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
Havok physics engine comes to Android 2.3, demoed on Xperia Play
Great graphics are often a component of great video games, but fancy physics can help too, and last week Havok announced that it was bringing those to Android, along with all of the requisite development tools. That means smartphones with Android 2.3 or up can potentially enjoy the same procedural animations and pretty dresses that we've enjoyed on PC and home console for years, and as the firs
Skyhook brings location-awareness to the Sony NGP, including WiFi-only models
The news got a bit overshadowed by some augmented reality demos and a little game called Uncharted, but Sony also talked a bit about the NGP's location-aware capabilities at GDC this past week, which we now know will rely on Skyhook's Core Engine system. What's more, that functionality will apparently be included on WiFi-only models in addition to those with 3G, which means that all NGP users wil
Guest Post: The Free Market Death Panel
Submitted by Miss AmericaThe Free Market Death PanelWho is the TMPG, and why should I care??? The Treasury Market Practices Group (TMPG) is made up of various market participants (representing custodial banks, investment “banks”, hedge funds, etc.. ) and attended by Brian Sack and six other representatives of the Federal Bank of New York. This group is nothing more than the financial equivalent
N64oid brings Nintendo 64 emulation to Android devices
There's not exactly a shortage of video game emulators for Android devices, but there has been one notable, 64-bit exception. That's finally been rectified with the just-released N64oid application, however, which finally brings emulation of Nintendo 64 games to the platform -- and, like the other emulators from developer Yongzh, it's conveniently available right in the Android Market (for $5.99)
4 Hot Social Gaming Trends to Watch
Prita Uppal is the founder and CEO of YooMee Games, a social competition platform that brings tournaments and cash prizes to skill-based games across websites, social networks and mobile apps.More than 18,000 interactive gaming industry pros came to San Francisco for the Game Developers’ Conference this week, an annual event that draws programmers, artists, producers, game designers, audio prof
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
Steve Jobs Calls End Of the PC, We Call The End Of The Fat Margin Tablet – Including The Pretty iPad, With Proof!
video Apple has announced the release of the iPad 2 and it is an impressive piece of hardware, very nicely packaged and comes with margin boosting accessories (that are actually pretty slick) such as a magnetic cover. With that being said, the RDF (reality distortion field) and FUD (fear, uncertainty & doubt) absorbed and regurgitated by the tech media is simply horrendous and is an example of
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
This Computer Teacher Made 17-Year Old Student Play "Strip Video Games" at His House
Larry David Twigg, a 53-year old computer teacher from Waterloo, Iowa, was recently arrested for having a 17-year old student of his play "strip video games," take a "chocolate syrup shower," and make a snow angel in his boxers. This is all terrible, obviously, and the Iowa Board of Education is currently considering terminating Twigg's license (b
An iPad Lover’s (Initial) Thoughts On iPad 2
“These are post-PC devices, that need to be even easier to use than a PC.” That was Apple CEO Steve Jobs’ closing remark as he left the stage having just announced the iPad 2 at an event today in San Francisco. And that comment really summed up the vibe of the entire event. When Jobs was on stage, he made it very clear over and over again that the iPad competition out there just doesn’t seem to g
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
iPad 2 first hands-on!
Well there you have it folks -- the absurdly thin new iPad 2. We just got our hands all over the next greatest tablet from Apple and it's... very much the same, save for that new body. There's no question that the industrial design is top notch, and we did notice some speedier behavior when jumping around -- but the core OS remains unchanged, so this won't be a major shock. We're spending more ti
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
Survey finds a quarter of adults in the US and UK are 'avid' mobile gamers
Just how many cellphone users can be considered gamers these days? According to a new survey from PopCap Games and Information Solutions Group, about a quarter of adults in the US and UK have played a game on their phone in the past week, which makes them an "avid" gamer in their eyes, while about a third have played a game in the past month. If you dial things down to just mobile gamers with a s
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
Xperia Play goes back to the FCC, this time with GSM
We're all familiar with this handset by now, but what we weren't suspecting (although we have yet to finish our first cup of coffee) to see a GSM version of the Xperia Play come through the FCC this sunny Tuesday morning. While we know that Verizon won't be the sole carrier of the phone in the states (we heard that from Sony Ericsson CTO Jan Uddenfeldt himself), there is yet to be another carrier
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