Angry Birds Creator Has First Original Idea

Until last Thursday, I had no faith in Rovio Entertainment, the Finnish developer behind Angry Birds.


As the addictive mobile game continued to dominate the world’s mobile devices (it has been downloaded one billion times as of May) and Rovio prepared for a possible multi-billion-dollar valuation, I sat back with a smug look on my face and predicted disaster, assuming that the studio was a one-hit wonder.
In the three years since Rovio’s rise to mobile dominance began, it hasn’t developed a single game without the Angry Birds branding. Given that Angry Birds was directly inspired by the browser game Crush the Castle, it seemed Rovio was far more adept at marketing than game design.
Then, on Sept. 27, it released Bad Piggies, a vehicle-themed spinoff of Angry Birds for mobile devices and PC. It’s a cute, funny, wonderfully designed game. Bad Piggies lets players create their own flimsy vehicles piece by piece, then guide that vehicle through treacherous levels using goofy contraptions like fans, balloons and TNT.
Most importantly, it’s completely original. It stands out among the glut of physics-based puzzle games that have flooded the App Store in Angry Birds‘ wake.
With adept marketing, attractive characters and original content, Rovio is poised to become the Nintendo of the mobile world: the foremost maker of appealing, fun games designed around the strengths of the new platforms.
Copying isn’t uncommon in the videogame business. It’s hard to find a single game publisher that hasn’t been guilty of it at some point, especially when it’s just starting out.
Nintendo’s first arcade games were total rip-offs. In 1978 it released Block Fever, a bland, imaginationless clone of Atari’s Breakout. The next year it followed up with Space Fever, a shameless knock-off of Space Invaders.
But within a few short years, Nintendo was known as the industry’s innovation leader, creating revolutionary games like The Legend of Zelda.
Although it copied the concept of Crush the Castle, Rovio improved everything about it: the user interface, the art, the music, the level designs. But it was still based on someone else’s gameplay insight. Another recent Rovio game, Amazing Alex, is a previously existing iPhone game called Casey’s Contraptions that the company bought and rebranded. Good marketing, no innovation.
Just cloning, and not innovating, can be dangerous. Take Zynga (please). The Facebook gamemaker hit it big in 2009 with FarmVille (copied wholesale from Chinese farm games), bought the maker of Words With Friends (a copy of Scrabble), and is mostly in the news today for a lawsuit about an alleged game copy, mass executive evacuations and a stock price that looks like a double black diamond ski slope.
Bad Piggies makes it appear as if Rovio wants to be on a different trajectory. Sure, the characters themselves are spun off from the Angry Birds brand. But gameplay is king, and creating something that doesn’t feel like anything else on the market is the only way that the industry can sustain itself in the long term.
If Rovio continues to produce games like Bad Piggies, it can become something much greater than “the Finnish guys who made Angry Birds.” It might be the first truly powerful force in the games industry born on mobile devices.

source: wired

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Facebook to Advertisers: Users Don’t Have to Click for It to Pay Off

“It is the delivery of the marketing message to the right consumer, not the click, that creates real value for brand advertisers.”
And with that, Facebook has a new strategy when it comes to convincing marketers that their ad dollars are well spent on the network. As long as the user sees your ad, they’ll want to buy your product or service. It doesn’t matter if they click, so you should really stop worrying about that metric at all.
Facebook isn’t just telling marketers all of this out of the blue – this comes straight out of a study conducted with new partners Datalogix. The study looked at over 50 digital campaigns and attempted to connect exposure to an ad on Facebook with in-store purchases of said products.
The name Datalogix may ring a bell, and that’s because their partnership with Facebook has raised some eyebrows over the last week. Datalogix is the owner of a massive database of consumer purchasing data. That data, when matched with Facebook data on ad impressions, can give marketers a general picture on whether or not their ad dollars are being spent on ads the directly lead to in-store purchases.
And that partnership with Datalogix has turned into a way for Facebook to tout their advertising clout with marketers.
Here’s what Facebook’s Measurement and Insights head Brad Smallwood had to say about the study in a studio blog post:

Impressions create value. 99 percent of sales generated from online branding ad campaigns were from people that saw, but did not interact with, ads— proof that it is the delivery of the marketing message to the right consumer, not the click, that creates real value for brand advertisers.
Reach drives revenue for online brand marketers. This is a concept very familiar to TV marketers, who often start with a reach objective—but until now hadn’t been proven for online. When applied to digital brand campaigns, the study demonstrated that campaigns that maximized reach had on average a 70 percent higher return-on-investment.
Finding the right message frequency is key. The study revealed that for online brand campaigns, if you reallocated high frequency impressions to people seeing too few impressions, you would see a 40 percent increase in ROI with the same budget. What this means is that for every online campaign there is a “sweetspot” of effective frequency that maximizes return on investment, and that the DataLogix tool can help marketers empirically isolate that sweetspot for each brand and campaign.

Facebook says that digital marketing is shifting its focus from the click to this more typical metric of measuring ad success. According to them, the Datalogix/Facebook tool is a huge step forward in measuring real return on investment for online advertisers.
Of course, this sort of data mining isn’t without its detractors. Two online privacy groups have already asked the FTC to investigate whether or not the partnership with Datalogix violates a previous order from the commission, where Facebook pledged to make “clear and prominent” disclosure of any sharing of nonpublic user information.
Facebook felt compelled to explain their purchase tracking initiative in a post to their privacy page. In it, they emphasize that all dat remains anonymous on their end and on Datalogix’s end:
“Importantly, we have designed this process with privacy at the forefront. We compare hashes of some Facebook data with hashes provided to us by Datalogix. Once we compare, we are able to send corresponding data on the reach of large-scale ad campaigns, which Datalogix uses to create aggregate reports comparing product purchases by large groups of people who did or did not see an ad.
Because of our commitment to privacy, we had an industry-leading auditing firm evaluate the privacy implications of this process. The auditor confirmed that, throughout this process, Datalogix is not allowed to learn more about you from Facebook profile information. Similarly, Datalogix does not send us any of their purchase data, meaning we cannot specifically tell whether or not you purchased a marketer’s product. Finally, with this partnership, Datalogix only sends the marketer aggregate information about large groups of people. None of this data is attributable to an individual Facebook user,” said the company.
Going forward, Facebook will continue to use this tool to show marketers that their money has legs on the Facebook platform. It’ll be up to marketers to decide whether or not digital strategies must move beyond the click.

source: webpronews

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Why Facebook Just Opened an Online Store

Citing its unique ability to recommend products, Facebook opened an online gift store. The move edges the social network onto the turf of e-commerce king Amazon, but at an opportune time: Amazon is busy making movies, computer hardware, cloud computing services, and entering other markets far afield from its core business of selling physical goods.
Not that Facebook is trying to usurp Amazon just yet. The launch of Facebook Gifts is modest: Facebook is emphasizing sub-$50 products like socks, cupcakes, teddy bears, and Starbucks gift cards. The idea is that Facebook will see words like “happy birthday” or “congratulations” on someone’s wall and prompt friends to buy the person something through the new store.
It’s an obvious and proven idea, one Facebook acquired when it bought year-old mobile gifting startup Karma in May. In the ensuing months, Facebook has rebranded the service and created a desktop version of the app, which is what is being launched today as Facebook Gifts. (From 2007 to 2010, Facebook operated a store by the same name, but it only sold virtual goods.)
In an interview with Wired Business in July, Facebook’s director of advertising product Gokul Rajaram explained Facebook’s thinking about gifts:

The reason it all germinated was because we saw that people wishing each other happy birthday is a really common social norm on Facebook. Because Facebook will basically tell you which of your friends have birthdays today. So we said, this could be a really interesting way to enhance that experience. In addition to saying ‘happy birthday’ you could actually give a small gift. We think that could be a really interesting thing that works on mobile, on the desktop, and is something that fits in with the norms.

In other words, Facebook is trying to monetize common, naturally occurring behavior on its network in a way that feels more natural than other Facebook ads, like “sponsored stories” that pop up when one of your friends mentions a business. Facebook is launching that business across mobile and desktop, and doing so only about four months after the acquisition of Karma.
It’s a smart approach. If anyone is better positioned than Amazon to recommend products to people, it’s Facebook, and the company is off to an auspicious start. It’s a small start, but then so was Facebook itself.

source: wired

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Adobe code signing infrastructure hacked by 'sophisticated threat actors'

Adobe today warned that an internal server with access to its digital certificate code signing infrastructure was hacked by "sophisticated threat actors" engaged in "highly targeted attacks."
The compromise, which dates back to early July, led to the creation of at least two malicious files that were digitally signed using a valid Adobe certificate, according to Adobe security chief Brad Arkin.
Although only two files were signed, the hack effectively gave the attackers the ability to create malware masquerading as legitimate Adobe software and signals a raising of the stakes in the world of Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs).
According to Arkin, one of the two digitally signed malware files is a utility that extracts password hashes from the Windows operating system.  This hints at the "lateral movement" that is common once a targeted attacker gains access to a network and attempts to elevate privileges to gain a higher level of access.
"The first malicious utility we received is pwdump7 v7.1.  This utility extracts password hashes from the Windows OS and is sometimes used as a single file that statically links the OpenSSL library libeay32.dll.  The sample we received included two separate and individually signed files. We believe the second malicious utility, myGeeksmail.dll, is a malicious ISAPI filter. Unlike the first utility, we are not aware of any publicly available versions of this ISAPI filter," Arkin explained.
"Within minutes of the initial triage of the first sample, we decommissioned our signing infrastructure and began a clean-room implementation of an interim signing service for re-signing components that were signed with the impacted key after July 10, 2012 and to continue code signing for regularly scheduled releases. The interim signing solution includes an offline human verification to ensure that all files scheduled for signature are valid Adobe software. We are in the process of designing and deploying a new, permanent signing solution," Arkin added.
Adobe did not provide details on the nature of the breach except to say that it affected a "build server" with access to the code signing infrastructure.  Arkin said the compromised machine's configuration was "not to Adobe corporate standards for a build server" and lamented the fact that this was not caught during the normal provisioning process.
"We are investigating why our code signing access provisioning process in this case failed to identify these deficiencies. The compromised build server did not have rights to any public key infrastructure (PKI) functions other than the ability to make code signing requests to the code signing service," he added.
Arkin said a forensics investigation identified malware on the build server and the likely mechanism used to first gain access to the build server.
"We also have forensic evidence linking the build server to the signing of the malicious utilities. We can confirm that the private key required for generating valid digital signatures was not extracted from the HSM. We believe the threat actors established a foothold on a different Adobe machine and then leveraged standard advanced persistent threat (APT) tactics to gain access to the build server and request signatures for the malicious utilities from the code signing service via the standard protocol used for valid Adobe software," he added.
Arkin says there is no evidence that source code was stolen during the compromise.
Adobe plans to revoke the impacted certificates on October 4, 2012.
The revocation will affect all code signed after July 10, 2012, which indicates the attackers had access to Adobe's infrastructure for more than two months.

source: zdnet

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Obama Defends Free Speech After Asking YouTube to ‘Review’ Anti-Islam Movie

As riots across the Mideast targeted U.S. embassies and consulates, the White House quietly asked YouTube to “review” whether an anti-Islam film allegedly fueling the chaos violated any terms of use. Now, in front of the United Nations, President Obama insisted that the only answer to offensive speech is “more speech.”
It’s not that Obama thinks that the Prophet Mohammed ought to be maligned by a filmmaker who uses tons of aliases and was once busted for PCP. There’s a principle at stake, he told the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday morning: “Our Founders understood that without such protections, the capacity of each individual to express their own views, and practice their own faith, may be threatened.” The calls for censoring the video emanating through the Muslim world are ultimately futile, as well: “When anyone with a cellphone can spread offensive views around the world with the click of a button, the notion that we can control the flow of information is obsolete.”
True enough. But his administration’s response to the video and the anti-American protests continues to whipsaw. The U.S. Embassy in Cairo tweeted condemnations of the film on September 11 and stuck by them as mobs outside stormed the embassy gates. Obama basically deleted those tweets in his speech. He challenged offended Muslims to “also condemn the hate we see when the image of Jesus Christ is desecrated, churches are destroyed, or the Holocaust is denied.” And Obama dismissed the idea that the anti-Islam film was the true cause of this month’s assaults on U.S. embassies, locating it in “intolerance” instead. Even Obama critics like Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol conceded that the president’s speech was “conventionally unobjectionable.”

But it was also, at the least, unmoored from the way Obama previously handled the crisis. “If we are serious about upholding these ideals, it will not be enough to put more guards in front of an embassy; or to put out statements of regret, and wait for the outrage to pass,” Obama said. “If we are serious about those ideals, we must speak honestly about the deeper causes of this crisis.”
At the same time if we are serious about those ideals, we also have to acknowledge that the White House asked Google to “review” the 14-minute trailer for the anti-Mohammed video to see if it violated YouTube’s terms of use. (It didn’t.) And if we are serious about those ideals, we also have to acknowledge that Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, placed a call to the anti-Islam pastor Terry Jones to see if Jones would rescind support for the movie. (He wouldn’t.) Let’s be clear — there’s a world of difference between those requests and government demands for censorship. But they’re still a far cry from combating hateful speech with more speech.
Obama’s United Nations speech was another indicator that his administration’s approach to this month’s anti-American violence is under revision. First the administration attributed the deadly assault on the Benghazi consulate to mob violence; then to a terrorist attack; and Obama declined to attribute blame for it at Turtle Bay. That might be fairly chalked up to the fog of war. But information doesn’t just want to be free, it wants to be accurate. And it should lead to a consistent response.

source: wired

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YouTube Makes Caption Translation Easier

Google announced that it has made it easier to translate YouTube video captions into over 300 languages.

“You’ll first need a caption track for your video, so if you don’t yet have one you can learn how to make one here,” the company explains in a blog post. “Select ‘Request translation’ in the YouTube Video Manager, choose the languages you’d like to translate into, and click “Next.” We’ll create caption translation documents that you can now invite anyone to help translate, or you can translate yourself. To translate the captions yourself, select the language, and it’ll open up the caption translation document in the Google Translator Toolkit editor to help your translate faster.”


“To give you context on the captions, we’ve also embedded the YouTube video in the editor so you can watch as you translate,” the company notes. “For several languages we’ll provide first draft of the translation using Google’s machine translation technology. We’ll also provide preview of what the translated caption looks like on the video so you can make sure the translated captions fit.”
After all of that, just click “Publish to YouTube”. 

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No iOS 6 for my original iPad? Now, I'm an Angry Bird.

Sorry, iPad 1, you're too old for iOS 6!

To say that I'm unhappy with Apple about the fact that I can't install iOS 6 on my iPad 1, is an understatement. It's not like the thing is seven or eight years old. I bought it just before the iPad 2 came out. And, now I'm angry. I'm very angry. I'm an Angry Bird who wants to have myself flung at the fortified pigs who made this very, very bad decision. You can install iOS 6 on the iPhone 3GS and on the iPhone 4, so why not the iPad 1?
So, now what?
Either I'm stuck with iOS 5.1.1 forever or I jailbreak the damn thing and possibly ruin it.
That's what.
When will Apple stop allowing my iPad 1 access to the App Store or iTunes?
Come on, Apple, how long do I have on this very expensive device that is less than two years old (for me)? How long does anyone have for a device launched in April 2010?
Bad move, Apple. Bad move.
I don't see any compelling features in iOS 6 that would preclude me from using it on my iPad 1. Sure, I don't have a camera or cellular connectivity (My choice) but what I do have is an official iPad and I want it supported. To drop support for it so soon after launch is just short of device homicide. And, it could prevent me from ever buying another Apple anything again.
I had finally convinced myself to like Apple after drooling over the original Macintosh and never getting one. I had come over to the "Dark Side" and even decided that the next computer that I purchase would be a Macbook Air.
But, not anymore.
You want to know why?
Because I don't know how long Apple would continue to support it.
And, guess what else? When my damn contract on my iPhone 4 is up, I'm not renewing it nor am I going to buy a new iPhone. $600 might not be a lot of money for Apple's decision makers but it is for me and I don't have it to waste. $600 would clothe my daughter for an entire school year plus extra left over for activities.
In my opinion, dropping iOS support for the iPad 1 means that Apple no longer cares about its customers and frankly, I'm shocked. It makes me want to take back all of the good things I ever said about Apple, my iPad and my iPhone. Sure, Apple probably doesn't give two hoots in hell about me, my opinion or my unsupported iPad 1, because Apple is going to be the world's first trillion dollar company. My $600 wasted investment means squat to them.
Apple, I have some sage advice for you: Stay focused on the customer or you won't have any. I don't think I'm alone in that feeling now that you've abandoned us.
I wonder if the other 15 million+ buyers of the original iPad would agree?
Do you really want to alienate 15 million customers?
There was a time in your past, Apple, when you were about 90 days from bankruptcy and now you're worth more than $600 billion. But, remember when the US had a $3 trillion surplus when Bill Clinton left office and now we have a $10 trillion deficit? You do the math and take a hint.
15 million is a lot of customers.
It's a lot of unsupported iPads.
It's a lot of pissed off individuals.
At $100 profit per customer, that's $1.5 billion. Small change to you?
It could be opportunity for another company who wants to offer something you don't: Support for your two year old unsupported devices. Sort of an opportunity for someone who wants to make a business out of supporting jailbroken devices with an App Store, new OS releases and updates that will continue the life of this computing platform.
By the way, for all of you who have anything but an iPhone 5, get ready for this: Your devices won't be supported very soon because Apple has changed the interface on the iPhone 5. So, the next generation of iPod and iPad will have the news ones too. And, my friends, that leaves your old devices in an incompatible format.
Awesome.
Think Different.
Planned obsolescence doesn't mean two years. Get a clue, Apple.
Consider me, "Unconverted."
What do you think of Apple's decision to not offer iOS 6 for a two-year-old device? Talk back and let (and Apple) know how you feel.

source: zdnet

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