The game console and software maker has offered professional-use conversion software to application developers so they can produce smartphone games that can be played on Wii U, a struggling home video game console that helped widen the firm’s operating loss in fiscal 2012.
From the perspective of a smartphone game studio, there is very little incentive to spend the energy converting your game into a WiiU title, when your current market (iOS and, to a lesser extent, Android) dwarfs the number of WiiU customers.
From the perspective of a hypothetical buyer in the market for a games console, there is very little incentive to buy a WiiU based on the fact it has smartphone titles. Demonstrated perfectly by Blackberry, ports never work that well to begin with. They just won’t stand up against the rivalling game selection of Xbox and PlayStation. Moreover, there is a high chance that the prospective customer already owns the game on her phone.
Finally, as you have may have already inferred, from my perspective this sounds like a stupid plan for recovery. I think Nintendo have to admit that they have already ceded the console market. Rather than pleading smartphone developers to convert their apps to WiiU, I believe Nintendo should do the reverse with their own titles.
Please Nintendo, bring your intellectual property (Mario, Pokémon, Zelda) to iOS and exploit the pent-up demand[2] for these brands on mobile.
With its announcement tonight, B&N acknowledges that, in this case, open is better. The company has responded directly to user feedback and will be issuing a software update to its Nook HD and Nook HD+ devices (sorry Nook Tablet and Color owners) that brings Google Play directly to the desktop. The software will come pre-loaded on new devices and will be available as an over-the-air update. If you can’t wait that long, you’ll also be able to download it directly from the bookseller’s site. The update also brings a few other tweaks to the system, but this is far and away the biggest news. The first question we asked upon getting a quick demo: will you be able to buy content like books, magazines and movies through Play? Yep, that’s coming too.
Barnes and Noble sacrificed profit margins on the Nook tablets to encourage purchases through its stores. With the addition of Google Play to these devices, they are, effectively, giving up that revenue stream as well.
If they weren’t before, Barnes and Noble must be making losses on these products now. Why are they bothering to still sell them?
The new operating system includes major enhancements to the Finder application such as tags and tabbed browsing modes
This is slightly out-of-character. I had the impression Apple thought Finder was the wrong way of thinking about managing applications and files, as highlighted by Lion’s Launchpad and Mountain Lion’s iCloud file storage model.
Tabbed browsing, though, seems to be an enhancement that goes against the grain.
As BlackBerry launches its keyboard-equipped Q10 smartphone, CEO Thorsten Heins is once again downplaying the importance of tablets in the mobile market. “In five years I don’t think there’ll be a reason to have a tablet anymore,” Heins told Bloomberg in an interview.
If Heins truly believes that, Blackberry should be preparing the next big thing right now. There are no indications of that being the case.
Initiated by the arrival of Google Glass and magnified by Google’s efforts to promote application development for the product, the global market for smart glasses could amount to almost 10 million units from 2012 through 2016.
They only get away with these predictions, because nobody will recall it in 2016 to criticise how ridiculously wrong it was.
Once it was up, we (at least a hundred of us) got called into a meeting with Steve Jobs. We all walked over to the building like we were headed to the guillotine. He stood in front of us and yelled at us, told us that we should be mad at each other, said we could have done a staggered launch and complained that we didn’t even try to do all the things that we (those on the ground floor of production that actually make the fucking products of the world) had been begging to do. It was the world’s best de-motivational speech.
Without actually being part of the company, it is impossible to say whether Jobs was managing correctly (which Caton refutes later in her story), but I think it’s good to be aware of the more-negative perspective on Jobs — straight from the firing line.
The Apple Store app for iPhone has been updated with a handy little feature that will notify you when you’re eligible for upgrade pricing on a new iPhone. You can even buy your new iPhone directly with the app after receiving the notification since all you need is your Apple ID credentials to do so.
“Put another way, the value lost over this seven-month period exceeds Friday’s closing market capitalization of the third-largest S&P index member, Google Inc., by more than $25 billion!”
And yet, Apple’s market cap is still 50% larger than Google’s. Tough life.
Is Apple secretly searching for a new chief executive to replace Tim Cook? Some Wall Street sources close to some Apple executives say such a move is afoot, although there’s yet no available evidence that the board of the once-mighty top tech-innovator is officially in such a game-changing mode.
Plain and simple, a six-month share price slump is not enough to justify a CEO change, especially when the company runs no debts, posts strong profits every quarter and has no signs of impending financial difficulty.
Marcial is one of Forbes’ “contributors”. From what I have seen, I feel like a more apt title would be “comedians”.
The worst part of this is that FoD could have created something really great. They have the resources and the manpower to produce a truly funny Steve Jobs parody. Others have done it before. Instead, they created this travesty. I feel like the only joke to be found in iSteve is the fact that Funny or Die tricked us into wasting an hour and twenty minutes watching it.
Do not watch this movie.
I watched this today and agree wholeheartedly with Beasley. This film is definitely in the ‘Die’ category.
Today’s Pocket update introduces a completely redesigned Share Menu—and we’re excited to introduce Send to Friend, a simple way to share with anyone without leaving Pocket.
Rather than just showing you a list of social networks, Pocket also shows you people. It makes the experience much more human, rather than the typical dry list of services. This feels like a next-generation interface.
The UI is well done too; the distinction between services and people is made very clear by the iconography. Services are represented by white icons in rounded rect’s, whereas people are depicted by circular-masked profile pictures. The effect is subtle, but has a profound effect in use.
In its own version of an upfront marketplace, Facebook is currently selling four daily summer “slots,” each targeting a relatively large demographic: women over 30; women under 30; men under 30; and men over 30. The ads will be capped at 15 seconds and frequency capped to ensure that no user sees more than three per day, with an asking price of upwards of $1 million, according to one executive.
To be effective, video ads require attention. Meanwhile, the News Feed is presented as a stream of scrollable content, which users tend to skim through. It doesn’t seem like a harmonious partnership.
