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This pea-based chicken alternative was inspired by hagfish slime
Another company wants to get in on the animal-free meat trend. The Swiss company Planted hopes to do for chicken what Impossible Foods did for beef. It claims its planted.chicken -- made from pea protein, pea fiber, water and sunflower oil -- is indistinguishable from the real thing, and as a meat alternative, it avoids some of the ethical and environmental concerns that come with raising poultry.
Google's 'Game of the Year' reminds you 2018 wasn't complete trash
It's safe to say that 2018 has been... a year, and while there's no end of untold horrors to reflect upon, Google has softened the blow with a look-back game that's altogether more pleasant. In its Game of the Year 2018 you can test your knowledge of the year's search trends in a simple click-to-choose format. Who appeared in search results more frequently, Justin Trudeau or Justin Bieber? Were craft cocktails searched more or less than last year? What do the people want more of, puppies or kittens? This is the first time Google's gamified its search results like this, and while it's not mind-blowing gaming, it's an interesting way to pass the time. You'll almost certainly come away with a few bits of curious trivia, and maybe even a deep-seated sense of vindication that "Laurel" was searched for more frequently than "Yanny." A reassuring reminder, then, that this year's not been all bad.
Why are people pretending to be dead on Instagram?
Ahmed Simrin, 15, is one of the millions of teenagers who uses Instagram. He doesn't post pictures on his page every day (there are two total), yet somehow he's managed to get nearly 3,000 people to follow it. That doesn't make him a social media influencer, by any means, but his Instagram page quickly stands out when you realize one of the photos has over 22,000 comments and 4,000 likes. This type of engagement is typically only seen on accounts from celebrities. His viral picture, posted in October 2017, isn't anything out of the ordinary, either: It's Simrin simply standing next to his friend, each staring directly into the camera, with a caption that reads "Fresh out the oven." But then you look at the comments, and it would appear that poor Simrin is no longer with us. There are thousands of users telling him to rest in peace. "RIP, you'll be missed." "RIP, bro." "You died way too young." "I can't believe you're gone." The list goes on and on.
The #2015bestnine Instagram meme was made to help launch a dating app
There's a decent chance you saw — and might have gotten annoyed by — a slew of #2015bestnine photo collages mucking up your Instagram feed just before the new year. Well, it turns out 130,000 people using the #2015bestnine app were doing more than just making collages — they were signing up for a secretive new service that turned out to be a dating app called Nine.
Twitter revamps trends to explain why a topic is popular
Peeking at what's trending on Twitter ensures you don't miss anything, but sometimes a hashtag's meaning isn't obvious. For those strange-looking acronyms, subjects and unfamiliar names, the 140-character social network tweaked the way its Android and iOS apps handle trends. On the top chart, there are descriptions for each item that not only decodes a hashtag, but explains why the subject is a hot topic. The company nixed the Discover and Activity tabs too, and all the details on what's popular now reside in Search. Unfortunately, the new workflow is only available on mobile in the US for now, but it'll arrive in more locales, and on the desktop, "in the future." Revamped trends follows the recent change to quote retweets so that they don't eat up that valuable character allotment -- both of which make Twitter's own software more attractive.
Massively's Best of 2014 Awards: Best MMO Trend of the Year
Massively's end-of-the-year awards continue today with our award for the Best MMO Trend of the year. We're not talking about a single article or game here; we are looking for trends, memes, and ideas that have seen a rise to prominence and have the potential to influence our genre for the better. All of our writers were invited to cast a vote, but not all of them chose to do so for this category. Don't forget to cast your own vote in the just-for-fun reader poll at the very end. The Massively staff pick for Best MMO Trend of 2014 is...
Free for All: The rising cost of early access and exclusivity
Here I sit, waiting to log into Aura Kingdom, a new Anime MMO by Aeria Games. The beta I am going to log into is the Founder's Beta, an exclusive early-access pre-closed beta that had an entrance fee starting at $19.00 and topping out at $299.00. Yes, 300 US dollars. I'm not trying to appear judgmental in my emphasis, but I do think that this provides more proof to the theory that prices for virtual items are continuing to climb. And why shouldn't they? I've talked before about selling power and how its slow climb will likely not stop. Just like selling exclusive or early access, selling powerful, useful in-game items most likely makes money. Something like a Founder's Pack offers useful in-game items and exclusivity, a very tempting concoction that many find too hard to resist. Is it fair to offer early access for such a price, and will other titles have to respond to the success of such sales by creating their own?
ARM unveils Cortex-A12 CPU and Mali-T622 GPU in expectation of a mid-range boom
Few trend-spotters would disagree with the following prediction from ARM, but it's worth laying it out anyway: Of the 300 million mobile devices sold in 2010, the majority cost over $400. Within the next two years, however, these "crazy money" products (as a spokesperson described them) may represent just 25 percent of the total mobile market -- still huge in absolute terms, since almost two billion phones and tablets are forecast to be sold in 2015, but a distinct minority relative to entry-level and mid-range options. In an effort to convert these expectations into an even taller heap of gold, ARM has just announced a new mid-range core, the Cortex-A12, which is designed to replace the aging Cortex-A9 while offering a 40 percent boost in performance. This gain will likely come with the added advantage of better battery life, since the Cortex-A12 will initially be fabricated at 28nm instead of 40nm, and will be offered to manufacturers alongside a new Mali GPU (the Mali-T622) and video engine (Mali-V500) that promise further power savings of their own. The Cortex-A12 will also support big.LITTLE configurations, allowing it to be installed alongside Cortex-A7 cores that will take over for low-effort tasks in order make further power savings. Big.LITTLE hasn't really blown us away so far, at least not on the Octa-core Galaxy S 4, but its wrinkles may well have been ironed out by mid 2014, which is when the Cortex-A12 is due to land. Check out the PR for more technical details on each component. Richard Lai contributed to this report. %Gallery-190050%
Twitter expands Trends to 160 new locations
Is the Ukraine hooked on Game of Thrones? What's Kenya's favorite Justin Bieber song? Thankfully, those questions (and more) may finally be answered, with the expansion of Twitter's Trends offering. The list of hot topics is coming to 160 new locations, including, for the first time, Belgium, Greece, Kenya, Norway, Poland, Portugal, and Ukraine. The list also includes 130+ cities located in countries that already have trending representations. Interested parties can switch locations in the Trends sidebar on Twitter's homepage.
Ofcom: Texting is more popular than talking
Ofcom's annual report into the communications habits of Britons has revealed that it's not just geeks who stare in annoyance when the phone rings. The general consumer is now abandoning voice calls is favor of texting in a big way, making five percent fewer calls than they did the previous year. The numbers also showed that on average, people send 50 texts a week, smartphone ownership was up 12 percent and tablet purchasing shot from 2 to 11 percent in a single year. The trend isn't slowing, either, given that a whopping 96 percent of 16 to 24-year-olds prefer SMS and Facebook to talking -- giving us hope that we'll soon be spared having to listen to that guy's conversation during our morning commute.
ArenaNet: Guild Wars 2 a 'reaction' to sluggish MMO design
Do you believe that the MMO genre has been stuck in a rut over the past few years? So does Christopher Lye, the global brand director for ArenaNet, who publicly denounced the post-World of Warcraft trend in the industry as stagnant. In an interview with Gamasutra, Lye stated that Guild Wars 2 is walking the walk when it comes to genuinely challenging the status quo in the industry. "Honestly, I think the problem is that there's been a lack of change in MMO design and that Guild Wars 2 is a reaction to that," he said. "People will call this risky, but we think it's riskier just to churn out the same MMO that everyone has played before." Lye pointed to Guild Wars 2's scaling dynamic event system and its action combat as examples of how ArenaNet is forging its own path. Observing that player consumption of content is "virtually insatiable," Lye said that the team has developed tools to allow it to implement changes and additions to dynamic events in hours, not weeks. Is this industry stagnation coming to an end? Lye says yes: "We're finally seeing a point where companies realize that they're not going to create the next great MMO by just copying what's come before."
WhatsApp founder says he doesn't want to hurt carriers, much
Given how much the world has already noticed that instant messaging can be cheaper than SMS, it's surprising to see the founder of WhatsApp trying to persuade carriers that he's actually doing them a favor. In an interview with Reuters, Brian Acton said that his messaging service is "facilitating a broad movement to data plans," from which carriers "stand to benefit quite substantially." While it's certainly true that smartphones and data plans make nice margins for operators, Acton's thesis also slithers around some slightly inconvenient evidence. According to analysts at Ovum, carriers lost $13.9 billion in SMS revenues last year, and are set to lose another $23 billion this year. All the while, WhatsApp's traffic is growing rapidly, with total messages doubling from one billion in October 2011 to two billion in February. With data costs falling around the world, and with platforms like WhatsApp running on lower-priced handsets (such as those running Nokia S40), it's the consumer, not the carrier, who ought to be charmed.
30 million NFC-equipped phones shipped in 2011, could reach 700 million by 2016
Those working on life-changing uses for NFC in phones will now find it even harder to explain why life still hasn't changed. According to Berg Insight, annual global sales of NFC-equipped handsets increased ten-fold to reach 30 million units in 2011 and are forecast to grow to 700 million units by 2016. The analysts attribute this rise to general smartphone adoption rather than to demand for NFC as such, which makes sense from where we're sitting. Aside from a few proximity-based apps, Google Wallet and some other handbag-spurning payment schemes, there's still no overwhelming reason to gear up. GPS and WLAN, on the other hand, remain must-haves, and the PR below looks at their prevalence too.
Digital gaming soars nine percent, still knows nothing of rarity value
It's already chewed up some big names on the retail scene, but the game-downloading trend shows no sign of being sated. Fresh figures from market research firm NPD show that American digital game sales (including rentals and DLC) amounted to $2.04 billion in the fourth quarter of 2011, which represents a nine percent year-on-year hike at a time when physical game transactions fell three percent. Things are going the same way across the Atlantic, with the UK, France and Germany adding a further $1.29 billion to the burgeoning click-to-buy market. Industry types will surely welcome the news, since digital titles rake in higher margins (hello, PS Store) and reduce the trade in used discs, but what about those of us who'll one day want to swap our dusty copy of Fight Night Round Four for something more subtle?
ComScore report finds drastic shift from web-based to mobile email among younger users in past year
ComScore released its annual US Digital Future in Focus report this week, offering a year-end wrap of many of the trends its tracked throughout the past year and a look towards the next. One of the more telling stats concerns email use among those in their teens and twenties. According to the report, web-based email use among 12-17 year olds dropped 31 percent in the past year, while use among those 18 to 24 saw an even bigger drop of 34 percent. Some of that can no doubt be attributed to Facebook and other email alternatives, but a big factor is the growth of email use on mobile devices; both of those age groups saw double-digit growth in that respect, with mobile email use jumping 32 percent among 18 to 24 year olds. In terms of sheer growth in the past couple of years, though, there's not much that matches the trajectory of tablets (obviously aided by one in particular). ComScore notes that US tablet sales over the past two years have topped 40 million, a figure that it took smartphones as a category a full seven years to reach. Another area that saw some considerable growth in 2011 is digital downloads and subscriptions (including e-books), which jumped 26 percent compared to the previous year, leading all other areas of e-commerce. The full report and some videos of the highlights can be found at the source link below.
Did you fire off a bunch of texts this Christmas? Welcome to the museum
Finland might be the spiritual home of the SMS, but it also proves that this ancient form of communication is going the way of the rune stone. A mere 8.5 million texts were sent over the country's Sonera network on Christmas Eve, versus 10.9 million on that festive day in 2010. The same trend was spotted on other Finnish networks and also on the other side of the world: Christmas Day texts in Hong Kong were down nearly 14 percent on the year before, and Telstra in Australia experienced a nine percent year-on-year decline over the whole of 2011. Things are different in America, where texting has continued to grow, but that growth seems to be slowing down and some analysts expect "SMS erosion" to hit Verizon and AT&T by 2014. The obvious culprit is mobile internet: social networking apps, BBM, iMessage and a host of other 'free' options, but you won't find carriers complaining -- data contract ARPUs suit them just fine.
Which class gets invited as what?
Veritable Avarice, a new blog on moneymaking in WoW, took a break from financial discussion and looked at class representation in tank, DPS, and healing roles by filtering and comparing data available from WoW Popular. Spec population was then checked against class population data available from Warcraft Realm's census and three live realms. Data differences, according to VA, weren't statistically relevant, and he/she is pretty sure that the numbers are at least a ballpark representation of which class is most likely to be filling a particular role within a group. I play a Druid, so that's really what I feel comfortable commenting on here. While I can't speak to the ultimate accuracy of the numbers, I do a lot of pugging and have to admit that VA's data seems pretty close to what I've seen on my own server. The tank numbers are also consistent with a few things Ghostcrawler's mentioned recently concerning the overwhelming population advantage still held by Warrior tanks, although I wonder whether the Feral statistics are somewhat inflated here by the overlap between Bear and Cat specs. Feral tanks have all but vanished from 5-mans on my server, and it's not uncommon for me to get comments from healers that I'm the first Bear they've healed in months. Less surprising is the representation advantage held by Druid healers. Trees are insanely good in Ulduar, and between this, the rise of the Death Knight, and the de-suckaging of the Protection Warrior spec, that probably accounts for the gradual disappearance of the Bear. Also thought-provoking is just how few Druids hold a share of the DPS pie.I'd love to hear from members of other classes on the data and how closely it dovetails into their own experience. There's a quick note for Warrior players (or anyone interested in the DPS graph) past the cut, as there's a small mistake on the relevant graph.
The rise and fall of class popularity
While writing the most recent Shifting Perspectives column and browsing old records on Druid population statistics, I started to wonder about the various factors that play a role in how popular a class becomes. While Blizzard and Blizzard alone has the exact numbers on who's playing what, various fan sites have honed data collection strategies over the years and amassed a pretty impressive pile of numbers. This only got easier when the Armory launched in spring 2007, and by now I'd be surprised if players weren't at least broadly accurate about overall trends. If we can trust what we see, how we do best explain fluctuations in class popularity? Has Arena success (or the lack thereof) been as influential as we think? Is class population an accurate, albeit crude, guide to the overall "quality" of a class at any given moment -- or just a guide to the perceived "quality?" I'd be interested to hear what people think.Having played a Druid since the beginning of Burning Crusade and observed it going from the second least-played class at 60 to the third or fourth most-played class at 80, I have my own theories about what's influenced Druid population numbers particularly, but I need to do a little more digging before I can be sure. However, I don't know whether any of it really applies to other classes, and the meteoric rise of the Death Knight is a thought-provoking (and somewhat troubling) trend.
Analyst finds DVD sales down, Blu-ray trends "encouraging"
As the year 2008 draws to a close, we're seeing report after report talking about Blu-ray sales and / or adoption. The latest to focus on the former comes from Pali Research analyst Rich Greenfield, who has reportedly stated that new DVD release sales are down "almost double digits," even despite respectable performance in the first half of the year. Said figure may help explain why the rental business is doing so well, but we digress. Greenfield also notes that DVDs are slowly but surely losing floor space to BDs, and given that not nearly as many folks are buying the high-def format just yet, it's not exactly helping the DVD cause. Beyond all that, he notes that Blu-ray trends are "encouraging," with titles that appeal to gamers (and thus, PS3 owners) doing particularly well. Then again, it's easy to look good during the holidays, but how will things look when everyone's third home equity loan is dried up in March?[Image courtesy of BusinessWeek]
Pascal's thoughts on multiplayer games
Pascal Luban at Gamasutra is now up to part three in his series on the multiplayer megatrend in the game industry. Part one explored how game creators use multiplayer modes, online distribution, and downloadable content to increase the life span of the game. Microtransactions are also used to increase the money-making potential and also increase the speed at which "fast games" can be consumed. Finally, he explored how more interactive, believable environments enhance the gaming experience and will continue to do so as rendering abilities increase over time.The second article explored the accessibility of games and the need to play them in smaller bursts rather than long marathon sessions. This stems mainly from the types of players (meaning more casual and older players). The latest discussion is around cooperative games, quality control, mobile gaming. And then, buried on page 4 of the article, is the bit that hits us hard - asking once again if MMOs are a public health risk. There have been claims for years now that gaming addiction is a very real problem - and there have been many answers over that time. For us, we just know that we love the games and are going to continue playing them... and looking forward to the last part of this article series.
