The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘philosophy’

hi5, one of the world’s most popular social networks, has been actively remodeling its site to cater to the gaming industry. Last fall, the social network launched a totally revamped site that places a much stronger emphasis on games and virtual currency, along with a new avatar system. Today, the company is furthering this strategy with the acquisition of social gaming developer Big Six. The terms of the deal were not disclosed. See the full release below.

Big Six’s founders, Kevin Gliner, Monty Kerr and Chad Hansing, will join the hi5 management team. Hi5 says the deal will boost the social networks efforts in developing in commerce platforms and payment processing offerings. Right now, gaming is a central part of hi5’s strategy for growth so it makes sens for the social network to acquire innovative technologies and talent. The games section of hi5’s site accounts for around 1/3 of the site’s traffic, and direct user payments through the game already account for 15% of hi5’s revenue.

Apart from the currency and payments technology, Big Six’s social gaming platform will also become part of hi5. With the massive success of Zynga and Playfish, it makes sense that hi5 would try to create a social network that centers around gaming itself. hi5 has over 60 million members, which is a far cry from Facebook’s 400 million users.

In December, hi5 brought on a new president, gaming industry veteran, Alex St. John, to help lead the social network’s efforts. Earlier in the year, the company suffered from layoffs and also hired a new CEO, Bill Gossman.

hi5, the largest social entertainment site focused on gaming, today announced the acquisition of social gaming company Big Six. The Austin-based company was founded by gaming veterans Kevin Gliner, Monty Kerr and Chad Hansing, all of whom will join the hi5 management team, as announced separately today.

The deal enhances hi5’s growing leadership in commerce for virtual goods and games. Building on hi5’s current commerce platform, which includes a global virtual currency called hi5 Coins, support for over 60 payment methods worldwide, and new advertising-based transactional capabilities – the Big Six acquisition brings significant new technology and software platforms in the areas of payment processing, fraud detection and conversion optimization. In addition to its proprietary commerce platform, Big Six also designed a social gaming platform which will become part of the core hi5 site.

“The Big Six team and technology are a perfect complement to what we have already developed at hi5,” said Bill Gossman, CEO of hi5. “Over the last two years, we have made a substantial investment in building out the industry’s most robust commerce infrastructure for virtual goods and gaming and this acquisition will considerably augment both our commerce platform and domain expertise.”

“We are excited to be joining a company that shares our philosophy and vision for how social gaming will evolve,” said Kevin Gliner, co-founder and CEO, Big Six. “This deal is a perfect match because it enables us to accelerate our go-to-market plans by leveraging hi5’s huge global audience.”

The boys at Razer are at it again , with the new Onza controller for the 360. They’ve manage to significantly improve on the standard 360 controller by improving the control buttons, adding a tension control, and making it easy to pwn your buddies with a programmable multi-function button.

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Razer reinvents the 360 Controller with the Onza

Goodbye, old storage media! Rumored for God knows how long, and teased for months, the Sony PSP Go is finally available at your friendly neighborhood retailer. We have one—well, I have one—and have been playing with it for a couple of days now.

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Review: The PSP Go isn’t bad, but it won’t light the world on fire

Once upon a time great wizards named Kamal Youcef-Toumi and Pablo Valdivia Y Alvarado created a magical mechanical fish. The King of MIT was pleased and so put forth a press release describing the fish as a “long-term sensing and exploration unit.” The fish are completely self-contained and covered in delicious rubber. It moves just like a real fish by twirling its fins and moving its body to create waves.

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Robo-fish swims like a real fish, tastes considerably worse than real fish when fried

Don’t you hate pants?! Wait, wrong post intro. Don’t you hate when your headphone wires tangle?! There you go. Behold, a solution! The simple fix comes to us by way of Lee Washington , a London-based gentleman

The rest is here:
Video: How to finally eliminate the scourge of tangled headphone wires

What’s black, yellow, red, and just a wee bit ugly all over? If you guessed the Samsung S3650 Corby, good job! We also would have accepted “Clint Howard wearing a bumblebee suit and a red fedora.”

Read more from the original source: 
Leaked Samsung S3650 Corby pictures indicate designers might have been colorblind

Back in the olden days I used to read Joey Devilla’s blog all the time. He was - and is - known as Accordion Guy and he produced consistently cool content. Well, I just stumbled on him again and found that he’s doing great, philosophical posts on tech. Take his examination of netbooks vs. smartphones, for example.

He compares netbooks and smartphones to two brands of fast food pie. Netbooks are sub-par pies made to look like a real slice of pie - you know you’re not getting good pie but the appearance of a pie shape and crust creates cognitive dissonance and makes you think you’re getting screwed (which, in most cases, you are - netbooks are sub-par notebooks and horrible “communication devices”). Smartphones are like McDonald’s pies in that they don’t look like pie - they look like a pared down and highly subjective vision of pie. You have everything in there - the filling, the crust, whatever else - but you know you’re not buying real pie and you can sit back and “enjoy” it on that level. Netbooks are faking it while smartphones have no pretensions of pie-like goodness. With me so far?