The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘over-the-years’

Got a MacBook Pro or iMac that needs a little customizing? Head over to this Etsy store for a bunch of lid and chin graphics.

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A one stop shop for all your MBP lid and iMac chin decal needs

Slide, the online entertainment company founded by Max Levchin (who we just interviewed in Davos), has decided to stop development on two of its social games, Slide SuperPocus and Top Fish, and will be laying off “less than 10%” of its employees in the process. The company had around 40 employees working on the two games, some of whom will be reassigned to work on other projects. Prior to the layoffs, Slide had around 137 employees.

This is a somewhat surprising move, because Slide only launched the two Facebook applications last fall. The magic-themed SuperPocus launched in October, and Top Fish, a virtual aquarium app, launched in early November. Both games were designed to turn into virtual economies that revolved around virtual gifts. Clearly Slide has a ’sink-or-swim’ attitude with regard to its applications, and it’s ready to cut its losses quickly.  Slide VP of Strategy and Business Development Keith Rabois says that the company is continuously evaluating its games based on their growth, user retention, and monetization, and that the two games weren’t reaching their goals.  Rabois says that the company intends to release a new project later this month.

Slide has dabbled in quite a few areas related to social gaming and online communities over the years. It is behind some of Facebook’s most popular games, as well as other entertaining apps like SuperPoke. The company used to generate most of its revenue through advertising, but the majority of its income now comes from virtual goods.

According to the site Gigatweet, we are about an hour away from the 10 billionth tweet sent since the dawn of Twitter. More incredible, this milestone comes less than 5 months after the 5 billionth tweet.

The only problem? It’s not an exact science.

Gigatweet isn’t counting to an exact number, but rather is extrapolating out when the 10 billionth tweet will hit based on previous tweet data provided from a range of sources. Most recently, we do know that Twitter is seeing about 50 million tweets per day now, because the service released that information. Other than that, it’s kind of a crapshoot.

To determine when the 5 billionth tweet would happen, watchers were looking at the numbers appended on to the URL of each tweet when it’s sent. The same is true this time around. For example, this recent tweet has the number 9996229078 in the URL. So yes, it would seem that is tweet number 9,996,229,078, but the problem is that Twitter has altered these numbers several times over the years, notably to move up the so-called Twitpocalypse (both 1 and 2).

As Twitter employee Ryan King notes, “Though its more numerology than math, it still scares me that this is my job,” followed by a link to Gigatweet. What he means is that no, it’s not exactly right, but it’s kind of cool, and close enough.

An interesting side note: the guy who sent tweet number 5 billion, Robin Sloan, now works at Twitter. Who will be number 10 billion? We’ll know in about an hour.

Greetings! Nicholas and Jimin here live from the big TiVo Premiere launch in New York. There was a man guarding the device, which was hidden under a cloak, but when the cloak was lifted, oh dear! The gist: this is a TiVo you’re probably going to want. HD menus (build using Adobe Flash), searching that actually makes sense, a fancy remote control, and other goodness that you wouldn’t mind

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TiVo Premiere hands-on~!

Sorry, TiVo owners. Your TiVo HD and HD XL boxes will not be getting the swanky new software TiVo announced today according to an official TiVo spokeswomen we just asked

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Series 3 TiVo boxes will NOT get the Premiere software

Sony just launched a new gaming headset line in Asia, and they look nice. I’m not entirely sure how comfortable they are based on the rendering, but they certainly look lighter than most headsets

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Sony’s gaming headset rocks the modern design

I have much love for Wordle. I’ve used the text cloud generator dozens of time for use in presentations, TechCrunch posts and random stuff ever since I discovered the tool.

But as of yesterday, the application is no longer available, and the website only displays the message copied above. In a notice and a blog post, Wordle developer Jonathan Feinberg says he’s been forced to take the service offline due to a trademark claim against his use of the word “wordle” and states that he’s looking for pro bono legal advice from IP lawyers to fend off the infringement claim.

A quick search on Trademarkia reveals that there is in fact a live trademark for ‘Wordle’, owned by Mark Jordan Koeff, a photographer from Orange County, CA.

Any intellectual property lawyers out there who want to provide the developer with some free counsel? The tool is loved by many and it would suck for the service to have to be rebranded, considering the name awareness Wordle has built up over the years. There are similar tools out there, e.g. WordItOut, but they’re not as good as Wordle.

Feinberg, a programmer who works at IBM Research, can be reached on the e-mail address shared on the Wordle placeholder website and his personal site or via Twitter.

(Via @jackschofield / @digitalmaverick)

So the Internet is abuzz about the fact that Microsoft has a document entitled “ Microsoft Online Services Global Criminal Compliance Handbook “. The document was leaked to Cryptome, and as soon as MSFT found out they sent a DMCA takedown notice to Network Solutions

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Be aware of your digital footprint

Don’t expect new console hardware from Nintendo in the near future. When asked “When do you think it’ll be time for new hardware?” in a recent interview with Gamespot , Nintendo’s Cammie Dunaway replied, “I don’t think it’ll be any time soon because even though our installed base is, at this point, 5 million households larger than the PS2 installed base was at the same point in its lifecycle, it still has a lot of room to grow.” Dunaway went on to say: “If you think of the PS2, there’s been about 50 million sold; Wii, close to 28 million sold. So that says to me that there’s still a big audience out there that we can access with Wii.

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No new Wii ‘any time soon’ says Nintendo

Anyone remember Neonode? Apparently we do , but not very well. Anyway, these guys are back with a range of touchscreen panels called zForce

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zForce touchscreens from Neonode