The bulk of social gaming revenue in the next three years will not come from Facebook, as you might suspect, but rather from alternative platforms that are dominant in other countries. In a study conducted by SuperData Research on behalf ofViximo, a social games and applications platform, it found that non-Facebook social gaming will explode to $5.6 billion in 2014, up from an estimated $3.2 billion this year. At that level, the study found that it will represent 65 percent of the overall projected revenue, including both Facebook and non-Facebook social gaming networks, which together are expected to hit $8.6 billion in 2014. Read more By Tricia Duryee for All Things D, 11 Oct 2011.
Category Archives: Trends
Raising geek kids
Being a nerd is a good thing in our house. My daughters both love being creative, working with technology and learning new things. They proudly identify themselves as geeks. For a long time now I’ve had a goal to raise children that are creative problem solvers – the kind of people that encounter a problem and say “I have an idea!” instead of “What am I going to do?” This post I wanted to share some of the things we do together in hopes of inspiring creativity and problem solving. Hopefully it give other geek dads parents some ideas they can do with their kids. Read more By Hugo Ware for hugoware, 25 Sept 2011.
Move over social media: here comes social business
IBM is moving itself and its clients well beyond social media into a new era of collaboration, insight sharing, and lead generation it calls social business. It takes extraordinary chutzpah to promote a vision before it can be fully realized by your audience, let alone your company. IBM did just that in 1997 when it introduced the notion of e-business. Fourteen years later, it is doing it again with a concept they call social business. Given its prescience about e-business, a concept that radically transformed how companies buy and sell their products, it is hard to dismiss their latest idée fixe. That said, getting your arms around this grandiose idea is not easy. Ethan McCarty, Senior Manager of Digital and Social Strategy at IBM, spent the better part … Continue reading
Mobile internet use nearing 50%
Almost half of UK internet users are going online via mobile phone data connections, according to the Office for National Statistics. Some 45% of people surveyed said they made use of the net while out and about, compared with 31% in 2010. The most rapid growth was among younger people, where 71% of internet-connected 16 to 24-year-olds used mobiles. Read more For BBC News: Technology, 31 August 2011.
Smartphones make religion mobile
Bible quotes, Torah chants and Buddhist prayer wheels can all be accessed on the go following an increase in faith-based phone apps. Carmen Roberts examines how app developers in Singapore are creating software designed to help people make the most out of religion. Watch video By BBC Click, 01 Sept 2011.
High tech schools: 7 innovative ways teachers are using tech in the classroom
Many schools across the country have rules about tech in the classroom, but they’re not the rules you might think. Teachers instruct students to take out their smartphones, to power up their iPads, and to log in to Twitter. Technology’s role in the classroom has been widely debated: does it simply feed an addiction to a mobile lifestyle, or does it give otherwise shy students a way to find their voices? A national survey released in April by Pearson Learning Solutions found that only “2 percent of college faculty members had used Twitter in class, and nearly half thought that doing so would negatively affect learning,” reported The New York Times. However, at the same time, a recent survey by the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth found that “98 percent of higher ed … Continue reading
Have computer games become boring?
There are some vintage video games that will live long in the collective memory. Space Invaders, Tetris and Doom were original, inventive and didn’t have a number after their name. Nowadays, the market is saturated with sequels and franchises. But does that mean innovation has dried-up? In the video games industry at the moment, things are coming in threes. Gears of War 3, Far Cry 3, Uncharted 3, Mass Effect 3 and Battlefield 3 – along with countless other sequels – are being released this year. Many will be played on the PlayStation 3, itself the latest offspring of a hardware dynasty. In fact, half of the global top 10 best-selling list is made up of sequels. In the European list, it is six out of 10. Read more … Continue reading
Is this a new tech bubble?
Are we in a new tech bubble? Has the thrill of the new – social media and ubiquitous connectivity – erased our memory of the last tech bubble’s burst just over a decade ago? The stock market flotation of LinkedIn and the excitement around the listing of social-buying website Groupon would seem to suggest that we have got carried away again with the idea of new business models that will change the world forever and create untold wealth in their wake. Read more By Julie Meyer for BBC News: Business, 15 July 2011.
Ever wondered what a global flow of information looks like?
During major events, people use Twitter to share news and thoughts with friends, family and followers around the world. Messages originating in one place are quickly spread across the globe through Retweets, @replies and Direct Messages. We see this behavior during everything from sporting events like the World Cup to widely-televised news events like the royal wedding, and also in the face of major disasters like the March 11 earthquake in Japan, where the volume of Tweets sent per second spiked to more than 5,000 TPS five separate times after the quake and ensuing tsunami. The videos below illustrate what this global flow of information looks like. Watch the video Read more Global Pulse posted by Abdur for Twitter blog.
If the internet gave free back rubs, people would complain when it stopped because its thumbs were sore
Spotify’s problem is that no one wants to pay for anything they access via a computer. It’s incredible how quickly we humans can develop a languid sense of entitlement over even the simplest of things. For instance, I’ve spent hours of my waking life in TV comedy writing rooms, which usually consist of about four or five people seated around a table coming up with gags. That’s the idea, anyway. The reality often resembles a bizarre group therapy session in which a small cluster of faintly dysfunctional individuals have been encouraged to exorcise their collective anxiety by discussing appalling notions in the most flippant manner imaginable. Read more By Charlie Brooker for The Guardian, 03 June 2011.