got a major overhaul that added more entertainment features to the company's search engine. Bing now makes it easier to find song lyrics, TV shows with online video, as well as information about movies and movie times. Bing now also allows users to preview songs via Microsoft's Zune service. The implementation of this - with the songs and preview buttons at the top of the search results - looks almost exactly like Google's Music Search. In addition to these search-oriented features, Microsoft also partnered with a number of developers to offer about 100 popular casual games directly on Bing.

]]> Music: Lyrics Search and Full Music Preview

As Stefan Weitz, Microsoft's Director of Bing, told us earlier this year when we got to see a sneak preview of some of these new features, lyrics are an extremely popular search category, yet a lot of lyrics sites are rather shady and the right lyrics are often hard to find.

According to Microsoft, about 70% of people online look for lyrics at one time or another. Now, whenever you search for a song that is in Microsoft's Zune library, Bing gives you the option to also see the lyrics to this song. The presentation is very basic - with the lyrics on a plain white background - but infinitely better than what you would find on most lyrics sites on the Web today.

As you search for songs, Bing's new music preview feature also allows you to play every single song in the Zune catalog once (after the first play, you will only get a 30 second preview). Songs can be bought from Microsoft's own Zune music service, iTunes and Amazon.

Bing Games

Bing now hosts over 100 popular casual games that users can play directly in the search engine. In addition, just like lyrics searches often lead to some of the darker parts of the Internet, searches for game walkthroughs and cheats also often end up on rather sketchy sites. The Bing team now aggregates this information, as well as reviews and videos, from trustworthy sites.

TV Shows and Movies

While this isn't a comprehensive "TV Guide for the Internet" like Clicker and its competitors, Bing now also links directly to full-length episodes of popular TV shows. Microsoft indexes about 1,500 shows for this service. For those who still watch "real" TV, Bing also now presents guide information for these shows.

For movies, the search engine now displays movie times, reviews, as well as real time sentiment analysis about the movie from Twitter and Facebook. In addition, Bing adds information about restaurants near the movie theater and parking information from Bing Maps.

One Search Domain at a Time

It is clear that Bing is trying to find all the top search domains (travel and shopping were one of Bing's first strengths there) and then cover them as best it can by bringing together the best information sources right in the search engine. While Google is also working on similar initiatives, the company still focuses mostly on taking users to other sites. Bing, on the other hand, is squarely focused on providing users with the answers they are looking for right on its own property (though Microsoft, of course, also still presents plenty of links).

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Google Celebrates Pac-Man's 30th Birthday with Playable Logo

Mike Melanson — Fri, 21 May 2010 09:09:00 -0800

As the eerily familiar bleeps and bloops of video games past began emanating from my computer this morning, a friend nearby immediately recognized them and quipped that he'd spent "way too much time and brain cells playing that game".

That game is Pac-Man and it's featured in a playable Google Doodle for the next 48 hours on the Google homepage.

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The search engine is celebrating the video game legend's 30th birthday today (and tomorrow) with its first playable Google Doodle.

To give it a shot, simply go to Google.com and press the "Insert Coin" button, or wait a few seconds and the game will start up. If you hit the "Insert Coin" button again, Ms. Pac-Man will join in and you can have a second player play along using the WASD keys.

The doodle goes to good length to recreate the original Pac-Man experience, glitches and all, according to senior UX designer and developer Marcin Wichary:

Google doodler Ryan Germick and I made sure to include PAC-MAN's original game logic, graphics and sounds, bring back ghosts' individual personalities, and even recreate original bugs from this 1980's masterpiece.

In its efforts to recreate the original, Google went so far as to include 255 playable levels, with the game glitching out on the 256th - just as it did in the original game.

Take a look at the game or go give it a shot for yourself.

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Shovelware: Developers Now Launch More E-Book Apps Than Games in iTunes Store

Frederic Lardinois — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 11:02:58 -0800

According to a new survey conducted by mobile analytics company Flurry, developers now launch more e-book apps than games in Apple's iTunes App Store. Games now represent 13% of the new releases while 20% of all the new apps in the App Store are e-books. One of the reasons for this is that it's quite easy for developers to release large numbers of e-books. Developers just have to switch out the text, rename the app and send it to Apple for approval.

]]> This data from Flurry doesn't tell us much about how many people actually download e-books on the iPhone, though an earlier report from Flurry showed that the iPhone e-book market saw impressive growth this year. The B&N Reader, Amazon Kindle app and Stanza are still the most popular e-book apps and it would be interesting to see more data about how users use these apps. While it's easy for developers to release lots of e-book apps based on public domain texts, this data tells us very little about how many people actually use them.

More Than Just Static Text

Over time, e-books on the iPhone will hopefully become more interesting than the current crop of apps. While today's hardware e-readers mimic traditional books, the next generation of e-readers will likely go beyond this and the iPhone is already in a position to lead the charge. Creative's forthcoming Zii MediaBook will offer some of this functionality. With iTunes LP, Apple also has a format that publishers could use to create richer e-book experiences. iTunes LPs aren't compatible with the iPhone and iPod touch, yet. It is likely only a matter of time before Apple brings this format to its mobile devices, though.

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