iPads and tablets vs Smartphones

The Smartphone is trumping tablets (including iPads) as the device of choice --

iPads and tablet growth — Benedict Evans: "...On the other hand, the smartphone explosion is putting the internet into the hands of far more people than ever before, and it's alway there. If you're watching TV and want to know about an actor or a product, do you go upstairs and turn on your PC, walk across the room to pick up a tablet, or just pull a smartphone out of your pocket? The declining relative utility of the PC is reflected in a slowing replacement cycle (you don't replace the one you have) - the tablet has yet to make the sale in the first place, outside the initial wave of adopters.  Compounding this, the smartphone explosion is accompanied by an apps explosion. There are thousands of amazing apps on iPad (and very few on Android tablets, which is why the balance of use between the two is so skewed), but the smartphone opportunity is so much bigger that it attracts much more attention: there are more of these devices, some use cases make much more sense on them (such as Instagram) and some only make sense on them (such as Uber, Hailo or Lyft). So the smartphone experience now is very rich...."

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​Comixology cuts Apple and Google out of digital-comics revenue

Amazon buys Comixology and promptly changes its Apple and Google apps to cut out the "middle-man" take --

​Comixology cuts Apple, Google out of digital-comics kickback - CNET: "....Comixology's Comics app for iOS is no longer able to make in-app purchases of any kind. iOS users must make all comics purchases from the Comixology website store and then synchronize the books to the iOS app. The Comics app had been one of Apple's top grossing apps with in-app purchases for several years. It ranked third on the iPad top-grossing chart for 2012, and was the top-grossing iPad app of 2013, with 14 percent of all nongame in-app sales. The old iOS app's comic-reading functions will continue to work, reports Bleeding Cool, but the store won't. For people who don't want to have to download their books to their iOS device, this could be a small time-saver. Comixology's Comics app for Android will continue to allow users to make in-app purchases, but instead of paying with your Google Play account, you must now go through Comixology's new system and pay with PayPal or a credit card...."

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Apple In Numbers (video)

Apple In Numbers -

 How many iPads are sold every minute? Why did The Beatles sue Apple? How much money has Apple got stashed abroad? (Published on Apr 23, 2014) - Apple In Numbers

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Barcodes, Invented on Miami Beach (video)

Barcodes In One Lesson. Barcodes have revolutionized modern life. Discover what happens every time you hear a beep at the checkout. For more information, check out a book called Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software 

Barcodes | 99% Invisible: A time without barcodes is hard to imagine now. But it wasn’t that long ago, and the story doesn’t start with George Laurer. It starts with an engineer named Joseph Woodland. In 1948 Woodland was trying to come up with simple symbol that, when scanned, would translate to a number that a computer could use to identify a product.Legend has it that he came up with his design while sitting on the beach in Miami. He was puzzling over the whole thing, thinking about Morse Code and tracing circles in the sand. When finally, bulls-eye!

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Google Fundamental Research, Google Gigabit Fiber

How Google Does Fundamental Research Without a Separate Research Lab | MIT Technology Review: "....Spector argues that it’s increasingly difficult for academic thinkers to independently advance a field like computer science without the involvement of corporations. Access to piles of data and working systems like those of Google is now a requirement to develop and test ideas that can move the discipline forward, he says. “Google’s played a larger role than almost any company in bringing that empiricism into the mainstream of the field,” he says. “Because of machine learning and operation at scale you can do things that are vastly different. You don’t want to separate researchers from data.”..."

Google’s gigabit gambit isn’t going away - Outside the Box - MarketWatch: "Google Fiber, the tech giant’s experiment as a high-speed Internet service provider, seems poised to make its critics look bad. . . Google Fiber’s gigabit service appears to be gaining momentum. The company said it has “invited” 34 cities across nine major metropolitan areas to explore ways to bring the service to their citizens, signaling it’s ready to make a substantial investment in the venture."

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Disney Retreats in Gaming

If you missed this -- Disney cutbacks in gaming --

Interactive Unit at Disney Cuts a Quarter of Its Staff - NYTimes.com: "Layoffs were long expected in the unit, but not on this scale. They came as a result of Disney’s decision to combine two businesses: booming mobile games (those played on iPads and smartphones) and sagging social games (those played on websites like Facebook). Disney also decided to sharply scale back in-house development of games of all types. It will now rely much more on outside licensing."

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Google Android Security, Continual App Scanning

Google Boosts Android Security With Continual App Scanning | News & Opinion | PCMag.com: "Google is about to make the process of app scanning, verification, and warning a wee bit easier by unveiling a new extension to its Verify apps service. The Android overlord will now automatically check devices on a continual basis to ensure that "all apps are behaving in a safe manner, even after installation.""

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Virtual Reality Boom, Back to the Future

Enthusiasts Go Back to the Future in a Virtual Reality Boom | MIT Technology Review: "“A lot of things have come together simultaneously to make this year ripe for VR to finally take off,” says Devin Reimer chief technology officer of Owlchemy Labs, an independent game studio based in Boston that is working on a base-jumping game for Oculus Rift. “The mobile-display resolution race has forced the cost of high pixel density displays down. The availability of cheap and small accelerometers, magnetometers, gyroscopes, and compasses also contributes to this effect. With compact CPUs and GPUs able to render two high-resolutions views at high frame rate, the tech really is there.”" (read more at the link above)

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Chinese Game Company, New Domain Name For Overseas Expansion

Chinese Game Company Buys New Domain Name For Overseas Expansion - ChinaTechNews.com - The Technology Source for the Latest Chinese News on Internet, Computers, Digital, Science, Electronics, Law, Security, Software, Web 2.0, Telecom, and Wireless Industries: "Li Yifei, president of Shanghai-headquartered 37wan.net, announced that the company has invested USD2.1 million to purchase the new domain 37.com and officially renamed the company 37 Game as he aims to accelerate overseas market expansion...." (read more at link above)

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Monument Valley Game, Trailer, Behind the Scenes (videos)

Monument Valley Game for iPhone and iPad, launched 3rd April 2014, Android coming soon
http://www.monumentvalleygame.com/

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Tomorrow's Apps, Bitcoin Technology

The blockchain is not limited to monetary applications--

Tomorrow's Apps Will Come From Brilliant (And Risky) Bitcoin Code | Wired Opinion | Wired.com: "... the actual innovation brought about by bitcoin is not the currency itself but the platform, which is commonly referred to as the “blockchain” — a distributed cryptographic ledger shared amongst all nodes participating in the network, over which every successfully performed transaction is recorded. And the blockchain is not limited to monetary applications. Borrowing from the same ideas (though not using the actual peer-to-peer network bitcoin runs on), a variety of new applications have adapted the bitcoin protocol to fulfill different purposes: Namecoin for distributed domain name management; Bitmessage and Twister for asynchronous communication; and, more recently, Ethereum(released only a month ago). Like many other peer-to-peer (P2P) applications, these platforms all rely on decentralized architectures to build and maintain network applications that are operated by the community for the community. (I’ve written before here in WIRED Opinion about one example, mesh networks, which can provide an internet-native model for building community and governance)...." (read more at link above)
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Cyberlaw, Athletes, Video Games

Cyberlaw: Of Athletes And Video Games | Hodgson Russ LLP - JDSupra:




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Slot machine patents, values

U.S.: the value of slot machine patents | DLA Piper - I-gaming - JDSupra:




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Amazon Fire TV review: "misses the same marks as Ouya, other media boxes"

Ars Technica has the most thorough review of Amazon Fire TV -- full review at link below, excerpt follows:

Amazon Fire TV misses the same marks as Ouya, other media boxes | Ars Technica: "When it comes to browsing Amazon content, the Fire TV is frustratingly obscure. During the announcement event in New York, as Amazon VP Peter Larsen showed off the device's search features, a reporter called out a question: "Will we be able to search just for content that is free?" Larsen demurred, but it turns out that not only is free content (with a Prime membership) hard to find, the free content that exists is difficult to identify" 

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Animation Industry Evolution (video)

How Industrial Light & Magic Creates Its Creatures: Video - Bloomberg:
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Animation Director Hal Hickel spoke at Bloomberg Businessweek's second annual design conference about the evolution of the animation industry over the past few decades.

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Google Night Walk, Take a Stroll in Marseille, France!

Google Night Walk in Marseille, France

Google Night Walk: Marseille - Google will take you on a magnificent tour of the French city’s streets at night.

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BlueStacks, Run Android apps on your computer

Surf Report: How to run Android apps on your computer: "If you're on your computer at home, why do you have to get up and find your phone just to send someone a SnapChat? As long as you have the BlueStacks App Player (bluestacks.com) on your PC or Mac, both of these scenarios can be avoided.Quite simply, App Player is a free program that lets you run Android 4.0 ("Ice Cream Sandwich") and supported apps on your computer — as if you were accessing them on your smartphone or tablet." (read more at your link above)

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Most Popular iPhone Game, "Shameless Ripoff"

"It was very clear to me that "2048" was a clone, ripped from another game with almost identical gameplay, a cleaner and more beautiful design, and a catchy soundtrack. I had been playing that game, "Threes!", for about a month." (source infra)

The Most Popular iPhone Game Is Just A Shameless Ripoff | Taylor Casti: " . . . . And it goes without saying that most game developers aren't George Lucas, able to protect their games with costly lawsuits, like the famed director and producer often tries to do with his movies. Making games might be their livelihood, and what takes them months to build takes a copycat only a few weeks to clone. ..." ) (read more at link above)

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Why Amazon Is Getting Into Games, Game Hardware (video)

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Why Amazon Is Getting Into the Hardware Business: Video - Bloomberg: "April 2 (Bloomberg) -- Brian Blair, an analyst at Rosenblatt Securities, and Bloomberg's Cory Johnson discuss Amazon's new Fire TV device with Trish Regan on Bloomberg Television's "Street Smart." (Source: Bloomberg)"

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Mobile game Threes, Chinese pirates, copy-cat clones

The mobile game Threes is fighting off Chinese pirates along with copy-cat clones - Quartz: " . . . The unfortunate answer for Vollmer and his fellow Threes developer Greg Wohlwend—as well as for anyone trying to sell apps in China—is that its software market for smartphones is rife with piracy. Illicit sites like http://www.7659.com allow users to download software without using Apple’s iTunes Store, and are chock-full of popular apps that can be downloaded for free. Chinese iPhone and iPad owners so prefer free apps to paid one that in 2012, the most recent year that data was available, the Chinese iTunes Store accounted for 18% of global downloads but only 3% of revenue...." (read more at link above)

Apparently, intellectual property rights do not mean anything in China, particularly if you a foreign company or individual. Caveat Auctor.

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Candy Crush Developer, Trademarks

Something is #rotten in #Trademarks

Sweet Victory: Candy Crush Developer Trademarks the Word 'Candy' | Entrepreneur.com: "The ruling gives King rights to the word in the domain of software products, educational services and -- somewhat tellingly -- clothing. And Apple is enforcing the decision by blasting emails to developers whose apps include the term, asking them to either rename or remove their games from the App Store. But in a market littered with emerging developers whose names often piggyback on buzzwords of the moment, makers are balking at the claim to a word as commonplace as "candy.""

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Russian e-commerce giant Mail.Ru, MyGames mobile division

Global gaming growing --

Russian e-commerce giant Mail.Ru adds its own MyGames mobile division with four new games | GamesBeat | Games | by Dean Takahashi: "Russian e-commerce giant Mail.Ru Group is moving into games. The company’s My.com division announced it has created a MyGames division with four new games coming. MyGames’ expansion is a sign of the growing attraction of the game business for international tech companies as mobile gaming takes off and becomes what MyGames calls “commutainment,” or a combination of communications and entertainment, for the masses. MyGames is partnering with established game studios Obisidian Entertainment and Slightly Mad Studios. They plan to launch four new games in 2014. My.com currently has a lot of experience operating the largest Eastern European online entertainment market. Each new title will be free to play and offer optional in-game purchases...."

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Google helps Web apps on Chrome

Google: Under-the-hood change helps Web apps on Chrome | Internet & Media - CNET News: "The newest Chrome beta version, 33, includes a feature called concurrent compilation that means the browser takes a smoother, faster trip to an optimized version of the Web page code it's running. "Concurrent code compilation is another step towards reducing latency in Chrome," said Chrome programmer Yang Guo in a blog post..."

more info:
http://blog.chromium.org/2014/02/compiling-in-background-for-smoother.html


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Execution: the things you don't do, and those you do

Execution is as much about the things you don’t do, as it is about the things you do.

--Don Mattrick, CEO, Zynga, March 3, 2014, at Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference

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King, Trademark, the word Candy

Did King.com Really “Trademark” the Word Candy? | Greenberg Glusker Fields Claman & Machtinger LLP - JDSupra:




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Developing and Distributing Apps, Legal Tips

Ten Legal Practice Tips: Developing and Distributing Apps | Dorsey & Whitney LLP - JDSupra:




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