Game

Doodle Jump for the iPhone is something like a developer’s fairy tale: two brothers set out to make a game using only the talents they’ve got at hand, and end up striking gold. They keep pushing out minor updates, and the game just keeps selling.

Tomorrow morning, Lima Sky will be announcing that Doodle Jump has just surpassed 3 million sales — a feat they claim is a first for any Indie development house. If it seems like we were just writing about Doodle Jump surpassing the 1 million download mark, it’s because we were; that last landmark only just came in mid-December of last year. Less than 3 months later, Lima Sky has managed to triple an already impressive haul.

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(S3E09)

Continue reading 'Chuck' - 'Chuck Versus the Beard' Recap

Filed under: OpEd, Episode Reviews, Chuck, Reality-Free

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• Knicks 99, Hawks 98: Who needs Tracy McGrady? The Knicks got by on the skin of their teeth after Al Horford's shot, orginally ruled good, was ruled to have gone off after the buzzer. McGrady sat with soreness but saw Danilo Gallinari (27 points) and David Lee (19 with 13 rebounds) pick up the slack. The Knicks are still only 3-12 in their last 15 games and one loss away from their ninth straight losing season. One game after missing all 18 of their 3-point attempts, the Knicks made 10-15. So over their last two games, the Knicks are 10 of 33. Not bad.


• Grizzlies 107, Nets 101: The Nets battled back, but to no avail. Courtney Lee shot 13-of-20 and had 30 points, and Devin Harris had 28. The Nets continue their road trip at Oklahoma City, Dallas and Houston, so things could get uglier before they get better.

Ladies and gentlemen, it's official. Facebook games have come full circle, as one of the biggest entertainment corporations in the world, Sony, now has a game on the social network platform. Sony Online Entertainment (SOE), the arm of the company that's pr...

At this point, the round robin release date game for the HTC HD2 is getting a little tired and we should preface this post by saying we can’t confirm this info. We were confident of a March 24^th release date after the leaked retail slide. After that a leaked Blockbuster Video press release also stating March 24^th, further verifying the leaked slide info. Then of course we had a little birdie whispering in our ear that maybe, just maybe we might see a middle of March release date. Now that T-Mobile has decided to go and tease us with their familiar, “coming soon” page which lends further hope to a close release date. MobiTV, one of the included multimedia apps on the HD2 has posted on Twitter that their app will indeed be included on the device, set for release 3/23 as pictured above. Now we assume that MobiTV is pretty good at what they do and that this is no accident. Nobody of course will complain about the phone releasing one day early but let’s just hope this isn’t an accident or someone is going to get fired over this.

MobiTV Twitter

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You’re familiar with the flash carts that Nintendo is waging a questionably successful war on, yes? Basically they just read from a ROM file and tell the console or handheld what it would hear if that game were actually in the slot. They work quite well and pirating games is unbelievably easy, so you can see why Nintendo would be worried. For the SNES, though, I doubt there will be quite as big of a response.

This cartridge does the same job but fits into your SNES, allowing you to load it up with as many ROMs as you can fit on there. You add ‘em on there via USB (the cart has 256MB of space, which will probably fit about 100 games) and then use the on-screen menu to navigate. It doesn’t seem to offer any of the advanced features of some flash carts — freeze states, rewind and fast-forward, that sort of thing. It also won’t support some games that had added hardware, like the SuperFX chip in StarFox and Stunt Race FX. It costs $169, which sounds expensive until you think that there are probably only a thousand people in the world who want one of these.

I personally have no use for this thing; I have all the cartridges I need, which is to say Super Mario Kart, Zelda, and Street Fighter II Turbo.

[via DCEmu and Engadget]

Filed under: Ratings, Reality-Free

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Got an email address? You're getting spam. Your mail provider might be doing a good job of screening you from420 it, but spam on the Internet is as common as Botox at the Oscars! Unfortunately email spam isn't the only spam variety. There's also link spam.

Unless you run a website you might not know about link spam. It's a way for 'blackhat' webmasters to pump up the value of their sites and it all relates back to how search engines work.

Not only do search engines check the content of websites they also check to see who trusts or depends on those website. That's shown by links. So, for instance, if you own a website and link back to AppScout (we are forever grateful) you are bestowing a little of your goodness on us. That's how Google, Yahoo!, Bing and the others interpret your largess.

But if you run a site that's not trustworthy and no one in their right mind would ever link to you how can you still achieve search engine greatness? One way is to game the system with link spam. We see it in our comments here on AppScout all the time (though we work hard at policing against it).

"Great post. That's really well thought out," is typical of comment spam. The content of the comment is meaningless. The commenter is really trying to get his/her URL listed alongside the comment. If he does--Bingo!

Matt Cutts, head of Google's web spam team recently blogged:

Google has been working on some new algorithms and tools to tackle linkspam and we'd like to ask for linkspam reports from you. If you'd like to tell us about web sites that appear to be using spammy links (e.g. paid links that pass PageRank, blog spammers, guestbook spammers, etc.), here's how to send us more info.

Link spam has the net effect of cheapening search engine results. If you've ever clicked a search link and ended up on a page with little real content you're probably a victim.

This is also fresh in my mind because of my personal website (yes, that link from AppScout is doing me some good). After moving servers and changing the underlying software I decided to reopen over 4,000 older posts for comments. Not quite two full days after the change I've gotten 74 comments and 61 of them are link spam!

Confidence games, and that's what this is--a con game, have always existed. The Internet just makes it easier for crooks to find their marks and operate in a high volume environment.

Android NDK hits Release 3, brings OpenGL ES 2.0 access to devs originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 08 Mar 2010 18:17:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Android NDK hits Release 3, brings OpenGL ES 2.0 access to devs originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 08 Mar 2010 18:17:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Brian X. Chen at Wired, on the default iPhone apps that aren’t present on the iPad:

But if you recall, the iPhone ships with some apps that appear to be left out from the iPad: Stocks, Calculator, Clock, Weather and Voice Memos. What gives?

Apple didn’t respond to a request for comment, but I’m willing to guess Apple will just stick those apps in the App Store for a free download, and they’ll be the same apps as they were on the iPhone. After all, it’s unlikely there’s much to do with those particular apps to make them visually special for the iPad.

Actually, it’s sort of the opposite problem. It’s not that Apple couldn’t just create bigger versions of these apps and having them run on the iPad. There were, internally to Apple (of course), versions of these apps (or least some of them) with upscaled iPad-sized graphics, but otherwise the same UI and layout as the iPhone versions. Ends up that just blowing up iPhone apps to fill the iPad screen looks and feels weird, even if you use higher-resolution graphics so that nothing looks pixelated. It wasn’t a technical problem, it was a design problem. So they were scrapped by you-know-who. Perhaps they’ll appear on the iPad in some re-imagined form this summer with OS 4.0, but when the iPad ships next month, there won’t be versions of these apps. At least that’s the story I’ve heard from a few well-informed little birdies.

(There is, alas, no secret “widget” mode for iPad in OS 3.2, either.)

Some (maybe even most?) iPhone games will work well as-is, on the iPad. Not just technically, but in terms of being fun and feeling right. But non-game iPhone apps that are just upscaled on the iPad are going to feel weird. And the run the app in a little iPhone-sized rectangle in the middle of an otherwise black screen mode is even weirder, I think. A 3.5-inch screen is just totally different than a 10-inch screen.

On the whole, it’s actually rather un-Apple-like that they’re even allowing iPhone apps to run unmodified on the iPad. It’s a huge compatibility win, of course: an instant market of thousands and thousands of titles. Given the runaway success of the App Store and the fundamental technical similarities between the iPhone and iPad, it’s the sort of decision that most companies wouldn’t even think twice about. But it’s undeniably a sub-optimal user experience. iPhone apps on the iPad are a “good enough” thing, not an “exactly right” thing. Most companies — the ones that wouldn’t even see it as a tough decision whether to allow iPhone apps to run on the iPad — settle for “good enough” all the time. Apple, on the other hand, usually goes for “exactly right”.

I’ll go so far as to predict that by the time Monday April 5 rolls around, it’ll already be an established meme that non-iPad-optimized iPhone apps are to the iPad what Classic apps were to Mac OS X — something you’ll make do with “for now” but can’t wait to abandon for the real thing.

I’m not saying it’s a mistake that Apple is allowing the iPad to run iPhone apps. I’m just saying that the iPad is not a big iPhone.

Boomerang Networks has spent the last year quietly building an advertising offers service designed to take on established players like Offerpal and Super Rewards. Now, it’s taking the covers off.

Every offers company is busy trying to optimize which ads appear to which users. Boomerang’s offer wall includes thumbs-up and thumbs-down buttons so users can vote on which ones they like. That’s the beginning: the company combines this user feedback with user comments, profile data — as Facebook’s and others’ terms of service allow — as well as number of clicks. Then, it analyzes the data to figure out which types of offers make the best fit between the user base (by country, age and sex), the category of application, and the price the users are typically willing to pay for the offers relative to the game. When users interact with the resulting offers, Boomerang gathers more information on their behavior and further optimizes the offers. It also has a customer service team pre-screen for deceptive offers, it says, and won’t repeatedly show offers to users who take them or vote them down.

The company has made internationalization a priority. Chief executive Honor Gunday tells us it has deals with more than 130 advertising networks around the world, so it is able to filter offers to be relevant to users in specific places. He provides a rough breakdown of what this looks like. For medium to high-engagement games in the US, offers can bring in from $1.00 to $1.50 per user; in southeast Asian countries, $0.50 to $0.80; in Latin America, $0.10 to $0.20.

The offer wall includes some other notable features. It has direct payments from more than 60 providers around the world. Although some are available through payment aggregators like PayByCash, Gunday also says that it has brought in some options not available through most rivals, such as Cherry Credits in Southeast Asia. The wall also provides categories of offers by content type and popularity, and shows banner ads. To make the experience easier for users, it also provides a detailed customer feedback form about each offer, and provides a window showing pending payouts and past offer votes.

Users also can click to view a full “customer relationship management” interface showing them the following information about each completed offer: title, date taken, status, earned or expected amount of virtual currency, payout timeframe, and user-generated quality ranking.

Boomerang’s current publicly-named clients include TheBroth and Hitgrab, and is in talks with more. The service is now live for apps on Facebook, MySpace, Hi5 and Bebo. Boomerang has raised a round of funding from angel investors, but the amount has not been disclosed.

A little late to the Android game, Gowalla has officially released its app Gowalla application for the Android Market! Now Gowalla is setting itself up to go head to head with Foursquare, not to mention Google Buzz, officially in the Android space.

A few weeks ago, we previewed the beta version of Gowalla, and now– just over two weeks later, we have an official release for Android phone holders to use at large. Within the official version compared to the beta, a ‘trips’ tab has been added to the application, ensuring you’re not missing a step.

One feature that is lacking on the Gowalla application that you will find in the Foursquare app is a widget. However, in my use of the Foursquare widget, it was fairly unreliable. It’s in no way a deal-breaker to leave one out, and it could always pop up later in a future update. I always use widgets, even when they serve little functionality. Gotta have em.  Also, as I’d said in my previous article, Gowalla is much nicer on the eyes than the Foursquare app, yet lacks some functionality that you’d be used to on Foursquare. But as similar as the two services may be, one can not expect them to do the exact same things in the exact same way. It’s all about which one works for you.

So if you’ve been waiting for a formidable Foursquare rival, it looks like the feature-rich Gowalla application may fit the bill. Personally, as a user of Foursquare for quite a while, I think I’ll be sticking to it, but I’m more than willing to give Gowalla a try. As a whole, my interest in social networking is beginning to wane, so as I start using Gowalla, hopefully my interest will be revived. In either case, the ware between Gowalla and Foursquare is just beginning in the mobile space, in theory– Which one will you be using?

[Via: Mashable ]

Related News from IntoMobile:

• Gowalla brings location aware social networking to Android
• Gowalla Coming to Android and BlackBerry
• Foursquare for BlackBerry Updated to 1.5 with Tips and Friend-Adding
• RIM Releases BlackBerry Widget SDK 1.0 Beta 1
• Foursquare now available for Palm Pre, too

Microsoft recently showcased an Xbox 360 game that was playable on both a Windows-based PC and a Windows 7 mobile phone.

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