Oil and Water

  It really seems like it should work, doesn't it? You'd think that movies like Harry Potter and Iron Man should make great games, right? There's plenty of room for action, creative game mechanics, even RPG elements... It's almost like the idea is gift wrapped for the developer. Regardless, time and time again, taking a movie and making it into a video game instead becomes an exercise in futility. Take Harry Potter, for instance. A quick look at Metacritic tells most of the story. The movie Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 has received an aggregate score of 87, an impressive showing. The game of the same name? 47. That's not even in the ballpark. Iron Man was also recognized as a decent movie by most standards. But the...

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Posted in: movie

The First Avenger

  When a superhero origin story movie is made it is inevitable that someone will be disappointed. Character introductions, lengthy exposition, and transformation scenes are all keys to getting the uninitiated up to speed, but can be merely a rehash for the target fanboy audience. Admittedly I went into Captain America: The First Avenger as a relative novice to the character’s history and status as one of Marvel Comic’s oldest heroic icons. The Captain has not exactly maintained a commercial presence outside of the realm of comic books like Batman, Spider-Man, or Superman (seriously how many people on the street would know his real name?). As a prelude to next year’s massive The Avengers, Captain America succeeds in introducing...

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Hulu Could Lead Apple, Google, or Yahoo to Dominance

Each tech giant has their case for obtaining Hulu in leading its company toward dominance on the web.  Apple seeks interest in possibly jumpstarting their Apple TV services.  Google may have a similar case along with solidifying its social networking features on Google+.  For Yahoo, the former premiere search engine website seeks a comeback in both traffic and revenue with Hulu as their missing piece of the puzzle.  Hulu shines as a highly attractive online property by proving its value with over 1 billion ad impressions a month, according to Comscore, and impressive offerings of video content.  The latest auction for Hulu has left many pondering on the potential combination of services that may birth from current bidders in Apple, Google, and...

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Google recognition firm, despite privacy concerns

Even after publicly declaring on several occasions that it had no interest in facial recognition, Google has gone out and bought itself a –yes – facial recognition software company by the name of PittPatt. Pittsburgh based PittPatt, which emerged from Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute, has all the algorithms needed to identify your little punum, and is even able to track the motion of faces on video. “At Google, computer vision technology is already at the core of many existing products (such as Image Search, YouTube, Picasa, and Goggles), so it’s a natural fit to join Google and bring the benefits of our research and technology to a wider audience,” said a notice on the PittPatt site. We will continue to tap the potential of computer vision in applications that range...

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Posted in: internet

Slowing Down to Savor the Data

DATA beats opinion” has long been a mantra at Google, where evidence-based research tends to rule. But now the company is showing its softer side with Think Quarterly, a business-to-business publication whose first United States issue is to make its debut online this week.   Although Google investors remain wary of the spending and long-term intentions of the company’s taciturn new chief executive, and co-founder, Larry Page, Google reassured them in July with financial results that beat Wall Street analysts’ expectations. Google reported second-quarter net income, excluding the cost of stock options, of $8.74 a share, up from $6.45 a year ago. Net revenue, which excludes payments to advertising partners, was $6.92 billion,...

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Posted in: internet

"Google" Places drops outside customer reviews

Google Inc (GOOG.O) has removed excerpts of customer reviews from sites such as Yelp and TripAdvisor from Google Places, its own competing online service aimed at helping consumers search for local businesses. The move, announced in Google's official blog on Thursday, follows the disclosure of a U.S. antitrust investigation last month. The federal probe concerns whether Google, which dominates U.S. and global markets for search engine advertising, abuses its market power by favoring its own services over those of rivals in online searches and through other practices. The blog post made no mention of the investigation. "Based on careful thought about the future direction of Place pages, and feedback we've heard over the past few months, review snippets from other web sources have now...

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Judge throws out Oracle's $6.1b suit against Google

San Francisco: Oracle Corp's $6.1-billion (Dh22.38 billion) damage estimate in its patent infringement lawsuit against Google Inc over the use of Java technology in the Android operating system was thrown out by a federal judge. US District Judge William Alsup in San Francisco ruled on Friday that a new damage estimate should start as low as $100 million, a figure Google was offered, and rejected, in 2006 to license Java from Sun Microsystems Inc, before Sun was acquired by Oracle, according to a court filing. The $6.1 billion estimate assumed that all of the seven patents Oracle is suing over were used in Android and the company didn't present sufficient facts to support that, Alsup said. "The court is strongly of the view that the hypothetical negotiation should take that $100...

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Prem luxury tax and Hope Solo to MLS, Tim Howard talks Everton

    After getting a bit of rest following the U.S.'s loss to Mexico in the Gold Cup final, Tim Howard has joined Everton's preseason tour of the states. Though he did so too late to play against the Philadelphia Union on Wednesday night, he did submit himself to a series of interviews earlier that day and one of them was with me. Here's how it went... I know you're coming off a break, but did you watch any of the Women's World Cup? Howard: [laughs] I was like everybody else -- captivated and mesmerized and inspired. They did pretty awesome. ESPN was talking about the hypothetical of Hope Solo joining MLS. What do you think of that? Howard: There's certainly not a precedent for it, but, you know, if anyone could do it...

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Could Hope Solo play in the MLS?

This was a week of Steve Williams feeling betrayed (Elin: ‘Welcome to the club’). A week of sheer, frilly Dennis Rodman undergarments. But most of all it was a week when Hope Solo and the U.S. soccer team did an odd victory lap. Odd, because they didn’t win the Women’s World Cup — only come in second to Japan. But that didn’t prevent America from embracing them. Especially adored is Hope Solo, America’s Goalie. And here Slate asks the musical question, could Solo make it in the MLS?     he short answer is no—Hope Solo won’t be moving to MLS. The even shorter answer might be dead silence, since I couldn’t get anyone connected to Major League Soccer or U.S. Soccer to broach the subject, likely due to fear that they’d...

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Hope Solo's delivers a kick that dunks George Lopez

When Hope Solo's soccer career is over she shouldn't have any trouble finding carnival work. The goalie of the U.S. women's World Cup team appeared on Lopez Tonight last night and answered George Lopez's challenge to drop him into a dunking pool. Here's the video, showing that Hope needs a couple of tries before hilarity ensues. ...

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Facebook's Privacy Changes

Facebook on Wednesday overhauled its privacy controls, in the hopes of making them simpler to use. The company focused on three major changes for Facebook users:"a single control for your content, more powerful controls for your basic information, and an easy control to turn off all applications," according to a blog post by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. The new changes should be rolled out to your Facebook account over the next few days. So, how do Facebook's new privacy controls stack up against recent criticisms about how Facebook handles your personal information? Perhaps the easiest way to measure this is to take a look at PCWorld's recent article, "A Bill of Rights for Facebook Users," and see how Facebook's new settings compare...

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Posted in: internet