A company called NeuroSky Inc, has built a prototype of a system that reads brain waves and uses them to control a mobile phone! They held a demonstration at CTIA Wireless IT & Entertainment 2008 in San Francisco last week. The demonstrated applications include: (1) an application to show the degree of brain’s relaxation on the screen of a mobile phone by using a visualizer (2) an application to show the degree of brain’s tension in chronological order after a user solves about 10 arithmetical problems (addition, multiplication, etc) shown on the screen of a mobile phone (3) a game...
ILike, the music company with popular applications on social networks including Facebook, Orkut and hi5, is making itself a platform — a trend among Silicon Valley web companies these days. Today, it will let other developers easily access its library of streaming music to include within their own applications. So if you have a Facebook game application, you could include licensed music in it through iLike. For example, Social Gaming Networks’ app “Free Gifts” will let you send a song with a virtual gift. You can make playlists within other applications within social network, or within customized interfaces on other...
Even the once king of pop, Michael Jackson, is taking advantage of the power of social networking. Jackson is launching an exclusive dance game application on Facebook, MySpace, and Bebo as part of his King of Pop album promotiom. The game will allow users to control the singer’s dance moves as if they’re playing dance revolution. Prizes will be awarded for the highest hourly and daily scores, exclusive ringtones for hourly winners, and limited edition iPod Nanos for daily winners. Top five scorers from each social network will move to a secret extra level. Scary? The secret level will actually...
Social network analytics company Kontagent is a bit like a machine-tool inventor of the 1800s. Machine tools helped spur massive industrialization: Manufacturers could buy these tools instead of creating their own in order to build production machines for things like consumer goods. In the young world of social network applications, Kontagent may help spur a wave of higher-quality Facebook applications. It provides detailed information about user behavior on social network applications in a web interface — at a level of complexity that smaller developers can’t easily build themselves, if for no other reason than lack of time.There have been a...
Anyone logging into the super popular Scrabulous board game application on Facebook today from the US or Canada was greeted by this message, “Scrabulous is disabled for US and Canadian users until further notice.” The demise of Scrabulous, one of Facebook’s most popular applications, was a long time coming and pretty well expected by anyone following the story. Last week, Hasbro’s general counsel, Barry Nagler, said that Scrabulous was a “clear and blatant infringement of [Hasrbo’s] Scrabble intellectual property” and suing the application’s creators was an effort to protect “the integrity of the Scrabble brand.” However, it’s becoming a bit...
There has been speculation recently that investors are no longer putting money into social networking application companies. That is not the case. Today at the f8 conference, Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said that more than $200 million in funding had already been invested in third-party applications to date. He announced that Flixster, a movie review application (and site), has just raised $6 million from investment bank Allen & Co. and other investors. Last night, game application builder Zynga said that it had raised a new $29 million round led by Kleiner Perkinds.Zynga and many other gaming application companies are...
