Estimates suggest 400,000 people are employed to build up credits in online games such as World of Warcraft and EverQuest by virtual gold mining or r such ways of building up in-game credits that can be translated into real value.This article titled “How gold farmers reap huge harvest from online gaming” was written by Josh Halliday, for The Guardian on Wednesday 25th May 2011 19.15 UTCTens of millions of people spend hours and pay big money for virtual gains on the most popular multiplayer online games, including World of Warcraft, Eve Online and EverQuest.Behind these games are “gold farmers”, who spend hours within the games each day, gathering virtual credits and selling them to gamers for real world cash.The most recent estimates, from 2009, suggest that 400,000 people are employed as gold farmers across the world, with 85% of those in China and Vietnam, according to Professor Richard Heeks of the University of Manchester.These gold farmers are almost entirely males between 18 and 25, and most are either cash-strapped college students or unemployed rural migrants. They sell in-game advantages – an increased skill level, or a virtual ore – to players eager to boost their online reputation.The multiplayer online games industry has boomed in recent years thanks to increased internet access and the rise of social networks. World of Warcraft, easily the most popular of its kind, had 12 million subscribers last year.According to a report published by the World Bank last month, gold farming was worth about $3bn (£1.85bn) in 2009 – most of which was kept by developing countries. guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blogHow gold farmers reap huge harvest from online gamingRelated posts:Farmers collaborate online to face rural uncertaintyOnline advertising in the UKRolling Your Own Online Office
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How gold farmers reap huge harvest from online gaming
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/05/29/how-gold-farmers-reap-huge-harvest-from-online-gaming
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May 29 2011, 9:16am | Comments »
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Boot up: Facebook’s OAuthpocalypse, Bing friends Facebook, and more
Plus Nvidia boss explains why Android tablets aren’t selling, and Nokia ‘rebrands’ Ovi. Also Facebook and Bing.
This article titled “Boot up: Facebook’s OAuthpocalypse, Bing friends Facebook, and more” was written by Josh Halliday, for guardian.co.uk on Tuesday 17th May 2011 07.30 UTC A quick burst of 7 links for you to chew over, as picked by the Technology team Facebook’s Own (Smaller) “OAuthpocalypse”: Devs Have 48 Hours To Secure Apps >> TechCrunch “Last night and into today, Facebook has been sending out notices to developers they believe have apps in violation of their policy against sending authentication data to third parties. Those developers have 48 hours to fix their apps or they risk being “subject to one of the enforcement actions” — read: being booted.” Bing Facebook Friends Now Fueling Faster Decisions on Bing >> Bing Community Big move: “Starting today, you can receive personalized search results based on the opinions of your friends by simply signing into Facebook. New features make it easier to see what your Facebook friends “like” across the Web, incorporate the collective know-how of the Web into your search results, and begin adding a more conversational aspect to your searches. Decisions can now be made with more than facts, now the opinions of your trusted friends and the collective wisdom of the Web.” Nvidia CEO: Why Android tablets aren’t selling |>> CNET News “During an earnings conference call, Sanjay Jha, CEO of Motorola Mobility, articulated part of the problem, saying, ‘Consumers want more apps for Android tablets.’That’s not the whole story, according to Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang, who I chatted with on Thursday…“”It’s a point of sales problem. It’s an expertise at retail problem. It’s a marketing problem to consumers. It is a price point problem,’ he said, for starters.Though Huang didn’t mention the $499 starting price for the iPad, it was clear that this was a reference point. ‘The baseline configuration included 3G when it shouldn’t have,’he said. ‘Tablets should have a Wi-Fi configuration and be more affordable. And those are the ones that were selling more rapidly than the 3G and fully configured ones,’ he said.He didn’t stop there. ‘And it’s a software richness of content problem,’ he added, echoing Jha’s comments.”3G’s there because Android is a phone OS. Speech by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rt Hon George Osborne MP, at Google Zeitgeist 2011 >> HM Treasury It didn’t sound that content-ful when he read it out, either – open data hirings and cyberattacks apart. Honeycomb has a fighting chance against the iPad >> Techcrunch “Don’t get me wrong: Honeycomb 3.0 on the Galaxy Tab is still buggy as hell. Sometimes I feel like the browser is a game — tap the wrong thing, and you’ll suddenly jump to the bottom of a webpage, or all animations will get sluggish. Even the 3.1 update, which I just tried out on my Xoom and will be available for the Galaxy Tab in a few weeks, doesn’t seem to have fixed all the performance kinks. And Android Market still appears to have fewer than 100 applications optimized for the tablet form factor.“But I think that will change soon.” This must be some strange new meaning of the word “soon” that we’re not familiar with. Then again, they handed out tablets to everyone at Google I/O. Didn’t they do that with Google TV? And look how that’s turned out. Oh. Top 10 awesome Android features that the iPhone doesn’t have >> Lifehacker Numbers 7-10 are unequivocally good, though the top 3 – “control your phone from your computer” (uh?), Flash (hmm) and “App integration” (leads to annoying modal dialogs) we’re less sure about. The evolution of Nokia and Ovi >> Official Nokia Blog “Starting with first services on some of the new Nokia devices in July and August, Ovi services will be rebranded as Nokia services in a transition expected to continue into 2012. Each of the services under the Ovi umbrella will simply be rebranded as Nokia, with no planned disruption to the service roadmaps.“Nokia’s EVP and Chief Marketing Officer, Jerri DeVard explains the shift: ‘We have made the decision to change our service branding from Ovi to Nokia. By centralizing our services identity under one brand, not two, we will reinforce the powerful master brand of Nokia and unify our brand architecture..’” So why was “Ovi” ever chosen if there’s this powerful master brand? The whole situation should become a case study in a book on marketing. You can follow Guardian Technology’s linkbucket on delicious
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May 17 2011, 2:57am | Comments »
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Spotify to halve free music allowance
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/04/14/spotify-to-halve-free-music-allowance
Spotify is notorious amongst musicians for only paying a fraction of the royalties that other online music sites pay to bands. But it’s popular with music fans for allowing them to listen to almost anything on demand. Now they are being forced to bring in new restrictions
This article titled “Spotify to halve free music allowance” was written by Josh Halliday, for guardian.co.uk on Thursday 14th April 2011 09.31 UTC Spotify is to cut back the amount of free listening available to users from 20 to 10 hours.
From 1 May, the music streaming service will reduce by half the amount of free music available to its six million users in the UK and Europe.
Under the new restrictions, non-subscribers will only be allowed to listen to an individual track a maximum of five times. New users will be moved on to the restricted model within six months; it will apply to existing users from 1 May.
Since its 2008 launch, Spotify’s free offering has proved popular enough to tempt more than 1 million people to become paying customers.
Daniel Ek, Spotify’s co-founder, announced the changes in a blogpost on the company’s website on Thursday.
“Making Spotify available to millions across Europe has seen the service become incredibly popular. People are listening to more music and from a wider range of artists than ever before, and are giving up on piracy, which is exactly what we hoped would happen,” he said.
“So it’s vital that we continue offering an on-demand free service to you and millions more like you, but to make that possible we have to put some limits in place going forward.”
Ek said that the changes would mainly affect heavier users of the service, and that users would still be able to listen to around 200 tracks or 20 albums for free each month.
The move will no doubt rankle with some music fans, who had grown used to Spotify’s free streaming service being “too good to be true“.
The first commenter on Spotify’s official blogpost lamented: “So long Spotify. It was nice knowing you. Guess I’ll go back to pirating music again then.”
More details soon…
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April 14 2011, 6:19am | Comments »
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iPad 2: where can I buy one in the UK?
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/03/30/ipad-2-where-can-i-buy-one-in-the-uk
Supplies of Apple‘s iPad 2 are running perilously short – but more iPad 2s are expected to surface before the weekend.
This article titled “iPad 2: where can I buy one in the UK?” was written by Josh Halliday, for guardian.co.uk on Wednesday 30th March 2011 15.04 UTC Apple’s iPad 2 has been virtually out of stock in the UK since its launch on Friday. Streams of shiny geeks have been left dissapointed and empty-handed by gadget shops up and down the land. But we have good news. Dixons, PC World and Currys expect to get more iPad 2s in stock today. Most will be going to those who have pre-ordered, but if you hurry you might just be able to buy one over the counter. Fancy that. Argos, meanwhile, has been left woefully short handed. Its 750 stores in the UK and Ireland ran out of stock on Monday – and doesn’t expect to get any more until 25 April. Sounds like a bad April Fools’ joke. At Phones4U, which was reported to have been given just one iPad 2 for each of its 500+ stores, the devices are only “down to the last few”, according to a spokeswoman. No word, yet, on when more will be available. John Lewis, which is famously “never knowingly undersold”, has sold out. The retailer says it will have more of the Apple gadgets in time for the weekend. As does Tesco, which encourages customers to order online. Now, over to you. Tweet @GuardianTech or @JoshHalliday with the store name, location (preferably with the postcode), and whether there are any iPad 2s in stock. We’ll update the map below.
Click here for a larger map.
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March 30 2011, 10:58am | Comments »
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Google’s Marissa Mayer on the location-based ‘fast, fun and future’
Marissa Mayer of Google products expounds at SXSW on Google and the proliferation of products. Where will it all go next?
This article titled “Google’s Marissa Mayer on the location-based ‘fast, fun and future’” was written by Josh Halliday, for guardian.co.uk on Saturday 12th March 2011 17.18 UTC Dubbed “the gatekeeper of Google products”, Marissa Mayer knows what she’s talking about. Ultimately, it falls at Mayer’s door to ensure the internet giant remains as agile, innovative and willing to experiment as it was a decade ago. “The challenge is how to stay true to what originally built this big and successful brand, with a lot of experimentation and still moving really fast,” Mayer said on Friday. “Now, when new people come in [to Google] who say their products are ‘not good enough for the Google name’ you have to tell them that the Google name was built on building stuff, throwing it out there, getting feedback, seeing how it works, ramping it up, making it a success and then managing resource afterwards.” What you end up with, then, is a proliferation of products. This is where Google has fallen short, Mayer admitted. “Some of our products should be features, like Latitude and Google Hotpot,” she said. “One of the things we need to do more is merge these products into core technologies, consolidate into Maps or Places. There’s probably more than one product [Latitude and Hotpot could fit into] but we still need to condense somewhat.” Mayer, an upwardly mobile Stanford University graduate who joined the Mountain View company almost 12 years ago, also admitted that Google Maps needs some form of customer support. (Late last year, Nicaragua refused to withdraw troops from a disputed parcel of land along its border with Costa Rica after Google Maps wrongly labelled it Nicaraguan territory.) “We do need to have some support there, and step up our customer service,” Mayer said. About 40% of Google Maps usage is local, according to Mayer, with 150 million people using the mobile Google Maps. (And drivers across the world travel 12bn miles a year using Google Maps navigation – who needs satnav?) Location-based services, including new releases of Maps for mobile, check-ins, deals and augmented reality, are evolving into quintessentially Google products. The world of “contextual discovery” – organising information, reviews and deals around a given location – is the local play on Google’s longest-standing ambition. Asked by the Guardian how Google manages to assuage privacy fears with cutting-edge consumer products, Mayer said that its Street View technology had got “better and better at blurring” licence plates and other opt-outs. Mayer said Google is “transparent” about the data it needs to inform its products, adding: “There are actually a lot of places that have a lot of data about you that people don’t know. I read the other week that credit card companies know with 98% accuracy two years before that you’re going to get divorced – that’s crazy. “But it means that there’s things that you don’t even know about, like changes in your spouse’s buying power. The real question is: because that data’s always been there but now it’s been recorded, the question is how are they handling it?”
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March 14 2011, 6:28am | Comments »
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Google demotes ‘low-quality’ websites in search overhaul
What’s becoming of the online world when The Guardian writes about Google algorithm changes?
This article titled “Google demotes ‘low-quality’ websites in search overhaul” was written by Josh Halliday, for guardian.co.uk on Friday 25th February 2011 11.51 UTC Google is making a “pretty big” change that will demote “low-quality” or “shallow” websites from online search engine results, in a move designed to tackle so-called “content farms”. The change, which will affect around 12% of Google search queries in the US, follows pressure from the media industry and many of its users. Although Google did not specify which sites would be affected, the search engine has come under fire for allowing content farm sites like Demand Media – which produces thousands of articles a day based on popular search terms – to “pollute” its results. “This update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites – sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful,” said Amit Singhal, a Google fellow, and Matt Cutts, head of the company’s spam-fighting team, wrote in a blog post late on Thursday. “At the same time, it will provide better rankings for high-quality sites — sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on.” The move is Google’s biggest yet in responding to growing criticism over the relevancy of the world’s most popular search engine. It vowed to address the concerns in January. Last week Google launched an extension to its Chrome web browser allowing users to set up a “personal blacklist” of sites that would no longer appear in their search results. Google said 83% of the “top dozen or so” sites which most often featured on the blacklist were demoted with its algorithm change. Responding to Google’s announcement, Demand Media’s executive vice president, Larry Fitzgibbon, said: “As might be expected, a content library as diverse as ours saw some content go up and some go down in Google search results. “This is consistent with what Google discussed on their blog post. It’s impossible to speculate how these or any changes made by Google impact any online business in the long term – but at this point in time, we haven’t seen a material net impact on our content and media business.” The move will also be seen as part of Google’s wider attempt to woo news organisations and other “high-quality” content producers. Some publishers’ content had slipped down Google search results as content farms rose in prominence. Last week Google unveiled plans for its One Pass online charging service for newspapers and magazines, just a day after Apple unveiled a rival internet payment offering for publishers.
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February 26 2011, 1:17am | Comments »
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