Almost half of the U.S. wireless subscribers now own phones capable of downloading games, and 27% of those (or 13.5% of the total population) play games (premium, free or demo) on their phones. This is up from 20% of those with game capable handsets last year.
The NPD Group invited a balanced group of teens […]

Is Google planning to offer nationwide WiFi? Business 2.0 is running a story touching many of the highpoints of the idea, but analysts covering Google have been following the company’s move in this area for a number of months.

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With Google’s recent fiber-optic purchases/leases and the rollout of Feeva, Google does appear to positioning itself to offer WiFi to the masses, at least in major cities.

Will “GoogleNet” be free? That is the next question. Google does offer some services/software for a fee and has continually told analysts that standard sales/licensing processes remain a viable option. However, it is much more likely that a WiFi offering by Google will be paid for, at least in part, via advertising similar to the majority of its services. Consumers often view searches on Google/Yahoo or even basic television as free, but it is not. These services are paid for from advertisers. While consumers may not pay initially, the advertising budget supporting these services come from consumers purchases online, in stores or from service centers. The business model is simply different.

Sprint has completed its takeover of Nextel to create a unified company with 40 million customers, making it the U.S.’s third largest wireless provider. The combined company will go by Sprint Nextel Corporation and will remain based in Overland Park, Kansas (Sprint’s campus).
What may be next for the Sprint Nextel? The company owns […]

Are you participating in that conference call or are you typing emails and talking with officemates? The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has proposed a piece of software that can answer this question for others. The “Jerk-O-Meter” measures the stress levels in your voice and rates you between 0 and 100 to let you know how annoying you are being and your interest level in the conversation.

A new research from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Nanyang Technological University in Singapore finds no evidence of a strong link between video game violence and aggressive behavior in players.

The study followed a “treatment” group of 75 people that had never played MMORPGs before and played Asheron’s Call 2 for the first time in the study and a control group of 138, who did not play the game. The only flaw that we initially see in reading the summaries is that the partipants, with ages from 14 to 68, were solicited through online message boards which may limit the personality types much more than a true random sample.

“According to Ziff Davis Media’s annual “Digital Gaming in America” survey of more than 1,500 randomly selected U.S. households, nearly a quarter of all video game players watched less television than last year and expect to cut their viewing time even further this year. The study also showed that 76.2 million people in the United States play videogames, up from 67.5 million a year ago, representing an increase of 11.4%. The increase in gaming follows strong sales of portable gaming systems and reductions in the prices of current-generation video game consoles.”

We have seen web-based applications/sites like LinkedIn, MySpace and Friendster become quite popular and expand the average view of what exactly networking is and how to organize a business/social network. Now, we see a Chicago based company release a new social networking application that continues to push the envelope of “connections”.
The application […]

The internet has been ablaze recently with talk of map products from Google and Microsoft. These additions are really cool to look at but do not seem to offer real value or things to do in the worlds. As an avid gamer, I was questioning, haven’t we seen similar things from games in the past. […]

While the industry saw a “few early pioneers brave the location frontier”, with titles such as BotFighters, Mogi-Mogi, and Undercover 1, the technology and networks simply were not available to support mass market location based games (LBG). Now, the technology has been rolled out and network bandwidth has been increased. Why have we seen no real mass market LBG?

Kurt Uhlir, Chicago-based technologist and IGDA Mobile-SIG Chairperson, believes that innovation and a better understanding of location technologies and source material by game developers has been the barrier, but that wall is falling…

Tapwave has announced that it is no longer selling or supporting the Palm-OS based Zodiac.

Official company announcement
The argument can be made that the Zodiac simply tried to do to many things (similar to the claims around the N-Gage). However, Tapwave simply took too long to roll out this device and it simply could […]

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