Recent Blog Posts
What our clients say?
The service provided is excellent. 
Development Manager, Software House
Latest Tech News
How to formulate an effective smartphone security policy
The mobile revolution offers new ways of working, but what are the challenges and how can they be overcome?
Playing The News: To Push Social Gaming Forward, Two New Startups Look To The Real World
When most people think of social gaming, they likely think of Zynga and its flagship titles, like FarmVille and CityVille — or even Words With Friends. Yet, as Facebook social gaming matures (right along with mobile technology and platforms), we are starting to see studios begin to push the boundaries more, looking for new ways to engage and educate gamers, maybe even reinventing the wheel while they’re at it. One example is the New York City-based startup Playmatics, which raised $1 million last year to build a new game franchise called Shadow Government.
For those unfamiliar, beginning with mobile and later moving to Facebook, Shadow Government is looks to bring real-world data and modeling to the social game sphere. To do that, the startup has partnered with the Millenium Institute to leverage its economic and sustainability data, and government-modeling software to allow players to build and run their own virtual countries. The Millenium Institute is perhaps best known for its Threshold 21 (T21) software, which is a dynamic simulation tool that allows policy makers and development organizations to run comparative analyses of different policy scenarios, identify the policies and strategies that lead to their desired developmental goals.
Using this reality-based simulation model, the goal for Shadow Government is not only to create a gaming experience that is entertaining but also one that is decidedly educational. For example, the Millenium Institute wants the franchise’s games to become a part of the curriculum for K-12 education. In that sense, Shadow Government sounds like a suped-up, hyper-modern Sim City, that might even be tweaked into something that could be used to educate high school students in a civics class.
What’s so unique about the model is that it is among the first to make a big push to “incorporate real world news and data,” says Playmatics CEO Margaret Wallace, often in realtime. The games could alter the game content depending on what’s happening in the world at any given time, integrating current events and creating different scenarios in the game based on the news. And this of course is all deepened by the participation of friends via integration with users’ social graphs. Studios like Trion can do this with their deep-end MMORPG games, like Rift, changing scenarios, characters, worlds in realtime, but this isn’t typically something that social, casual games entertain. (You can check out more on the game’s actual narrative here.)
But Playmatics is not the only studio playing around with reality-based social gaming: Today, North Carolina-based fiveonenine Games officially launched into the space, with plans to build its own franchise of social games for mobile and Facebook that are inspired not only by reality, but by current events, specifically politics.
While fiveonenine doesn’t have government modeling software, it is backed by two old media giants: The E.W. Scripps Company and Capitol Broadcasting. When you think social games, you think modern, you think of the present. E.W. Scripps was founded in 1878, which doesn’t exactly inspire confidence with many of its major newspapers having gone out of business, but it’s still ticking, and has teamed up with another old media empire to bring its educational and journalistic content to social games.
It also helps that the startup’s roster includes veterans of Disney, Washington Post, Playdom, RealNetworks, and RIM. The startup is still in its early stages, but basically it’s looking to build an alternative way for younger generations to get news and learn about politics, campaigns, and government. As more and more young people get their data and news from social networks, The Daily Show, and less from traditional media sources, fiveonenine is looking to move that to social gaming — a venue that’s actually relevant to them.
The startup’s first title, Political Rampage, will be released on iOS and Android later this month, and will feature figures like President Obama and Sarah Palin facing off in a tongue-in-cheek “match-three format,” the company said in a recent statement. Other upcoming titles include Campaign Story for iOS, Nook Tablet, Kindle Fire, and Real Politics (Facebook, iOS) — both are due out by mid-April.
There’s still so much opportunity in the social mobile gaming space, and plenty of room for startups and studios to have an impact in defining what the landscape will look like going forward. Playmatics and fiveonenine are just two of the players looking to either blur the lines between reality and gaming, or better leverage reality-based data and information to inform and educate. Both have merit, and it will be interesting to see which approaches hold up. But trends now seem to be indicating that the demand is growing for deep, immersive, and original social gaming content. Educate users without letting them know what you’re up to, in gameplay, UI, or otherwise, and you’re onto something. Just ask Carmen Sandiego!!
For more on Playmatics, check them out here and Fiveonenine here. Side note: Both companies need better websites.
Woman spanked for dissing ex in Facebook snapshot
h4Spanish court objects to obscene t-shirt slogan/h4 pA Spanish divorcée's purse is somewhat lighter after she posted photos on Facebook of herself wearing a t-shirt declaring "My ex-husband's an arsehole" - and was ordered to pay €1,000 damages for her trouble.…/p pa href="http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=21735339amp;iu=/6978/textlink"img src="http://regmedia.co.uk/2011/12/13/office365-468x60.png" width=468 height=60/a/p
Microsoft apes Google social search master plan
h4Building a separate internet with Facebook... bitch/h4 pEvery now and again Microsoft comes along to remind us of two things: it's still a big name in online search and remains very cosy with the world's biggest social network, Facebook.…/p
Don’t Just Pin It, Buy It: Pinterest Rival Fancy Figures Out Social Commerce
Amid the increased speculation surrounding Silicon Valley darling Pinterest’s forthcoming revenue model, competitor Fancy, a social photo-clipping service popular among the style-conscious set, has been quietly working on revenue ideas of its own. Previously, the service was doling out coupon code to users who “fancy’d” images belonging to specific merchants, but today, the site is diving head-first into social commerce.
Starting now, Fancy users will not only be able to post, like (“fancy”) and share photos of things they find inspiring, they’ll also be able to purchase them directly on Fancy’s website itself.
Fancy is often lumped into the same category as other photo-pinning startups like Pinterest, which gets credit for having invented the space despite Tumblr’s head start in popularizing the image re-posting format. But Fancy, its functional similarities notwithstanding, is no Pinterest.
For starters, Pinterest users are predominantly female, and seem happiest when pinning things like craft projects, recipes, funny quips about parenting, motivational sayings, decorative items for the home, and other types of photographic inspiration. Meanwhile, Fancy’s users are currently 60% male, and are more often posting consumer goods of the Fab.com variety, high-fashion clothes and accessories and photos of exotic locales.
“We’re really focused on the commerce angle, and I think different sites may be focused on self-expression,” Fancy CEO Joe Einhorn tells us, describing how Fancy is unique in the photo re-posting space. “We’ve constrained our growth to be laser-focused on commerce, and that’s working for us in terms of the quality that’s on the site,” he explains.
Though much smaller than Pinterest’s 10 million+ users, Fancy’s 250,000 registered users fancy’d over 1 million products last week from the web, mobile and tablet combined, and 150,000 of those were fancy’d yesterday. Every day, around 100,000 to 200,000 unique visitors are browsing, favoriting, and sharing the site’s photos. Starting now, they’ll be able to buy what they see, too, without leaving the website.
Fancy, whose parent company is thingsd, already has some impressive supporters (hello, Kanye), as well as board members like Jack Dorsey (Twitter, Square), Chris Hughes (Facebook), Jim Pallotta, and LeRoy Kim (partner at Allen & Co.).
The startup’s investor line-up also includes top VC firm Andreessen Horowitz, Allen & Co., General Catalyst, Esther Dyson, Celtics owner Jim Pallotta, MTV creator Bob Pittman, former eBay COO Maynard Webb, Eric Eisner, Jeff Samberg, oh, and Ashton Kutcher.
But Fancy’s lead investor in its latest $10 million round comes from an unexpected source from outside the Valley: PPR, the $25 billion French firm run by Francois Henri-Pinault which owns some of the biggest fashion brands in the world, including Gucci, Bottega Veneta, Yves Saint Laurent and Balenciaga.
With guidance from Mr. Pinault, Fancy has been preparing to take its next step into revenue generation with the launch of a complete commerce marketplace.
“The way that commerce works up until today is that buyers buy products and tell customers what we’re allowed to buy, how much it costs and how to buy it. We want to turn commerce on its head,” explains Einhorn. “Merchants and brands will be able to come into any post and bid to sell against the demand right there.”
At launch, merchants and brands will be able to use a self-serve commerce platform to upload their own images and associated deals, or they can tap into the demand for their products generated by the site. Fancy’s users will now be able to “shop” the images. Instead of clicking through to an external website, they will be presented with the option to purchase the item in question (or in the case of exotic scenes, a hotel room, perhaps) from Fancy itself.
After the entire checkout process takes place on Fancy, the site then sends orders to the merchants. Using Fancy’s online tools, merchants can fulfill those orders, and even print UPS shipping labels, if need be.
For now, the system is first-come, first serve, with the first merchant to claim a post as the only one who can sell against it (after a light vetting process). But in the future, the site will support an Google-like bidding system, except instead of keywords, merchants will be bidding on the demand surrounding users’ clipped postings.
“And it might not be their exact product,” Einhorn notes, “…but they want to sell against it the same way they do on Google.”
The current social commerce model on Fancy, which involves offering coupon codes, will also still be available, Einhorn says, as the service aims to be an end-to-end solution for merchants and brands. There are 400 different merchants already using this process now, to the tune of 150,000 deals sold to date – figures that hint at the potential for this new, more robust social commerce system.
The commerce platform is available as of this morning on Fancy’s homepage and will arrive on all mobile platforms over the next week or two.
Dave Morin, Post-Pathgate: Dealing With Unprecedented Scale, Hopeful About The Future
In case you live under a rock (I hate that played out phrase, someone please come up with something better) Path founder Dave Morin has been through a hellish past two weeks — About a week before Valentine’s Day, his app came under major fire for uploading user iOS Address Books. So we had two weeks of tech news BS around this issue, and then all of a sudden Apple’s all like “My bad.”
Sigh.
Morin’s advice for founders that want to innovate in social and find themselves in a similar situation? “When you build social software you’re working with new model. Sometimes you make assumptions [and] consumers might not think it is the right way to do it. The right thing to do is listen to users and apologize. “
Morin abides by the controversial philosophy that users are always right, adhering to it almost instinctually,” It was clear immediately, as soon as people started talking about it, that it was not kosher for users,” he explains about the Address Book mismanagement.
Still, a mistake is not a career, and Morin is moving forward. He tells me he’s focused on putting the new Path’s hard-earned 2 million users and 1.2 million MAUs to good use. The company is currently in partnership with Nike+ and is slowing unveiling its Nike Fuelband integration. Rumor has it there are more poignant integrations and partnerships to come.
Also, I saw Morin randomly outside of The Creamery today chatting it up with Zynga founder Mark Pincus while I was on my way back to the office. Mike is right, SF is so hot right now.
Foxconn allegedly hid underage workers from inspectors
h4Non-profit claims iPad-maker cheated in factory audit/h4 pstrongAnalysis/strong Apple faces increased pressure today after its manufacturing partner Foxconn was accused of using forced student labour and hiding underage workers during high-profile independent inspections last week. Foxconn also makes components for other manufacturers, but Apple is its most prominent customer.…/p
Third of Blighty stuck on snail-speed broadband
h4UK.gov's uphill battle to get us superfast by 2015 revealed/h4 pThe UK government will have a tough time fulfilling its superfast broadband promises for the country with a third of British postcodes still stuck at sloth-like speeds.…/p
Juniper buys Mykonos to beat off web app attacks
h4The art of deception/h4 pJuniper has bought web application security firm Mykonos Software in a deal valued at around $80m (£51m) in cash.…/p
UK.gov vows to purify TV with £180m from mobile networks
h4£10,000 per home to protect Freeview from 4G signals/h4 pBored of waiting for Ofcom's consultation on the possible interference between 4G telephony and Freeview TV, the a href="http://www.culture.gov.uk/" target="_blank"Ministry of Fun/a has said it will spend £180m of operators' money mitigating the problem.…/p pa href="http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=21735339amp;iu=/6978/textlink"img src="http://regmedia.co.uk/2011/12/13/office365-468x60.png" width=468 height=60/a/p
LG touts Tegra 3 talker
h4Optimus 4X HD exposed/h4 pLG has revealed what it has in store for next week's Mobile World Congress (MWC): specifically its Nvidia Tegra 3-based smartphone, the Optimus 4X HD.…/p
China cuffs 905 suspects in online black market purge
h48,000 emporiums eradicated/h4 pThe Chinese authorities have gone on yet another web crackdown, shutting close to 8,000 websites, although this time the target appears to have been genuine criminal ventures rather than sites spouting politically incorrect sentiments or peddling smut.…/p
Millennial: Android Ad Impressions Grew 504 Percent in 2011; iOS Share Declined 7 Percent
After filing its S-1 for an IPO, the largest independent ad network Millennial Media is releasing a yearly report on on performance of smartphone operating systems on its network in 2011. Continuing its growth as a platform on Millennial’s network, Android impressions grew 504 percent year-over-year.
In 2011, Android had a 47 percent share of device OS impressions, while iOS had a 33 percent share. For basis of comparison, in 2010, iOS had the top spot with a 41 percent share, while Android made up 30 percent. iPhone impression share declined 7% year-over-year but maintained its position as the number one device on the Top 20 Mobile Phones ranking, with 15% of the impression share. Millennial says no other device has been able to achieve the same level of market share of the iPhone.
The Apple iPad has been the number one tablet on Millennial’s platform since its debut in early 2010, with Samsung Galaxy Tab in second place with a little more than half the impression share of the Apple iPad. Smartphones led the Connected Device Mix for the past two years, increasing 68% year-over-year, thanks to the decline in Feature Phone usage.
In terms of manufacturers, Apple was the top manufacturer on Millennial’s platform in 2011 and the iPhone was the top individual mobile phone (both were also on top in 2010). Apple’s impression share as a device
manufacturer was relatively flat year-over-year; however the Apple iPad impressions grew substantially from 2010 to 2011.
Samsung was the number two device manufacturer on Millennial’s platform for two consecutive years, representing 17% of the Top 15 Manufacturers ranking in 2011. Samsung’s impression share was also relatively flat year-over-year. In terms of Android manufacturers that saw the biggest growth, HTC grew 79 percent year-over-year and was the number 3 manufacturer on Millennial’s platform in 2011.
Wi-Fi grew 21% year-over-year and accounted for 27% of the Carrier Mix in 2011, thanks to an increased number of Connected Devices on the platform.
In terms of app-specific data, gaming applications moved into the number one spot on Millennial’s Top Mobile Application Categories in 2011, growing 16% year-over-year. Music & Entertainment applications moved to the number two position, and news apps moved up five spots and grew 66% year-over-year.
Freetard MP allegedly cuffed after scrap in Commons bar
h4Plods called after pints spilled, punches thrown/h4 pFreetard MP Eric Joyce (sample quote: "It's highly debatable that downloading is theft") has allegedly been arrested following a fight in the Strangers Bar at the House of Commons.…/p
Twitter Adds Another International Google Exec To Its Sales Team: Stephen McIntyre
Twitter says that 70 percent of its users come from outside the U.S. at the moment, and so it makes sense that this is where it is also investing more to grow the rest of its business. Today the company announced that it has appointed another sales executive to beef up its efforts outside its home market.
Stephen McIntyre, most recently of Google, will be overseeing Twitter’s international self-serve business, based out of Twitter’s European HQ in Dublin, which Twitter opened in September 2011.
McIntyre’s appointment comes about a week after reports emerged that Shailesh Rao, currently based in New Delhi, India, would be leaving Google to join Twitter. Rao is now Twitter’s new VP of International Revenue.
The news also comes as one third-party Twitter analytics company, Twopcharts, claimed that Twitter this week would pass the 500 million user mark. Twitter’s most recent official figure for active users comes from September 2011, when it said it had 100 million active users.
Both announcements were “officially” confirmed on Twitter today by Adam Bain, the company’s overall president of global revenue.
Update: We now have slightly more detail Bain himself. “2012 will be a pivotal year for Twitter and our advertising business,” he said. “These hires are key to bringing our Promoted Products to more markets around the world and helping businesses everywhere get value from advertising on Twitter. I couldn’t be more excited.”
Both McIntyre and Rao had been with Google for years and played a significant part in Google’s international growth.
McIntyre (pictured left) is the latest hire for Twitter’s office in Dublin, opened in September last year. According to his LinkedIn profile — not updated to include the Twitter news at the time of writing — he was senior director, new media products and platform at Google, where he was also overseeing self-service platforms for international advertisers. That job was also based in Dublin. McIntyre had been with Google since 2005, working in a variety of jobs in sales for the search giant.
Twitter rolled out its self-serve platform only last week; this indicates that Twitter very much wants an aggressive roll-out of that platform.
Rao, meanwhile, who had been with Google since 2007, had been MD of Google India and also oversaw display sales for Asia. His appointment signals a key move for Twitter to start monetizing its service in international markets where it had not done so before.
While McIntyre is looking after a specific platform, it looks like Rao, as a revenue VP, might have a wider remit. Twitter tells us that he will be tasked with setting up direct sales operations in new markets. It is not clear if it might also include licensing deals along the lines of the one announced earlier this week between Yandex and Twitter to provide real-time search results. Although there were no financial terms revealed with that announcement, a similar one between Twitter and Microsoft to provide similar data for Bing was reported to be worth $30 million.
The hires come at the same time that Twitter is looking to expand its employees outside the U.S. That hiring drive has also seen the company looking for additional staff to manage PR and others to focus on content development from specific verticals, such as sports.
YouPorn User Emails and Passwords Exposed
Thousands of user emails and passwords from pornographic site YouPorn were exposed in a security breach, the Associated Press reports.
The security breach was allegedly caused by a third-party chat service, which “failed to take the appropriate precautions in securing its user data,” according to Kate Miller, spokeswoman of YouPorn parent company Manwin Holding SARL. YouPorn has shut down the breached server and notified its users about the security breach.
To make matters worse, a list of user emails and accompanying passwords (in plain text) is already circulating online. The list contains some 6,400 passwords, and it’s already been widely publicized, looked over and analyzed – for example, a word cloud of the most popular passwords from the site has been created by researcher Ashkan Soltani.
YouPorn is one of top 100 visited websites on the internet according to Alexa, which makes this security breach a high profile one. It’s also highly embarassing for users, many of which probably do not want to be publicly associated with a pornography site.
The lesson to be learned from the incident is the usual one: do not use the same login credentials for multiple sites. Additionally, if you use services such as this one, choose an e-mail and/or login and password that cannot easily identify you.
[via AP]
More About: hack, hackers, security breach, youporn
For more Tech coverage:
- Follow Mashable Tech on Twitter
- Become a Fan on Facebook
- Subscribe to the Tech channel
- Download our free apps for Android, Mac, iPhone and iPad
Nominet to launch .wales and .cymru
h4Welsh gov backs bilingual domains, rugby legend to head up advisory group/h4 pWales is to get two new top-level internet domains – one for Welsh speakers and one for the rest of us – under a deal announced yesterday between the Welsh government and .uk registry Nominet.…/p
Pirate Bay looks to overcome potential High Court ban
Controversial file-sharing site The Pirate Bay has vowed to go underground in the face of a potential UK ban after the High Court ruled the site illegally encourages users to infringe music copyright.
Grid Lens
h4Frame and fortune/h4 pstrongiOS App of the Week/strong iGrid Lens/i is a fun little photography app that allows you to combine multiple images within a single shot.…/p
HP reports 44% decline in quarterly profit
Hewlett-Packard has reported a 44% decline in earnings mainly because of poor sales of PCs, printers and enterprise equipment.
