These days Xiaomi, this hyped-up China phone maker, held the first on the net sales with the new Xiaomi Mi3 Smartphone along with the smart MITV, and the two devices had sold outs in merely over 60 seconds or so.

With NaturalMotion, Zynga Is Ready To Make Real Games Now

Zynga appears to have turned a new leaf. The oft-maligned casual game maker is known more for its skill as a master imitator than for its own games, many of which are ad-stuffed knock-offs of already successful franchises (Scrabble, anyone?).


Zynga announced Thursday that it would pay $527 million to acquire NaturalMotion, a company with a real gaming pedigree—and a harbinger of major change at Zynga, whose biggest innovation to date might be its dogged pursuit of virtual gambling in the U.S.


Along with news of the acquisition, Zynga announced further job cuts, saying it will trim its workforce by 15%—the latest in a series of layoffs and cost reductions that began under former CEO Mark Pincus. With Microsoft’s former head of its Xbox division now at the helm of Zynga, it’s no surprise that the company is looking to improve its gaming portfolio. New CEO Don Mattrick took over at Zynga just months after he personally unveiled the Xbox One at Microsoft’s Redmond, Wash., headquarters.


Zynga will get a serious boost to its gaming cred thanks to its new half billion dollar baby. NaturalMotion, helmed by motion animation whiz Torsten Reil, might not be an everyday name, but its intelligent graphics engine “Euphoria” has hummed under the hood of the last two Grand Theft Auto games and other hits from Red Dead Redemption to Star Wars: The Force Unleashed.


More recently, NaturalMotion has thrown its weight toward mobile with its iOS hit Clumsy Ninja , a charming physics-based game that lets the company’s dynamic graphics engine shine.


Natural Motion and Zynga couldn’t be more complementary—or more opposite. Zynga has honed the formula of casual, social gaming to disturbingly addictive perfection. Meanwhile, NaturalMotion creates games from the bottom up—building out its technology into games that serve as proofs of concept.


I recently spoke to Reil, and he made a great case for why mobile is the most compelling platform for the biomechanical and neuromechanical underpinnings of NaturalMotion’s technology, which I thought seemed more at home on the two powerful new consoles rather than 4” touchscreens.


At Zynga, NaturalMotion will have a big social platform for showing off its deep technology. With NaturalMotion, Zynga will bring true innovation on board—a first for the notorious copycat, and an interesting new shared direction for two companies that couldn’t have less in common.






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Twitter Tweaks Its Homepage Search




Twitter rolled out new search filters on Twitter.com that allow you to limit searches with categories such as "people you follow," videos, news, and photos. The update also makes Twitter's advanced search options, which let you search tweets with select words, phrases and hashtags, a little easier to find—the link is at the bottom of the new filters on the search results page.







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Apple Celebrates 30 Years Of The Mac Computer

Today, Apple celebrates the 30th anniversary of the Mac, the computer that was almost a critical failure when it launched and turned out to be one of the most important pieces of machinery in the modern computing era.


The Mac was announced by Apple co-founder Steve Jobs on January 24, 1984. The launch was accompanied by one of the most iconic commercials in the history of television, Apple's "1984" spoof which railed against the likes of IBM's computers in favor of the sleeker Mac. The commercial debuted in the third quarter of the Super Bowl that year and was an instant success.


The Mac was one of the first personal computers to employ a Graphical Unit Interface (what people today called windows) and used the Motorola 68000 processor that was considered extremely fast for its time. At the time of the Mac, Apple was in the middle of developing the Lisa 2, of which Jobs was one of the leaders of the team. The Lisa 2 proved to be expensive for Apple to develop and Jobs was famously switched to the Macintosh team which included Bill Atkinson, Burrell Smith, Jef Raskin along with some computer luminaries that people still recognize today including George Crow, Chris Espinosa, Joanna Hoffman, Bruce Horn, Susan Kare, Andy Hertzfeld, Guy Kawasaki, Daniel Kottke and Jerry Manock.



The Mac 128K, the first of the generation, originally was supposed to retail for $1,995 but was increased to $2,495 by Apple CEO John Sculley after a series of expensive Apple promotional events. Jobs was not happy with the price increase and the subsequent slow sales of the Mac. The rift between Sculley, the Apple board and Jobs was one of the reasons that Jobs was forced to leave the company in 1985.


The Mac eventually did sell well, finding its way into homes but especially schools. If you are a child of the 1980s, using a Mac was one of the key ingredients of your formative years. Macs would sell relatively well to homes and education systems for the 1980s before it began to decline in the 1990s with the uprising and dominance of Microsoft and its Windows computer operating system. By 1996, Apple was in serious trouble as a company and brought Jobs back into the fold as CEO where his first project was working with hardware designer Jony Ive to completely redesign the Mac. The colorful iMac was released in 1998 and was followed by iconic Apple products like the iPod, iPod Touch, iPhone and iPad over the next 13 years. Jobs died in October 2011.


To commemorate 30 years of the Mac, Apple put together a video for the anniversary of the computer, explaining its history and the impact that it had.



Lead image: Steve Jobs with the Mac 128K via Apple.com






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Twitter Launches Analytics For Twitter Cards




Users can better understand how their Twitter cards are performing thanks to a new analytics tool the company announced today. Twitter cards expand tweets with photos, videos and links.


The new analytics tool will let users see how many people click or retweet their card, and in the case of cards that feature apps, how many installations resulted.


Image via Twitter






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Samsung Aims To Invade The Connected Home

Samsung has a gadget for just about every aspect of your life, so it seems fairly natural that the company would want to invade your home as well. Samsung announced this week two new wall-mounted connected cameras for homes and business called the SmartCam and SmartCam HD to help individuals and business monitor their surroundings at all times.


Samsung’s design here is simple: It wants to integrate into just about every aspect of your life. The SmartCam HD Outdoor and Smartcam HD offer full 1080p HD streaming of their surroundings with 128-degree wide angle lenses. They both work with slow Internet connections and provide full recording playback capabilities. Ostensibly for security, the two relatively low-cost cameras ($179 for the for the Smartcam HD, $229 for the Outdoor) are part of Samsung’s master plan to be one of the pivotal gadget makers in the Internet of Things.


In a demo at the 2014 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, one of the biggest gadget annual gadget shows in the world, a Samsung Techwin (a division of Samsung) representative said that the two cameras are part of their notion to connect every appliance in people’s homes and businesses. Samsung also makes a variety of televisions, home appliances like dish washers and washer and dryers and, of course, a long list of smartphones and tablets. Samsung is a company that has the wherewithal and product line to produce just about everything in your house; the next step is to connect all of those with each other.



Samsung SmartCam HD Outdoor Samsung SmartCam HD Outdoor



The Samsung representative said the two SmartCams are definitely a piece of that puzzle, but not necessarily the primary piece.


Of course, Samsung is not the first or only company to make mobile-connected surveillance cameras, nor will it be the last. But Samsung's plans are bigger than just a couple cameras made by one of its subsidiaries. One of the biggest questions for the connected home will be what the central hub device will be. What will everything connect through to provide a simple protocol that a consumer can then easily interface with? Will it be the television? A thermostat-like device like the Nest? Samsung’s SmartCams are ancillary devices that help monitor your home and as such are a piece of the company’s connected home and the Internet of Things plan.


The most pertinent connected home hub in the short-term will likely be the smartphone. The Samsung Techwin SmartCams can be set up through Android or iOS and use Wi-Fi Direct to connect to other devices like a tablet, smartphone or a PC.






from ReadWrite http://readwrite.com/2014/01/06/samsung-smartcams-connected-home-internet-of-things

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CBS Tests Twitter Rules By Placing Film Critic's Tweet In An Ad

On Saturday, the print edition of the New York Times carried a full-page ad for the movie Inside Llewyn Davis with a single tweet by A.O. Scott, a film critic for the newspaper.


While he tweeted the words of praise for the film's soundtrack, the version of the tweet quoted by the movie's studio, CBS Films, while mocked up to look like a real tweet, actually omitted his first sentence, which mentioned competing movies The Wolf of Wall Street and American Hustle.




As a publicity stunt, it worked: Even Scott himself marveled at the idea that a tweet could become an ad, as did many others.




CBS Films publicist Grey Munford did not respond to a request for comment from ReadWrite, but he seemed aware of the controversy: On Twitter, he retweeted a couple of tweets about the controversy and Scott's reaction.


Is It Legal?


While movie studios have a long history of stretching the truth with movie reviewers' quotes in ads, that's largely been an arena where disputes are resolved quietly between the critics and the studios involved—who, after all, need each other.


The inclusion of Twitter, which has long asserted that its users have rights over the content they broadcast on the service, appears to change the equation.


CBS Films' use of the tweet—if, as it seems, it came without Scott's permission, seems to be a straightforward violation of Twitter's rules about the use of tweets in ads:


In all cases, without explicit permission of the original content creator, Twitter content may not be used

• in advertising

• to imply endorsement of any product or service.



...



Use the full text of the Tweet. You may edit or revise Tweet text only as necessary due to technical or medium limitations (e.g., removing hyperlinks).

That's not all: The Federal Trade Commission also forbids the "alteration" of such material when used in advertisements, though it's arguable whether the omission of Scott's mention of the other movies violated his intent.


Jim Prosser, a spokesman for Twitter, said the company did not comment on individual violations of its policies.


In other cases, advertisers have sought permission and even paid Twitter users to include their tweets in advertisements. Tom Biro noted a Pop Secret ad which used his tweet complaining about the smell of burnt popcorn; he said the agency involved paid him for its use. (Twitter's guidelines require permission, not payment, though some advertisers might offer payment to gain a user's agreement.)


Even Twitter itself has gotten in trouble for misusing tweets in promotional materials: In a blog post about its advertising offerings, it invented fake tweets under real users' names last year, was caught, and apologized.


The Fallout


Could CBS have avoided trouble by merely paying to promote A.O. Scott's tweet on Twitter? No, it turns out. A Twitter advertiser may not use your tweet in an ad without your permission, even on Twitter:


Do not include another person’s content in Twitter Ads without the person’s permission. Create your own Tweets, or get permission from the authors of the Tweets and Retweets you use.

That only applies to paid ads, of course. The studio could freely have retweeted Scott's tweet, as it has done for many other positive mentions of the film.


It seems unlikely that the studio will face any backlash over the ad. Scott—who liked the film, after all—seems more bemused than upset. And Twitter is courting the same movie studios who place ads like this in the New York Times to buy ads on Twitter, too.


But it's worth pointing out that according to the rules, your tweet can't become an ad without your permission.


Still via CBS Films






from ReadWrite http://readwrite.com/2014/01/04/inside-llewyn-davis-twitter-ao-scott-new-york-times-ad

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