Unreal Engine 3, the game engine that provides the visuals and physics behind popular shooter games such as “America’s Army 3” and “Mass Effect 3,” is being licensed to government customers.
Another, more hush-hush project is Sirius, the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Agency (IARPA) effort to develop serious games to train intelligence analysts to recognize and diminish their own biases and thus produce more accurate analyses. ARA, along with other contractors such as Raytheon, has received a $10 million IARPA award to fund research.
Sunday, June 3
Friday, June 1
Big Losses on Hyperlocal News
In 2011, according to Starboard’s estimates, Patch lost $147 million while generating a mere $13 million in ad revenue—roughly $15,000 per site. “We do not believe Patch is a viable business,” the Starboard report said.
The skepticism goes beyond AOL. In 2011, Allbritton Communications (the owners of Politico) scaled back its investment in TBD.com, an ambitious hyperlocal news site for the D.C. area. Likewise, Washington Post Co. and New York Times Co. have pulled back from their investments in online local newsgathering. Across the Atlantic, Guardian Media Group shuttered its hyperlocal experiment last year, noting that the project had proven unsustainable.
Starboard argues that cost-conscious local advertisers prefer online ads with an immediate payoff, such as Google (GOOG) search ads, where an advertiser pays only when someone clicks on an ad and can tell whether a click leads to a sale.
From a content perspective, hyperlocal sites simply aren’t essential reading. Matt Booth, head of interactive local media at researcher BIA/Kelsey, says that people tend to use a search engine 109 times a month. They visit local websites one to two times a month. And the advertising dollars follow the traffic.
Read more here
The skepticism goes beyond AOL. In 2011, Allbritton Communications (the owners of Politico) scaled back its investment in TBD.com, an ambitious hyperlocal news site for the D.C. area. Likewise, Washington Post Co. and New York Times Co. have pulled back from their investments in online local newsgathering. Across the Atlantic, Guardian Media Group shuttered its hyperlocal experiment last year, noting that the project had proven unsustainable.
Starboard argues that cost-conscious local advertisers prefer online ads with an immediate payoff, such as Google (GOOG) search ads, where an advertiser pays only when someone clicks on an ad and can tell whether a click leads to a sale.
From a content perspective, hyperlocal sites simply aren’t essential reading. Matt Booth, head of interactive local media at researcher BIA/Kelsey, says that people tend to use a search engine 109 times a month. They visit local websites one to two times a month. And the advertising dollars follow the traffic.
Read more here
Tuesday, May 29
Newspaper Revs Sink 6.9%
The latest figures for the newspaper industry are in, and they show no evidence of a rebound or even stabilization in advertising revenues. According to the Newspaper Association of America, total ad revenues dropped 6.9% from $5.5 billion in the first quarter of 2011 to nearly $5.2 billion in the first quarter of 2012. This was due to declines in print ad revenues, which fell 8.2% to $4.36 billion over the same period. Online ad revenues edged up 1% to $816 million.
It's clear newspapers are stuck in a long-term, secular decline with little prospect of the trend reversing. The first quarter marks the 23rd straight quarter of year-over-year declines in total newspaper ad revenues, which started to slip in the third quarter of 2006
Read more here
It's clear newspapers are stuck in a long-term, secular decline with little prospect of the trend reversing. The first quarter marks the 23rd straight quarter of year-over-year declines in total newspaper ad revenues, which started to slip in the third quarter of 2006
Read more here
Crowdsourcing is transforming the science of psychology
Crowdsourcing is a way to get jobs like deciphering images, ranking websites and answering surveys done for money by online workers. Several firms offer the service, including oDesk, CrowdFlower and Elance. But by far the most popular for scientific purposes is Mechanical Turk, which is run by Amazon and is named after an 18th-century chess-playing machine in which a human secretly moved the pieces.
For many researchers, though, the appeals of crowdsourcing—bargain prices, vast supply and enormous scale—are too attractive to ignore. Indeed, the new methodology might democratise the very practice of psychology, allowing those without a laboratory or university behind them to join in as well. Gabriele Paolacci, a marketing researcher at the Rotterdam School of Management who was once in precisely that position, has started a blog called “Experimental Turk” (experimentalturk.wordpress.com) to help draft guidelines for such freelance experiments.
The revolution, then, has begun. So far, Google Scholar, a website devoted to academic matters, counts 3,000 published papers that involve crowdsourced experiments. Discussions at conferences, among psychologists, behavioural economists, political scientists, linguists and computer scientists, suggest that may be the tip of the iceberg. It would be an exaggeration to say that crowdsourcing has turned the whole world into a laboratory. But it has certainly made psychology a lot less WEIRD.
Read more here
For many researchers, though, the appeals of crowdsourcing—bargain prices, vast supply and enormous scale—are too attractive to ignore. Indeed, the new methodology might democratise the very practice of psychology, allowing those without a laboratory or university behind them to join in as well. Gabriele Paolacci, a marketing researcher at the Rotterdam School of Management who was once in precisely that position, has started a blog called “Experimental Turk” (experimentalturk.wordpress.com) to help draft guidelines for such freelance experiments.
The revolution, then, has begun. So far, Google Scholar, a website devoted to academic matters, counts 3,000 published papers that involve crowdsourced experiments. Discussions at conferences, among psychologists, behavioural economists, political scientists, linguists and computer scientists, suggest that may be the tip of the iceberg. It would be an exaggeration to say that crowdsourcing has turned the whole world into a laboratory. But it has certainly made psychology a lot less WEIRD.
Read more here
Thursday, May 24
Adaptive radio may upend wireless spectrum system
James Collier runs Neul, a Cambridge startup that makes the green boxes,
which house a new technology called adaptive radio. Today, anything that
transmits long-range signals over the airwaves -radios, cell phones,
television networks - broadcasts on a single, fixed frequency. Think of
the 106.7 that appears on your radio dial. Both broadcaster and listener
have to be tuned to the same wave. Each cell phone, similarly, has its
own allotted frequency to communicate with nearby towers. Carriers must
spend billions to license chunks of spectrum to make sure their
subscribers can connect wherever they go.
A radio from Neul - or one of several startups working on similar technology - upends this whole system. An adaptive radio doesn't always use the same fixed frequency, but checks to see which frequencies around it aren't in use, then borrows empty air for a short-term connection. As devices move around, the connection can shift, too. Collier's loop around Cambridge is a demonstration - part of a trial led by Microsoft and other tech giants - that the idea works technologically. If it works commercially, too, it could change the dynamics of the wireless business.
An adaptive network could help companies in the United States such as AT&T or Verizon Wireless run their networks far more efficiently by squeezing more smart phones and other devices onto a given range of wireless spectrum.
Read more here
A radio from Neul - or one of several startups working on similar technology - upends this whole system. An adaptive radio doesn't always use the same fixed frequency, but checks to see which frequencies around it aren't in use, then borrows empty air for a short-term connection. As devices move around, the connection can shift, too. Collier's loop around Cambridge is a demonstration - part of a trial led by Microsoft and other tech giants - that the idea works technologically. If it works commercially, too, it could change the dynamics of the wireless business.
An adaptive network could help companies in the United States such as AT&T or Verizon Wireless run their networks far more efficiently by squeezing more smart phones and other devices onto a given range of wireless spectrum.
Read more here
For Cumulus Media, Huckabee Takes On Limbaugh
Radio may seem like yesterday’s medium, but it remains hugely
lucrative, with profit margins—before debt servicing—of about
30 percent, according to media research firm SNL Kagan. It’s a business
that boasts low fixed costs: towers, transmitters, and talent. “The
great thing about the radio business, it’s not capital-intensive,” says
Michael Bergner, president of media brokerage firm Bergner & Co.
“It’s old technology, but it’s easy and it works.” Overall projected
2012 industry revenues climbed to $14.6 billion from recession lows of
$13.3 billion in 2009, according to research firm BIA/Kelsey.
Read more here
Read more here
The ‘Rich Guy Play Toy’ Future of Newspapers
Media General is a chain of small-ish newspapers across America. Not a particularly prestigious or savvy chain of newspapers, and the company's value has been nosediving off a cliff for the past five years along with most of the rest of the newspaper industry. But Media General has now been purchased by Mr. Warren Buffett. And just like that, this mediocre little newspaper chain becomes the embodiment of the industry's future.
Read more here
Read more here
Paywalls Proliferate, Most DIgital Pros Won't Pay For Them
While the figures may not be indicative of broader consumer behaviors,
over half of digital media professionals who encounter online paywalls
say they immediately leave the Web site,
according to a DigiCareers survey cited by eMarketer. However, there was
some good news for online publishers, as a substantial number said they
looked into the details of access and pricing.
The bad news for news publishers: digital media pros were far more willing to pay for entertainment content than for news: 47% paid for movies, 36% for digital magazines, and 35% for music, compared to just 13% for news and newspapers.
Read more here
The bad news for news publishers: digital media pros were far more willing to pay for entertainment content than for news: 47% paid for movies, 36% for digital magazines, and 35% for music, compared to just 13% for news and newspapers.
Read more here
Wednesday, May 23
Why local firms dominate the Russian internet
Last year the number of Russians online went up by 14%, to 53m. That made Russia’s online population Europe’s biggest, just ahead of Germany’s, with lots of room left to grow. GP Bullhound, an investment bank, reckons that only 18% of those people shop online and that online advertising, though rising fast, takes up only 9% of Russian ad budgets.
The Russian internet market looks more like China’s than either resembles anything in the West. Baidu dominates Chinese search. Tencent plays a similar role to Mail.ru, of which it owns 7.8%. When the Chinese buy online they turn to Dangdang, 360buy or one of Alibaba’s online marketplaces rather than Amazon or eBay. They tap out a cacophony of short posts on Sina Weibo, not Twitter. And so on.
Read more at The Economist
The Russian internet market looks more like China’s than either resembles anything in the West. Baidu dominates Chinese search. Tencent plays a similar role to Mail.ru, of which it owns 7.8%. When the Chinese buy online they turn to Dangdang, 360buy or one of Alibaba’s online marketplaces rather than Amazon or eBay. They tap out a cacophony of short posts on Sina Weibo, not Twitter. And so on.
Read more at The Economist
Saturday, May 19
How Apple became a cult in Hollywood
Apple's gadgets were discussed or shown 891 times on TV in 2011, up from 613 in 2009, according to researcher Nielsen. In the same year, iDevices appeared in more than 40 percent of the movies that topped the weekly box office, according to Brandchannel, which tracks product appearances. That's nearly twice the penetration of the next most common brands in Hollywood - Dell, Chevy and Ford.
Read more here
Read more here
Thursday, May 17
iHeartRadio Hits 10 Million Users Faster Than Facebook or Twitter
Digital radio platform iHeartRadio announced its user stats for the first time ever on Thursday, citing growth in an eight-month period that was faster than other popular services including Facebook and Twitter when they first opened up registration.
The growth of its new registration occurred more quickly than other platforms from Facebook and Twitter to Pandora, Spotify and Instagram right out of the gate. Although those services reach far more than 10 million users now, iHeartRadio said it reached the milestone faster than any other service.
Read more here
The growth of its new registration occurred more quickly than other platforms from Facebook and Twitter to Pandora, Spotify and Instagram right out of the gate. Although those services reach far more than 10 million users now, iHeartRadio said it reached the milestone faster than any other service.
Read more here
Tuesday, May 15
Video games could help identify security threats
The government is spending millions of dollars to determine whether video games can be designed as instructional tools for intelligence analysts, who help compile reports that U.S. officials use to identify potential threats from emerging foreign powers.
Officials said they view the multiyear research program, known as Sirius, as an effort to improve analyst training for college students, who could become tomorrow’s analysts.
Read more here
Officials said they view the multiyear research program, known as Sirius, as an effort to improve analyst training for college students, who could become tomorrow’s analysts.
Read more here
Amid Media Upheavals, Television Holds Sway
Brian Wieser, an analyst with the Pivotal Research Group who was once the top advertising forecaster for the Interpublic Group of Companies (says) “The durability of television,” despite its flaws, stems from something “most observers forget,” Mr. Wieser said, that “advertising on television satisfies most large marketers’ goals better than alternatives, and its advantages hold as more consumers watch more TV more often than any other medium.”
“Advertisers use television because they need to make everyone aware of the differences in brand attributes” between their products and those sold by competitors, Mr. Wieser said. “And as long as TV is viewed as the primary driver of brand awareness, TV will grow its revenue base.”
And grow it has. According to Nielsen, television ad revenue in the United States last year totaled $71.8 billion, up 5 percent from 2010. It was larger than for any other medium and was perhaps the first time the figure has topped $70 billion.
“As long as you have advertisers in these oligopolistic categories, operating on a national scale and looking to drive awareness for massive audiences, TV keeps growing,” Mr. Wieser said. “The growth of the Web will come mostly at the expense of print.”
Read more in the New York Times.
“Advertisers use television because they need to make everyone aware of the differences in brand attributes” between their products and those sold by competitors, Mr. Wieser said. “And as long as TV is viewed as the primary driver of brand awareness, TV will grow its revenue base.”
And grow it has. According to Nielsen, television ad revenue in the United States last year totaled $71.8 billion, up 5 percent from 2010. It was larger than for any other medium and was perhaps the first time the figure has topped $70 billion.
“As long as you have advertisers in these oligopolistic categories, operating on a national scale and looking to drive awareness for massive audiences, TV keeps growing,” Mr. Wieser said. “The growth of the Web will come mostly at the expense of print.”
Read more in the New York Times.
Release of big-name games could revive sales
etailer GameStop reported last week that first-quarter sales fell 12.5% on a drop in store traffic due to fewer blockbuster titles. Overall April retail sales were $630.4 million, down 32% from $930.9 million in April 2011, reports market tracker the NPD Group.
Read more here.
Read more here.
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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