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Capcom joins OpenFeint social gaming network on the iPhone
While Microsoft has Xbox Live as an official network, and of course Sony has PlayStation Network, the iPhone doesn't yet have an official social gaming network, at least not until Apple's Game Center is unveiled later on this year. Until then, a company called OpenFeint has been connecting gamers on iPhones with leaderboards and achievements (which is why you'll often see their logo appear in your iPhone games). And while most of the developers signed on to OpenFeint so far have been pretty small, it's starting to reel in the big fish -- Capcom has signed on to hook its games up to the OpenFeint service. The service will first appear in Capcom's Dark Void Zero and Hatchlings iPhone games, and both OpenFeint and Capcom say they are excited about the possibilities of working together. Of course, the release of Game Center may change the relationship, depending on what features Apple offers later this year. But OpenFeint says they're planning to offer services even on top of Game Center's planned featureset (Capcom has confirmed they want to use OpenFeint X, a platform for serving up virtual goods on the iPhone even beyond what Game Center will offer). So it sounds like even after Apple's official network is released later this year, Capcom will still have a use for its new partner.
iPhone OS 4.0: Apple announces Game Center, a social gaming network for the iPhone
This is huge -- Apple has announced Game Center, an official social gaming network for the iPhone, coming to the device along with OS 4.0 this summer. So far, there have been a few social networks vying for an audience in the form of OpenFeint and Ngmoco's Plus+ system, but Apple's going official, bringing in friends lists, leaderboards, achievements, matchmaking, and so on all to the iPhone themselves. Jobs said on stage in Cupertino that they will combine GameCenter with the App Store's over 50,000 games and entertainment titles. It'll be extremely interesting to see how Apple's network interacts with App Store titles, and it looks like OpenFeint and the like have some serious first-party competition.
Booyah releases MyTown 3.0, adds friends lists and social features
Booyah has released version 3.0 of their MyTown location-based social networking app on the iPhone. As Keith Lee told me at GDC a few weeks ago, this app makes up the largest number of location-based social users on the platform, eclipsing even Foursquare and Gowalla in terms of users. And version 3.0 overhauls the social side of the game, allowing you to now visit friends' towns, view their check-in history inside the app, and track them across leaderboards. You can also send items and gifts to your friends, which will likely make up a huge part of their in-game microtransaction system. The upgrade is available on the App Store right now, and the app is a free download. MyTown is almost the silent contender in the race over check-in apps on platforms like the iPhone -- Foursquare and Gowalla are getting plenty of press, but Booyah is quietly building up a gigantic, dedicated audience for their app. As Keith Lee told us, they're working on "some very interesting viral growth mechanics or loops that haven't worked out yet on iPhone but have been done on other platforms." This social update will likely drive their already sizeable audience to grow even bigger.
ScreenSharingMenulet hits 2.0
ScreenSharingMenulet is a free (donations requested) program which I've mentioned before that runs in your menu bar and gives you access to computers for quick access to screen sharing. My success with Back To My Mac was "spotty" at best until I started using the DynDNS service, port forwarding, and DHCP Reservations to get 100% reliable screen sharing sessions between my home and work computers. (It's not nearly as complicated as it sounds. Most of it is just one-time configuration which will then make things easier every time you do it in the future.) This does not require a subscription to MobileMe or involve any cost. DynDNS hosts don't appear in the Finder like Back To My Mac hosts do, which is where ScreenSharingMenulet comes in. Click on the menu bar icon, type in the DynDNS hostname (check the box to "Add to My Computers"), and voilà! You're connected as easily as you always thought Back To My Mac would be, but never was. ScreenSharingMenulet has just released a new version 2.0 which has preferences to show/hide Back to My Mac Hosts and show/hide local IP addresses. It also fixes a few bugs. One change that people may not like as much is the removal of the "Recent Hosts" submenu, but frequently contacted hosts can easily be added to the "My Computers" menu by checking a box when initiating the connection. A few other minor changes were also made. Even if Back To My Mac worked consistently and reliably, I would still prefer ScreenSharingMenulet for initiating the connection because it's easier and faster to reach from my menu bar than going through Finder.
Belkin Surf, Share, Play and Play Max app-equipped routers may finally make wireless configuration tear-free
Belkin may have once been about flashy, blue LED-glowing routers with alpha-numeric model numbers, but its new Surf, Share, Play and Play Max are certainly horses of a different color. We caught a glimpse of the new range this morning, and while routers are usually a bit of a snooze fest, this group of boxes show potential of being the easiest routers in the world to configure. While they are surely vanilla-looking, they come with the SSID and encryption pre-configured. Just plug in and you are good to go, though if you want to change your network name to something "creative" you can do that with the included software. Beyond the simplistic setup, all of the 802.11n routers -- save for the entry level $49.99 Surf -- come with "apps." For instance, the $79.99 2.4GHz Share comes with a USB port that supports external USB hard drives or printers and Belkin's own backup and printing software. By far the snazziest of Belkin's "progs," as we now like to call them, is the Vuze Torrent Genie, which gets baked into the $129.99 Dual-Band, Gigabit Play Max. The software shifts the download of your totally legal torrents to the router when your computer isn't powered on or has been disconnected from the network, ensuring that your transfer keep on humming with or without PC intervention. We know, the fact that we're remotely excited by a group of new WLAN routers seems like an early April Fools joke, but this time around we actually encourage you to read the PR below for more details on these boxes. %Gallery-88917% %Gallery-88918%
Insider Trader: Advertising your profession
There are relatively few avenues for selling your profession's wares. The first, and probably the most universal, is to create your trade goods and then list them on the auction house. This is a pretty common channel for selling trade goods. As such, there's more than a few techniques and arts to getting the most out of working the auction house. Check out Gold Capped, for example, to pick up a lot of great advice on how to work the AH. The second way to sell your goods is via small-scale professions gathering. We talked a few weeks ago about how to get together a crafting bazaar. The advantage to a crafting bazaar is that you get a lot of exposure from a lot of people. If your event is fairly well attended, then you're going to get a lot of different customers cruising to buy crafting goods. It's especially advantageous to spend time working with a consumer in a bazaar environment, because you have face-to-face interaction during which you can try and upsell the client. You can check out all of their gear and enchants, and make recommendations for things they might want to purchase to improve their performance. There's a middle ground between those two methods, however, and it combines a lot of the best traits of the crafting bazaar with the open, free market of the auction house. By advertising your profession on Trade, the official forums, and word of mouth, you can get in touch with prospective customers while still respecting and interacting with your server's overall economy. You get the chance to meet someone "face-to-face" (or, at least, whisper-to-whisper) and you get the same chance to review the gear that you would in the bazaar. However, you don't have to wait for a special location or particular time in order to meet those folks. Considering how important word-of-mouth can be to growing a network of steady customers, we should take the time to review a few tips for advertising your profession.
Google's 1Gbps broadband offer brings out the crazy in municipal officers around the States (video)
You'll be aware by now that Google's cooking up an experimental high speed broadband network, which is currently in the process of collecting applications and nominations from interested communities. Given the limited coverage planned -- anywhere between 50,000 and 500,000 people -- there's understandably a lot of competition to get your small town on Google's radar, and city officials all around the USA have been doing their utmost to grab some publicity for their locale. Duluth mayor Don Ness can be seen above taking a dip in Minnesota's icy Lake Superior (with his unfortunate underling Richard Brown taking a fish to the face), while others have held parades, danced, invented a "Google Fiber" flavor of ice cream, and even swam with sharks for the sake of that precious fiber. Duluth, however, is the only place officially endorsed by a senator, and you can see Al Franken promote the city's virtues on video after the break. [Thanks, b3ast] Update: We've now also got video of the actual dip in the water, slide past the break to see it [Thanks, TheLostSwede].
GDC 2010: Interview with Keith Lee of Booyah
Booyah is an App Store company with quite a few lessons in its past already. The founders are former developers at Blizzard (they worked on both Diablo and World of Warcraft before setting off on their own), and after their first app, Booyah Society, didn't exactly strike gold on the App Store, they went back to the drawing board on their idea of "real life achievements," and have done much better with their latest app, MyTown -- it's one of the top grossing apps around, with more users and higher engagement than the popular Foursquare. We got to sit down with CEO Keith Lee for an interview at GDC, and he told us about what they learned from Booyah Society, why Booyah is convinced that real-life social gaming is where it's at, and what they think of the iPad (and what Blizzard thinks of the iPhone). Read on for more.
AT&T completes 100-Gigabit Ethernet field trial using new Cisco gear, proves it does care
Remember those network investments that AT&T was talking up just days before Time Warner slipped over an offer for help? Looks as if the firm wasn't kidding around, but there's still nothing here that should get you excited about more available bandwidth in the coming days. Utilizing that fancy new Cisco router, the carrier recently completed a live network environmental trial of 100-Gigabit backbone network technology (far more hasty than that 40-Gigabit stuff that's around today), but we're told that the tech isn't expected to be ready for "commercial deployment" until the "next few years." 'Course, we suspect we should be struck by the notion that the internet may actually have the proper infrastructure to keep on keepin' on once Hulu really does take over the world, but for now, we'll just have to extract a bit more joy from those vague "little things" in life.
Cisco promises the 'next generation internet,' delivers markedly less
Cisco promised us a significant announcement this morning, one that would "forever change the Internet and its impact on consumers, businesses and governments," so we had to tune in to the company's webcast to find out what it was all about. We were instantly bowled over with the shocking news that video is the killer app of the future internet, before getting it drilled into our heads that we really need, like and want more bandwidth. No kidding -- so what, Cisco, what is your revolutionary next step? Is it the space-based IP router? Some killer alternative 4G connectivity? Well, it turns out it was the CRS3. The what? Cisco is bringing out a new Carrier Routing System, which Pantaj Patel describes as "huge" in a perfect monotone. We couldn't agree more. Apparently Cisco is keen on offering smarter pipes, and we did hear that AT&T is handling 19 petabytes of traffic each and every day, but the sum of the whole thing is that Cisco is just refreshing its backhaul hardware and regurgitating promises about 100Gbps bandwidth and whatnot. The internet remains safe and un-revolutionized for another day. Video after the break.
Breakfast Topic: Fancy meeting you here
A random reader email we received this week sparked an interesting topic of conversation among the crew here at WoW.com -- the odd places and ways people happen to meet or bump into fellow World of Warcraft players. Some of us find fellow players through work, some of us meet them on the street or in the store, and there's no real way to identify them. Whether it's a hoodie, a sticker on a car, or someone making the familiar mouse and keyboard hand motions when mentioning they play video games, there's a peculiar thread that connects the millions of people that play WoW. It's identifying that thread that can sometimes be tricky. By the end of the conversation, it was pretty much decided that WoW players need some sort of signal to indicate they play, a secret hand gesture of some sort. As for myself, the most random of these moments was selling my television. I found a buyer who arrived with a friend to pick up the thing and noticed the friend was wearing a WoW hat. Upon asking him if he played, I discovered not only did he play, he had played on my server, and not only had he played on my server, he played a character that I'd randomly /licked in Dalaran out of sheer boredom one evening when turning in a cooking daily. Small world. With a game that has over 11 million players, running into someone that plays the game at some point in real life is almost a given. Where have you met your fellow players? What's the most random, unexpected moment you've run into someone that plays WoW?
Macworld 2010: TUAW talks to OpenFeint
On the day before Macworld last week, I got a chance to sit down with Eros Remini, VP of Marketing for OpenFeint, to talk about his social gaming network for iPhone apps. He shared with me that the network has claimed a gigantic 12 million users total, with about a million of them active in iPhone games from day to day. Additionally, the average user plays three or four games regularly -- unlike most other consoles, the iPhone is really a device that can split attention rather than have players dive deep in on one game. He also told us about the OpenFeint app that was released last month, as well as their popular free game of the day giveaway -- once per day, they give away an OpenFeint game for free right there inside the app. And we also talked about both how OpenFeint is serving as connection between developer and customer, as well as why Apple hasn't really shown an interest in an official iTunes gaming network like this. You can check out the whole interview on video right after clicking through the link below. Enjoy!
Battery-powered Wi-Reach Classic turns any USB 3G / 4G modem into portable WiFi hotspot
Mobile broadband routers certainly aren't new, but Connect One's take on the whole thing just might be our favorite (yeah, even more than Cradlepoint's offerings). Of course, we'd pick up a MiFi of some sort if we were buying into the space today, but for those still under contract with a USB WWAN stick, the Wi-Reach classic adds a whole new level of utility. Put simply, this minuscule device boasts its own battery and a sole USB socket, which is used to connect with whatever 3G (and after a future firmware update, WiMAX / LTE) USB card that you slap in there. Once in place, you're now in possession of a mobile WiFi hotspot which can be shared with up to ten WiFi-enabled devices. We're told that the device can last for up to five hours on a full charge, and it can even be re-energized via USB. Interested? Prove it. It's up for order right now for $99.
Analog Tweet-O-Meter shows city-specific Twitter activity the old fashioned way
Never mind keeping track of how many gold medals Bermuda, Cayman Islands and Monaco rack up during the Winter Olympics; the real nerds are watching to see exactly how many tweets are being pushed out per minute from a smattering of cities around the world. CASA's Tweet-O-Meter has been running on a webpage for awhile now, but frankly, the novelty tends to wear quickly. These, however, are far more tempting to the retinas. What you're looking at above are a few analog Tweet-O-Meters, which do exactly what you think they do: showcase the amount of tweets that are leaving New York, London and Paris at any given time by moving a needle within a conventional gauge. Head on past the break for a video, and be sure to express your reaction on your favorite up-and-coming social networking site. [Thanks, Dr. Andrew]
Spiritual Guidance: Assessing yourself
Every Sunday (and the occasional weekday) Spiritual Guidance offers holy and discipline priests advice on how to wield the holy light and groove to the disco night. Your hostess Dawn Moore will provide the music. Last week, I had a bad day. More specifically, I had a bad raid day. I logged in, prepared, researched, and with high hopes of downing 25-man Sindragosa that evening. My guild had plenty of attempts, and many members had the weekend to explore the fight on 10-man or at least watch a video; I was certain we'd succeed, even with the initial difficulty of the ice block gimmick. For whatever reason though, it didn't go as planned, and with our attempts on the line, a small debate would break out after every pull. Tension between guild members rose quick and appropriately, my own focus and abilities deteriorated. What started out as an occasional mistake on my part turned into frequent and reoccurring disasters. I did keep trying hard, even though I failed, but there was no amount of effort to change how awfully I was playing. Despite everything, I understood everything that was happening as it exploded around me. I could source each mistake I made to some bad step, wrong guess, or mistakenly pressed button. Past the mistakes, as I looked over my output on each attempt I could see it was suffering tremendously as well. This is what we'll be talking about today; how do we assess ourselves as players, and as healers?
Google Buzz now available on iPhone web app
Google revealed its new social communications feature Buzz yesterday while we were all traveling to Macworld, and the new service is now up and running in the Mobile Safari web app, as well as in your Gmail account everywhere else. The mobile app has all the features of the main service (it's kind of like a mix between Twitter and Google Wave, where you can post status updates and media in an ongoing conversation) with some interesting mobile features, including the option to see "buzz" nearby while out and about, as well as comment on or 'like' other people's "buzz." The whole thing is still pretty new, and as you've probably seen around the rest of the 'net, there's lots and lots of people discussing how this might work alongside (or in spite of) Twitter and all of the other growing social networks out there. Time will tell whether or not the system will be a hit (or fizzle like Wave apparently did), but Google definitely made sure that the iPhone has full capability up and running right away, even if the Apple/Google relationship isn't what it used to be.
D-Link's DIG-1320 Powerline router eyed at CES
Looks like Netgear isn't the only one bringing its Powerline data-over-power line devices to Las Vegas this week! Our fine friends at gdgt have just hepped us to a couple new D-Link boxes, including the DIG-1320, the company's first Powerline router -- with 802.11n WiFi to boot!. If using the ominous power of electricity to watch The Fall Guy on Hulu seems a bit much, the company has also unveiled DIR-632, its first consumer dot-n router with (count 'em!) 8 Ethernet ports. No word on price or release date, but if any of these things "fall off the back of a truck," we'll drop you a line. We know a guy.
Tablet speculation: How could a tablet connect to the world?
Do you know what word Dave Caolo is hearing in his sleep? Tablet. What phrase is trending mightily on Google Search? Tablet. What is every Apple fanboy and fangirl dreaming of for...um...some new gift-giving holiday in the March/April timeframe? Tablet. It's what good little geeks hope to find on their doorstep if their credit cards are not maxed out and Apple ships on the rumored schedule. In addition to bringing world peace, universal vaccination, and rainbow puppy unicorns, the tablet carries its own compliment of mobile issues: specifically, how and how well will it connect? This is a question we were kicking around this morning in the TUAW chatroom, after encountering a number of speculative reports in our morning RSS feed. Rather than predict which way Apple is going to go, we thought we'd run down the most likely possibilities. We all agree that a tablet would be, at a minimum, no less connected than an iPod touch. That is, none of us think that Apple will ship a tablet sans Wi-Fi connectivity. And with McDonalds now offering free Wi-Fi at over 11,000 restaurants world wide, let alone sponsored municipal Wi-Fi, new Wi-Fi for pay services on airplanes, and other commuter-based Wi-Fi services, you can easily imagine an urban tablet that works in most major cities around the globe. A Wi-Fi-only approach, though, cuts out a lot of possibilities for tablet use on the go, when users move away from cities. 3G/4G access, similar to the kinds of deals currently offered on Dell netbooks and laptops, might be a way for Apple to go as well. Of course, that would involve signing up for 2-year contracts at outrageous prices (it doesn't matter who does the service, the prices are outrageous across vendors). That could seriously put off existing iPhone contract holders, who might not be willing to expand their obligations to another multi-year commitment.
Sprint's flagship WiMAX desktop modem goes on sale
WiMAX desktop modems have been popping up all over the place lately, and the latest evidence for a major push towards 4G for the home user comes to us courtesy of Sprint. The company quietly made Motorola's CPEi 25150 (the predecessor of the CPEi 100 we saw at CES) available to customers over the weekend, featuring that famous shark's fin form factor, white and yellow Sprint logo, and the promise of "the best radio performance in its class," on account of dual integrated antennas. Of course, this thing also has the requisite ethernet and USB ports for connecting to your home router. If you're lucky enough to have Sprint WiMAX coverage in your area, call your main man to get started. You can look forward to paying $100 (with $150 instant rebate) after signing a two-year contract. PR after the break.
Windows 7 Starter comes with hidden wireless connection sharing
Ah, the blessings of market fragmentation. If you thought that, in its efforts to differentiate the Starter Edition from its beefier Windows 7 offerings, Microsoft chopped off the ability to share wireless connections between compatible devices, we've got good news: it didn't. Turns out that ad-hoc networking is very much a part of Windows 7 Cheap Edition, and the only thing missing from it is the dialog you see above. Thrifty Edition owners will have to find the application themselves -- through the shockingly difficult process of a Start Menu search -- but once they do it'll behave exactly as if they'd bought the Extra Awesome variety. Great job, Microsoft -- you keep hiding features and we'll keep installing Chrome OS on our netbooks, deal?
