SXSW Geek Games: Compete To Gain VIP Status & Win Big Prizes
We all know that geeks are now in vogue and should receive VIP treatment. That’s why participants in Mashable‘s Geek Games will get priority VIP entrance into the third annual MashBash SXSWi party on Sunday, March 13, and the official Mashable Night 2 SXSWi 2011 Party on Monday, March 14.The 64 participating teams consisting of two to five players will participate in a single-elimination tourna
SXSW For Startups: Top 10 Questions Answered
As part of this year’s SXSWi, Mashable presents the Mashable SXSWi House, featuring private events, open houses, meet-and-greet opportunities and two nights of parties. Learn more here and register for public events on Eventbrite.You’ve got an idea. You’re an entrepreneur. You know that if you just get your app in front of the right people, it’ll be well on its way to becoming the next big thin
6 Successful SXSW Startup Launch Stories
As part of this year’s SXSWi, Mashable presents the Mashable SXSWi House, featuring private events, open houses, meet-and-greet opportunities and two nights of parties. Learn more here and register for public events on Eventbrite.Startups vie for a chance to be part of the SXSW Accelerator competition for the opportunity it brings — 41% of the companies that have participated in the first two c
Announcing the Mashable Geek Games Host: Romany Malco
Romany Malco, known for his roles in ABC’s No Ordinary Family and the 2005 hit comedy The 40-Year-Old Virgin, is coming to the Mashable SXSWi House to host the Geek Games on Sunday, March 13 and Monday, March 14, in Austin, Texas.Romany, who also created the character Tijuana Jackson on HBO’s Funny or Die Presents, will host the two-day single-elimination tournament where geeks will test their
Announcing Mashable & Gowalla’s SXSW 2011 Partnership
Like Mashable, Gowalla is about connecting with others, discovering new things and finding inspiration to explore.That’s why we’re thrilled to announce we’ll be teaming up with the location-based service to enhance the SXSW 2011 experience. Attendees can collect custom passport stamps and earn exclusive pins for checking into the Mashable SXSWi House, the Mashable Geek Games and panels featurin
Untapped Opportunity: Exploring the Arab Video Game Market
Mahmoud Khasawneh is the founder and CEO of Quirkat, a games development company based in the UAE with studios in Jordan. He is also the IGDA Middle East Chapter Leader.As the games industry in the Middle East has grown and evolved over the past decade, video game development and game localization aimed at the Middle Eastern market remains a tremendous opportunity. At first glance, the complexi
What Should Mashable Ask Foursquare’s Dennis Crowley at SXSWi?
I will be interviewing Dennis Crowley, Foursquare’s CEO and co-founder, on the big stage at SXSW Interactive. The featured Q&A will take place on Monday, March 14, at 12:30 p.m. CT at the Austin Convention Center.I’m going to start the conversation with questions about the changing face of game-dynamics and how that fits into Foursquare’s growing role as a location platform, as much as a m
Inside One Man’s Kickstarter Quest to Build True Artificial Life
Virtual worlds have long been populated by creatures that interact, reproduce, compete, evolve and die. But by and large, they do so because their behavior is programmed by developers. These efforts can produce complex virtual ecosystems, but they’re not quite the digital reflections of what happens in nature.Life in the real world is “programmed” by DNA, but its form and behavior are determine
A Deep Walkthru For Silver Manipulation - Redux
Now that silver continues hitting nominal high after high (except of course for the record price hit during the Hunt Bros period), and there is a very distinct possibility we may see an unprecedented melt up in the price of silver to over triple digits for a variety of previously discussed factors, here is a post we produced a year earlier, courtesy of a "deep insider" which dissects with exquisit
Mashable Geek Games: Get Your Geek On for a Good Cause
The countdown is on for the Mashable Geek Games on Sunday, March 13, and Monday, March 14, at the Mashable SXSWi House in Austin, Texas.At the two-day, single-elimination tournament, geeks from all over will test their skills at skeeball, Twister, shuffleboard and trivia for all the geek glory and for a good cause: helping to fund a mentoring program for children in Central Texas.The $25 partic
Google Pulls 21 Apps In Android Malware Scare
Google has just pulled 21 popular free apps from the Android Market. According to the company, the apps are malware aimed at getting root access to the user’s device, gathering a wide range of available data, and downloading more code to it without the user’s knowledge.Although Google has swiftly removed the apps after being notified (by the ever-vigilant Android Police bloggers), the apps in q
Virtual Ping Pong Tournament Pits Media Giants Against Each Other for Charity
Beer and ping pong and Xbox Kinect — you don’t need a heck of a lot more to make for an epic Saturday. But those factors all combined to pit media giants including The New York Times, Gawker.TV, Aol Thrillist, and Foursquare in a tournament to support charity.The tournament, BackSpin 2011, was a way to bring together the NY tech community and raise money for Child’s Play, a non-profit that provide
How MTV Is Marrying Digital Design & Social Good
The building for frog design in New York’s Greenwich Village sits in an innocuous patch of offices just by the Holland Tunnel. Inside and seven floors up, however, is a bustling hive of designers and creatives thinking in broad strokes and typing details on their sundry Macs. Off the large, open workroom is a small, dark alcove filled with sticky notes, charts and candy: the hard work of MTV’s
Unity Technologies Expands 3-D Dev Support for Android
Games on Android are poised to become more robust with advanced 3-D graphics thanks to Unity Technologies, which is expanding its support for the platform. The company announced today it is releasing Unity for Android, its 3-D game engine that will allow developers to easily port over and create robust games for Android devices. It comes at an opportune time as hardware manufacturers roll out a sl
6 Mobile Games That Beat Playing on a Console
The Social Gaming Development Series is supported by Level 3 Communications, an international provider of fiber-based communications services. Level 3 is committed to carrying digital media from anywhere to anywhere, in whatever format needed.The kinds of games available on your mobile device have come a long way. A decade and a half ago, the state of the art was Snake, the game that came pre-l
Smashing Email Newsletter Turns One Year Old: Comment and Win!
As most of you may already know, every second Tuesday of a month we send out an email newsletter to our subscribers (over 50,000 at the moment). Every newsletter issue contains exclusive, short articles that present recent design techniques, freebies as well as useful resources and tools. We work hard to make every issue special and useful, interesting and entertaining, and therefore your feed
One in Three Mobile Phone Owners Is a Regular Mobile Gamer
A new survey from casual gaming company PopCap shows that an incredibly high percentage of adults in the U.K. and U.S. is into mobile gaming.This stat may be due in part to the uptick in smartphone adoption. According to a separate Nielsen survey, 31% of U.S. mobile users now own smartphones, and a Pew survey shows nearly half of cellphone users download and use mobile apps, too.In PopCap‘s res
Website Uses Dictator Game for (Mostly) Charity
There aren’t a ton of websites out there based on complicated thought games that are based on experimental economics. Part of that may have to do with the difficulty of turning thought experiments into viable websites. But what if that game could net you cash on a regular basis?The Moral Experiment, a website developed by John Bushell, is part pyramid scheme (although he reasonably argues again
Zynga’s FrontierVille To Hype Premiere of Johnny Depp’s New Film
Rango, the Johnny Depp-voiced chameleon whose self-titled movie is set to hit theaters this weekend, will have a cameo in Zynga’s FrontierVille to help promote the release.Starting today, FrontierVille players will be challenged to find Rango, ask their friends for 10 water buckets and view the trailer for the film. If they complete that mission, players get a Rango statue to add to their homes
3 Podcast Success Stories from Creative Small Businesses
This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business.There is a chance that your business is interesting to a general audience, that you have connections with a nationally syndicated radio show, and that the show asks you to be a regular guest. However, in the more likely ca
Calling All Geeks for the Mashable Geek Games
At Mashable, we love geeks, all types of geeks, and we know that geeks have many different skills — nunchuku skills, bow-hunting skills and computer skills. But do they have what it takes to compete in the Geek Games at the Mashable SXSWi House in Austin, Texas?We want all geeks to bring their A-game to compete in the Mashable Geek Games, a two-day, single-elimination tournament Sunday, March
This Morning’s Top Stories in Tech & Mobile
Welcome to this morning’s edition of “First To Know,” a series in which we keep you in the know on what’s happening in the digital world. We’re keeping our eyes on three particular stories of interest today.Google Declares War on Content FarmsGoogle has announced an algorithmic change to its search engine that should dramatically improve the quality of Google’s search results by eliminating con
OpenFeint Releases New Version Of Freemium Game Development Suite OFX
Last year, AuroraFeint launched the private beta of OpenFeint X (OFX), which offers indie developers the ability to create Zynga-like free-to-play games including microtransactions and virtual goods. Last December OFX exited private beta and today, OpenFeint is releasing a new version of the suite, OFX 2.0. With OFX, developers can create Farmville-like iOS games with a chat wall where players ca
Is Developing a Mobile App Worth the Cost?
Aaron Maxwell is founder of mobile web design agency Mobile Web Up. You can find him on the agency’s mobile business blog, where he writes about mobile and social media.Almost every business is gearing up their mobile strategy. No secret why: Mobile is really taking off. There are already more people on the planet who communicate with text messages than with e-mail and more people who own pho
Adult Swim's iPhone and iPad App Lets You Stream Full Episodes
Adult Swim has a free app that lets you stream full episodes of all your favorite shows (and various clips!). There's also a TV schedule, a dashboard to get all their games (that you have to pay to play) and the iPad version even throws in a music player, a clock, weather and a calculator. Why? Who knows! [iTunes] More »
How Social Media Is Having a Positive Impact On Our Culture
This post reflects the opinions of the author and not necessarily those of Mashable as a publication. Josh Rose is the EVP, digital creative director of ad agency Deutsch LA, who — when time permits — moonlights as a photographer. Follow him at @joshrose.Two events today, although worlds apart, seem inextricably tied together. And the bond between them is as human as it is electronic.First, o
How Outfit7 Built A Toy App Powerhouse
While Angry Birds grabbed headlines last year, it wasn’t the only breakout mobile app success story. Slovenian start-up Outfit7 last year managed to quietly rack up more than 60 million downloads of its Talking Friends apps, led by its breakout hit Talking Tom Cat. The company, which is now up to about 72 million downloads, has built a fast-growing empire by side-stepping the mobile gaming market