Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010
Video game sales dropped 7 percent in 2009 globally, as represented in the top game markets: United States, Japan, and the United Kingdom. The UK had the greatest drop in sales with 14%. The annual Top Global Markets report by The NPD Group, GfK Chart-Track, and Enterbrain agreed with the NPD study of the 2009 U.S. market.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 defied the overall industry performance by becoming the fastest selling video game of all time.
Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010
Google, two days before the announcement of the iPad by Apple, put mock-ups of a new product that would ride on the hype of the device–a browser-based Chrome OS for tablet computers.
Chrome OS was designed primarily for netbooks. Netbooks will not be the extent of it’s use however–it will work with an array of web enabled devices–each with very different input methods, available screen space, and processing power.
Stephen Shankland writing for “DeepTech” at CNET believes that Chrome OS may be a better sell for tablet computers than netbooks, because netbooks are often used as a primary computer which may make a browser-based OS a less appealing option.
Monday, February 1st, 2010
Analytics, Google’s web traffic analysis tool, has added six new language options. The new languages are: Bulgarian, Catalan, Greek, Lithuanian, Slovak and Vietnamese. Now Google Analytics supports 31 languages.
To switch to another language option, there is a control button at the top right corner of the Analytics login page.
Monday, February 1st, 2010
Microsoft is seeking to reinvent the bar code.
In essence, Microsoft seeks to make the bar code more stylish–allowing businesses to use the area of packaging dedicated to the bar code to appeal to consumers as well as be a content transmission device between businesses.
Microsoft Custom Tags will allow graphic artwork to be incorporated into the bar code. Custom Tags will work with current mobile Tag Readers. Although there are guidelines for proper usage of the Custom Tag approach to bar code and machine readable codes, this will provide more flexibility to packaging design and manufacturers.
Monday, February 1st, 2010
Google will be teaming up with Neustar UltraDNS to work on a proposed extension to DNS. The concept of the project would make it so that the first three quarters of a user’s IP address would be included in a DNS request. Each DNS request would then have a built-in geographic awareness, which would improve the responsiveness and accuracy of the Domain Name System.