About Serious Games

Serious games (SGs) or persuasive games are computer and video games used as persuasion technology or educational technology. They can be similar to educational games, but are often intended for an audience outside of primary or secondary education. Serious games can be of any genre and many of them can be considered a kind of edutainment.

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Wednesday 31 December 2008

Tweetree Enhances Twitter.com - Adds Basic Threading and FriendFeed Style Inline Media



Just login with your twitter username and password:

http://tweetree.com/



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Will Apple finally launch an ipod based 8" $500 web tablet in 09 ?








Apple has been experimenting internally with large form tablet devices for years, one source says, but there was concern that users wouldn’t like the device. The difference now is the iTunes app store, which has thousands of games and other applications that are perfect for a touch screen device with an accelerometer.


http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/12/30/large-form-ipod-touch-to-launch-in-fall-09/

These patents show apple are thinking hard about how to 'dock' a tablet:
http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/08/11/13/apple_pushing_for_patent_on_versatile_tablet_docking_station.html

http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/apple-tablet-contest/apple-touchscreen-tablet-contest-winner-and-gallery-326468.php

Previous post:
http://seriousgamesblog.blogspot.com/2008/12/where-are-netbook-tablets.html

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MMO year in review



What a freaking year. The weather outside is frightful for newcomers to the MMO genre, with a Blizzard that's been going on for so long that no one remembers what swimsuit weather is like. WAR broke out. Expansion packs rained down like meteors, but left no craters in the marketplace. And yet, good news abounds if you know how to read the signs


http://www.massively.com/2008/12/29/gamerdna-and-massively-look-back-at-the-mmo-year-in-review/

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Tuesday 30 December 2008

1938Media Breaks down twitter for dopes who don't know how twitter works

Loren Feldman on Twitter in 08:



















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Where are the netbook tablets ?





Here’s the basic idea: The machine is as thin as possible, runs low end hardware and has a single button for powering it on and off, headphone jacks, a built in camera for video, low end speakers, and a microphone. It will have Wifi, maybe one USB port, a built in battery, half a Gigabyte of RAM, a 4-Gigabyte solid state hard drive. Data input is primarily through an iPhone-like touch screen keyboard. It runs on linux and Firefox. It would be great to have it be built entirely on open source hardware, but including Skype for VOIP and video calls may be a nice touch, too.


http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/07/21/we-want-a-dead-simple-web-tablet-help-us-build-it/

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/08/30/update-on-the-techcrunch-tablet-prototype-a/

Instead, I'm suggesting that the thing we think of as a netbook should really be something else—a flat-panel, touch-screen tablet that can do photos, music, movies, e-mail, games, and full-function Web browsing. The device would include a small amount of onboard storage but would depend on the Internet cloud for most of its resources. Why no keyboard? Because then the device would be conceived as an appliance. You'd use it mainly for passive computing—for reading e-mail and Web pages, for looking at photos, for sharing documents in a meeting. You'd keep it on your lap to scan Facebook as you watch TV or bring it to bed to read the news before you go to sleep. You'd catch up on your e-mail as you ride the bus to work; you could respond to that e-mail using the on-screen keyboard, and when you get to the office, you could connect a USB keyboard.


http://www.slate.com/id/2207557/pagenum/2

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Monday 29 December 2008

Report Says Twitter Would Take 36 Years to Catch Facebook

If Facebook stopped growing right now and Twitter's numbers were at the upper end of Hubspot's estimates (10k per day) - it would take 36 years for Twitter to catch up. [(135,000,000 more Facebook users / 10,000 new Twitter users per day) / 365 days per year = just about 37 years]

Facebook, on the other hand, grows another Twitter's worth of new users every 8 days. This at a time when everyone from the President Elect to CNN to Shaquille O'Neil to Britney Spears is jumping on board Twitter!


http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebook_kicking_twitters_ass.php


http://cdnqa.hubteam.com/State_of_the_Twittersphere_by_HubSpot_Q4-2008.pdf


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Netbooks Hacked To Run Apple OSX

MSI Wind:





http://netbooks.modaco.com/content/msi/270099/pauls-complete-guide-to-installing-osx-leopard-on-your-msi-wind-advent-4211/

Gigabyte M912X with touchscreen:



HP MINI 700:




Acer Aspire One with touchscreen:



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Sunday 28 December 2008

HP mini 1000 versus MacBook Air - Will 2009 be the year of the netbook ?



Here's the dilemma: Will consumers buy a thin, light, relatively-fast $1,800 MacBook Air or a thin, light, ultrasmall, not-as-fast $700 Hewlett-Packard Mini 1000 Netbook?

If many people, fully aware of this choice, opt for a Netbook then we have the foundation of, at the very least, a rethinking of the pricey ultraportable.


At most, we have many more consumers buying into the Netbook concept--particularly if 3G comes as a standard option.

Here's the dilemma in more detail: Do you want an ultralight subnotebook replete with a Core 2 Duo processor, 64GB solid-state drive, and 12-inch (or 13-inch) LED screen that will set you back at least $1,800?

more ...

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Pentagon to Look at Possible Applications for Nintendo Wii



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Friday 26 December 2008

The growth of the web 2.0 blogs in 08. Techcrunch still king



http://friendfeed.com/e/a2dabb3f-8fb9-49aa-a951-54c3287fc87c/Why-is-ReadWriteWeb-s-traffic-going-down-and/



http://www.powerset.com/explore/semhtml/Mashable





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5 stages of Twitter acceptance



70% of users joined in 2008.
20% have joined in the last 60 days.
An estimated 5-10,000 new accounts are opening every day.
The average user has been on Twitter for 275 days.
80% of users have a bio on their profile. (I personally don’t follow users without a bio)
62% have a photo on their profile.
Traffic has grown 600% over the last 12 months.
Total user numbers are between 4-5m with approx 30% unengage


http://www.litmanlive.co.uk/2008/12/5-stages-of-twitter-acceptance/

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Two desktop-printer engineers quit their jobs to search for the ultimate source of endless energy: nuclear fusion. Could this actually succeed?







The source of endless energy for all humankind resides just off Government Street in Burnaby, British Columbia, up the little spit of blacktop on Bonneville Place and across the parking lot from Shade-O-Matic blind manufacturers and wholesalers. The future is there, in that mostly empty office with the vomit-green walls -- and inside the brain of Michel Laberge, 47, bearded and French-Canadian.

According to a diagram, printed on a single sheet of white paper and affixed with tape to a dusty slab of office drywall, his vision looks like a medieval torture device: a metal ball surrounded on all sides by metal rods and bisected by two long cylinders. It's big but not immense -- maybe 10 times as tall as the little robot man in the lower right corner of the page who's there to indicate scale.

What Laberge has set out to build in this office park, using $2 million in private funding and a skeletal workforce, is a nuclear-fusion power plant. The idea seems nuts but is actually, he says, not at all far-fetched. Yes, he'll admit, fusion is generally considered the kind of nearly impossible challenge undertaken only by huge universities or governments. Yes, fusion has a stigma to overcome; the image that it is fundamentally bogus, always and forever 20 years away, certainly doesn't help. Laberge would probably even admit that the idea of some Canadians working in a glorified garage conquering one of the most ambitious problems in physics sounds absurd.

But he will also tell you that his twist on a method known as magnetized target fusion, or MTF -- to wildly oversimplify, a process in which plasma (ionized gas) trapped by a magnetic field is rapidly compressed to create fusion -- will, in fact, work because it is relatively cheap and scalable. Give his team six to 10 years and a few hundred million dollars, he says, and his company, General Fusion, will give you a nuclear-fusion power plant.

If (and this is a truly serious if) Laberge and his team succeed, the rewards could be astounding: nearly limitless, inexpensive energy, with no chemical combustion by-products, a minimal amount of extremely short-lived radioactive waste, and no risk of a catastrophic, Chernobyl-level meltdown. "It's an astonishing story," says Mike Brown, the founder of Chrysalix Energy, the venture-capital firm that provided the angel funding for General Fusion, and who now leads the company's search for backing. "If Michel makes it work, he's a Nobel Prize winner."

more ...

http://www.powerset.com/explore/semhtml/Fusion_power?query=General+Fusion

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Tuesday 23 December 2008

Twitter has made Dell $1 million ?



Less altruistically, some businesses have discovered that Twitter is an effective way of communicating with consumers. Dell (NASDAQ: DELL) says Twitter has produced $1 million in revenue over the past year and a half through sale alerts. People who sign up to follow Dell on Twitter receive messages when discounted products are available the company’s Home Outlet Store. They can click over to purchase the product or forward the information to others.


http://venturebeat.com/2008/12/15/twitter-has-made-dell-1-million-in-revenue/

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Arrington thinks Scoble has gone Twitter Mental :(



In addition to watching all day, he says he spends at least seven hours a day, seven days a week, actually reading and responding directly on those services.

That’s 2,555 hours over the last year.

Which is more than a full time job (2,000 hours/year).

It is more than 106 full 24 hour days interacting with those services in aggregate
.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/12/22/im-sorry-robert-but-its-time-for-a-friendfeed-intervention/





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Pentagon hires British scientist to help build robot soldiers that 'won't commit war crimes'



The US Army and Navy have both hired experts in the ethics of building machines to prevent the creation of an amoral Terminator-style killing machine that murders indiscriminately.

By 2010 the US will have invested $4 billion in a research programme into "autonomous systems", the military jargon for robots, on the basis that they would not succumb to fear or the desire for vengeance that afflicts frontline soldiers.


A British robotics expert has been recruited by the US Navy to advise them on building robots that do not violate the Geneva Conventions.

Colin Allen, a scientific philosopher at Indiana University's has just published a book summarising his views entitled Moral Machines: Teaching Robots Right From Wrong.

He told The Daily Telegraph: "The question they want answered is whether we can build automated weapons that would conform to the laws of war. Can we use ethical theory to help design these machines?"

Pentagon chiefs are concerned by studies of combat stress in Iraq that show high proportions of frontline troops supporting torture and retribution against enemy combatants.

more ...

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3D Projector + Buildings


http://www.easyweb.fr/slideshow.html


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Monday 22 December 2008

Gizmos on Display at Microsoft Research labs in Cambridge

<a href="http://video.msn.com/?mkt=en-GB&playlist=videoByUuids:uuids:64f75b18-f7f4-4e15-b7f9-fa889e7ed703&showPlaylist=true&from=msnvideo" target="_new" title="Gadgets at Microsoft Research Labs">Video: Gadgets at Microsoft Research Labs</a>

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Will the Recession Kill Web 2.0?

So there is a silver lining to even the dark clouds of this recession. Certainly there will be many companies that suffer over the next few quarters, and some that will fail. But Web 2.0 companies with large audiences and the right advertising model will benefit from a flight to quality and a flight to surety. They may exit the recession even stronger than today. However, since many of these companies are not yet profitable, they will only benefit if – and this is a big if – they have enough funding to ride out the storm.


http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122963672858119195.html


Digg's numbers do not look good. No sign of profits any time soon, even though it has a sweetheart ad deal with microsoft. However it has lots of cash runway to make it to an IPO, if it can keep costs down AND keep growing:



http://valleywag.com/5114435/it-costs-digg-5-million-a-year-to-run-the-internet

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More iPhone Tilt Games That Kevin Rose Likes: Dr. Awesome and Rolando


Dr. Awesome iPhone Review from Kevin Rose on Vimeo.


Rolando! from Kevin Rose on Vimeo.





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Sunday 21 December 2008

Twitter News: The Best Twitter Clients and Track real time search will be restored

Tweetie Offers a Rich Twitter Experience On Your iPhone:




TweetDeck - Adobe Air App for Twitter Power Users:



Track is working internally at Twitter.
The Summize engineers are working to perfect Track.
When it’s perfect they will ship it.


http://www.techcrunchit.com/2008/12/17/why-track-will-be-back-fred-wilson-says-so/






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Advergame: Dash of Destruction



The game is a modern retelling of the old "dinosaurs vs. Doritos delivery trucks" fable that we all loved as children. You play from both sides. As the T-Rex, you scamper around and through a city, destroying buildings as you attempt to eat Doritos trucks. At the end of every level, you receive an enhancement, like a metal face that lets you bash through buildings. Eating enough trucks ends the level


http://www.giantbomb.com/news/advergaming-at-its-most-honest/687/

http://www.giantbomb.com/dash-of-destruction/61-24825/

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Amazon uk