Friday, May 4
Mobile money in Africa
MANY people know that “mobile money”—financial transactions on mobile phones—has taken off in Africa. How far it has gone, though, still comes as a bit of a shock. Three-quarters of the countries that use mobile money most frequently are in Africa, and mobile banking in some of them has reached extraordinary levels.
A new survey of global financial habits by the Gates Foundation, the World Bank and Gallup World Poll found 20 countries in which more than 10% of adults say they used mobile money at some point in 2011. Of those, 15 are African. Sometimes, though, mobile banking goes hand in hand with the familiar kind. In Kenya, where a staggering 68% of adults use mobile money (by far the highest rate in the world, partly because regulation is extremely light), more than 40% also have ordinary bank accounts.
Read more here
China’s film market is proving tough for foreign studios to crack
Last year China’s box-office take rose by more than 30%, to over $2 billion, according to the Motion Picture Association of America. The number of cinema screens in China has doubled in five years, to nearly 11,000—again, second only to America. China’s box-office revenues may overtake America’s by 2020. Yet China will not grant Hollywood the access it desires. Until recently only 20 foreign films could be screened at Chinese cinemas each year. In February the number increased to 34—though only if the extra 14 are shown in 3D or large format.
Read more here
Thursday, May 3
Angry Birds, Farmville and Other Hyperaddictive ‘Stupid Games’
In 1989, the Japanese game-making giant Nintendo (released) Game Boy. The unit came bundled with a single cartridge: Tetris, a simple but addictive puzzle game whose goal was to rotate falling blocks. And so a tradition was born: a tradition I am going to call (half descriptively, half out of revenge for all the hours I’ve lost to them) “stupid games.” In the nearly 30 years since Tetris’s invention — and especially over the last five, with the rise of smartphones — Tetris and its offspring (Angry Birds, Bejeweled, Fruit Ninja, etc.) have colonized our pockets and our brains and shifted the entire economic model of the video-game industry.
Tetris was invented exactly when and where you would expect — in a Soviet computer lab in 1984 — and its game play reflects this origin. The enemy in Tetris is not some identifiable villain (Donkey Kong, Mike Tyson, Carmen Sandiego) but a faceless, ceaseless, reasonless force that threatens constantly to overwhelm you, a churning production of blocks against which your only defense is a repetitive, meaningless sorting. It is bureaucracy in pure form, busywork with no aim or end, impossible to avoid or escape. And the game’s final insult is that it annihilates free will. Despite its obvious futility, somehow we can’t make ourselves stop rotating blocks. Tetris, like all the stupid games it spawned, forces us to choose to punish ourselves.
In 2009, 25 years after the invention of Tetris, a nearly bankrupt Finnish company called Rovio hit upon a similarly perfect fusion of game and device: Angry Birds. Today it has been downloaded, in its various forms, more than 700 million times.
Stupid games are rarely occasions in themselves. They are designed to push their way through the cracks of other occasions. They’re less an activity in our day than a blank space in our day; less a pursuit than a distraction from other pursuits.
In the era of consoles, most games were designed to come to life on a stationary piece of furniture — a television or a desktop computer. The games were built accordingly, around long narratives. Smartphone games are built on a very different model. The iPhone’s screen is roughly the size of a playing card; it responds not to the fast-twitch button combos of a controller but to more intuitive and intimate motions: poking, pinching, tapping, tickling. This has encouraged a very different kind of game: Tetris-like little puzzles, broken into discrete bits, designed to be played anywhere, in any context, without a manual, by any level of player. The Angry Birds creators like to compare their game with Super Mario Brothers. But the first and simplest level of Super Mario Brothers takes about a minute and a half to finish. The first level of Angry Birds takes around 10 seconds.
Read more here.
Tetris was invented exactly when and where you would expect — in a Soviet computer lab in 1984 — and its game play reflects this origin. The enemy in Tetris is not some identifiable villain (Donkey Kong, Mike Tyson, Carmen Sandiego) but a faceless, ceaseless, reasonless force that threatens constantly to overwhelm you, a churning production of blocks against which your only defense is a repetitive, meaningless sorting. It is bureaucracy in pure form, busywork with no aim or end, impossible to avoid or escape. And the game’s final insult is that it annihilates free will. Despite its obvious futility, somehow we can’t make ourselves stop rotating blocks. Tetris, like all the stupid games it spawned, forces us to choose to punish ourselves.
In 2009, 25 years after the invention of Tetris, a nearly bankrupt Finnish company called Rovio hit upon a similarly perfect fusion of game and device: Angry Birds. Today it has been downloaded, in its various forms, more than 700 million times.
Stupid games are rarely occasions in themselves. They are designed to push their way through the cracks of other occasions. They’re less an activity in our day than a blank space in our day; less a pursuit than a distraction from other pursuits.
In the era of consoles, most games were designed to come to life on a stationary piece of furniture — a television or a desktop computer. The games were built accordingly, around long narratives. Smartphone games are built on a very different model. The iPhone’s screen is roughly the size of a playing card; it responds not to the fast-twitch button combos of a controller but to more intuitive and intimate motions: poking, pinching, tapping, tickling. This has encouraged a very different kind of game: Tetris-like little puzzles, broken into discrete bits, designed to be played anywhere, in any context, without a manual, by any level of player. The Angry Birds creators like to compare their game with Super Mario Brothers. But the first and simplest level of Super Mario Brothers takes about a minute and a half to finish. The first level of Angry Birds takes around 10 seconds.
Read more here.
The Data Journalism Handbook
The Data Journalism Handbook launched this past weekend at the School of Data Journalism, based at the 2012 International Journalism Festival in Perugia. It is a one stop shop for reporters interested in learning about data journalism and includes a free, open sourced web version so anyone can access it.
Read more here
Read more here
Nielsen Reports a Decline in Television Viewing
For the first time in years, Nielsen is reporting a slight decline in overall TV viewing in the United States. In the last three months of 2011, the average American with a TV set at home spent 153 hours and 19 minutes watching traditional TV each month, about 46 minutes less than they watched in the last three months of 2010, according to Nielsen, which monitors a sample of United States households to produce TV ratings every day.
Per person, the decline comes out to be about 30 seconds a day, hardly a seismic shift. But cumulatively, the decline is significant because– to the astonishment of some in the industry — total TV viewership has been steadily rising year-over-year despite a plethora of other entertainment options. It may suggest that some people are opting for Web video or are spending more time playing video games and less time watching TV.
Nielsen also said Thursday that it believes the total number of American households with television sets is continuing to shrink. Last year, for the first time in 20 years, Nielsen said the figure dropped to 114.7 million, from 115.9 million previously, despite a rise in the total number of households in the country. Nielsen attributed the drop both to economic factors and to technological ones.
Americans are not turning off. They are shifting to new technologies and devices that make it easier for them to watch the content they want whenever and wherever is most convenient for them. As such, the definition of the traditional TV home will evolve.”
Read more here
Per person, the decline comes out to be about 30 seconds a day, hardly a seismic shift. But cumulatively, the decline is significant because– to the astonishment of some in the industry — total TV viewership has been steadily rising year-over-year despite a plethora of other entertainment options. It may suggest that some people are opting for Web video or are spending more time playing video games and less time watching TV.
Nielsen also said Thursday that it believes the total number of American households with television sets is continuing to shrink. Last year, for the first time in 20 years, Nielsen said the figure dropped to 114.7 million, from 115.9 million previously, despite a rise in the total number of households in the country. Nielsen attributed the drop both to economic factors and to technological ones.
Americans are not turning off. They are shifting to new technologies and devices that make it easier for them to watch the content they want whenever and wherever is most convenient for them. As such, the definition of the traditional TV home will evolve.”
Read more here
Wednesday, May 2
Global Smartphone Market Is on Fire
"Here is what we know is true -- smartphone growth has gotten simply ridiculous," James Brehm, senior strategist and consultant with Compass Intelligence, told the E-Commerce Times. "Smartphone devices are now on par with feature phones, and low-priced offerings mean even budget-minded consumers can have one."
More than 106 million people in the U.S. owned smartphones during the three months ending in March, according to ComScore's MobiLens -- up 9 percent versus December.
The worldwide smartphone market grew 42.5 percent year over year in the first quarter of 2012, noted IDC in its recently released Mobile Phone Tracker report on the mobile market.
Read more here.
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