Good times roll at E3 videogame trade show, for now

By Malathi Nayak

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Few first-time participants at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) in Los Angeles this week would have realized that the $66 billion videogames industry is in steep decline.

Microsoft Corp, Sony Corp, Electronic Arts and other industry giants whipped up the crowd of gamers and developers at the event into a frenzy, with displays of high-powered new consoles and previews of popular genre games.

For an industry accustomed to dwindling revenue in recent years, the pervasive visual pyrotechnics offered something to look forward to after years of subsisting on franchise-oriented games such as "Call of Duty" and "Halo" that run off aging technology.

This fall will usher in the Xbox One and Sony PlayStation 4, which apart from being more powerful than their predecessors, now support cloud-based game play and mobile integration.

It remains to be seen whether these will avoid the fate of Nintendo Co Ltd's Wii U, whose disappointing sales since its late 2012 launch have forced the Japanese company to sharply curtail revenue forecasts.

The Xbox One will sell for $499 and the PlayStation 4 for $399 - a hefty bit of change in an era when free-to-play Internet and smartphone games from "Angry Birds" to "Clash of Clans" are attracting budget-conscious gamers and millions in investment.

"The graphics capabilities of console games are going through the roof, but mobile games are becoming more and more sophisticated too," said Mike Cuff, vice president of content at Wikipad, which launched a portable gaming tablet at E3.

At this year's E3, which will end late on Thursday, the debate raged around how Microsoft and Sony will treat used games, a segment that is growing quickly because the Facebook and iPhone generation seem to be moving away from the traditional practice of shelling out for newly released, highly marketed franchise titles.

"Sony and Microsoft still have work to do in order to convince a broad consumer base that they need to spend $400 or $500 on new hardware, in addition to $60 for each new piece of software," R.W. Baird analyst Colin Sebastian said.

"There doesn't seem to be as clear a reason to upgrade compared to prior cycles, which introduced DVDs, 3D and HD to consumers."

MIXED FEELINGS

According to industry tracker NPD, sales of videogame hardware and software have fallen every month, on a year-on-year basis, since January 2012.

Still, industry executives were encouraged by the enthusiastic response they received at E3.

"There's been a lot of confusion about, 'Hey, with the rise of tablets and phone games does that have some impact on consoles?' Not at all," said Yusuf Mehdi, senior vice president of Microsoft's Interactive Entertainment Business. "All that's doing is bringing more people to the world of gaming."

The high level of excitement at the convention, driven by the faceoff between the Xbox One and PlayStation 4, was the noticeable difference from last year, said Keza MacDonald, editor at games news site IGN.com.

Developers fed off that excitement by showing off what they envisioned as franchises in the making.

EA unveiled "Titanfall" with mech-style soldiers and robots, a project led by Vince Zampella, a co-creator of Activision Blizzard's "Call of Duty." Ubisoft Entertainment SA announced "Tom Clancy's: The Division," a role-playing shooter revolving round a pandemic that breaks out in New York on Black Friday.

"The good news is, we entered the show thinking, 'Why do we need consoles anymore?' We're leaving the show with, 'Which one would you like to buy?'" said Peter Moore, EA's COO. "That's a win for the industry coming in here."

New hardware and software will boost the video game industry's growth in 2014, Ubisoft Entertainment SA Chief Executive Officer Yves Guillemot said.

Still, questions remain over how long the good vibes will last or whether the crowd at E3 is representative of a much broader swathe of casual and mobile game players out there.

"In the near term, we see pent-up demand among core gamers for new hardware and software, which should deliver a strong launch," R.W. Baird's Sebastian said.

"Beyond that, we still need more visibility that Sony and Microsoft can safely avoid a stall-out like what is currently plaguing the Wii U."

(Editing by Edwin Chan, Richard Chang and Andre Grenon)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/good-times-roll-e3-videogame-trade-show-now-120858791.html

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One Protein Shows Elephants and Moles Had Aquatic Ancestors

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One Protein Shows Elephants and Moles Had Aquatic Ancestors
Whales, seals and manatees are so at home in the water that it?s easy to believe their recent ancestors were also aquatic. That conclusion is harder to sell for lumbering elephants, burrowing moles or bumbling spiny echidnas. And yet, new evidence from Scott Mirceta at the University of Liverpool suggests that all of these groups recently descended from ancestors that spent a lot of time in the water.

Source: National Geographic
Posted on: Friday, Jun 14, 2013, 9:25am
Views: 269

Source: http://www.labspaces.net/128644/One_Protein_Shows_Elephants_and_Moles_Had_Aquatic_Ancestors

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AT&T GoPhone plans to support LTE, drop most data add-ons on June 21st (updated)

AT&T hinted that it was shaking up its GoPhone plans later this month, and it's making good on its word. As of June 21st, customers using the prepaid service will have access to the same LTE service as their subscription peers; AT&T will mark the occasion by selling the Samsung Galaxy Express to GoPhone users at $250 off-contract. The simplified smartphone plans are here as well, although they're better than previously expected. The carrier is dropping all data add-ons except for the $5 / 50MB pack, which is only available for a $25 monthly tier with 250 voice minutes and unlimited messaging. However, it will only cost $40 a month for a plan with 200MB of data and 500 minutes, and a $60 plan will offer 2GB of data with unlimited voice. AT&T's new strategy won't appease some data lovers, but those trying to avoid long contracts and harsh upgrade policies should be happy.

Update: To be clear, this is the official launch of LTE -- some customers have had the faster service in advance. The plans should be new.

Filed under: Cellphones, Wireless, Mobile, Samsung, AT&T

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Source: AT&T

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2013/06/14/att-gophone-lte/?utm_medium=feed&utm_source=Feed_Classic&utm_campaign=Engadget

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Design, And Insecurity, Is Back At Apple

“Can’t innovate anymore, my ass.” The phrase uttered by Phil Schiller during today’s keynote got a few laughs from the predictably enthusiastic WWDC audience. To me it dropped like a ton of bricked iPhones. Let’s catch up. The last time we heard from Apple was at its absurdly aggressive September 2012 press event, where it introduced the iPad mini and refreshed an astounding number of its products in one fell swoop. The company’s stock was soaring at around $700 per share. Apple goes quiet for about nine months — the longest in recent memory. Its stock slides steadily, losing nearly 40% of its value. Samsung is said to have overtaken its position in the smartphone space. There are supply chain worries. And then the new refrain. We’ve heard it. Even people who don’t follow tech seem to have heard it: Apple just isn’t innovative anymore (the subtext clearly referring to Steve Jobs’s death in 2011). Well, it’s clearly gotten under Apple’s skin, and they’re doing something about it: launching an ad campaign to tell you how much they care about the design and user experience of their products. Wait, what? Let’s put aside for a moment that iOS 7 looks like the most stunning, thoughtfully designed new software product Apple’s shipped since, well, iOS. Go ahead and table the company’s fresh, cylindrical new Mac Pro that looks more like a minuscule jet engine than any desktop computer I’ve ever seen. Apple really seems to think we now believe they’ve lost their touch. Is perception reality? Do products no longer speak for themselves? As Cook said at D11 last month, “Many people now define innovation as new [product] categories.” Perhaps Steve’s final act was the impossibly high bar he set at a very particular moment, where in the span of just a few years Apple was able to single-handedly define the modern smartphone, create the entire tablet industry seemingly out of thin air, and reinvent the laptop in the MacBook Air. So yeah, you might say expectations are a little high. Do products no longer speak for themselves? But the reality is not every idea deserves to exist. Steve was fond of saying that he was as proud of the things Apple didn’t do as those it did, and that view continues to define Apple today. Trends change — today we finally toss out skeuomorphism in favor of so-called flat design

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/9d4Km-TTehA/

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Reputation can trump money: Reputation concerns can encourage people to take part in real world 'public-good' programs

June 10, 2013 ? Whether it's an effort to increase recycling rates, reduce energy usage or cut carbon emissions, the conventional wisdom says that the best way to get people to do the right thing is to make it worth their while with cold, hard cash.

But Harvard researchers say there may be an easier, cheaper way -- by appealing to people's reputation, not their wallets.

Using enrollment of thousands of people in a California blackout prevention program as an experimental test bed, a team of researchers that included Erez Yoeli, a researcher at the Federal Trade Commission, Moshe Hoffman, a visiting researcher at Harvard's Program for Evolutionary Dynamics (PED), David Rand, formerly a post-doctoral fellow at PED (now a professor at Yale University), and PED Director Martin Nowak, showed that while financial incentives boosted participation only slightly, making participation in the program observable -- through the use of sign-up sheets posted in apartment buildings -- produced a three-fold increase in sign-ups. Their work is described in a study published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"We wanted to see how observability compares to a cash incentive for getting people to act to benefit the common good. The answer is that observability is really dramatically better," Rand said.

Using a cash incentive of $25, the utility company sponsoring the program had seen participation increase from about three percent to four percent. When researchers made people's participation observable, however, participation jumped from three to nine percent. To get the same result using a cash incentive, Yoeli estimated, the company may have had to offer every person as much as $175.

Observability proved to be the key factor in the results, the researchers said, because it puts people's reputation at stake, encouraging those who might not otherwise sign up to do so.

"When people know it's a cooperative effort, they feel peer pressure to take part," Rand explained. "They think, 'If I don't do this, I'm going to look like a jerk.' But if it's not observable, then there's no problem with not participating."

"In fact, we think this is one reason why the Prius, for instance, is such a different-looking car," said Hoffman. "The designers at Toyota seem to have intuitively had this idea, designing a car that didn't look like any other car so your neighbors can tell you're driving a hybrid.

"You can also see this phenomenon when you go to vote, and you get an 'I voted' sticker," he added. "Or when you go to give blood and you get a pin you can put on your backpack."

To directly demonstrate the effect of observability in a highly relevant real world setting, Yoeli and colleagues turned to a large-scale California blackout prevention program. As part of the program, residents were asked for permission to install a monitoring device on their air-conditioning system. If power demand spiked, the device would automatically adjust the air-conditioning temperature to reduce electricity demand and not overload the power grid.

As part of their study, researchers randomly offered people one of two ways to sign up for the program.

In the first, people received a mailer that described the program, and were encouraged to sign up in their apartment building using a unique identification number. In the second, people received a similar mailer and identification number, but also had to write their name and apartment number when they signed up.

"The idea was that in one case, it's anonymous, and in the other, it's observable -- everyone can see who has and hasn't signed up," Rand said. "When participation is observable, people worry about their reputation, and wanting to seem cooperative drives them to sign up."

To support that explanation for the increased sign ups when participation was observable, Yoeli and colleagues point to three pieces of evidence: First, tests showed that the effect was greater in large apartment buildings -- where more people were likely to see the sign-up sheets -- than in row houses, which have less common space.

Second, tests showed that the effect was more pronounced among people who own their apartments than among renters. "People who own their apartments are real, permanent members of their community," Rand said. "They are more likely to care about what other people in the community think of them. If you are a renter, by comparison, you may not even know any of your neighbors."

Finally, Yoeli and colleagues said, tests showed observability only increased participation when the program was portrayed as a community-wide benefit.

"We showed that signing up only matters when others can see it, and particularly when people you care about can see it. But we also wanted to show that it matters whether people think you are being cooperative or not," Rand said. "If you think about the way reputation works, you can get a bad reputation for being selfish, but things that don't involve a cooperative element -- like signing up for a promotion offered by your utility that has no effect on others- aren't going to affect your reputation."

Ultimately, Yoeli and colleagues said, the study suggests that similar strategies could be relatively cheaply and easily employed to boost participation in a host of efforts to improve community-wide efforts.

"This finding is very policy-relevant, because we're talking about changing real-world behaviors that are economically significant," Rand said. "The moral here is that these type of reputation concerns deserve a prominent place in the toolkit used by policy makers to encourage people to do things that benefit the public good. We think that observability and reputation concerns are powerful tools that are being under-utilized."

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/~3/cLYj3xNXv2E/130610152135.htm

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Attractive & Fat: Blogger Recreates Abercrombie Ads, Flaunts Size 22 Body

Source: http://www.thehollywoodgossip.com/2013/05/attractive-and-fat-blogger-recreates-abercrombie-ads-flaunts-siz/

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Iranians face new Internet curbs before presidential election

By Yeganeh Torbati

DUBAI (Reuters) - Iranians are struggling with slower Internet speeds and limited access ahead of an unpredictable presidential election that has put hardline Islamist authorities on alert for possible unrest.

Experts and web users say they believe the Internet obstacles are related to the June 14 presidential vote, the first since 2009 polls in which accusations of fraud - denied by the government - kindled months of protests organised in part via social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter.

Iranian officials denied any connection between the Internet disruptions and the upcoming vote. But, after the disputed re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad four years ago, they are wary of the possibility of further unrest this time around.

The last-minute entries of moderate former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and Ahmadinejad ally Esfandiar Rahim Mashaie have shaken up what was expected to be a limited race between hardline conservatives close to clerical Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and hostile to Ahmadinejad.

The populist Ahmadinejad, who has fallen out with Khamenei, is limited by law to two consecutive presidential terms.

Iran's Guardian Council was due to present a final list of approved candidates to the Interior Ministry on Tuesday. The ministry then has two days to announce the approved names.

The opposition website Kaleme reported on Monday that security had been heightened in Tehran, apparently to counter any protests should the candidacies of Rafsanjani or Mashaie be rejected by the council.

Iranian web users, who number some 45 million according to official figures, have grappled with increased obstacles to using the Internet since the 2009 election.

Kaleme said on Monday Internet speeds had dropped in much of Tehran and that in some parts of the capital, accessing the Web had become impossible - which would prevent dissidents from mustering protests online as they did after the 2009 vote.

Hamed, 33, a dissident freelance journalist living in Tehran, said his clients now have resorted to sending him files by loading them onto CDs and transporting them by courier.

"We get things done but with more time spent," Hamed told Reuters via email.

INTERNATIONAL WEBSITES BLOCKED

Many Iranians used Virtual Private Network (VPN) software to bypass the government's extensive web filter. But the government blocked access to most VPNs, which make computers look as if they are located in another country, in March.

Since then, experts said, Iranians have faced slower access to encrypted international websites using the Secure Sockets Layer protocol, with addresses beginning with "https", such as Google Inc.'s email service Gmail, and this could push them to resort to unencrypted sites easily watched by the state.

"SSL services are being throttled by the government to create a system of incentives or coercion not to use them," said Collin Anderson, a U.S.-based Internet researcher who focuses on Iran. "That affects Gmail and pretty much anything that you want a layer of security on."

A similar Internet blockade was put in place in February 2012, ahead of parliamentary elections.

Several Iranian Web users said they have had trouble accessing their Gmail accounts in the last three weeks. Elham, an Internet user from the northeastern city of Mashhad, told Reuters that since late April, any VPN she tries to use only works for about two minutes before she is disconnected.

She and Hamed declined to be fully named for fear of repercussion for speaking to a foreign reporter.

One man in his 30s who works at an Internet Service Provider (ISP) company in Tehran confirmed that most VPNs were down and those still up were crashing within two minutes.

He added: "Fewer and fewer people are using Twitter in recent days which shows their problems accessing the net."

Iranian officials denied any link between the disruptions and the election. "Numerous parameters contribute to the speed of the Internet and the approach of elections will not have any role," Ali Hakim Javadi, head of Iran's Information Technology Organisation, told ISNA news agency.

(Additional reporting by Marcus George; editing by Mark Heinrich)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/iranians-face-internet-curbs-presidential-election-122712408.html

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