In case you missed anything, here’s a quick roundup of the news that powered AllThingsD this week:

1. As AllThingsD‘s Kara Swisher and Peter Kafka were first to report this week, Yahoo is seriously thinking about buying hipster blogging service Tumblr. In fact, Yahoo’s board is scheduled to consider a $1.1 billion all-cash deal on Sunday.
2. Google wanted to dominate the headlines this week during the company’s annual I/O conference … just maybe not like this. By sending Microsoft a cease-and-desist, they helped promote that rival’s anti-Google campaign.
3. That little drama didn’t come up during the official proceedings of I/O, but a lot else did. Here’s a rundown of all the news Google announced in its three-and-a-half-hour opening keynote.
4. Watch this: An interview with Bill Gates, in which the Microsoft founder talks about his longtime relationship with Steve Jobs, on “60 Minutes.”
5. Can productivity apps for the iPad make it as useful as a traditional work PC? Walt Mossberg puts them to the test.
6. Speaking of the iPad, the Justice Department is closing in on Apple with an e-book price fixing case … but one of the seemingly most damning pieces of evidence, a line from a letter from Steve Jobs to James Murdoch, is a little less damning in context.
7. Web video services like Amazon, HBO and Hulu all say they’re seeing significant growth. But is anyone cutting into Netflix’s lead? A new report says: Nope!
8. BlackBerry is bringing its messenger application, BBM, to iPhones and Android phones this summer. But is it too late?
9. Cisco’s earnings only barely beat analysts’ expectations this week, but that beat sent the company’s stock up 9 percent in after-hours trading. Arik Hesseldahl got CEO John Chambers on the phone to talk about where Cisco is and where it’s going.
10. And lastly, if you want more battery life out of your iPhone on the go, you may have considered a special re-juicing case. Product reviewer Lauren Goode tries the battery boosters before you buy.

To stay on top of the latest, follow AllThingsD on Twitter and Facebook, and subscribe to our daily email newsletter.

And Animoca couldn’t be happier about that.

Co-founder Yat Siu calls them “fast food apps.” His 150-person company, a conglomerate of 12 smaller studios, has developed and published more than 350 apps, he said, currently at the rate of about four every week. Its goal is to one day crank out a new app every day as it expands its reach further into Asia and beyond.

Siu, who is also the CEO of Animoca’s parent company, Outblaze Ventures, said as much in a recent interview with AllThingsD. But he also had a lot more to say about the advantages of working outside of Silicon Valley, the maturation of Google’s Android ecosystem and why quantity is sometimes better than quality.

AllThingsD: What’s the difference between being based in Hong Kong and being based in Silicon Valley?

Yat Siu: In terms of our [Android] ecosystem, it is the dominant marketplace, whereas in the Valley, there’s a lot of focus on Apple. We don’t have that much venture capital available to us, so we have to focus on profitability and the bottom line very, very quickly. Our games aren’t all profitable, but our business is. And we’re just a small island city, so we do not have a domestic market. It’s go global or die.

How do your games fare in different regions?

When we first started [in 2011], the U.S. was our biggest market, but just because it had a larger ecosystem. That’s changing today. North America as a continent is now in second place to Asia because Japan and Korea are driving a lot of the revenues. … The people who are buying iPhones or Android phones in the U.S. today are not the first movers, whereas in Asia, a lot of the marketplace still has way under 50 percent smartphone penetration rates. In Japan, at the start of this year, it was under 30 percent.

Is Android fragmentation a problem for you? Putting most of your eggs in that basket means you’re dealing with phones that range from the very low end to the very high end, right?

Two years ago, we had a testing rack of 600 devices. Now, Samsung is outselling basically everyone else, except in China and Japan. The second thing that’s different now is that “low end” is no longer really “low end.” You used to have really poor devices with poor resolution and processing power. Even the so-called “cheap” devices that are sold in China today are quad-core or dual-core devices; they just cost $100, is all. And they’re all standardizing around Jelly Bean (the most recent version of the Android OS). The whole Android philosophy was, “Here, take the operating system. Do what you want. Good luck!” We had weird memory issues because people would be coding stuff on top. Now, with Jelly Bean, most of the stuff that’s going on in the operating system is going on in the application side.

Pretty Pet Salon is one of the more popular games Animoca has published, and started a “Pretty Pet” franchise.

Tell me about your games and how they perform. How do you evaluate success?

We look at every product as a gateway to another product. The key driver is popularity. Monetization will come, we think, once people are in there, but the ability to cross-promote to other games becomes important. We want to make sure that the user always has at least a few of our games to play, because we don’t believe that there is such a thing as a person who can play a game for years and years and years. It’s “fast-food apps.” People just want to consume quickly, move quickly and go on to the next thing. It doesn’t mean that they won’t come back to it, but they’re not prepared to invest console-style, sitting down and playing for four hours.

And if you spent $60 on a game, you’re probably going to invest a lot more time than if you spent nothing or spent 99 cents.

That’s true, too, definitely. But also, with mobile, whether it’s in trains or one-handed game time, sometimes it’s just when you’re lying in bed, the behavior that we’re seeing now is that a person is playing a game, and then after five minutes, he wants to move on to another game. He’s not necessarily playing the same game for an hour. He’s like, “I feel like something else.” It’s no different than people switching TV channels every once in a while, except they’re switching games.

So it’s not as much of a “hits-driven” business for you as it might be for others?

It’s all relative. What is a hit? Because it’s a global audience, a niche segment is pretty large. And yet, if you have a five-million-user niche, is that a hit? It’s probably a hit for an indie studio, but it’s not a hit for us because of the scale we operate in. Typically, we call anything a hit if it has over 15 million downloads, but as a franchise, as a series. We might have one app, and then if it does well and has a few million downloads and reasonable revenues, then we put sequels and additions on top of it. Out of the series, we may wind up having something like 20 or 25 apps.

For those games that aren’t sequels to existing games, how do your studios come up with new things to publish?

We have studios that are as small as six people. The producer is empowered to have his own budget and his own creative vision. There’s a weekly meeting where all the producers come together and talk about what they’re doing, and then go off and do their own thing. The advantage for the business is, if you start off with a studio of six people and it bombs, who cares? It’s not great for them, but the business can afford to do it. If they do well, they have a platform.

The independence of our studio is also attractive to our staff. They have the chance to be a startup without the startup risk. They don’t have to worry about payroll or finance, they can focus on the product and build their own team. The additional unintended advantage is that, in Hong Kong, we’re unique. So, if you want to do games and you want to publish your games, then, frankly, there’s nowhere else to go. People come to us because the other option is banking or finance — which is a good career, just not if you don’t like it. If we were in the Valley, we might end up getting slaughtered by the amount of recruitment and loss of staff. Who knows?

But it’s worth noting that you do also maintain an office here in San Francisco for non-game development roles like partnerships and PR.

In the past, the meccas of the global gaming space used to be different. They used to be Sony, Nintendo and, at one point, Sega. But it was never centered around Silicon Valley. That changed with the smartphone. Now the new mecca is the Bay Area, because Google Play is here and Apple is here. We have an office here because we have to pay homage to the new temples. Even though we’re not in the Valley, it’s absolutely required for us to go in. Every other app company that’s international that wants to succeed must do the same.

Almost all of your revenue, about 95 percent, comes from in-app purchases. Are you looking at other business models?

Advertising will come, but it is not dominant yet. Primarily, the buyers for that now are other app companies, and we’ve got our own network. If we focus more on our cross-promotion, we get more out of that than necessarily opening up inventory to everyone else. Right now, ads are generally low-quality, and they’re also spammy, so it’s a bad user experience. But that will change. The experience is there already — think about how much time you’re spending on mobile versus PC — but [ads] have to deliver value to the user. Facebook has the right idea. People who like casual games, you should really only show them other casual games. Today, the targeting doesn’t exist.

What does your conversion rate of non-paying to paying players look like? The typical curve has a lot of people at the bottom paying nothing or almost nothing, then a long tail with a bump at the end, composed of a small number of players who pay a lot.

That is the hardcore type of model, where basically you have a very low conversion rate, something like 2 percent, and a very high consumable model where people can spend thousands of dollars. That’s not our model. If you look at games like Pretty Pet Salon, you’d be hard pressed to spend more than 20 bucks, just because of the game play. We are expecting to have more volume of titles with a larger frequency of players coming in from outside. So, for instance, Pretty Pet Salon has an 8 percent conversion rate. Now, when we start working with Forgame (Animoca recently accepted a “strategic minority investment” from the Chinese hard-core game maker), that is different. We will listen to their suggestions, and it does appear that that will be the strategy, because people are prepared to spend that kind of money. It’ll be a learning experience for us.

The report, obtained in advance by AllThingsD, shows just how different the new generation of mobile games is from the gaming-only devices that previously reigned supreme. For context, back in Q4 2012, total consumer spending on games for iOS and Android devices surpassed spending on “gaming-optimized handhelds” (that is, Sony’s PSP and Vita, and Nintendo’s DS, DSi and 3DS).

But the real bombshell is in the new report, which covers Q1 2013: In that quarter, consumer spending on Sony’s and Nintendo’s handhelds declined significantly, while iOS and Google Play spending both increased, also significantly. Combined, the phone and tablet crowd spent nearly three times as much on games as handheld device owners.

(And bear in mind, of course, that a new 3DS or PS Vita game costs about $40, while even brand-new mobile games are typically free or 99 cents to download, with many offering optional in-game purchases.)

But wait, you say. This is the first quarter of the year, being compared to the lucrative holiday-driven fourth quarter. How is that fair to Sony and Nintendo?

Exactly. It’s not. With slower game production schedules and much lower device turnover, the holiday quarter matters a great deal to Nintendo and Sony. But for consumers with a steady stream of new games and newer, better devices on which to play those games, seasonality is mostly irrelevant.

IDC and App Annie’s numbers, then, amount to a double whammy: At both the best of times and the worst of times, new-school mobile games beat out their older counterparts.

A few other points of interest from the new report:

• The global install base for those “gaming-optimized handhelds” was about 200 million in Q1 2013. To put that in perspective, Gartner estimates that more than 2 billion phones and tablets are being/will be shipped this year alone. In other words, it’s through volume that mobile devices have closed and blown past the revenue-per-user gap.
• Although the total amount consumers spent on mobile games was far greater on iOS than on Android, gaming amounted to about 80 percent of all consumer spending on Android, vs. about 70 percent on iOS.
• The report splits consumers into four geographic zones: North America, Western Europe, Asia-Pacific and the rest of the world. For both Android and gaming-optimized handhelds, the Asia-Pacific share of total spending increased by more than 10 points (see the chart embedded below).

This report is the second such collaboration between IDC, which tracks videogame and entertainment hardware, and App Annie, which tracks mobile software and in-app revenue.

If you said “gambling,” then nope. Or not yet, anyway. If you said “betting,” it’s probably just because you read the headline, but yes, good job! And if those two answers sound totally interchangeable to you, read on.

Zynga recently began to test the waters in the U.K., but real-money online gambling (that is, betting on games of chance like slots or bingo) is still outlawed in 47 states, and only operating in one, Nevada. In the U.S., though, players can legally bet cash on “games of skill” in 36 states; the appropriately named startup Skillz is now trying to make something out of that legal distinction on Android.

Gamers are familiar with betting virtual (fake) currency on games, said Skillz CEO Andrew Paradise — think Zynga Poker, which sells virtual poker chips in packs that can cost between 99 cents and $99.99. Skillz’s SDK, which launched in open beta late last month, cuts out the middleman: After a developer’s game has been reviewed and approved by Skillz, the company flips a switch that lets players directly bet on their ability to beat another human in a multiplayer game.

In other words, both players pay an entry fee, a cut of which gets split 50-50 between Skillz and the game developer. Then, one player finishes the game with a profit, and the cycle can restart.

Skillz spokesperson Molly Gerth said engagement and user retention for Skillz-enabled games has increased since the SDK launch, in one case by 110 minutes of additional gameplay per user in the two weeks with Skillz vs. the two weeks prior. Another game saw its total revenue triple in a little over a week, Gerth said.

Paradise made sure to say, though, that Skillz can complement rather than replace existing business models: Players can be served ads regardless of whether they bet with real money or virtual money, which is why those engagement numbers matter. He also proposed that the entry fee for a real-money game could be bundled with power-up items that would otherwise be bought in an in-app store as a sort of cheap sample (that is, rather than a free one).

Most of the people who play Skillz-enabled games currently do so with virtual currency, he said.

Skillz has to review the games that want to fully use its SDK because, in those states that allow betting on them, “games of skill” have to fairly allow players to improve over time with practice. “Skilled” players must be able to beat “unskilled” players in at least three out of every four games, Paradise said.

This is interesting because many popular multiplayer mobile games are already games of skill, or close enough to the legal definition that they could be tweaked to be in the clear. However, for the time being, Skillz’s baby beta is only available on 10 Android games, including one it publishes called 3D Cave Runner.

And why Android? Paradise said it’s because iOS has historically monetized far better than Android, even though the latter has a much larger user base. It’s not a gamble, though; he quickly added that he’s “excited about working with Apple in the future.”

In case you missed anything, here’s a quick weekend roundup of the news that powered AllThingsD this week:

1. Wondering just how much your new S4 costs? Market research firm IHS pegs the cost of Samsung’s new flagship smartphone at just above $237 per unit.
2. It planned to do so originally, but Google will not roll out a physical credit card later this month to bolster its “Google Wallet” commerce project.
3. Everyone who works in Web advertising seems to be talking about the same video ad lately, and here it is: A three-minute-28-second mini-documentary from McDonald’s Canada.
4. The Onion is best known for its prowess at disseminating false information. But it performed an “awesome” public service this week when it explained in detail just how it got hacked by the Syrian Electronic Army.
5. Brace yourselves: Windows Blue is coming. Yes, Microsoft confirmed this week that an update to the “no compromise” PC-mobile hybrid OS Windows 8 is on the way.
6. In other Microsoft-related news, BlueStacks’ software that lets you emulate Android apps inside of Windows has been downloaded more than 10 million times. And it’s still in beta.
7. Mobile videogames currently cater to easily distracted players, but is there room for more thoughtful strategy games? Firaxis Games’ Sid Meier (a.k.a. the Civilization guy) says yes.
8. Two new iPad apps claim that they can teach children programming skills directly on the tablet. But can they? Lauren Goode puts Hopscotch and Kodable to the test.
9. It hasn’t made a formal bid, but Yahoo has joined the gang of companies meeting with wanna-sell execs at Hulu.
10. Social video startup Viddy is returning most of its Series B round to investors and moving people in and out of its board.

To stay on top of the latest, follow AllThingsD on Twitter and Facebook, and subscribe to our daily email newsletter.

But on the heels of runaway hits like Temple Run 2 and Subway Surfers, the company is off to the races, hoping to give those single-player phenomena a multiplayer-focused run for their money.

(Pardon the barrage of running puns.)

The company’s latest game is Running With Friends, a smart twist on the popular endless-runner genre. As with other games, you swipe on the touchscreen to avoid obstacles, collect powerups and move your character around the screen: Left and right to change into one of three “lanes,” up to jump and down to slide.

The twist comes in the form of some familiar multiplayer features that Zynga has built around this tried-and-true formula. This is asynchronous multiplayer, meaning you can challenge someone to a race without needing to play at the same time as your opponent to compete (as is the case in other “With Friends” titles).

Developed in partnership with Twisted Metal and God of War creators Eat Sleep Play, the game just looks good — the bright Subway Surfers-esque 3-D graphics are streets ahead of the other titles in Zynga’s existing lineup.

Factoring in a bit of luck from a pregame slot-machine spin, Running With Friends awards points to players based on how far they can run and how many bonus items they pick up along the way. And if one of your opponents has run the same obstacles as you already, the game remembers how they moved, sort of like the “ghost” mode in Mario Kart.

That means you might see your friends on the track and can shove them out of the way with a swipe — which, let’s be honest, is pretty fun.

The game is iOS-only to start (so, available on iPhone, iPad and iPod touch), but Zynga’s mobile SVP Travis Boatman told AllThingsD that the company will likely do what it has done with previous games like Zynga Poker and Words With Friends: See how the game does, improve it and then roll it out to other platforms, one at a time.

Oh, wait. Scratch one more idea off the list. Now seeking funding via a just-launched Kickstarter, CatLand would give users the chance to care for a Tamagotchi-esque pet by sending check-ins to a location-aware mobile app.

So, if your cat is hungry, you can check in at a restaurant, and if it’s bored, you can take it to the park. CatLand’s creators said they’re still uncommitted to any one business model, since their first priority is just to get funded and get users. But it might eventually offer the ability for local businesses to sponsor special check-in hotspots that reward one’s digital kitty with more virtual points than check-ins at other, non-paying locales.

Silly? Yeah, a bit. But this piqued my interest for two reasons:

1. Foursquare, the former mayor of location-based gamification, is backing away from check-ins and moving toward local discovery; since it’s targeted at teenage girls, CatLand may be an interesting test case for check-ins as a niche product as opposed to a broad “Yelp-plus” service.
2. With the exception of a few apps like Quadstreaker and — more notably — Google’s alternate-reality game, Ingress, mobile games haven’t yet embraced location as an important element of play, either because it’s hard to implement or maybe because it’s just not fun for most types of games. So that’s two trends this silly Kickstarter project is bucking.

(And — unofficial third reason — just because this is about cute animals. We’re definitely gonna win that Webby next year, guys!)

CatLand’s Kickstarter page is here, and a video explaining the app in a bit more detail is below:

Courtesy 2K Games

When you think of mobile games, you probably think of titles like Angry Birds, Temple Run or Fruit Ninja — not the sort of micromanaging strategy games for which Sid Meier is best known.

And yet the creator of the hit Civilization franchise and his company, Firaxis Games (owned by Take-Two Interactive), are moving more troops into mobile after testing the waters with ported games like Pirates! and Civilization Revolution. Rather than just producing, Meier himself was one of three programmers on a new mobile-first Firaxis game, Ace Patrol.

Although the WWI dogfighting game — scheduled to launch on May 9 — will be iOS-only, Meier acknowledged that “there’s certainly a logic into looking into other platforms and seeing what the possibilities are.” He caught up with AllThingsD on the phone recently to talk about how he sees the changing landscape of games.

CC BY-SA 2.0 Antonio Fucito

Sid Meier: The very early console games were very simple, twitchy hand-eye coordination games. And then, over time, strategy became okay to do on console. I think we’re going to go through a similar evolution with mobile, where initially the games are pretty casual and simple, but that’s not because of any restrictions in the platform or anything, it’s just that the market is gonna evolve and the audience is gonna evolve. There’s definitely a role for more strategy-oriented games on mobile.

And do you think that’ll go mainstream, or will that be a niche audience?

I think [strategy] is probably not going to be the predominant genre on mobile, but it will grow in the same way it has grown in the PC market and the console market. In a lot of ways, it’s more suitable to mobile than console because, on mobile, you could potentially be distracted, so you want a game that’s played at the player’s pace, and not at a pace that’s driven by the game itself — something you can start and stop, and put away for a while.

What about multiplayer? Depending on whom you ask, the future of multiplayer games could be asynchronous and turn-based, or all about playing live, either in the same room or on different devices anywhere in the world. Do you have a dog in the fight?

Since our game is turn-based, we chose to support two of those modes. One is the asynchronous mode, where you can have 10 games going on at the same time with 10 different people. The other mode, which we’re calling “hot-pad” mode, is where you’re playing on the same machine with the same player. Real-time multiplayer is suited to another type of game. I’m playing a lot of World of Tanks right now, and that works really well as a real-time multiplayer game. It might not work so well on mobile, where you might get a phone call, or maybe you’re traveling and you can’t guarantee that you’re going to be able to hang around until the end of the game.

What did you learn from the experience of heading up such a small team on Ace Patrol? Do you think you will do the same thing in mobile again?

I’ve enjoyed the small-team aspect — fewer meetings, and more time to actually work on the game. And I’ve learned really to kind of appreciate some of the unique features of the mobile platform: The touchscreen, the gestures, the swiping, the pinching. That tactile interaction between the player and the game really connects you more closely with what’s happening on the screen. We’re very impressed with just the raw horsepower of the platform. For a flight game, it’s fun to have a 3-D world to fly through … we actually weren’t sure whether we could do that when we started. Also, [we've learned] how many of our core strategy game elements that we’ve used on other platforms seem to work fairly well on iOS.

And that’s interesting because not all games are as mobile-friendly as others. Will Firaxis be doing more with turn-based games on mobile?

I think it works very well, yes. There are certainly some real-time games that work just fine. But the turn-based games that we’ve done, whether it’s Haunted Hollow or Ace Patrol or XCOM, later this summer, just all seem to be a natural fit for the mobile platforms. Is it part of our future? I think the answer is pretty assuredly yes. But we’re not giving up on PCs. They’re our bread and butter, and the new consoles are very interesting, but we definitely see mobile as a significant part of our future going forward.

What do you think about what Microsoft is doing with Windows? Obviously, they have the legacy title for being the home of PC gaming, and yet, in some ways, they’re making their main OS a lot more like a mobile operating system.

That’s a very interesting development. The PC market is splitting into tablet PCs and the traditional desktop PCs. These games that we’re doing cross over really nicely into tablet PCs or any kind of mobile format. That’s another reason why we’re looking really seriously at this market. I’m not sure what’s happening in the PC market, whether it’s going to go toward tablet or continue to be really strong in desktop. It’ll be interesting to see how it plays out.

In case you missed anything, here’s a quick weekend roundup of the news that powered AllThingsD this week:

1. Sources say that Apple is pulling engineers from the next version of OS X and assigning them to its mobile OS in order to get a preview ready in time for next month’s Worldwide Developers Conference.
2. By 2017, more than half of companies will require their employees to supply their own devices on the job, according to a new Gartner report.
3. A California court has ruled in Facebook’s favor versus “typosquatters” who benefited from registering domain names with misspellings like “gacebook” and “dacebook.”
4. Speaking of Facebook, it’s growing — but that growth rate has seen a slow decline over the past year.
5. As it tries to convince consumers that the iPhone and Android aren’t the only options, Microsoft released a hard-edged, humorous ad for Windows Phone.
6. Buying a laptop is all about timing; if you can, you might want to wait.
7. “This is just like another language, just a different set of life skills than if you learned French or Spanish.” That’s Krishna Vedati, CEO of Tynker, a platform aimed at teaching children to code.
8. Consumer electronics warranty provider SquareTrade says Samsung’s new Galaxy S4 is more breakable than both the S3 and the iPhone 5.
9. In AllThingsD Must-Reads, Bizo CEO Russell Glass writes, “There is a revolution brewing in the enterprise and it’s starting right at the desk of the chief marketing officer.”
10. To show off its ability to precisely move and manipulate individual atoms, IBM released the smallest movie ever made: An animated short called “A Boy And His Atom.”

To stay on top of the latest, follow AllThingsD on Twitter and Facebook, and subscribe to our daily email newsletter.

Photo courtesy NeuroGaming Conference & Expo

In San Francisco this week, a nonprofit group dedicated to neurogaming — the intersection of brain science and videogame playing — is taking its turn at bat in predicting the next wave of game-changing technology.

The conclusion of the NeuroGaming Conference and Expo’s organizers, unsurprisingly, is that hardware and software that monitor and respond to your body’s electrical and chemical signals will do for games what synchronized sound did for movies. Zack Lynch, CEO of the neurotech industry’s trade group, said the end goal is to create a new, deeper category of games.

Speakers and expositioners all had their own takes on how to reach that goal, including (just to name a few):

• “Mind-reading” headsets with sensors that attach to the ear and forehead
• Smooth, unassuming touchscreens that provide haptic (touch) feedback
• Headphones that convert low-frequency bass sounds — think explosions in an action game — into physical vibrations
• Neurotech integrations with much-discussed emerging wearable technologies like Google Glass and the Oculus Rift
• Experimental sensors that could estimate a player’s emotional state by, for instance, calculating the pH of their sweat.

But questions about the technology’s future abounded throughout the first day of the conference on Wednesday. At the root of all their caveats was a single point of potential failure: those pesky consumers.

“Most consumers are not going to put down their hard-earned money” for experimental one-time-use gadgets, NeuroSky CEO Stanley Yang said. “There has to be lasting value.”

(Yang should know: his company’s first consumer product, the Star Wars Force Trainer, was a $130 ping pong ball-levitating device … batteries not included.)

Photo courtesy NeuroGaming Conference & Expo

“Regardless of how we define it, keep the consumers in mind,” Petrovic said in a venture capital-focused panel about investing in the technology. “Don’t call this ‘the next great neurogaming platform’ or ‘neurogaming device,’ because it won’t sell.”

Those terms, he explained, connote an invasion of one’s body and may seem scary to those unfamiliar with the technology — that is, almost everyone.

A few of the speakers and numerous attendees (Lynch said about 300 registered for the conference online) suggested that the best immediate hope for brain-powered technology is not consumer gaming at all, but rather improvements in the places where it has already succeeded, like clinical therapy for those with limited mobility or as a teaching aide for children with mental disorders like ADHD.

The problem is that most brain-training games are just, well, boring, said Petrovic’s fellow panelist Roger Quy, a general partner at Technology Partners. A popular refrain throughout the day was that without great content, all attempts at neurogaming would be doomed to the same fate as 3-D TV, which fizzled despite enormous hype and investment.

Union Square associate Nate Hennings added that games targeted at a niche of enthusiasts may prove to be a testing ground for the mass viability of neurotech, just as the Tesla Roadster laid the groundwork for cheaper versions of the electric cars.

The dream, though, is that one of the companies represented at the conference will come up with a device that immediately “clicks” with consumers, as the Wiimote did starting back in 2006. To that end, perhaps the most important axiom to measure future brain gaming products’ success came out of Yang’s appearance earlier in the day.

“What happens to the consumer when they open up the box?” Yang asked. “Are they able to plug it in and start having fun instantly? If you can’t deliver that, nobody will jump in.”

In case you missed anything, here’s a quick weekend roundup of the news that powered AllThingsD.com this week:

1. Daily-deals site LivingSocial was hacked, compromising the names, emails, birthdates and encrypted passwords of 50 million users.
2. In an essay, Reed Hastings laid out his predictions for the future of streaming video, which includes not just his company, Netflix, but also HBO, ESPN and anyone else transitioning from a channel to an app.
3. Walt Mossberg reviewed the Galaxy S 4, Samsung’s new flagship smartphone, and concluded that “while I admire some of its features, overall, it isn’t a game-changer.”
4. What are Google’s plans for its high-speed Internet project, Google Fiber? Theories abound, but good luck divining an answer from CEO Larry Page’s words.
5. According to multiple sources, Twitter is testing local discovery features that will help you better understand what’s happening not just around the world, but also down the block.
6. Android’s seemingly inexorable ascension over the iPhone may not be inexorable, after all. A new report says customer loyalty will let Apple overtake Google in smartphone market share by 2015.
7. On the 10-year anniversary of its sale to Google, Applied Semantics co-founder Eytan Elbaz explained what he and his partners learned from starting up and getting acquired.
8. For the first time, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer publicly commented on the controversy created after Yahoo banned its employees from working from home.
9. Speaking of Mayer, she’s officially joined the board of wireless gadget maker Jawbone, and it’s likely to be a good fit.
10. Apple needs some new hit products to drive growth, and CEO Tim Cook says they’re on the way… just not until this fall.

To stay on top of the latest, follow AllThingsD.com on Twitter and Facebook, and subscribe to our daily email newsletter.

So, it’s at once refreshing and puzzling to see something so trend-buckingly different as the zSpace, a 3-D monitor developed by a “virtual-holographic computing” company of the same name in Sunnyvale, Calif.

ZSpace execs said the monitor is mainly intended for non-gaming uses, but at both the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco last month and at zCon — a company-run conference in Mountain View, Calif., this week — the potential for games was on prominent display. The problem is that this (admittedly cool) new hardware is very, very expensive right now: You can pick up a monitor, stylus controller and 3-D glasses for a cool $3,995 online.

Here’s how it works: Those 3-D glasses have five passive markers that signal four cameras in the 24-inch LCD monitor. By moving one’s head in any direction, the picture on the screen adjusts, as if the objects displayed within it occupied real, three-dimensional space.

Then, using a wired stylus with three physical buttons, users see a straight (virtual) line connecting the object in their hand to a mouse-like dot onscreen. To use a simple example, a cube on the screen can be looked at from multiple angles using just the glasses, then picked up, brought closer or moved farther away, rotated or moved somewhere else using the stylus.

The video below shows the first part of that equation, as I pushed my phone camera up against the glasses lens and then moved the glasses back and forth in front of the monitor, traveling around a 3-D diagram of a heart.

At its high price point, the zSpace is currently best suited for enterprise and educational customers seeking to, for instance, visualize data in three dimensions or (as in the video above) virtually study the structure of real-world objects.

However, the company pointedly brought in a handful of video game professionals for its conference to get developers thinking about games on the monitor. Indeed, the most impressive demo on display at zCon — also found at GDC — was of the game engine Unity running its demo game AngryBots in 3-D. Using the stylus to move a soldier and shoot from a top-down view, players could physically duck down to help their soldier “see” through a window.

At its conference, zSpace seemed confident enough in its future that it didn’t require its speakers to be cheerleaders for the technology. On Monday, virtual reality expert David Nahon of Dassault Systems pointed out that plenty of others’ stabs at VR in the past have failed despite cool hardware.

“If you don’t have content, you can have the best container, and it’s going to fail,” Nahon said, adding that zSpace currently lacks a “killer purpose” like Wacom’s Cintiq drawing tablets, which are aimed at professional artists and can cost between $999 and $3,699.

The following morning’s keynote address, by Guitar Hero co-creator Charles Huang, barely mentioned the zSpace at all, shoehorning the device into a single slide at the end of the presentation. Instead, Huang spent most of his time talking about Guitar Hero, a prominent example of a great game that led consumers to buy new hardware — those plastic guitars.

During a Q&A following the presentation, Huang speculated that shooter and battle games played by hardcore gamers will drive adoption of the zSpace. That niche, he said, has proven willing to drop thousands of dollars on top-of-the-line gaming PC hardware from companies like Nvidia.

Huang also humorously noted that games have supplanted pornography as the standard-bearer for what new technologies consumers are willing to adopt, since they created the strongest revenue stream on Facebook, Apple’s App Store and Google Play.

Both zSpace CTO David Chavez and CEO Paul Kellenberger said independently that consumer games are not a top priority for the company right now. Kellenberger said educational games may be a proving ground, though, since colleges and universities are among their current target audiences.

Kellenberger said he expects the price of the zSpace to fall below $1000 within 18 to 24 months, and that when that happens, it’s only a matter of time until consumer games resembling the Unity AngryBots demo become a serious use case. Whether developers will agree with that assessment remains to be seen.

Asa Mathat / AllThingsD.com

It’s been a long, hectic week for news — so it’s understandable if you’ve missed a couple stories on the technology side of things. Here’s a quick weekend roundup of the news that powered AllThingsD this week:

1. In an essay in AllThingsD Voices, Jan Chipchase writes that Google Glass is the company’s “unintentional public service announcement on the future of privacy … it threatens surreptitious, unexpected or continuous recording from the perspective of the human-eye/ear view.”
2. At D: Dive Into Mobile, WhatsApp CEO Jan Koum announced that his messaging app is now bigger than Twitter, which officially claims 200 million monthly active users.
3. Also announced at our mobile conference were Facebook’s updates to its iPhone and iPad apps to incorporate the “Chat Heads” from Facebook Home. As of Wednesday, those changes have started rolling out to users.
4. In an interview with Arik Hesseldahl, Workday co-CEO and Greylock Partner Aneel Bhusri said, “it’s the most disruptive time in 25 years” for enterprise, and that landing HP as a customer at Workday “gives people more comfort that the cloud is real.”
5. Peter Zatko, a computer hacking expert better known as Mudge, is leaving his post at DARPA, where he was tasked with helping government agencies fend off cyber attacks. Mudge’s next stop? Google.
6. If the netbook wasn’t dead already, it will be soon. New data from research house IHS iSuppli say shipments of the mini-computers will fall to zero by 2015.
7. Maybe you’ve heard of this small company called Microsoft? Windows Phone head Terry Myerson is casting his division as an underdog and going on the offensive against Google: “[there is] clearly mutiny in the Starship Android,” he said.
8. Facebook would love to put its new Home overlay on Apple’s iPhone and iPad. Apple almost certainly doesn’t want it there. In this interview, Kara Swisher asked Facebook CTO Mike Schroepfer and mobile head Cory Ondrejka to explain the two companies’ complicated relationship.
9. If you haven’t heard of Chinese smartphone company Xiaomi yet, you will soon. With 7.19 million handsets sold in 2012, Xiaomi president Bin Lin said the company expects to sell twice as many this year.
10. And finally, one of readers’ favorite quotes of the week came from AllThingsD’s own Walt Mossberg. He kicked off Dive Into Mobile by asking Mozilla CEO Gary Kovacs about Firefox’s mobile operating system: “So … what the f**k?”

To stay on top of the latest, you should follow AllThingsD on Twitter and Facebook, and subscribe to our daily email newsletter.

Asa Mathat / AllThingsD.com

And that’s a wrap! After Monday’s half-day kickoff to D: Dive Into Mobile — Global Edition, Tuesday saw a full day of great speakers on topics ranging from messaging to activism to driverless cars. In case you missed it, here’s a good place to start:

1. Starting at the end: “We’re big believers that this [phone] screen is the first screen,” said Bob Bowman, president of Major League Baseball’s Advanced Media, in the conference’s final interview. “Anybody that doesn’t believe that is living on another planet or doesn’t have children. Reality is the second screen.”
2. “Our goal with Android is to reach everyone,” Google chairman Eric Schmidt said. “We’ll cross one billion Android devices in six to nine months. In a year or two, we’ll hit two billion.” Schmidt also talked about Google’s self-driving cars and the company’s new gadgets.
3. Intel said it is getting the hang of mobile — which is good, because the company also reported bleak Q1 earnings today, with a 25 percent drop in profit as demand for PCs declines.
4. WhatsApp CEO Jan Koum said his messaging app is now bigger than Twitter, which officially claims 200 million monthly active users. WhatsApp has eight billion inbound and 12 billion outbound messages per day, Koum said.
5. Meanwhile, Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel said his photo- and video-messaging app has grown by three times in four months, and that users are now sharing 150 million ephemeral photos per month, versus 40 million permanent pictures per month on Instagram.
6. A mobile app called Better launched onstage, promising to provide 24/7 concierge medical care to paying users. Better’s offerings include the ability to directly contact doctors and nurses, through a partnership with the Mayo Clinic.
7. Twitter’s VP of Product Michael Sippey said the site is heavily investing in and focusing on improvements to Twitter’s once-poor search and discovery experience.
8. Microsoft’s Terry Myerson said Windows Phone is a global competitor, because it has had stronger momentum in markets where carriers do not subsidize phones. He also aimed more than a few potshots at the likes of Android and Facebook.
9. Nonprofit activism organization DoSomething’s Nancy Lublin announced that the company had reached one million teens via weekly text messages, with a 97 percent open rate.
10. And lastly — mobile security provider Lookout demonstrated how phones can be hacked via phishing emails with phony app-download links, urging users to be wary of unfamiliar download sources.

These 10 blurbs only scratch the surface, though. For more, please check out our full list of stories from D: Dive Into Mobile.

Asa Mathat / AllThingsD.com

BKash’s CEO Kamal Quadir made the case for the e-commerce company at D: Dive Into Mobile, during the last of three “Global Voices” sessions. Quadir said the company is growing rapidly in Bangladesh, a country with 95 million mobile phones, but said nothing similar has caught on in the developed world.

“Fundamentally, it’s designed for poor people,” he said. “In the U.S., one of the reasons this kind of service hasn’t kicked in yet is because we have so many alternatives.”

BKash oversees a network of 45,000 agents across the country who let people connect to its service like mom-and-pop ATMs. That way it gets around the overhead expenses that a traditional bank would have to pay.

So, a merchant who lives far from a bank can use his or her mobile phone to send virtual money and go to a local agent to receive money. BKash uses middleware technology from Visa called Fundamo to hold onto people’s transactional information.

BRAC Bank, a subsidiary of the development agency BRAC, owns 51 percent of bKash, with the rest owned by Money in Motion, which Quadir said brings capital, tech and know-how to the table.

Check out the full video from Quadir’s session below:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130416/bkash-offers-mobile-banking-for-bangladesh-a-country-with-few-bank-accounts/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130416/sesame-workshop-shows-off-mobile-experiments-in-rural-india-augmented-reality/ http://allthingsd.com/20130416/sesame-workshop-shows-off-mobile-experiments-in-rural-india-augmented-reality/#comments Tue, 16 Apr 2013 19:27:57 +0000 Eric Johnson http://allthingsd.com/?p=311968 Can you tell me how to get to Galli Galli Sim Sim? Not all of India’s kids can, since many don’t have access to a TV, so the official Indian version of “Sesame Street” is expanding its reach with new mobile services that work on all phones.

Sesame Workshop’s Scott Chambers talked about those services at D: Dive Into Mobile today in New York City. The hope is that Sesame will now have a better way to educate children in rural areas, where mobile devices have greater penetration.

Chambers called the Indian mobile outreach program a “successful experiment.”

“The communities are using what they’ve learned just from watching this media,” he said, after showing a short video.

Chambers also demoed an augmented-reality application called Big Bird’s Words. With the app, children can use a phone’s camera to find printed words that Big Bird announces from out of a 500-word vocabulary. In the picture above, Chambers is finding the word “milk” on a label.

The app isn’t commercially available yet, but Sesame Workshop is experimenting with it now in the U.S.

“We look at [mobile] the same way we looked at television as an opportunity back in 1969,” Chambers said. “It’s not just using technology for technology’s sake.”

Check out video from Chambers’s appearance below:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130416/sesame-workshop-shows-off-mobile-experiments-in-rural-india-augmented-reality/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130416/five-things-we-learned-at-dive-into-mobile-day-one/ http://allthingsd.com/20130416/five-things-we-learned-at-dive-into-mobile-day-one/#comments Tue, 16 Apr 2013 07:13:43 +0000 Eric Johnson http://allthingsd.com/?p=312229 D: Dive Into Mobile — Global Edition kicked off Monday with an afternoon of interviews that touched on everything from driving directions to the future of mobile operating systems. Here’s a handful of highlights:

1. “Firefox OS? What the f**k?” asked AllThingsD’s Walt Mossberg, kicking off the day’s first interview. Mozilla CEO Gary Kovacs said it’s all about the open Web standards that underlie the forthcoming Firefox operating system.
2. Google may not have 44 million robotic cars on the road, but Waze has 44 million users, Waze CEO Noam Bardin said, and they make Waze’s maps better by using them. Bardin touted the power of crowdsourced driving directions, which so far have “validated” about 1.5 billion km (or about 932 million miles).
3. Google’s Jason Spero, appearing with Millennial Media’s Mollie Spillman, said that mobile ads will have more potential once they can track user behavior for advertisers’ sake. However, Spillman added, “It’s becoming more mainstream and mandatory that mobile is part of the marketing budget or media spend.”
4. Xiaomi sold 7.19 million handsets in 2012, and expects to sell double that number this year. The high-end smartphone company is one of China’s fastest-growing. “We believe the future of the mobile Internet is really about services,” said company president Bin Lin.
5. Lady Gaga’s manager Troy Carter simultaneously balanced Gaga’s plans for a hybrid album-app with the fact that physical CD sales are still incredibly important in the music business: “You can’t shock the water in our business. It’s about gradual change,” he said. “You still have to cater to the market that’s out there.”

For more, please check out our full list of stories from D: Dive Into Mobile. See you tomorrow!

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