We knew Zynga’s Facebook game CityVille was a hit if the company ever had one (and it’s had several already) but the growth that it is displaying is simply mind-blowing.
Last week, the Sim City-esque game logged about 61.7 million monthly active users, effectively eclipsing its other hit game, FarmVille. Today, CityVille is at close to 72.5 million monthly active users, which means that it has already outgrown FarmVille (which boasts roughly 57,4 million monthly active users) by more than 25 percent. → Read More
Inspired by a tweet from First Round Capital VC Charlie O’Donnell (“Can someone hack a Foursquare app that cc’s my checkin photos to Flickr?”), developer Benny Wong has created Flicksquare, an app that takes advantage of Foursquare’s recent enabling of photo check-in features, allowing you to also send your Foursquare photos to Flickr.
While Foursquare gave lip service to working on the Flickr and Facebook export capability a couple of weeks ago, Wong has beat it to the punch. → Read More
Earlier this week, some folks over on the XDA developers forum got their hands on a leaked test build of a revamped Android music player. This evening the footage was spotted by Engadget, and now the word is spreading like wildfire: Android is going to get a default music player that isn’t totally mediocre.
Alright, maybe I’m being a little harsh — the music player that ships with the stock build of Android can play music just fine. But it’s also underwhelming, especially when compared to the iPhone’s much slicker music application. It’s drab and there’s nothing like Apple’s Cover Flow — but all that’s changing. → Read More
Shhhh… baby is learning Haskell. via ShortForm → Read More
Continuing today’s theme of scouring Quora for interesting nuggets of information, a Q&A about Mozilla’s Firefox Mobile browser is of some interest. In response to the question: Will Firefox Mobile ever be released for iOS devices?, Mobile Firefox developer, Matt Brubeck, this morning gave his answer.
First, he gave the obvious and fairly well-known official answer, “We have no plans to release the full Firefox browser for Apple iOS devices,” Brubeck wrote. Why? Because the current iOS SDK agreement forbids apps like Firefox from including their own compilers and interpreters, Brubeck explains. → Read More
Let’s say you want to find that perfect quirky little black dress for New Year’s? Like a mashup of Etsy, Flickr color search, and Google Instant, Glancely lets you search Etsy visually, sorting instant results by color and by price so you can scan through multiple green knit caps or purple socks or whatever handmade items your heart desires. Hold your mouse over an item to get a closer look and click on an item to go straight to its Etsy profile. → Read More
This thing makes me want to go loot some ancient temple, then stop and have a panini on the way out. Of course, I’m a sucker for waxed canvas, but you have to admit this Artifact lunch sack handsome object. It costs $45, which is a bit much for giving to a young’un with a habit of losing things, but it’s a great option for reducing your own brown paper bag usage. You still want to have a few bags around for taking 40s to the park, but for actual lunching, this is a good bet. [via Uncrate and A Continuous Lean] → Read More
Although the specs on this LG HDTV pretty much put it at the head of its class (72 inches, 3D-ready, local-dimming LEDs, 400Hz (barf), in-TV access to local and remote content), I just don’t like the look. Am I crazy? I just think it’s kind of gaudy-looking. I think I’m more of a thin-bezel wall-mount kind of guy. That little crystal base isn’t doing it for me. They’ll be showing off the LZ9700 at CES, though, so we’ll get a better look then at what they’re claiming is the word’s biggest something or other. Every device out there now is the world’s somethingest these days. → Read More
If there’s any justice in this world then “traitorware” will become the phrase of 2011. It describes any technology, be it hardware or software, that betrays its users. Remember the Sony rootkit fiasco from a few years back? You pop a CD into your computer expecting to listen to some rubbish band, and then you’ve got a nice rootkit on your system, sorta like a bonus feature of the album. “INCLUDES THE HIT SINGLE ‘BABY YOU FINE’ ALONG WITH MALICIOUS SOFTWARE THAT YOU COULDN’T UNINSTALL IF YOUR LIFE DEPENDED ON IT!” You’d need a pretty big sticker to fit that, though. → Read More
Like most little kids, I used to love getting things in the mail. And in the 1990s, I was lucky enough to get something new every single day. Sadly, 99.9 percent of those were install discs from AOL. If you lived in the United States in the 1990s, you remember these. They started as 3.5-inch floppies and transitioned into CDs. And I’m not exaggerating. I got one just about every single day. You’ve got mail, indeed.
If nothing else, it was ingenious marketing for AOL. While people eventually started bitching about getting spammed by the discs, most of those people probably also installed them at least once and checked out the service. So how much did that cost AOL?
“A lot,” says CEO at the time, Steve Case. Case himself took to Quora recently to answer the question: How much did it cost AOL to distribute all those CDs back in the 1990′s? → Read More
MyDVDInsider has an interesting interview with Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood lead writer Jeffrey Yohalem. Yohalem describes his inspirations in the filmic arts and includes titles like Avatar and There Will Be Blood (!!!) but how’s this for a surprise inspiration? → Read More
It’s not every day you see how the sausage is made. This is how Leica puts together their famous M9 camera – by hand, all done by men in white lab coats. It’s an impressive bit of engineering to be sure and pricing aside, this is an incredible camera. Click through for one more walk-through video. → Read More
Over two years ago I wrote about a startup called StyleHop that set out to identify hot fashion items through the use of casual games — instead of having to fill out a survey or poll, it would generate fashion recommendations based on how you played these games. Unfortunately, that didn’t work out (nor did the startup’s second business plan) and today the company is announcing that it will be shutting its doors early next month.
Some of the company’s struggles stem from the financial meltdown of 2008 — founder David Reinke explains that after raising some seed money, StyleHop was planning to close a Series A in October 2008, which happened to be right when Sequoia’s RIP: Good Times was making the rounds. → Read More
While they’ve tried to be pretty hush-hush about the specifics, HTC and Verizon have made it pretty dang clear that they plan to launch a 4G phone at CES — and unless the rumor mill is way, way off, it’ll be the handset thus far known by its rumored codenames: the Incredible HD, or “Mecha”. Neither of those names really captures the 4G spirit, though. Incredible HD implies the phone’s big selling point is its screen; Mecha just conjures up images of super rad robots. You know what name really says “fast”? Lightning. Crap! Dell already used Lightning as a codename! Go-go-gadget-synonym! → Read More
Remember back in September, when webOS “sort of” clicked past the 5,000 app mark? The “sort of” was because that number included unofficial and off market apps, like the stuff in the Beta catalogs or available via homebrew repositories. In other words, it was flubbing the numbers a bit. Just shy of three months later, webOS has now passed 5,000 apps, no flubbing required. For the numbers geeks: as of October, iOS had around 300,000 applications, while the Android Market was at around 100,000. Since launching in October (2 months ago), Windows Phone 7 has climbed from 0 to roughly 4,800 applications, while it’s taken Palm nearly a full year to climb from 1,000 to 5,000. → Read More
Over the weekend, a interesting demographic survey of over 6000 4Chan users made the rounds of 4Chan, Reddit and Hacker News. While if anyone is going to skew a survey it’s 4Chan users, the Google document with the responses given a lot of Internet ink, lauded for being “bracingly honest.” → Read More
It begins: the first Android media player worth a hoot is coming from Samsung around CES time. The 4-inch device has front and rear cameras and – get this – a removable battery. It will run Android 2.2 and includes Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and a MicroSD slot. This looks totally like a hackers dream. I’d buy one just to mess around with it. A few more specs after the jump. → Read More
Like many people, I’ve been holding out for the iPhone to arrive on Verizon before upgrading. It’s been a long wait, and now that my wife has an iPhone 4 she got for Christmas (on AT&T), my iPhone 3GS is really starting to look dated. Fortunately, it looks like Apple’s component suppliers in Taiwan are gearing up to ship 5 million to 6 million CDMA iPhones to Verizon in the first quarter, according to DigiTimes.
Verizon has a CDMA mobile network, as opposed to AT&T’s GSM-based network. So if you know the components, you know which networks the phones will work on. We first reported last August that Apple was developing a CDMA iPhone set for a January ship-date. The DigiTimes report is the latest piece of evidence that this will indeed happen. → Read More
Visible Light Communication is a data trasmission protocol that uses visible light to send data at 3 Mbps using LEDs and special models. The system works by modulating the LED lighting in your home or office. → Read More
Did Santa give you an AMD Radeon HD 6950 this year? Good news: he actually gave you a 6970! It turns out that with a few clicks of your mouse you can unlock your 6950 so that it runs at 6970 speeds. Nice! → Read More
