Hats off to one of the crazy ones. Most wouldn’t endure one tenth of what that boy has.

“It was a game I was playing,” he said. “What is the minimum amount of money I can spend each day to stay alive. You do some crazy things.” Reminded me of when I owned only 3 bags. I wish him good luck.

Hippo, you can have my lunch.

Very cool!

Go Alex, go! :)

Henrik Rinne Behrouz Derakhshan Tan Miaoqing Niklas Kari

It looks like Angry Birds games have been downloaded 1 Bn times.
Very, very proud to be part of this company.

Terry Jones’ (of Monty Pythons fame) book Starship Titanic is finally available for free online!

The free online edition of the book has all the words in alphabetical order.

You probably use YouTube every single day, but it’s not something you think about tweaking the way you do, say, Gmail. Yet YouTube is filled with annoyances, like obnoxious autoplay, intrusive ads, and mind-numbingly stupid comments (to name a few). Here’s how to make YouTube more bearable.

Chrome: Tweak Every Corner of YouTube with the YouTube Options Extension

Chrome users are lucky: You have one amazing extension that fixes all of YouTube’s annoyances and then some. It’s called YouTube Options for Google Chrome, and it can do all of the following things with just a few checkboxes:

• Set the size and/or quality of every video you visit. The viewing size will actually make the video take up more space on the page without going full screen, while the viewing quality will only adjust the resolution each video plays in.
• Hide ads and annotations
• Disable auto-play, though you can enable autoplay for playlist videos if you so desire
• Automatically replay videos when finished (perfect for 10 hour long Nyan Cat sessions)
• Hide the header, headline, video description, comments, video suggestions, footer, and playlist sections of the window. This is great for cleaning out the things you don’t like looking at. You can also automatically expand the video description instead of hiding it, which works great in conjunction with the “hide comments” feature.
• Darken the background of your videos
• Download videos to your hard drive
• Much more

And if that weren’t enough, a lot of these features also work on other video sites, like Vimeo, Dailymotion, Metacafe, Hulu, and lots more. We’ve actually mentioned it before, and it’s still the simplest yet most powerful YouTube tweaker out there, and it’ll single-handedly rid it of all its worst annoyances. If you’re using Chrome, you need this extension.

Firefox, Chrome, and All Other Browsers: Get Rid of Annoyances with the Extensions You Already Have

If you don’t have Chrome, you’re unfortunately not quite as lucky. Most user scripts and Firefox extensions built for these purposes have become obsolete, and are no longer being updated. However, you can still get rid of YouTube’s annoyances with some of the extensions you probably already have. Here’s what you can do.

Hide Annoying Comments: If you’re sick of YouTube comments, you have two choices: use something like YouTube Comment Snob to try and filter out the comments you don’t like, or block the comment section altogether with AdBlock Plus. Both options work fairly well.

Stop YouTube from Autoplaying: The only reliable method I’ve found for stopping autoplay is to just use the Flashblock extension for your particular browser. This will keep all videos from playing until you click on them. Unfortunately, Flashblock blocks all Flash, not just YouTube—and while you can whitelist certain sites, there’s no way to allow Flash on all sites except YouTube. So, it isn’t a perfect solution, but it’ll get the job done, and probably fix annoyances on other Flash-based sites too.

Block In-Video Ads: The best way to block YouTube ads is to use the previously mentioned AdBlock Video extension for Firefox. Unfortunately, it doesn’t keep up very well with Firefox’s rapid release schedule, so it doesn’t currently work with the Aurora or Beta channels—just the stable one. If you’re on Aurora (or you use a browser other than Firefox), you’ll have to resort to AdBlock Plus, which doesn’t work quite as well—you’ll still have to sit through a blank screen for a few seconds before some videos—but it’ll block the other popup ads just fine.

Automatically Play Videos in HD: Unfortunately, there isn’t currently a user script or good Firefox extension to manually set the quality for your videos, but there is the YouTube High Definition extension, which will automatically play each video at the highest possible resolution. This is annoying if you’d rather play at 720p than 1080p, but it’s either that or you manually set it yourself, unfortunately.

Do Them All At Once With YouTube Center: Many of you have mentioned the YouTube Center Greasemonkey script in the comments, and it’s a great way to do all of the above with one quick installation. Unfortunately, since it’s a user script, it doesn’t let you customize which settings you use and which ones you don’t, but if you know you want them all, you should use this script. If you want to pick and choose, the above options should still work just fine. Thanks to everyone that sent this in!

Obviously, there are a ton of different YouTube tweakers out there, and we can’t possibly mention them all. But, if you have any of your own favorite tips, scripts, or extensions for dealing with YouTube’s annoyances? Be sure to share them with us in the comments below.

(from Lifehacker http://lifehacker.com/5906775/how-to-fix-all-of-your-biggest-youtube-annoyances-hide-comments-turn-off-autoplay-and-more)

It’s been several weeks since Double Fine raised a record-breaking $3.3 million for its Kickstarter-funded adventure game, and now that development has begun, the studio has revealed that it will develop the project using Zipline Games’ Lua-based Moai Game platform.

The Moai SDK, which went into open beta last year, enables developers to code their games using a single language, and Double Fine says this programming environment will help it more easily create prototypes and launch its game on multiple platforms.

“We like to control every aspect of our games in order to bring [Double Fine founder Tim Schafer's] ideas to life, and because Moai is open source we can change any line of code we need to,” said Double Fine technical director Nathan Martz.

“Plus the fans asked for Double Fine Adventure on five different PC, tablet, and mobile phone platforms, and Moai supports them all with a single core codebase. It was the best choice for us,” he added.

Double Fine plans to release its adventure game in Spring 2013. For more information on the Moai platform, visit its official website.

(from Gamasutra News http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/169585/Double_Fines_Kickstarterfunded_adventure_game_to_use_the_Luabased_Moai_platform.php?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+GamasutraNews+%28Gamasutra+News%29)

A new feature of News.me for iPhone delivers your news to your device whenever you leave the house. It’s called Paperboy, and it uses iOS 5’s built-in geofencing to wake up the app and download fresh news in the background. How cool would it be if your grocery list or your podcasts worked the same way?

Delivery at Your Doorstep

Front-end developer (and Chief Marketing Officer) Jon Ferrer came up with the name Paperboy, and it’s a perfect description. News.me gathers all the news articles shared by your friends on social networks and streams them to you in a clean interface, which you can read on- or offline. Paperboy refreshes the app automatically as you walk out the door, so you’ve got today’s news to read when you pull out your phone.

The background geofencing in iOS is triggered by cell tower changes rather than GPS, so while it’s less precise, it doesn’t consume much additional battery life. With some apps, you’ll notice the slight drop in accuracy: For example, Apple’s built-in Reminders app uses geofencing for location-based reminders, and those can be hit-or-miss. You might want to set a location reminder for a specific store, but it might go off as soon as you enter the neighborhood.

But News.me doesn’t need the precise location of the user, just the signal that he or she is leaving home, so geofencing works brilliantly. “What we’ve learned is that people love the app because they can read it on the subway,” says Jake Levine, general manager of News.me. Thanks to Paperboy, they don’t even have to remember to refresh before they go underground.

Built in a Weekend

“I’ve been trying to figure out some way to implement this idea of having different functionality based on [the user’s location] for a while,” News.me developer Rob Haining says. “I built the original Epicurious iPhone app at Condé Nast, and back then I was thinking about how you’d use the app differently at home cooking versus out shopping.”

Though Haining never got to implement geofencing in Epicurious, the idea had been kicking around for a while by the time he got to News.me: “The idea that you can mark something as your home and provide functionality around it is really interesting. And now, with geofencing, it’s easy to implement something with pretty low cost to battery life, CPU and the user.”

“This is not a feature that was on any roadmap anywhere,” Levine explains. “We were walking home one Friday night. We walked out of the building together, and Rob said, ‘Hey, what do you guys think about updating the news in the background when you leave home?’ ”

“It was nowhere near any of the features we were building,” Levine says, but they all loved the idea. So Haining went home that weekend and built it on his own time. “On Sunday night, we got a build from Rob that said, ‘First version of automatic downloading by location,’ and it worked when I left home on Monday morning.”

Implementing Geofencing

Since geofencing is built into iOS, Haining says implementing it is “pretty straightforward.” Paperboy has two components. The first uses the native map view to drop a pin designating the “home” location. By way of contrast, OmniFocus for iPhone offers a different example of how to set up a geofence; it asks the user to choose an address from his or her contacts.

The other component is the actual geofence trigger when the user leaves that place. In News.me’s case, it detects when the user leaves the “home” area, wakes the app up in the background and downloads the latest news for online or offline reading. Haining says “it’s not too bad” to implement.

For developers, make sure you peruse your App Store review guidelines if you’re building in geofencing. “There’s language in the guidelines about proper use of geofencing, and it’s incredibly vague,” Levine says. The team wasn’t sure Apple would even approve it, but they did: “Whatever the decision process was inside Apple to let this feature through, I think this is a thumbs-up for those guys.”

For detailed instructions on how to turn on Paperboy, check out the News.me blog.

Lead image via Shutterstock.

(from ReadWriteWeb http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/other-apps-could-learn-from-newsmes-location-features.php?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+readwriteweb+%28ReadWriteWeb%29)

Tween girls, or those ages 8 to 12, doubled their game playing time per month in the past year, from 38 minutes a month to 78 minutes, according to a new report from Spil Games.

The report sheds new light on a key demographic group that has become more and more engaged with games with the rise of mobile devices and casual web sites.Tween girls control about $260 billion in spending in the U.S.

The three most popular games on Spil’s girl-related site are cooking, dress-up, and quiz titles. Android phones are becoming increasingly popular among tween girls, accounting for 46 percent of mobile sessions.

Hilversum, Netherlands-based Spil Games has 170 million worldwide users across three major brands. Its U.S. tween site, GirlsgoGames, has more than 7.6 million monthly active users and it was the source of the data. Girls enjoy interacting with the community and they create more than 88,000 pieces of content a day.

For girls, gaming is inherently social, said Floris Jan Cuypers, vice president of corporate development and external communications at Spil Games, in an interview with GamesBeat. They enjoy creating avatars and dress-up outfits. Girls focus on being creative, cultivating friendships and engaging with a community of fans. They play most often on Friday through Sunday, between the hours of 3 pm and 7 pm.

The main sites for girls in the U.S. are GirlsgoGames, Club Penguin, Barbie.com, Kizi.com, and Stardoll.com. According to the report, the top celebrities for girls are Beyonce, Justin Bieber, Angelina Jolie, Miley Cyrus, and Jennifer Lawrence. On GirlsgoGames, the most popular game is Pet Party.

Filed under: games, gbunfiltered

(from VentureBeat http://venturebeat.com/2012/05/01/tween-girls-doubled-their-game-usage-in-the-past-year/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Venturebeat+%28VentureBeat%29)

This post is the first in a three-part series

You’re probably familiar with the purchase funnel, invented in 1898 by the colorfully named St. Elmo Lewis: he proposed that consumers go from awareness to interest to desire to action, gradually reducing the number of options or brands they consider along the way. This has been adopted, with some changes, as the standard across industries. But the funnel model is fading. Decades ago, consumers may have methodically winnowed their choices as the funnel describes. But today’s consumers, barraged by information, are adapting their shopping habits to cope with the noise — and that has profound implications for marketers

In a survey of 7,000 consumers worldwide, we found the funnel is no longer the most common purchase path. In fact, only one third of consumers now use the funnel approach when they shop. Why the decline? The biggest reason, our research shows, is cognitive overload. Consumers are overwhelmed by the volume of choice and information they’re exposed to, and marketers’ relentless efforts to “engage” with them.

Their response to this overload has been two-fold: About 30 percent of consumers now anxiously embark on an open-ended purchase path, adding and dropping brands, caught in a loop and compelled to continue researching alternatives. Meanwhile, another 30 percent abandon the considered search altogether and simply zero in on a single brand. We call this latter path the “tunnel.” In our survey, the majority of tunnel purchasers were buying the product or service for the first time, so this wasn’t an expression of loyalty to a particular brand; rather it was a response to overload, a way to simplify what’s become a frustratingly complicated process. Either way, these 60 percent of consumers are responding to the bombardment in ways that can lead to poorly considered decisions — or no decision at all.

At first blush, the tunnel approach may seem like an efficient strategy that benefits consumers. And it may on occasion. But there’s an important downside: Have you seen the “I want an iPhone 4” video (warning, strong language)? In the animation, a customer insists she wants an iPhone even as the store clerk repeatedly tells her about better alternatives. An electronics store employee made the video to mock Apple fans’ single-minded pursuit of iPhones with no regard for the superior features and benefits of competing products. But that’s precisely the reaction consumers are having to cognitive overload in all purchase categories: self-imposed simplification of the decision process.

Brands suffer as well because tunnel purchase means tunnel vision. What do you do if your product is not the iPhone 4? Well, the fact that these changing purchase behaviors are a reaction to cognitive overload suggests a smart response. Because marketers have some control over the customer’s purchase experience, they can appeal to consumers by, simply, making it simple for them. In fact, we found that the single biggest driver of “stickiness” — customers’ likelihood of following through on a purchase, buying the product again, and recommending it — was, by far, “decision simplicity,” the ease with which consumers can gather trustworthy information about a product and confidently and efficiently navigate their purchase options.

The bottom line: These days making a purchase decision easy is what makes customers choose your brand.

Read our HBR article here to see how savvy brands are making it easy for consumers to navigate and trust information, and weigh options, on the path to purchase. That’s the winning formula for making consumers stick in today’s chaotic marketplace. Or, you can watch customers tunnel right by your product on their way to a competitor’s offering

Learn how simple — or complex — the decision journey is for your customers with this decision simplicity quiz.

(from HBR.org http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/05/what_do_consumer_really_want_s.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+harvardbusiness+%28HBR.org%29)

If reports are to be believed, the first major casualty of Sega Sammy’s restructuring of its loss-making videogame business is an unannounced sequel to 2010 Platinum Games brawler Bayonetta, the 11th game ever to receive an Edge 10 and without question the finest game of its type seen this generation.

read more

(from Edge Magazine – Main feed http://www.edge-online.com/opinion/why-we-need-bayonetta-2)

Doujin = Japanese indie game (loose translation)

I’ve been sitting on this blog post for months now, ever since Megaupload went down, and have kept meaning to put it up. A look at how archives of doujin magazines were lost in the FBI raid, and some interesting homebrew titles which no one seems to have an archive of. Also, anyone who has seen these Doujin Soft magazines will know that a lot of them contain nudity – well there’s none in this blog entry… OK, so maybe there’s a little, but I censored it, and I only include it because there’s a non-existent Atlus connection.

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There’s an almost unimaginable quantity of magazines and books in Japan, documenting every facet of gaming in all its minutiae. DiscoAlucard of HG101 picked up several RPG bookazines while on his previous trip there, and posted scans on the HG101 forums. Some of the console releases will be familiar to those who import, but a lot of the game are mysterious and poorly documented – and so of course they hold a special allure. What I enjoy most about games isn’t the big titles everyone knows are great, but rather the adventure of digging deep to find something legitimately good, and then sharing it online with all three of you who still read my entries.

Here’s something I wrote previously on doujin games. The world of Japanese homebrew is terribly documented in the west; the games extremely difficult to source, and are often available through piracy. So when discovering that there were large bookazine type publications titled “DOUJIN SOFT” parts 1-3, detailing work from the 1980s, I was curious to see what gems they possibly held. Just think about this: 1987 was 25 years ago, a quarter of a century away. These magazines with their photos and listings are likely the best historical archives we’ll ever have for those handfuls of obscure games which people knocked up in their spare time and sold at the Comiket conventions.

Just look at this photo, these hundreds if not thousands of people. The games they’re selling and buying – this snapshot in time existing only in grainy photos and faded memories.

Of course with Megaupload going down so too were the scanned archives of these magazines. Damn!

Anyway, someone PM’d me and pointing me in the direction of three new download links. Here they are (with permission from the gentleman who PM’d me).

Doujin Soft Dai Shuugou
同人ソフト大集合

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

pw: potato98

Word of warning, they contain A LOT of coverage of adult games, and are definitely not safe for work.

Not long after I also stumbled across this forum post from Macaw on the old (now closed) Tokugawa Forums:
—————-
Theres a decent pack of PC88 doujins that have been floating around for years now, but here is a couple of more interesting ones still missing. If anyone can find them please let everyone know!

RaiseDead (1988, Tsukka Software)

Umi no Mukou (海の向こう) (1988, Tsukka Software) – aka海のむこう

Rack88 (1989, Tsukka Software)

AbnormalHour (1989, Tsukka Software)

Tenchiryu no Ken (天地龍の剣) (1989, Cherry Soft/Tomcat)
————–

Looking through the 3 magazine downloads, I found several of them, with photographs (mainly in part 3). Googling the names, even in Japanese, yielded little to nothing. It’s almost as if some of these games have ZERO internet presence.

My personal favourite is Umi no Mukou (海のむこう) by Tsukka Software. Just look at these screens. It resembles an Ys game, of which there can never be too many (one of the most satisfying gaming experiences I’ve had in recent years is actually working my way through the legendary Ys II Special, entirely in Korean). I’ve often gone through my PC88 archives, finding obscure games I’ve never heard of, and just messed around with them. Cryptic, mysterious, and hinting at a complex history which I can scarcely even imagine. It’s not the kind of top-down action RPG which will captivate the younger generation, but I can’t help but feel a fascination seeing it. How many developed it? Who were they? What were their goals and dreams, back in the mid-1980s? Would it prove as much fun or as mysterious as Ys II Special?

Tsukka Soft seems to have a website, but emailing them yielded nothing.

I also found a web-page (NOT SAFE FOR WORK) with emulated screens (it definitely IS emulated), so there are digital copies floating around for Umi no Mukou. The fun now is solving the mystery – will any of us find it?

Even more interesting is a game which Macaw never mentioned: Sorceriman.

There is NOTHING online for this name in English, apart from a single post by myself, on the HG101 forum. What is this game? It looks like a hack of Sorcerian for the PC88. Is it some kind of add-on disk? A homage? (More to the point, why don’t I just read the text?!) There appears to be a massive dude, instead of a party, walking through levels from Sorcerian. Here’s the Katakana: ソーサリマン. Googling it just brings up ladies dressed as Santa Claus. And more porn (FFS!).

This, for me, is what videogames are about (well, not the porn, obviously). Grainy screenshots and wading through foreign text trying to piece things together. I suppose it’s human nature to fight against the inherent entropy of the universe, by saving, archiving and perpetually trying to protect everything – regardless of inherent worth – from inevitable loss. Both piracy and Megaupload helped with this, allowing easy proliferation of material. There are other sources now that MU is gone, of course, and I was even chastised online for lazily relying on it too much. But it still bugs me that in the click of a mouse terabytes upon terabytes were wiped out.

There’s a lot of really, really interesting games out there, which have almost no documentation on them at all. We should talk about them.

Oh wait, I promised you nudity, didn’t I? Here it is! An advert for Penguin in Bondage, featured in the doujin books. And it has Prinnies in it. Given the year it came out, there’s obviously no real connection to Atlus or Prinnies in Penguin in Bondage, but the little blue fellows do have at least a slight, passing resemblance, right? Or perhaps this is just a typically stylised way of drawing penguins and I’m being deliberately obtuse…

(from Hardcore Gaming 101 – Blog http://blog.hardcoregaming101.net/2012/05/lost-doujin-games-nsfw.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+HardcoreGaming101-Blog+%28Hardcore+Gaming+101+-+Blog%29)

Innovation may be an organization’s life blood, but still its success rate in most companies hovers at just 17%. Even innovation leader P&G succeeds less than 50% of the time.

What prevents companies from innovating better? One possibility is that managers don’t really want their people to innovate, no matter what they say otherwise. Take time utilization: How many hours per day, week, or month are you encouraged to think creatively, or work on innovation? Companies like 3M and Google that allow employees to carve off a certain percentage of their paid time for innovation are rare. Most other firms want their people to stay focused on today’s business — and only work on innovation in their spare time. So in the end, it’s a mixed message: “We want you to innovate, but only after you’ve done your real job.”

Based on my experience, there are at least three (largely unintentional) reasons why managers send mixed messages about innovation.

First, managers need immediate results, often reinforced by short-term incentive plans or the regular expectation of earnings improvements. Innovation may take a long time to produce returns, which conflicts with these short-term requirements. So even though managers know that innovation is necessary, most do not have the patience to wait years for results. Consequently, they say that innovation is important, but they don’t back it up with time or resources.

Managers may also fear that innovation will cannibalize current business. I’ve seen managers slow down investments in new products because customers might switch to something less expensive or longer-lasting, or otherwise impact existing results. In other words, while managers might want to disrupt their competitors, they are less comfortable disrupting themselves.

Additionally, managers are often schooled in slow, continuous improvement. Approaches like Six Sigma have helped companies squeeze out inefficiencies, but also tend to reinforce existing processes with an eye towards doing them better. On the other hand, innovation requires messy experiments instead of methodical analysis. As a result, managers who have grown up in a continuous-improvement culture may be uncomfortable with change that doesn’t happen step-by-step.

If you recognize these mixed messages in your organization, here are a couple of ideas for picking up the pace of innovation:

Talk about how innovation is avoided. Politely and respectfully ask your manager or senior team about their commitment to innovation. Share the mixed messages you’ve perceived and provide examples of missed innovation opportunities. Remember that most managers are not intentionally trying to prevent innovation — so discussing the dilemmas will make decision-makers more conscious of them.

Work on innovation with colleagues. Instead of working alone, partner with co-workers to achieve an explicit innovation goal. For example, one divisional leadership team decided to spend every Friday morning focusing on how they could develop business for “the year after.” By carving out the time, and reinforcing to each other the legitimacy of working on something without a short-term payoff, they were able to make more progress than any of them could have made alone.

Obviously, trying to change your company’s innovation culture won’t be easy. But that’s what innovation is all about.

To what extent does your company really want to innovate?

	MORE ON KNOCKING DOWN BARRIERS TO INNOVATION
	Innovators, Are You Applying the Wrong Lessons from Manufacturing?
	Don’t Cripple Innovation for the Sake of This Quarter’s Numbers
	What Doesn’t Motivate Creativity Can Kill It
	Free Your Frontline Workers to Innovate

(from HBR.org http://blogs.hbr.org/ashkenas/2012/05/managers-dont-really-want-to-i.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+harvardbusiness+%28HBR.org%29)

Alternate-reality game designer and researcher Jane McGonigal has launched the first game from her SuperBetter Labs studio — a “gratitude network” game, designed for talk show host and producer Oprah Winfrey.

Oprah’s Thank You Game, available on Facebook, features a large “I said thank you’ button,” with the idea that players take part in daily challenges and send thank yous to each other.

The game is a collaboration between SuperBetter and the Oprah Winfrey Network, with the goal of “spreading the positive emotion of gratitude to half a billion people worldwide.”

McGonigal and SuperBetter director of design Chelsea Howe believe that the game will encourage players to show gratitude towards each other, via social elements and world heat maps.

Sean Baenen, vice chair of SuperBetter Labs, noted, “We had a vision for a social game that resulted in every single person in the United States and Canada feeling truly appreciated for something they’ve done. It was an ambitious project in the field of social media as agency for positive emotions, making Ms. Winfrey the perfect partner.”

McGonigal is a proponent of serious games and positive change in games. She is currently director of game research and development at the Institute for the Future, and has previously written the book Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World.

(from Gamasutra News http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/169503/Designer_Jane_McGonigal_launches_gratitude_network_game_for_Oprah_Winfrey.php?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+GamasutraNews+%28Gamasutra+News%29)

(from Hacker News http://superuser.com/questions/419070/transatlantic-ping-faster-than-sending-a-pixel-to-the-screen/419167#419167)

Portal 2‘s level-editing DLC, the Perpetual Testing Initiative, will push the boundaries of physics and patience on May 8 for PC and Mac, and the above video shows us exactly how. It appears prolific level creator TopHATTwaffle originally uploaded the video but took it down at Valve’s request, and it has since been uploaded by another, less remorseful Internet denizen.

The walkthrough shows a blank map as it switches between edit and playthrough modes, and the ease of creating unique, new Portal 2 levels. The only thing we think it’s missing is the vocal stylings of J.K. Simmons, but we’ll just content ourselves with drinking whisky and yelling at the screen every now and then.

This is how you’ll edit Portal 2 levels originally appeared on Joystiq on Tue, 01 May 2012 16:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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(from Joystiq http://www.joystiq.com/2012/05/01/this-is-how-youll-edit-portal-2-levels/)

Not every startup succeeds. Most persistent entrepreneurs eventually find themselves with a business that is failing or going nowhere. There’s lots of advice about starting a new business and navigating a great exit. People don’t like to talk about less successful endings. But pulling off a safe landing is at least as tricky as taking off. Even if you have to land hard and crunch the landing gear, you can still avoid hurting the passengers and crew.

It’s conventional wisdom (and true) that an entrepreneur who has failed is often better for the experience. But failing badly can hurt your reputation and, in the worst case, saddle you with personal liabilities. We’ll address to major sources of trouble: Unpaid payroll taxes and fiduciary duties.

Pay the Payroll Taxes!
Fortunately, officers and directors of a failing company usually are not liable for the company’s debts. There are some exceptions, and it is crucial to be aware of them. The major exception is payroll and withholding taxes. The responsible officers of a company are personally liable for these. You must pay the payroll taxes and you must pay any amounts withheld from employees’ wages. The government will pursue this liability aggressively. Another exception is employee claims for wages, severance, sick pay, vacation pay, and holiday pay. In some circumstances, corporate principals can be liable for failure to pay employees. Paying your employees their final paychecks (and paying the government the related taxes) will avoid these liabilities.

Notice Conflicts of Interest and Deal with them
You’ve probably heard of fiduciary duties. Directors and officers of a company owe them to the company and, in certain circumstances, its shareholders or creditors. In a growing company, fiduciary duties are usually (and rightly) far down the list of concerns for the officers and directors. That changes when you’re shutting down or selling at a price that won’t make everyone happy. First, when people are unhappy (and especially when some people are more unhappy than others), they tend to point fingers and find fault. Second, a struggling business often makes desperate deals to keep going. These deals can involve difficult conflicts of interest.

Fiduciary duty is a simple concept: When you agree to act in someone else’s interest rather than your own, you have a duty to do just that. The problems mostly concern conflicts of interest rather than outright dishonesty. The law recognizes that people’s decisions are strongly but unconsciously influenced by self-interest. So if you make a corporate decision in which you have a personal interest, the law usually assumes that you decided in your favor and against the corporation’s interests, even if you don’t think you did. The trick is to notice conflicts and find a way to take yourself out of the decision or get someone disinterested to help with it in advance.

So as you wind down, keep a look out for conflicts: the “circling the drain” convertible debt round from a few principle investors, the sale of the company’s IP to one of the founders who’s willing to put up some cash for it and then have another try at commercialization, the sale of the company that will get some money to the preferred stock but none to the common.

We’ll spare you the hellish legal detail. Get good legal advice if you’re facing a conflicted decision. But two simple rules can save you a lot of legal bills:

Get Consensus
First, try to get consensus, after complete disclosure. If everyone knows what’s happening and agrees, it’s hard for them to complain later. There are two major problems with this approach. First, it’s hard to get consensus. Try. Don’t assume that people want to fight. There’s usually not much at stake, and most of the people involved are repeat players — this isn’t their last rodeo and they care about their reputations. If you can’t get everyone, it can help to get nearly everyone, if you get the most likely troublemakers.

The second problem with getting everybody on board is figuring out who “everybody” is. In a faltering startup, “everyone” usually means all shareholders (preferred and common) and all lenders (e.g. convertible note holders). You might want to reach out to other known creditors, such as landlords. Think expansively. You’re trying to cover yourself. So the old adage that it’s better to ask forgiveness than permission doesn’t apply.
If you’re going for consensus, get a lawyer. The point is to make sure people can’t complain later, so it’s important to get the wording and procedure right.

Stay Independent
The old adage “He who pays the piper calls the tune” doesn’t apply to corporate fiduciaries. Directors and officers talk about answering to the shareholders, but the law is clear: They make their own decisions in the interests of the corporation. Corporate directors don’t take orders from anyone. Corporate officers answer only to the board and superior officers.
In normal times, this point is theoretical. If directors and officers don’t listen to major shareholders, they’re replaced. When the going gets tough and the participants’ interests diverge, however, deciding independently can be crucial. A majority shareholder who wants to buy the corporate assets for nothing may scream at you that you have to do what she says because she controls the corporation. So remember that the very worst that shareholder can do to you is remove you from office. If you think about it, that’s usually a reward, not a punishment, in the context of a failing business. With a good employment contract, you might even snag a payday as you leave. By contrast, giving in could get you sued. It will feel uncomfortable, but stiffen your spine and act the way the law expects: Decide independently.

This gets us to the final question of shutting down a business. How do you wind everything down?

Four Ways Out
There are four ways to close up shop. We’ll give a general idea of how things work, but this is not a safe DIY project. Get a lawyer to help you.

1. Walk Away. One way to deal with a failed company is to walk away. If the company has minimal assets and minimal creditors, this approach can work. But if there are assets or creditors, it can leave the directors with liability (for failing to do their jobs), so it is not desirable.

That brings us to the other three ways:

2. Bankruptcy. Bankruptcy is a court proceeding. In a “chapter 7” bankruptcy, a trustee takes over and liquidates. In a “chapter 11” bankruptcy, management remains in control under court supervision. The benefit of bankruptcy is that it stops all lawsuits and creditor collection. It also allows the company to sell assets free of liens and creditors’ claims, which can increase the sales price. Bankruptcy also allows the company, with court approval, to assign certain contracts without the other contracting party’s consent. Finally, shareholder approval is not required to file bankruptcy or to sell assets in the bankruptcy. The downside of bankruptcy is that it can be a long, expensive, and bureaucratic process.

3. Assignment for the Benefit of Creditors. Assignments for the benefit of creditors (“ABC’s”) are similar to bankruptcy. In California, an ABC is a private proceeding, so no court is involved. In an ABC, the company transfers its assets to a neutral third-party in trust for creditors. The assignee sells the assets and pays the proceeds to creditors. ABC’s offer speed and flexibility. The ABC and the assignee’s asset sale are often simultaneous, avoiding any interruption in an ongoing business and preserving the going concern value. An ABC also usually costs much less than a bankruptcy. Finally, there is much less publicity. On the downside, an ABC requires shareholder approval, which can be cumbersome, and the assignee can’t sell the assets free of claims. So an ABC is best if there’s a buyer willing to proceed without a 363 sale.

ABC’s are often used to sell the company’s assets to insiders. Insider purchases raise red flags because they involve divided loyalties. The officers or directors of the seller have a duty to maximize the sales price. But if the same people are also buying, they have an incentive to underpay.

Accusations of a breach of fiduciary duty are a definite risk. An insider buyer can sometimes inherit some of the failed company’s liabilities as a “successor” to its business, if the buyer is a “mere continuation” (i.e. basically the same people using the same assets to operate the same business), or if the transaction is for the fraudulent purpose of escaping the seller’s debts.

Finally, a buyer of assets from a failed company can be exposed to claims to claw back the assets as a fraudulent conveyance. Under fraudulent conveyance law, the failed company’s creditors or its bankruptcy trustee can claw back assets transferred for less than reasonably equivalent value when it was insolvent or lacked adequate capital. The reach back period is two years under bankruptcy law and can be as much as six years under state law. Value is arguable, so fraudulent conveyance law enables the company’s creditors to surface with claims years later.

An ABC with an independent assignee can help address these concerns because the assignee can independently evaluate the fairness of the insider transaction. The assignee can market the assets to other bidders or get an appraisal to validate the price offered by the insiders. Finally, the ABC insulates the buyer against fraudulent conveyance claw backs. An ABC does not offer as high a degree of protection as a 363 sale in bankruptcy but often will be good enough, especially where the sales price is not high enough to justify the expense of bankruptcy.

4. Dissolution. Dissolution means the corporation distributes its assets and ceases to exist. Dissolution (without a prior bankruptcy or ABC) is best when there are enough assets to address known liabilities. We’ll discuss dissolution under Delaware law (which governs most venture-backed startups), but remember that state laws and company documents vary.

There are two basic ways to dissolve a corporation: The board can dissolve by itself, or it can get court approval. Either way, the goal is to pay all known claims, provide for disputed and uncertain claims, give notice to anyone known to have a potential claim, and wait some time for claimants to appear. You always have to wait at least three years before you’re done, but the actual work is usually quicker.

Most liquidating corporations, especially failing startups, don’t go the court route because it’s expensive and slow. The advantage is that court approval can insulate the directors and shareholders from claims they improperly distributed the corporation’s assets and can force resolution of potential claims. But a contested dissolution can be as slow and expensive as a bankruptcy, and bankruptcy provides better protection.

The Confidence to Move On
No one enjoys failing. But doing it right can avoid future problems and enable you to move on. As you start your next venture, you want the freedom to keep your eyes on the road ahead and the horizon beyond, not the rearview mirror.

Ethan Stone is a transactional lawyer, focused on early-stage entrepreneurial companies. He represents clients in company formation and financing (company and investor-side), mergers and acquisitions, technology transactions, executive employment agreements and other transactions. He writes the Stone Business Law Blog.

Bennett Young is a partner at Jeffer, Mangels, Butler & Mitchell focused on insolvency matters. He represents financially distressed companies, their investors and creditors in workouts, restructurings, bankruptcy and related litigation. He also represents buyers of distressed companies.

[Top image credit: mypokcik/Shutterstock]

Filed under: Entrepreneur

(from VentureBeat http://venturebeat.com/2012/05/01/is-your-startup-failing-heres-how-to-exit-gracefully/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Venturebeat+%28VentureBeat%29)

PlaySay has launched a new language learning app on the Apple iTunes App Store that allows people to learn to speak a foreign language using a non-classroom, game-like setting.

The goal of the PlaySay Survival app is to take learning out of the classroom and make learning a language more fun.

You can learn pronunciation by using the app to complete a series of real-world missions in scenarios such as ordering food, introducing yourself, delivering a pick-up line, or asking someone for help.

In the app, which is the culmination of four years of work, you can open a conversation with someone in the network. If you are learning Spanish, the app asks you to say an introduction in that language. If you pronounce the greeting correctly, you can send the message to the other person, who then sends a reply.

San Francisco-based PlaySay uses speech recognition technology from Nuance to evaluate your pronunciation and provide feedback. The app thus enables a conversation between people who are interested in language learning. PlaySay keeps score and tracks your points over time for the phrases you have learned. That adds gamification, or making a non-gaming app more game like.

PlaySay contends that rivals such as Rosetta Stone, Voxy, MindSnacks, and LiveMocha haven’t kept learners engaged with language learning the way that Facebook has with its audience.

PlaySay has also secured a $250,000 funding as a follow-on to its earlier funding. It has also secured a licensing deal with HarperCollins, the largest foreign-language dictionary publishers in the world.

PlaySay has four employees and was founded in 2008. Ryan Meinzer, founder and chief executive of PlaySay, started the company out of his own need to learn Japanese (and speak to Japanese women).

“Technological advances in speech recognition and cloud technologies have enabled us to create this iPhone app that I am most proud of,” Meinzer said. “It will truly change the way people learn and communicate in foreign languages worldwide.”

The company has raised $820,000 to date from Novak Biddle Venture Partners, Kevin Yu (former director of PayPal Japan; and Sean Glass (founder of Higher One).

PlaySay previously tried to improve language learning by communicating in that language via pictures. That didn’t work out so well, since the learning wasn’t verbal and the options for extending the learning were limited. But the company learned a lot and it turned to the speech recognition technology.

Filed under: deals, games, gbunfiltered, VentureBeat

(from VentureBeat http://venturebeat.com/2012/05/01/playsay-gamifies-language-learning/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Venturebeat+%28VentureBeat%29)

(from Slashdot http://yro.slashdot.org/story/12/05/01/1636230/hacked-skype-ip-address-search-shows-whos-speaking-from-where?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Slashdot%2Fslashdot+%28Slashdot%29)

“Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while.” ~ Steve Jobs

It’s compelling to believe there’s a route to true creative thinking, and there are certainly ways to help yourself engage, but many times a great idea will just feel like it came from a simple realization and you won’t know exactly why. While there are certainly more creative people than me, when I’ve had my moments they’ve often been this way. I think I’m able to look at things more creatively because I’ve done so many different things in my life and enjoy exploring what I don’t know. My first few jobs were mowing lawns and working at a grocery store before I started working in offices. After mowing lawns for awhile I started to see how much work went into making everything the way it is in the world, and how all work contributes to the whole. And through the many different jobs that followed, I noticed similarities in most everything I did. Once I started connecting the dots, I found that my creative work benefited. Many creative ideas that came to me early on came from connecting lawn mowing to advertising or bagging groceries to online video. Somewhere in the process of drawing a line between two things that seemed impossibly different was the inspiration for better creative work.

How do you explain your creative realizations (or not)? Share your experiences in the comments.

Steve Jobs; the quotes that touched me | Schiffner via Swissmiss

(from Lifehacker http://lifehacker.com/5906749/creativity-is-just-connecting-things)

With an NFC-enabled Nook, you could “walk up to any of our pictures, any [of] our aisles, any of our bestseller lists, and just touch the book, and get information on that physical book on your Nook and have some frictionless purchase experience. That’s coming, and we could lead in that area,” the US bookseller’s CEO has told Fortune.

Read the rest of Barnes & Noble to add NFC to Nook e-reader at NFC World.

Related news

1. NXP launches NFC reader chip
2. Barcode reader app adds NFC
3. ACS launches NFC reader with interactive LCD display

(from NFC World http://www.nfcworld.com/2012/05/01/315459/barnes-noble-to-add-nfc-to-nook-e-reader/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+nfcw+%28NFC+World%29)

As it seeks to diversify its game portfolio and revenues, Zynga announced today it has begun promoting the games of third-party platform partners.

Zynga announced in March that it would start publishing games made by outside developers. The first game to be promoted is Row Sham Bow‘s Woodland Heroes game on Facebook. The idea is to generate more users for the developers by cross-promoting their games across Zynga’s network, which has has

Rob Dyer, head of platform partners at Zynga, said the company has begun testing an important part of the Zynga Platform for its partners.

“We’ve begun adding Woodland Heroes to select Zynga games via our zBar, the bar that sits above Zynga games on Facebook and promotes other games in our network,” Dyer said. “Row Sham Bow’s also added Zynga’s zBar across the top of Woodland Heroes to help its players discover even more games.”

The program is still in beta testing. Zynga’s other partners include MobScience, Rebellion, Sava, and Konami.

“We intend to drive traffic and test promotions in ways that ensure the best experience for players and our partners,” Dyer said. “It’s also an area we’re continuing to work with our partners to refine. Driving players to try out new social games is one thing, but the trick is making sure they stick around; that’s where some of our upcoming tools to increase social engagement come in.”

Dyer added, “This also marks just the start of traffic and revenue generating tools that we’re implementing for Zynga Platform partners. We’ll soon roll out more promotions across our network for some of our other early partners, so stay tuned.”

Filed under: games, gbunfiltered, VentureBeat

(from VentureBeat http://venturebeat.com/2012/05/01/zynga-starts-promoting-third-party-partner-social-games/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Venturebeat+%28VentureBeat%29)

(from Slashdot http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/12/05/01/1957219/mit-tetris-hack-source-code-released?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Slashdot%2Fslashdot+%28Slashdot%29)

True story (again).

Good move from Facebook

As we reported earlier, Facebook has today rolled out a new feature that allows users in the US and UK to share that they’re an organ donor on their Timelines. ABC News has now released an interview with Mark Zuckerberg that explains more about the thinking behind its introduction.

Zuckerberg says that having seen how Facebook users were utilising the platform to solve social issues after disasters such recent tornadoes in Missouri and last year’s earthquake and tsunami in Japan, the company was spurred to do something more directly.

Why organ donation? The on-the-job experiences of Zuckerberg’s student pediatrician girlfriend Priscilla Chan were a big factor, the company’s CEO says, along with seeing the effect a liver transplant had on extending the life of his friend Steve Jobs. “That definitely, I think, was something that we all had in mind as we were building this out… His story is just one of many, of people who both were able to have an organ transplant that made his life longer and he was extremely thankful for that,” Zuckerberg told ABC News.

Zuckerberg admits that this won’t change things overnight, but he believes that it will help convince people who are undecided about registering to donate their organs to do so.

You can watch a clip of the interview below:

(from The Next Web http://thenextweb.com/insider/2012/05/01/zuckerbergs-girlfriend-and-steve-jobs-liver-transplant-inspired-facebooks-new-organ-donor-feature/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TheNextWeb+%28The+Next+Web+All+Stories%29)

The toy…

MCV is the leading news site for the game industry. Check out our news, press releases and interviews.

(from The game retail industry according to MCV http://www.mcvuk.com/news/read/toys-r-us-facing-financial-struggle/095307?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+mcvuk%2Fstream+%28MCV%3A+Home+Stream%29)

In an effort to reduce male patron’s messiness (and grab some cash from locales not necessarily associated with gaming) Sega’s Toylets can now be found in restrooms across Japan — and even in a handful of cities overseas. You won’t need to make the laborious trek to your nearest bar or arcade to beat the high score any more, however, as Sega’s now put the urinal games terminal up for sale to (Japanese) Joe Public. A sensor at the base will detect pressure and, er, volume which acts as the controls. A screen at eye level will show your progress, and you can expect several short-but-sweet games in the style of Rhythm Tengoku or Warioware. It all comes a price though — you’ll need to stump up 140,000 yen (around $1750) for the device itself and 10,000 yen ($125) a piece for games. The porcelain is (unfortunately) not included.

Continue reading Sega urinal game ‘Toylets’ goes on sale to general public, sink companion still missing (video)

Sega urinal game ‘Toylets’ goes on sale to general public, sink companion still missing (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 01 May 2012 07:14:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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(from Engadget http://www.engadget.com/2012/05/01/sega-urinal-game-toylets/)