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Lyft tries offering free bike-share passes to hospital workers
Lyft is offering free, 30-day bike-share passes to critical workers in New York City, Chicago and Boston. This should help people who still have to get to work during the coronavirus pandemic, and to keep them safe, Lyft says it is ramping up its cleaning efforts.
Last month was the hottest January on record
In 141 years of climate records, January 2020 was the hottest January yet, according to scientists from NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information. Global land and ocean surface temperatures were 2.05 degrees Fahrenheit (1.14 degrees Celsius) above the 20th-Century average, beating the previous record set in January 2016 by 0.04 degrees F (0.02 degrees C).
Crowdfund Bookie, January 2014: 63 percent nosedive
The Crowdfund Bookie crunches data from select successful Kickstarter and Indiegogo campaigns that ended during the month and produces pretty charts for you to look at. Any momentum maintained in the video game crowdfunding space in December 2013 was dashed just one month later. Gaming projects for the month totaled only $845,876, a 63.71 percent decrease from December's $2,331,061. Just 20 projects were funded during a five-week January period, half the amount that were successful in December. The number of backers for projects also saw a 79.58 percent downturn, plummeting to 12,712 funders. Unlike previous months, there wasn't a marquee project to prop the crowdfunding arena's totals up, as the top earner was Taitale Studios' 4X strategy game Novus Aeterno, which hauled in $268,875. Another game stole our attention for the month: MMA Federation. Much like the infamously suspicious funding patterns of Gridiron Thunder, the MMA-focused mobile social game managed to earn $163,924 thanks to only 159 backers, an outlandish average of $1,030.97 per funder. As expected, the odd funding averages of MMA Federation significantly impacted the end results for January, as removing the game's data for the month drops the mean average pledge per backer amount from $66.54 to $54.33. Without MMA Federation's sales data, January's projects also added up to 281.3 percent of their funding goals. Both impacted data points show that January's projects still stayed consistent with the funding trends seen in our past Bookies; pledges average out to roughly $50 and backers tend to push projects well past their goal amounts. Head past the break to see the month's top five projects and a breakdown by genre.
The Lawbringer: Mail Bag 9
Pop law abounds in The Lawbringer, your weekly dose of WoW, the law, video games and the MMO genre. Mathew McCurley takes you through the world running parallel to the games we love and enjoy, full of rules, regulations, pitfalls and traps. Welcome to another mail bag edition of The Lawbringer, ready to answer your questions, inqueries, and crazy considerations. A lot of you have been emailing me about SOPA and PIPA, the two bills currently being legislated on in the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate. These bills make it extremely easy for parties who feel that they are the victims of copyright infringement to take websites offline without much due process due to the overreaching aspects of the broadness of the respective legislations' wording. We as a subculture of the internet do not like these pieces of legislation. I chose not to talk about SOPA or PIPA because, honestly, I think everyone is saying what I would say better than I could say it. So many people much smarter than I have already said wonderful things about these bills that you should probably read those instead. If you're looking for more information on SOPA, PIPA, and their general mechanics and potential fallout, hit up Wikipedia for a full FAQ about the bill and great links. For a different perspective, my good friend Chris put up a great discussion of SOPA from a non-legal standpoint as a developer and programmer. My Lawbringer mail bag always has awesome questions, and I'm thankful to all of you who send them in. I try to get to as many of them as I can, and if you haven't gotten a response, try sending your question in again. It might have just gotten lost or whatever. Email mat@wowinsider.com with any of your Lawbringer questions.
iOS 5 features: Calendar
iOS 5 has arrived, and with it come some really nice updates to the Calendar app. There aren't a whole lot of new things; the app's basic functionality of saving events on dates and showing them back in various views hasn't changed, but there are a few new elements. First up are the new views. On the iPhone and iPod touch, you'll be able to see a week view where you can scroll all the way through from Monday to Sunday. On the iPad there's a new year view, where you can pick up a wide angle look of what your schedule is like. In the views where it's appropriate, you can now drag event borders around to set up the various end and start times for each event (dragging a meeting from 1 pm to 2 pm to last for an hour, for example). You can add, rename, and delete whole calendars right on your iOS device. And there are some subtle features that really make the app more polished. You can now see event times on the month view -- before iOS 5, you could only see that there was an event there, not when it started -- and when you turn pages, you'll get a nice iBooks-like effect. Calendar is better than ever in iOS 5. Whether you're a longtime Calendar user or are just setting it up to sync up with your standard calendar service, these new changes should be quite helpful.
Chinese WoW wraps up closed beta, to start charging soon
It looks like the long saga of World of Warcraft's transfer of operatorship in China is almost finally over -- NetEase has announced that the closed beta period is done with, and that they're just about ready to open up normal registration and bring the game back to for-pay status. They're still pending government approval there, so they're not quite online and running yet, but they have closed off registration to new players, and will only bring it back online when they're ready to start charging yet again. Of course, their pay scheme there is different from here in the US and EU -- they often charge per hour to play rather than a constant monthly subscription. But however they decide to charge, NetEase seems sure that by the end of the month, things will finally be back to normal in China's version of Azeroth.Meanwhile, the former operator of the game, The9, has announced that they are extending by a month the option for former players to get refunds for their prepaid game cards. That option was originally planned to end on September 7th, but players of the game who have unused cards will have another 30 days to redeem them back for cash. All of this back-and-forth originally started back in April of this year, but it seems like, five months later, the game might finally be getting back to normal.
Reminder: get your free, um, gem stickers
Listen, our corporate overlords have forced us to write about Hello Kitty Online starting today, but there's something you should know about another game that rhymes with "Mold of Forcraft," so we're going to try to sneak this news under the radar.We just wanted to remind you that the Consortium -- wait, I mean the Sanriotown Town Council is offering their free bag of, errr, gem stickers today to anyone with Friendly or higher reputation. It's a new month today, so stop by Gezhe of Aeris Landing -- um, I mean Cinnamoroll of Cafe Cinammon -- and claim your free gem... stickers. Man, this sucks.Whoops, I mean we all love Hello Kitty Online and can't wait to keep playing and writing about it. Please kill me.
New Virtual Console games on the horizon [update 1]
Yes, the U.S. Virtual Console launch line-up is a bit ... anemic. We know, it hurts. However, one has to consider why it doesn't really matter: 1) We'll all be too busy playing Twilight Princess to bother with the Virtual Console immediately, and 2) Nintendo has promised ten new Virtual Console releases per month. That's quite a bit, especially looking at how often Xbox Live Arcade is updated, but the question then becomes: what's on the horizon?Well, thanks to the ESRB, we've got a clue. The ESRB requires that games be rated before release, which obviously means that companies need to send in their product quite a bit in advance. Since they publish their ratings, we've managed to score a list of eight potentials, and quite an eight they are (all rated E for Everyone): Duck Hunt Hogan's Alley Kid Icarus Kirby's Adventure PilotWings Pro Wrestling Punch-Out Wild Gunman Kid Icarus, Duck Hunt, and Punch-Out? Holy hell. The Virtual Console is awesome.[via Joystiq][Thanks, Zeke!][Update 1: Legal issues?]
