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Atlus' parent company Index files for 'civil rehabilitation'
Index Corporation, parent company of Shin Megami Tensei and Persona publisher Atlus, is petitioning for "civil rehabilitation proceedings," a form of bankruptcy protection under Japanese law. As part of its petition, as of May, the company has ¥24.5 billion ($249 million) in total liabilities. Jurists.co.jp has a pretty solid explanation of the procedure from this point forward. The company will have a supervisor appointed and a plan will be drawn up for rehabilitation of the company. After that, there is a creditors meeting and approval. Then the company is supposed to follow the plan. We've reached out to Atlus for a statement about if this will have any impact on the company's daily business or release schedule. Update: Atlus provided the following statement from President and CEO Naoto Hiraoka: "Currently, Index Digital Media, Inc. and the Atlus brand are unaffected by the Index Corporation proceedings in Japan. We're carrying on day-to-day activities, business as usual. Shin Megami Tensei IV and Dragon's Crown are still releasing on July 16 and August 6 respectively, and we're licensing and publishing third-party titles such as R.I.P.D: The Game and Daylight. We want to thank all of our fans for their outpouring of support."
Netflix intros a dedicated ISP speed index page to highlight streaming champions
Netflix has long been judging your ISP's streaming quality, but you've had to dig around blog posts and other less accessible pages to get the low-down on just which networks reign supreme. Its new, dedicated ISP Speed Index page is much more straightforward: stop by and you'll always have a quick glimpse of which internet providers are the most Netflix-friendly across key countries, with more detailed breakdowns for individual nations. Not that there's been an upheaval in the pecking order, at least if you're an American. Google Fiber was once again the clear US speed leader in February, while DSL and Clearwire's WiMAX trailed the pack. The site mostly provides a handy point of reference for ISP shopping, even if it suggests that a cross-country (or cross-planet) move might be in order.
Analytics firm Applause launches the Applause Index
I'm not sure how useful this idea is, but it is interesting, and we'll see how it all plays out. Applause is an analytics firm that purports to measure app quality and user satisfaction, by scanning the App Store for rankings, sales and reviews (there are a few other companies that do this already, like App Annie and Distimo). But Applause's innovation is that it boils an app's performance down into one 0-100 number, called the Applause Score. From all of the information available for that app, Applause ranks it into one number, which you can then (supposedly) use to compare app quality and popularity. And Applause has used these numbers to launch the Applause Index, which tracks the scores of 60 high-profile apps, combining them into one number that Applause claims will let you see "peaks and valleys in the overall apps economy." In other words, Applause has tried to boil the day-to-day popularity of both the Android and iOS marketplaces into one number, similar to the way the Dow Jones Industrial Average works in the stock market. Is it useful? We'll have to see -- it's possible that, over time, this number could show trends in the app stores, or even reflect actual consumer attitudes. But that will probably take some practice and research -- at this point, Applause has only begun to track these defined "scores," so there are undoubtedly some quirks in the system (and it's not clear to me how these 60 apps were chosen to represent the Index, even after browsing through the footnotes). But it is an interesting idea, and who knows? Over time, this number could show us something about the App Store we didn't see before.
iPhone waltzes into top spot of US phone satisfaction index, small carriers trump the giants
We know almost too well how smartphones perform in US market share; what we don't usually see is how happy customers are once the shrink wrap's off. Going by a newly-expanded American Customer Satisfaction Index, it's the iPhone that most scratches the itch at a score of 83. Despite having just been added, Apple was noticeably ahead of a three-way tie between HTC, LG and Nokia at 75. You might not want to look if you're a freshly-minted RIM executive: the BlackBerry made its freshman debut on the charts at the bottom, or 69. Big carriers have their own reasons to wince, too, knowing that smaller carriers like US Cellular and TracFone scored higher on the happiness meter than incumbents hiking service fees. While there's definitely some wiggle room for your own experience to have been better or worse, if you were an iPhone owner on a regional carrier in the past few months, you were statistically the most likely to be on Cloud Nine.
AT&T announces home automation platform, eco-ratings for consumer devices
Today, AT&T revealed that it's working on a new home monitoring and automation platform known as Digital Life. While it'll be marketed toward service providers, the IP-based system will allow business and residential users alike to remotely monitor cameras, lighting, thermostats, motion detectors, window and door sensors, along with a litany of other devices. It'll be demonstrated next week in Barcelona as part of the GSM Association's Connected Home experience. As you'd expect, we'll be there to bring you a peek of AT&T's handiwork.The company has also announced that, later this year, customers will find eco-rating labels on AT&T-branded mobile devices. With this initiative, shoppers may evaluate criteria such as a product's energy efficiency, the percentage of recycled materials used in manufacture, and the inclusion of metals such as lead, cadmium and mercury. These factors and more will be presented as a composite score that evaluates the sustainability attributes of each device -- think of it as an easy way to get your green in gear. You'll find the PR for both announcements after the break.
Sega signs distro deal with Atlus parent company Index Holdings
Index Holdings, parent company of developer and publisher Atlus, is looking to take advantage of Sega's significantly larger distribution network in Japan, announcing intentions to partner with the Japanese publisher for future distribution. The deal kicks off in April 2012 and will see games across Atlus' various properties distributed under the Sega moniker in Japan.The deal doesn't apply to digitally distributed titles, and it's unclear if this will affect Atlus' distribution in other parts of the world. It seems that the distribution deal arises from Index Holdings' consistently declining revenues and an inability to support Atlus' growth in its most important market. We've reached out to Atlus for further comment.
Catherine moves 500K copies worldwide
Relationship-infused puzzler Catherine has definitely shipped (and maybe sold) 500,000 copies globally, according to financial results published by Atlus parent company Index. Andriasang also points out strong brand performance by Atlus' Persona series during its latest fiscal year, ended August 31, 2011. Atlus had a slight communications snafu in early August when its cake (above) reported the game sold 200,000 copies -- given our experience with the truthfulness of cake, this should have been immediately suspect. Turns out, Catherine shipped 200K copies, but still sold a respectable 78K during July in North America. We've followed up with Atlus to confirm the shipped vs. sold conundrum and will update when we hear back. Either way, not bad for a niche Japanese game -- and it should teach Shadows of the Damned to put a tantalizing picture of a woman undressing on the cover next time. (Oh, who are we kidding? There won't be a next time.)
IBM developing largest data drive ever, with 120 petabytes of bliss
So, this is pretty... big. At this very moment, researchers at IBM are building the largest data drive ever -- a 120 petabyte beast comprised of some 200,000 normal HDDs working in concert. To put that into perspective, 120 petabytes is the equivalent of 120 million gigabytes, (or enough space to hold about 24 billion, average-sized MP3's), and significantly more spacious than the 15 petabyte capacity found in the biggest arrays currently in use. To achieve this, IBM aligned individual drives in horizontal drawers, as in most data centers, but made these spaces even wider, in order to accommodate more disks within smaller confines. Engineers also implemented a new data backup mechanism, whereby information from dying disks is slowly reproduced on a replacement drive, allowing the system to continue running without any slowdown. A system called GPFS, meanwhile, spreads stored files over multiple disks, allowing the machine to read or write different parts of a given file at once, while indexing its entire collection at breakneck speeds. The company developed this particular system for an unnamed client looking to conduct complex simulations, but Bruce Hillsberg, IBM's director of storage research, says it may be only a matter of time before all cloud computing systems sport similar architectures. For the moment, however, he admits that his creation is still "on the lunatic fringe."
British Library and Google Books partner up to digitize 250,000 out-of-copyright works
Oh paper, ye olde guardian of human wisdom, culture, and history, why must you be so fragile and voluminous? Not a question we ask ourselves every day, admittedly, but when you're talking about the British Library's extensive collection of tomes from the 18th and 19th century, those books, pamphlets and periodicals do stack up pretty quickly. Thankfully, Google's book digitization project has come to the rescue of bewildered researchers, with a new partnership with the British Library that will result in the availability of digital copies of works from that period -- spanning the time of the French and Industrial Revolutions, the Crimean War, the invention of the telegraph, and the end of slavery. In total, some 250,000 such items, all of them long out of copyright, will find a home on Google Books and the British Library's website, and Google has even been nice enough to bear the full cost of transforming them into web-accessible gems of knowledge. Jump past the break for the similarly digital press release.
Xerox shows off Smart Document Review table, a Surface that sifts through billions of docs (video)
You have a lot of documents you've acquired over the years, hundreds or thousands in some semblance of order thanks to folders and whatnot. Now, imagine taking the output from hundreds or thousands of others, all with their own ideas about organization, and finding only those pages relevant to a certain topic. That's what legal aides have to do in cases where a major corporation is being investigated, and we're thinking that's a major target market for Xerox's Smart Document Review. It's a prototype touchscreen table that enables users to collaboratively filter documents, starting by indexing a giant pool and then allowing for the creation of "magnets" that contain keywords or other heuristics and dynamically pull out matches, all happening courtesy of animations that look only slightly less sophisticated than those seen in Hackers. Search results can then be dumped to a thumb drive. The prototype table dates back to earlier this year, but Xerox is now making them available as part of a pilot program exclusively for trendy law offices with unisex bathrooms. [Thanks, Pradeep]
Google helps scholars mine 1.7 million Victorian era book titles for clues to our historical attitudes
Whether we like, loathe, or never even considered the idea of it, quantitative literary analysis seems ready for its moment in the spotlight. Dan Cohen and Fred Gibbs, a pair of historians of science over at George Mason University, have been playing around with the titles of some nearly 1.7 million books -- accounting for all the known volumes published in Britain during the 19th century -- in a search for enlightenment about the Victorian era's cultural trends and developments. By looking at how often certain words appear in text titles over time, they can find corroboration or perhaps even refutation for the commonly held theories about that time -- although they themselves warn that correlation isn't always indicative of causation. Their research has been made possible by Google's Books venture, which is busily digitizing just about every instance of the written word ever, and the next stage will be to try and mine the actual texts themselves for further clues about what our older selves thought about the world. Any bets on when the word "fail" was first used as a noun?
Atlus to be merged into parent company Index Holdings
Index Holdings, the parent company of 3D Dot Game Heroes publisher and Shin Megami Tensei developer Atlus, has announced its intent to completely absorb Atlus to better manage the company's resources. The dissolution is expected to take place on October 1, provided Atlus, Index Holdings and subsidiary company Index agree to the terms of the merger during board meetings being held today. It's unclear how this deal could affect future releases from the prolific RPG developer and publisher. According to Game Watch, a representative from Index Holdings explained that upcoming titles would still be released under the Atlus brand. We've contacted Atlus for further clarification.
Media Catalog 4.0 faster, supports Quick Look
People who are religious about backups, especially those who use removable media like CDs or DVDs as backup media, often find themselves in a world of hurt when they try to find individual files on a pile of discs. It's worse than finding the proverbial needle in a haystack!Developer Robert Kuilman released version 4.0 of his Media Catalog application today (July 7, 2008). Media Catalog makes quick work of cataloguing all of those archive CDs, DVDs, and external hard drives. While test-drivng Media Catalog, I popped in a few old backup CDs. The application catalogued hundreds of files in a few seconds, then popped the CDs out. You can also drag-and-drop volumes onto the application to add them to the catalog. Searching is extremely fast, and you can use Quick Look to preview documents as long as the original media is mounted.Kuilman rewrote his indexing code and speed has improved up to 770% over version 3.9. You can try out Media Catalog 4.0 for free (limited to five media), or purchase it for $24.95.
DS Fanboy's shiny new review index
Did you ever wish there was a convenient page that gathered all of our game reviews in one place? Do you hate wading through categories? Are you in the mood for delicious candy? While we can't actively help you with the last one (though we can recommend these), we've got the answer to the first two questions in the form of DS Fanboy's handy review index. On the new page -- which we'll update every week -- you'll find a chronological list of all of our full game reviews, with the newest first, along with their scores and the initials of the reviewer. We've also included a sortable spreadsheet for your downloading pleasure, and as we add more reviews, we might just add more information there as well. It's an exciting time to be a DS Fanboy!**Okay, not really. But pretend for us.
Tracking the Keynote Index Fund
Matt Haughey has worked up a little analysis/thought experiment of just how much money could be made by buying stocks before every Macworld Keynote of the past ten years-- he calls it the Keynote Index Fund, and has the stock prices before every keynote, directly after every 'note, and a day after every 'note.And the fact is that buying the stock a day before and holding it for 48 hours (until the day after) would have made you money over the past ten years-- he calculates 1.2% growth over 24-hour period, and 2.2% growth over a 48 hour period. Of course, that doesn't hold a candle to what you would have earned if you just kept Apple stock the whole time (holding on to $10,000 of Apple stock since 1997 would have you holding shares worth $525,187 today).But the fact is that Macworld keynotes can make wily stock traders money. The worst performing keynote so far was in 2005, when only the Mac mini and the shuffle were announced, and the best was last year, when the iPhone was first introduced. So just standard common sense just tells you that if the iUltraportable does appear, you could probably make money with a little day trading*, but if it doesn't show up (and there are no other major announcements), you could take the worst bath so far on the Keynote Index Fund.*This advice is given by a nonprofessional and should not be listened to under any circumstances or by anyone-- past performance of a stock means nothing to future performance. Plus, I'm still hungover from New Year's Eve, and in no condition to give stock tips anyway.[Via Waxy]
VacuumMail: Automate Vacuuming Your Mail Index
A while back we mentioned a neat trick for speeding up Mail.app by "vacuuming" its SQlite database. Now the original source of the tip, Tim Gaden over at Hawk Wings, points to Leland Scott's VacuumMail, which utilizes a little AppleScript and launchd to automate this process. Tim also notes that if the default time of 1pm on Tuesday isn't to your liking, you can change it using Lingon. VacuumMail is a free download.[Via Hawk Wings]
TUAW Tip: force Spotlight to re-index some apps
I recently was fortunate enough to upgrade to a MacBook Pro, which means my wife can now get her mobile on with a MacBook. After I moved everything over and got to work with the new machine, I noticed some strangeness with Spotlight and Yojimbo: apparently, thanks to some quirk of bits and bytes, Apple's fancy schmancy search wasn't bringing up any of my Yojimbo items. After requesting some support from Bare Bones Software, a most useful employee of theirs shared a handy trick that forced Spotlight to re-index my items. It worked like a charm, and it was simple to pull off.If you have a 3rd party app that isn't behaving well with Spotlight, you could try surfing to ~/Library/Caches/Metadata. This is where apps, especially database-driven ones that want to be indexed by Spotlight, place cache data in order to make it into search results. For me, simply quitting Yojimbo, tossing out the Yojimbo folder sitting inside that Metadata folder and restarting Yojimbo forced Spotlight to get to work. The little magnifying glass began flowing on and off, and my Yojimbo items were soon appearing in my Spotlight search results just as they should.Now I don't know if this is the end-all solution to Spotlight indexing issues like this. I only know it worked for me, and judging from the emails that occasionally bounce over the Yojimbo mailing list, I'm not the only one who's ever tangled with Spotlight's indexing quirks. I hope this tip can help you unravel any Spotlight searching issues of your own.
