United Gamer Online (UGO)

by Mike Smith
Buzz up!

April 29 2:59 P.M.

We thought we were pretty hot at Bejeweled 2.

But we've got nothing on steel contractor Mike Leyde, of Riverside, CA., who managed to score so many points, he broke the game.

Leyde became the first person in the world to reach the game's maximum score of 2,147,482,575, after which the game simply can't process any more points. It took him over 2,000 hours of gameplay -- the equivalent of about three straight months of 24/7 play -- to amass the score, which the game's makers, Popcap, had thought impossible to reach.
"While developing Bejeweled 2, we debated endlessly whether it was even possible to best the 2.147 billion 'maximum' score," said Popcap co-founder John Vechey. "We deemed it impossible...and thus kept the cap at 2,147,482,575 knowing we were safe."

Safe, that is, until Leyde came along. His winning score saw him collect over 4.8 million gems and reach the game's 439th level, though his three-year commitment is apparently par for the course for the skilled gamer.

"If you're going to invest time in something, you might as well be as good at it as you possibly can," Leyde said. "I really enjoy the thrill of victory – like when I won my first stock car race or when I bowled a perfect 300 game."

Although Leyde actually completed his feat in March 2009, Popcap wanted to be sure it was genuine before crowning him King Bejeweled.

"We took some time in validating the score to make sure it was real," a rep told us -- and holding off on the record-breaking news let the achievement be part of Bejeweled's 10th anniversary celebration, which happens this month.

by Ben Silverman

While that may sound ludicrous to old-school Scouts, the new "Video Game" award is intended to make Tiger, Cub and Webelos Scouts more responsible gamers.

Rather than shooting their way to success, they'll have to accomplish a number of far more mundane tasks to earn the new belt loop and pin, such as explaining the importance of the video game ratings system, working with an adult to build a schedule that includes chores, homework and gaming, and playing a game designed to boost math, spelling or other school-oriented skills. Belt loops and pins are the cub scout/webelo equivalent of merit badges for boy scouts.

Of course, earning the game award involves playing games, too. Scouts will have to show their shopping savvy by comparing games at different retailers for the best prices, install a gaming rig, and -- toughest of all -- play a game with a friend for one hour. Is there a statute of limitations on getting Cub Scout pins? Because I earn this one pretty much every day.

To be fair, the requirements do seem to fall in line with the overall Boy Scout mission of being a responsible citizen. And with harsh language and intolerance plaguing online gaming, anything that helps instill good sense into young gamers is okay in my book. You can check out the full list of Video Game award requirements here.

So does gaming has a place in the Scouts, or should they pull the plug on this in favor of more traditional outdoor activities? Earn your 'Commenting' badge and sound off!

Published: Thursday, 29 Apr 2010 | 11:09 AM ET
By: Chris Morris
Special to CNBC.com

Bungie Studios, the development house behind one of the most successful franchises in video games, has found a new home—and Activision may be on the verge of having its third billion-dollar franchise.
Bungie and Activision Blizzard [ATVI 11.26 0.33 (+3.02%) ] on Thursday announced a 10-year exclusive partnership that will bring the next franchise from the creators of “Halo” to the company behind “Call of Duty” and “World of Warcraft.”

For the past 10 years, Bungie has made games exclusively for Microsoft [MSFT 31.003 0.093 (+0.3%) ].

“This partnership is great for Activision because it strengthens our long-term growth prospects,” says Thomas Tippl, chief operating officer of Activision Blizzard. “Our unprecedented partnership with Bungie will enable us to broaden our pipeline of exciting new games as we continue to strengthen our industry position and pursue long-term growth opportunities.”

Bungie was a Microsoft-owned studio until 2007, when it successfully negotiated a split from the company. The separation is widely viewed as one of the most amicable developer/publisher breakups in the industry’s history.

Activision, of course, is on the opposite side of that coin, with the acrimonious split from several key staffers at its Infinity Ward studio (creators of the “Call of Duty” franchise).

Both the former studio heads and a coalition of 38 other employees (both former and current) are suing the company for hundreds of millions of dollars in unpaid bonuses. And Jason West and Vince Zampella, who founded Infinity Ward, recently launched a new studio that will work exclusively with rival Electronic Arts [ERTS 19.80 0.17 (+0.87%) ].

The Bungie alliance is a sign to the video game world that despite the bad press, top developers are still eager to work with the publisher.

“We liken it to the equivalent of signing a 10-year deal with Stephen Spielberg,” said Ben Schachter, an analyst with Broadpoint AmTech. “More importantly for the stock, in our view, is that the announcement should put to rest any concerns about whether the well-publicized issues at Infinity Ward would limit Activision’s ability to attract key developers.”

The “Halo” games are largely responsible for the success of Microsoft’s entry in the console space, having generated more than $1.5 billion in revenue and sold more 25 million copies. Fans have played more than 2 billion hours of the series’ multiplayer component—the equivalent of more than 228,000 years.

Everything Bungie has done in the console world has been an Xbox exclusive so far. That will change with this next franchise, however. The agreement gives Activision the right to publish all of Bungie’s games in the new franchise on multiple platforms and devices—meaning it’s a virtual certainty the game will appear on Sony’s [SNE 35.34 0.64 (+1.84%) ] PlayStation 3 and quite likely on an Apple [AAPL 268.64 7.04 (+2.69%) ] device.

Bungie will retain the intellectual property rights to its game and remains an independent company. That gives it ultimate control over the look, feel and frequency of new titles in the franchise.

That same issue was part of the sticking point between Activision and the Infinity Ward founders. Activision owns the “Call of Duty” franchise and can dictate when new titles come out. (Bungie and Activision began negotiating their alliance nine months ago, long before the PR nightmare surrounding Infinity Ward began.)

While Bungie has not revealed any details about its next franchise, fans are already eager to see what it has in store. Analysts say they expect the first title to be released no later than the end of 2011. (Bungie will release its final “Halo” game this fall for Microsoft.)

While it won’t have the built-in fan base of “Halo,” Bungie’s new franchise will have a wider potential audience, since it will be multiplatform. That could help it equal or better “Halo’s” sales numbers, which could be particularly important if the fallout surrounding “Call of Duty” begins to impact sales of that franchise.

“It’s probably not worth as much as the ‘Call of Duty’ brand, but it could supplement any degradation of sales in that franchise,” says Michael Pachter of Wedbush Securities. “The Bungie guys are pretty good with 10 million unit selling games.

The question is: Can they do 15 or 20 million—‘Halo’-like numbers—with this next franchise? Maybe they won’t hit $1 billion with a single game, but with the franchise? Definitely.”

April 28, 2010 Dean Takahashi


Virtual worlds, those fully-formed, three-dimensional renderings of the real world, are waning as apps take off on social networks and mobile phones. But the mother of the virtual-world craze, Second Life, is bucking that trend and growing.

What’s more, Linden Lab’s Second Life virtual economy is adapting to the new business model of virtual goods. Last year, in the midst of the recession, Second Life’s virtual goods economy in user-to-user transactions was $567 million, up 65 percent from the year before. And in the first quarter, the growth continued, according to Mark Kingdon, chief executive. The world remains the largest user-generated virtual economy.

San Francisco-based Linden Lab is announcing today that March user-to-user transactions topped $57 million. For the quarter, user-to-user transactions were $160 million, up 30 percent from a year ago. The company’s monthly unique user number peaked in March at 826,000, up 13 percent from a year ago. This was at a time when virtual worlds such as There.com, Vivaty and Metaplace were closing down.

“It has been a vibrant market, and has become a full-time job for some people,” Kingdon said in an interview. “We set another record in March.
While user-to-user transactions make money for Second Life Residents, as members are called, they indirectly benefit Linden Lab, which makes money through sales of virtual land, premium subscriptions, and sales of Linden dollars, the virtual currency which Residents use to engage in transactions inside the world.

Kingdon believes that Second Life has continued to thrive because it nailed a particular kind of customer: the creative class. These are the artistic people who have fun creating avatars, or virtual characters, goods, and homes inside the virtual world. They put those goods up for sale, making the world more fun and the economy more vibrant.
On a trip to Paris, Kingdon met a Parisian boutique manager who designed her own fashions in Second Life. She quit her real world job to work on a Second Life business that had partner designers in Japan. Members are creating 250,000 virtual objects a day and are uploading them for sale in Second Life. That’s a long way from the giant beanstalk, which was the first virtual item created in Second Life, back during its beta test in 2003.

On top of targeting a creative class, Linden Lab has poured resources into attracting new users. It is doing a small amount of search engine ads and affiliate marketing deals, and it is also making improvements in its user interface. Back in December, the company started offering homes to new users. With a single click, a user could move into an incredible Japanese home or a cabin in Lake Tahoe.
It has also redone the experience that users have when they first log into the world. On March 31, the company launched a new viewer, which is used to view the world. It was designed to make 3D browsing feel more comfortable for new users and to make it easier to find places in Second Life.

Second Life has come a long way from its hype cycle a few years ago, when everyone in the media from Time magazine on down predicted a huge gold rush for virtual worlds, led by Second Life. Journalists opened up shop in Second Life, as did major corporations. Reuters opened up a virtual bureau and dedicated a full-time reporter, Eric Krangel, to the beat.

Knockoffs proliferated. At one point, there were more than 200 virtual worlds just for kids. Many have collapsed.

Inside Second Life, lots of companies left ghost towns. But about 1,400 businesses remain, and the online voice chat they engage in generates billions of minutes of usage. Companies such as IBM are staging virtual conferences inside Second Life.
“A fair amount of the press left,” Kingdon said. “The customers stayed.”

Even as Facebook grows past 400 million –dwarfing the numbers of Second Life — more than half of Linden Lab’s customers report that they are active on Facebook. Hence, Kingdon argues that Second Life is complimentary to other social media, which generates traffic for the virtual world.

Linden Lab has 350 employees, but they aren’t creating virtual goods for the company to sell. Linden Lab leaves that up to its Residents, while most of the company’s employees work as developers or in customer support. The developers are hard at work on ways to connect Second Life to the social Web more explicitly, so that content created in Second Life can flow into other places.
“Our strategy is to bring more of Second Life out to the Web,” Kingdon said. “The distinctions between Second Life and the Web will blur more and more.”

April 28, 2010






Today Linden Lab announced that Second Life's economy had grown to an all-time high in Q1 2010, defying recent trends toward decline in virtual worlds. Users spent $160 million in user-to-user transactions, a 30% gain year-over-year and a new all-time high. Over half a million Second Life residents were active in the world's virtual economy and over 800,000 unique users logged in repeatedly every month. Second Life continues to be the world's single largest virtual economy, despite the record-breaking sums spent in rival virtual world Planet Calypso.

In its report, Linden Lab attributed its economy growth to several different factors. Perhaps the most important was Valentine's Day, which is usually a major virtual goods-selling holiday. Linden Lab reports that this year's Valentine's Day saw the highest-ever single day sales of virtual goods on the Xstreet SL marketplace.

Xstreet SL sold $2.3 million in virtual goods throughout the quarter, up 82% year-over-year. Xstreet Valentine's Day 2010 sales were up 28% over the previous all-time high for single day sales, Christmas Eve 2009. Linden Lab noted that it made changes to the Xstreet marketplace that made it easier for users to access their L$ balances through the Web interfaces, which drove a 25% overall increase in purchases.

Linden Lab also attributes a major cultural factor to Second Life's growth in Q1 2010, the release of the James Cameron film Avatar. Linden Lab believes the popular film's themes may have sparked new interest in exploring virtual spaces, by making the concept of online avatars easier for mainstream audiences to understand. Avatar was screened widely in 3D, which Linden Lab believes may have driven desire to interact in an online space rendered in three dimensions. Linden cites, as evidence, increased traffic to Second Life's Web destinations and increased search traffic.

Coincidentally, Linden Lab had chosen Q1 2010 to begin an advertising campaign designed to attract new users. Advertisements for Second Life began appearing in Google searches, on Youtube.com, in display ads, and in affiliate website programs. Linden Lab reports that the amount spend on advertising was not significant, but probably acted as a key driver in the overall increase in number of repeated monthly repeat logins that occurred during the quarter.

New Features, New Growth

This quarter saw Linden Lab introduce a new feature, Linden Homes, that it believes increased the overall number of premium subscribers. In particular, Linden Lab states that many Residents reactivated lapsed subscriptions in order to gain access to a Home for their avatar. Linden Lab also believes that Homes helped drive Xstreet purchases during the quarter, with users purchasing furniture items and media players for use in their new virtual living spaces.

Other factors cited by Linden Lab include technology upgrades, like moving critical databases to new generations of server hardware and migrating the Second Life data center from San Francisco to Dallas. Linden Lab believes these moves increased uptime, decreased latency, and overall helped hold onto new and returning users through increased performance.

Linden Lab believes winter seasonal issues like fewer daylight hours may have driven more users into Second Life from northern hemisphere territories. A trend toward declining user hours spend in the virtual world reversed itself, with users spending a total of 116 million user hours in Second Life. While this number is still a 6% decline from Q1 2009, it is a 3% increase from Q4 2009. Linden Lab expects further growth in Q2 2010, driven by ongoing efforts to promote Second Life.

By Jessica Poitevien, Sun Sentinel

4:40 a.m. EDT, April 28, 2010
Ten weeks of intense competition among senior citizens across America has all come down to this: the Spring 2010 Senior Wii Bowling Championship.

The defending champs, SAS Strikers of St. Andrew's Estates in Boca Raton, will face off with The Wood Choppers of Lakeland on Wednesday.

"This time we're up against much stiffer competition," said Duane Webster, 88, a returning member of the SAS Strikers.

More than 800 bowlers from senior living communities in 23 states competed via Skype webcam in the second Nintendo Wii bowling championship hosted by the National Senior League.

This all-Florida showdown will be the culmination of what these senior citizens have been working toward for months. Members of the final two teams practice several times per week with some sessions lasting five hours.

"It's pretty wonderful to have competition at my age," Webster said

Sat, Nov 8, 2008
What’s the most downloaded catalog track in iTunes history? Before you jump out your seat and guess ‘Jack Johnson’, keep in mind that a catalog track refers to a song released in the pre-digital era, but later re-released as a digital download. So any guesses? Here’s a hint: think Power Ballads.

Well, it turns out that the most downloaded catalog track in iTunes history is actually “Don’t Stop Believin” by Journey. In fact, it’s the first catalog song to ever reach 2 Million in digital sales. Originally released in 1981, the song topped the Billboard charts at #8. The song, however, has made a modern day comeback and has become something of a pop culture phenomenon after being featured on popular TV shows such as Laguna Beach, and more famously on The Sopranos.

In fact, after the song was featured on the last episode of The Sopranos, sales of the song on iTunes increased by over 428% in just 3 days. SoundScan has the full scoop over here. And below, check out the final scene from The Sopranos.