Welcome to the Engage Digital Wrap-Up for the week of December 23, 2010. The Wrap-Up is where Engage Digital spotlights stories that we didn’t get to cover individually, but still make for interesting reading about the business of user engagement. This will be Engage Digital’s last news post of the year. We will return to [...]
Rovio has pushed out an update to the original Angry Birds, version 1.5, which includes 15 new Western-themed levels and the game’s first in-app microtransaction, the Mighty Eagle. It should be noted that version 1.5 of Angry Birds is distinct from the “Angry Birds Seasons” version of the game, which receives level packs themed around [...]
Tencent, publisher of the lucrative Chinese IM service QQ, plans to release its own branded Android smartphone. The phone will be manufactured by Huawei, called HiQQ, and come with 19 Tencent applications preloaded. This will include QQ, a Tencent mobile browser, and a Tencent microblogging service. Tencent hasn’t announced a launch date or price point [...]
The Edmonton Oilers hockey team is launching a virtual world for young fans called Rinksters, in conjunction with developer Visimonde. The virtual world is aimed at children aged 6 to 12 and features customizable avatars, chat rooms, virtual currency, mini-games, and virtual collectible trading cards. Rinksters is also partially educational in nature, designed to help [...]
Second Life creator Linden Lab has named Rod Humble its new CEO. Humble comes to Linden from Electronic Arts, where he served as Executive Vice President of the EA Play label. EA Play is the label that published The Sims and its various sequels. Humble is a 20-year games industry veteran who has worked on [...]
Nexon America’s MapleStory keeps hitting new milestones. On December 22nd, the freemium MMORPG hit 136,000 concurrent users, more than double the title’s previous peak concurrency milestone. The new traffic seems to be driven by MapleStory’s ongoing “Big Bang” updates. The two “Big Bang” updates released to date have overhauled the game’s beginner experience and added [...]
Peanut Labs has released data from a survey of social and casual game players which indicates that two-thirds of them would be happy to accept virtual goods as a holiday gift. Over half of the survey’s respondents had bought virtual goods as a gift for someone else. A quarter of respondents said that they would [...]
The virtual world for kids Poptropica has launched its newest island, “Cryptids Island,” for subscribing members. Free players will have access to Cryptid Island beginning on January 17, 2011. Players who visit Cryptid Island will search for creatures like the Loch Ness monster, the Yeti, and the Jersey Devil. Players will be attempting to outrace [...]
Forrester Research has issued a new Mobile Augmented Reality report which argues that most augmented reality apps on smartphones now don’t deliver true augmented reality. Report author and Forrest Research Senior Analyst Thomas Husson argues in an accompanying blog post that true augmented reality technology involves object recognition and computerization happening in the mobile device, [...]
UK institution University of Sunderland will take part in a study called eCUTE (Education in Cultural Understanding, Technology Enhanced) that will use virtual worlds to help study how children and young people respond to culturally different behavior in a virtual world. The study’s virtual world will use “intelligent characters” that display various types of different [...]
Tech Career Expo SF Bay
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Recent Posts
- First 17 Tech Career Expo San Francisco Participating Companies Announced
- San Francisco Tech Career Expo to Bring Leading Employers Together with Top Technology Talent on June 28-29, 2012
- Reddwerks Presents iPads to Top Candidates Recruited from Tech Career Expo
- 10 Reasons Why You Need to be at Digital Kids
- Speaker Lineup Reaches 95 with YogiPlay, Electrotank, Bare Tree Media CEOs and More
- Digital Kids Registration Ends this Friday
- Ink New Partnerships at Digital Kids
- An Interview with Joby Otero, VP of Art and Technology & Creative Director for Product and Brand, Activision & Skylander
- Universal Pictures, Lego, Microsoft, National Geographic and More Bring Digital Kids Speaker Lineup to 80+
- Digital Kids Conference Call for Volunteers
" @AnatHovavEsq please follow us at @DigitalKidsCon. Formerly Engage! Expo, we've re-branded to Digital Kids Conference, April 25-26 in L.A. " — engageexpo
