Eidos' highly anticipated Batman: Arkham Asylum is due to hit stores on August 25. The action title, which will be available on PS3, Xbox 360, and PCs, follows the caped crusader as he takes on the likes of Joker, Poison Ivy, and other supervillains. Several new screenshots surfaced at E3 2009.
SolarCity said it has the funds to further finance its solar panel leasing offering.
The Foster City, Calif.-based company on Wednesday said it has secured tax equity funding through U.S. Bancorp Community Development Corporation, the second fund created with the U.S. Bancorp division.
First Solar panels installed by SolarCity in Berkeley Hills, California.
(Credit: SolarCity)SolarCity is one of a handful of companies that offer financing options for homeowners and businesses to install solar electric panels.
Rather than pay the large up-front cost of solar, consumers pay a monthly fee and can anticipate lower monthly electricity bills. In some cases, the solar installer owns the panels and the consumer leases the panels for 20 years.
SolarCity now offers its financing option in California, Oregon, and Arizona. With the fund, the company plans to hire another 100 employees over the next six months.
The solar industry overall has been hit hard by a dearth of tax equity funds to finance solar projects. Because corporate profits have dipped, fewer banks are able to create a fund based on tax credits, which is how renewable energy projects in the U.S. have traditionally been subsidized.
SolarCity said its two tax equity funds were the only ones created this year to finance residential solar.
Microsoft faces several tough problems in trying to market Bing, its revamped search engine.
The first issue, is of course, that Google has become essentially synonymous with search.
"Google is so much a part of everyday culture," said Danielle Tiedt, general manager for marketing in Microsoft's online unit. "It is the verb. If you talk about search you talk about Google."
The second issue, also a thorny one, is that people tend to think they are pretty happy with search. When they have problems, they tend not to blame their search engine or look for alternatives, Tiedt said.
"We know there is this latent dissatisfaction in the search market," Tiedt said. "When people don't get right search result they thing it's their fault."
Microsoft's huge TV ad campaign, which kicks off on Wednesday, aims to put a name to the problem and pitch Bing as the answer.
"A big part of the campaign is 'It's not just you'," Tiedt said. The ads will run first on CBS' "CSI: New York" and Fox's "So You Think You Can Dance." (Disclosure: CNET News is published by CBS Interactive, a unit of CBS.)
Bing started to be publicly available on Monday, but officially launches Wednesday, following months of development and internal testing. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer showed off the company's effort last week at the D: All Things Digital event in Carlsbad, Calif.
Microsoft isn't saying just how much it is spending on the ad campaign, though advertising trade magazines have estimated it at between $80 million and $100 million.
"Obviously, we are spending a significant amount of money," Tiedt said. "We're trying to get entered into the conversation of search. We are spending enough money that people (will) have heard of us."
The initial video spot will run for about two weeks, followed by more lighthearted ads that try to illustrate the challenges of search today. The next wave of ads, Tiedt said, are dramatizations of what it would be like if people had to talk to their partners or friends the way they do to a search engine. They get back responses that have the same words as their question, but nothing at all to do with what they asked.
Next month, Microsoft will start doing more product-specific TV ads that look at specific areas such as travel search.
An online ad push also starts Wednesday, with Bing ads on the front of MSN.com. The ads will move throughout the Web and Microsoft is also doing some things on Facebook and Twitter, including a photo contest where the community will get to choose a winning photo to become the backdrop for Bing itself on a particular day.
The TV spots are being done by JWT, while Microsoft's Razorfish unit created the online ads.
The original God of War helped spur sales of the PS2. Now Sony's hoping God of War 3, the first version of the franchise to hit the PS3, will deliver a sales jolt to that console. Some new screenshots and a rather gory trailer showed up at this year's E3. (Note: the latter half of the screenshots in the slideshow originally appeared in February).
Additional reading: Dan Ackerman's Take on God of War 3.
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The explosion in social networking may be even greater than imagined. The time that people in the U.S. spend on social network sites is up 83 percent from a year ago, according to a report from market researcher Nielsen Online.
Facebook enjoys the top spot among social networks, with people having spent a total of 13.9 billion minutes on the service in April of this year, 700 percent more than in April 2008, Nielsen said. Minutes spent on Twitter soared a whopping 3,712 percent to almost 300 million, versus around 7.8 million from the same month a year ago.
Former top dog MySpace watched its usage drop nearly one-third to around 4.9 billion minutes, from 7.2 billion in April 2008. MySpace still scored the number one spot for online video among the top 10, thanks to its users streaming more than 120 million videos from the site for April of this year.
"We have seen some major growth in Facebook during the past year, and a subsequent decline in MySpace," Jon Gibs, Nielsen's vice president for online media and agency insights, said in a statement. "Twitter has come on the scene in an explosive way perhaps changing the outlook for the entire space."
But the report also offered a cautionary note: the social networking user can be fickle, quickly bouncing from one service to another. "Remember Friendster? Remember when MySpace was an unbeatable force? Neither Facebook nor Twitter are immune," said Gibs. "Consumers have shown that they are willing to pick up their networks and move them to another platform, seemingly at a moment's notice."
Despite its growth and popularity, Twitter may be especially vulnerable to users who don't stick around. Another Nielsen report from April found that 60 percent of Twitter users--dubbed Twitter Quitters by the media--abandon their tweets after only one month of use. Only about 30 percent of users on MySpace and Facebook jump ship.
Your Spandex tights or car dashboard in the future will be made out of sugar cane rather than petroleum if start-up Genomatica succeeds on its plans.
The San Diego-based start-up on Tuesday said that it has reached a technical milestone in converting sugar--derived from sugar cane or beets--into an industrial plastic called 1,4-butanediol, or BDO. It's a material that's used in the auto, apparel, and pharmaceutical industries for a variety of uses.
Coaxing little bugs to do some heavy lifting.
(Credit: Genomatica)Genomatica uses a genetically modified strain of E.coli bacteria to convert sugar water into BDO through fermentation. On Tuesday it said it demonstrated that it can remove impurities from that fermented brew to make a 99 percent concentrated version of BDO.
"We're using a process that will continue to allow the overall economics of making BDO from sugars to be cost advantaged," said Genomatica CEO Christophe Schilling. "Not only do we purify it, but we purify it in a way that will allow us to use technologies known to scale."
Schilling said that at the current price of sugar and $50-per-barrel oil, the process is 25 percent cheaper than petroleum-based BDO. The cost advantage will attract customers, which are also interested in finding a plant feedstock that has a less volatile price than oil, he said.
The company plans to build a demonstration facility next year that will produce about one ton of BDO a day. A commercial-scale operation would 20 to 100 times larger.
Biological-based chemical manufacturing is poised for greater adoption in part because of volatile fossil fuel prices and because consumers are demanding products made from renewable materials, Schilling predicted. He noted that DuPont is using a fermentation-based process to make 1,3-propanediol (PDO), another industrial plastic.
If successful with its demonstration facility, Genomatica expects to license its technology to other chemical manufacturers.
Schilling said the company has plans for making other chemicals, using a suite of software modeling tools that speed up discovery of ways to manipulate microorganisms to make a desired product.
On Saturday, Tetris, the famous falling-blocks puzzle game, turns 25.
Ah, the good ol' days of Tetris.
(Credit: The Tetris Company)Tetris was created by Russian programmer Alexey Pajitnov in June 1984. He had an immense love for puzzles, and he felt compelled to create a game that allowed players to arrange distinctive puzzle pieces along the bottom of a field or "matrix." Pajitnov chose the name Tetris by combining the words "tetromino" and "tennis."
The game was first made available on the IBM computer. It quickly enjoyed popularity and was ported to a variety of other platforms. In 1987, it became a major hit in the United States.
But it wasn't until Nintendo released its version of Tetris for the Game Boy in 1989 that Tetris reached critical mass. According to The Tetris Co., the Game Boy version of Tetris sold more than 35 million copies.
Pajitnov made very little money from his popular game during that time. Prior to the release of Tetris on the Game Boy, a series of legal disputes ensued over who really owned Tetris. Atari Games, the former Soviet Union government, and Nintendo all fought in court over the rights to the title.
Eventually, Tetris Holding became the exclusive agent for Tetris licensing rights. The Tetris Co. holds the license to Tetris. Since that company's inception, Tetris has made its way online, attracting 1.5 million monthly visitors. The game is available in-flight on 50 airlines worldwide. It's also available on a variety of mobile devices. The Nintendo DS version of the software sold 2 million copies.
And today, Pajitnov is back where he belongs--controlling the legacy of Tetris.
"We have exciting plans for the future of Tetris," Pajitnov said in a Tuesday statement. "We want to make Tetris more accessible to kids, boomers, and busy moms--everyone who enjoys a fun, stimulating, and even meditative short escape from the daily grind."
So what will the future of Tetris hold? Only Pajitnov knows. But if it's anything like the past, I'm sure that it will be just fine.
Pajitnov's game left an indelible mark on the lives of millions of gamers. It was the game we all played on our Game Boy. It was the title we had to have whenever a new Nintendo handheld was released. It was, quite simply, one of the few games that started our love affair with games. Along with Super Mario Bros. and Pong, Tetris is one of those games that defined the video game industry during its early years.
And that's why we celebrate the 25th anniversary of Tetris this week. It might not be the most beautiful game. It certainly isn't the most complex game. Even with today's epic story lines and gorgeous graphics, there is little debate over whether it is one of the greatest games ever released.
Happy birthday, Tetris. And thank you.
Flash gaming site Kongregate has a new service launching on Wednesday called the Collabs that lets musicians and artists share their work in the hopes of getting it used in upcoming Flash games. Content creators upload their works directly to Kongregate where it goes into a directory that's curated by several of the site's power users.
The Collabs are not just for developers though. Kongregate users can listen to music and view animations, as well as rate them the same way they're able to do with the service's games. In a phone interview, Kongregate's CEO Jim Greer told me that he wants it to be a place for users to explore and discover new designers and musical artists before they go mainstream. Their input also has the power to get some of the ideas turned into games that they can later play, or sound creations that can go into their favorite games, since the highest rated submissions win cash and the chance to get free home game studio tools.
The new sounds section lets music creators share their work with potential developer clients who can preview a track and maybe license it, or hire them to work on game music.
(Credit: CNET)Casual users who have a game design idea will also soon be able to publish it directly to the art Collabs using built-in tools from Aviary. Using special versions of Raven and Phoenix (Aviary's vector and image editors), which run right on the page, users will be able to create new art that can be sent directly to the Collabs. This functionality won't be live on Wednesday, but Greer says it will be there in a week or two.
To handle all the licensing, each item can be set to one of three creative commons licenses--both for acceptable use and acceptable modification. There is no integrated purchasing system though. Instead, each submitter can be directly contacted by those who are interested in their creations or services. There's also Kongregate's "hook up" forum for developers to hire talent or find testers, or for people looking for work to match up with their skills.
Kongregate continues to grow since launching three years ago. Greer says the site is now adding around 1,000 new games a month, which are entertaining more than 7.5 million monthly unique users. That audience is doubling every six months. The site is still driven by ad revenues, although has recently built in a micropayments system which developers can include in their games. This new system will hopefully generate more Flash game development, which should augment those numbers even more.
User created art, as shown off in Kongregate's Collabos.
(Credit: CNET)
The Apple MacBook Air has remained almost unchanged for a year and a half--a testament to the staying power of its design. So, how will Apple respond to the wave of inexpensive, ultra-thin lookalikes hitting the market over the next six months?
The Air is still a stunning design but its novelty and high price will come under assault as lookalikes flood the market
(Credit: Apple)The Air was a sensation when it debuted in January of 2008. Not that it sold by the boatloads, but the stunning form factor set off an industrial-design frenzy. Ergo, the Dell Adamo and the raft of "ultra-thin" laptops in the hopper as a result of Intel's push to get its "ULV" (ultra-low-voltage) chips in as many glamorous but affordable designs as possible.
The just-announced ultra-thin Acer Aspire Timeline is the writing on the wall. No, it's not the equivalent of a MacBook Air or Dell Adamo but it's close enough to give prospective buyers even more reason to balk at the $1,800-plus price tags attached to those two gorgeous designs.
And other designs are already out there like the 0.78 inch-thick MSI X340 X-Slim, which is, more or less, a photocopy of the Air. And even Lenovo is tempting fate with the 3.5-pound 13.3-inch IdeaPad U350, which will start at $649 and make the $1,900 ThinkPad X301--and the Air--look very expensive.
So, what does an Acer Aspire Timeline get you for $899? Let's take a quick look:
Many of those specifications are a stone's throw away from the Air (and Adamo)--or match it.
So, what will Apple's MBA encore be? Thinner? Lighter? Faster? 3G capable? Dare I say, cheaper? Or a new industrial design that will send all the ultra-thin wannabes back to the drawing board? I'm waiting.
