One area of apps involves gaming. I’m not just referring to the single player, heads-down games that consume a person for hours until she beats her own best score, or the scores of strangers around the Internet—though plenty of those exist for the tablet. I’m talking about old-fashioned board games, the kind that involve sitting around with friends or family and actually having fun together. Some of these apps are purely digital. But one company is bringing real board-like elements to tablet games.

This week, I tested a game that successfully marries digital and analog games by using the first physical device to digitally interact with the Apple iPad screen. The $40 Duo by Discovery Bay Games (yoomigame.com) doesn’t plug into the iPad, nor does it connect to the iPad via Bluetooth or other means. It sits on the iPad screen in a specific spot and uses a built-in light sensor on its underbelly to interpret light signals displayed on the iPad screen during a game.

To play the Yoomi game with Discovery Bay Games’ Duo, players drop jewel-like tokens onto the top of the device to vote on possible answers to questions.

The first accompanying game app to use the Duo, called Yoomi, is free from the Apple App Store and can be played by kids as young as 3 years old. It simply asks players to guess what one person would choose between two possible answers, or options, both of which are displayed as digital cards with text and images on the iPad screen. Cards include options like, “dig a hole to China” or “find buried treasure.” Up to six people or teams can play, and each receives a set of jewel-toned tokens that they’ll try to get rid of before the other players by guessing each person’s choice. Playful music and sound effects accompany each game.

Players cast their votes by placing tokens on one of two spaces atop the Duo, a plastic hollow device with clear sides and a tiny black switch. Each space represents an answer, and the person about whom everyone else guesses privately chooses one answer by reaching into the Duo and touching the iPad screen to select the answer.

After the other players cast their votes, a Reveal button on the iPad screen uncovers the chosen answer. Suddenly, the space at the top of the Duo representing the correct chosen answer drops like a trap door, collecting all tokens that were there. The iPad is passed to the next person and play continues, with each person selecting an answer for others to guess until one person or team is out of tokens.

At first, I was skeptical that the Duo and the Yoomi game could replicate playing with traditional board games. Since so few aspects of my life aren’t touched by digital technology, putting down my laptop, iPad or BlackBerry to play a board game always feels like a treat. But I found that while playing Yoomi, the iPad becomes the game board, stationed in the center of a table or circle of friends and passed around for each person to cast a vote.

Since the iPad has plenty of additional functions, playing a game on it may invite distractions from the outside world. Other apps continued to work in the background on my iPad, like my Facebook and Entertainment Weekly apps, which send occasional pop-up notifications onto the screen. The thought of personal Facebook messages popping up would be enough to embarrass any teen into not wanting to use his or her iPad to play with family members. On a good note, the chime indicating I received a new email on the iPad was automatically silenced during game play.

And of course, the iPad costs at least $500, so even though the $40 Duo is relatively affordable, the whole set won’t fit most family budgets.

Still, several advantages come from using a digital game that incorporates physical components, like tokens and a device that collects those tokens. Instead of holding a controller and staring at a TV, like with video games, players need to look up at one another to see how many tokens each person has and who’s winning. And the Yoomi game questions are provocative enough that people will want to ask one another why they chose their answers or voted a certain way.

One of the most exciting things about this technology is its ability to use a light sensor for communication between the iPad screen and another object. Discovery Bay Games CEO Craig Olson said the company might consider using this technology for other products such as a health-related device that, when placed on the iPad screen, allows data to be automatically recognized and recorded.

Like other digital apps, Yoomi can be updated with new content to replenish the 150 pairs of digital cards that come loaded with this free game; another 150 pairs will be sent in an update later this year. Mr. Olson said people tend to burn through digital games much faster than traditional board games, and the ability to send new game material without manufacturing and delivering physical parts is a real boon.

The people working at Discovery Bay Games know a thing or two about traditional board games: Numerous Discovery Bay Games employees worked at Cranium, the charades-esque game that gets people humming, whistling, drawing with closed eyes and miming. Duo is likewise deliberately designed to encourage interaction with others.

In the next nine months, some 12 to 15 other iPad app games will be released for use with Duo, including a $2.99 Smithsonian Fact or Fiction game and a $2.99 Discovery for Kids–Astonishing Comparisons game.

This summer, Discovery Bay Games will start releasing other physical devices that will work with the iPad and range in price from $30 to $60. Some will use the light-sensor technology while others will use different signaling methods to communicate with the iPad. These will launch in conjunction with lead titles, like a Highlights for Children game and a Saturday Night Live game. Mr. Olson said the company is developing for the Android platform as well as for Windows 7 devices.

For now, the Duo and Yoomi are a fun way to add technology into family game night, with continuously updated content keeping game material fresh. As games improve to take full advantage of the other tablet functions, they’ll become even more enjoyable and interactive.

Write to Katherine Boehret at katie.boehret@wsj.com

Notice to Readers

Starting today, The Mossberg Solution column becomes The Digital Solution. It will still be written by Katherine Boehret and edited by Walter S. Mossberg.

Here’s a reminder of what that was like: Meet StyleFind.com, which is supposed to be live Tuesday morning. It’s a new shopping site from Time Inc.’s InStyle magazine, and you’ll figure it out as soon as you see it.

In case you don’t: The site helps shoppers pick through some 2,000 brands, from 150 retailers, and eventually sends them off to partner sites, which handle the actual purchase and fulfillment. InStyle will get affiliate fees for forwarding on customers, giving the title another revenue stream to complement circulation and advertising.

StyleFind sports the requisite Twitter and Facebook buttons, but this isn’t one of the new breed of social shopping sites that have cropped up in the past year, like Svpply.

Instead, StyleFind assumes that shoppers are interested in the sense and sensibility that InStyle exudes, translated here by a small team of dedicated editors who pick out clothes and accessories.

Pretty straightforward stuff, and you can find versions of it elsewhere on the Web, and from other publishers as well. The major difference here is that Time Inc. built and operates the site itself, based on technology it acquired when it bought Boston-based StyleFeeder nearly a year ago for a price reported as “well into eight figures.”

Following that deal, Time Warner’s publishing unit then hired Bluefly vet John Carles to head up e-commerce for its Style group. Assuming Stylefind pans out, Carles will be able to use the same model for other titles, including People and even Entertainment Weekly, the publisher says.

The Facebook movie is finally here, the reviews are in and–no surprise–the critics are raving.

After all, it was done by Hollywood pros director David Fincher and writer Aaron Sorkin, who have apparently transformed the appalling badly penned and very fictional book “Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal” by Ben Mezrich into some bit of cinematic art.

But that’s not BoomTown talking, so here is a rundown of five reviews by top critics, as collected by the terrific Rotten Tomaties site (you can click on the links below for the full reviews):

Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times:

“Smartly written by Aaron Sorkin, directed to within an inch of its life by David Fincher and anchored by a perfectly pitched performance by Jesse Eisenberg, ‘The Social Network’ is a barn-burner of a tale that unfolds at a splendid clip.”

Owen Glelbermann, Entertainment Weekly:

“‘The Social Network’ has everything you want in a thriller for the brain: Huge doses of ego and duplicity, corporate backstabbing, and some very layered performances.”

Joe Morgenstern, The Wall Street Journal:

“This account of Facebook’s founder, and of the website’s explosive growth, quickly lifts you to a state of exhilaration, and pretty much keeps you there for two hours.”

Bob Mondello, NPR:

“‘The Social Network’ is terrific entertainment–an unlikely thriller that makes business ethics, class distinctions and intellectual-property arguments sexy.”

Joe Neumaier, New York Daily News:

“Weeks after seeing it, moments from it will haunt you.”

Hauntingly sexy is simply not the Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg that I know or what most think of the powerful social networking site, but it seems to go on and on like that in the reviews, with every critic using the film to wax poetic about life in the digital age.

(Personally, I find all my life lessons in “The Terminator” series, but no one seems to grok my profound insight here.)

On Rotten Tomatoes, which you can see above, the movie got a 97 percent critics rating, although only an 81 percent audience vote. Still, only Ben Affleck’s “The Town” is as close.

In other words, Mark, even if it is trashing you as a person, what you represent seems to have inspired analog ecstasy and movie magic.

And for most film critics, it seems, a very happy ending.

I will be seeing “The Social Network” later today at a special screening in Silicon Valley, sponsored by Eastwick Communications, which will be followed by a panel discussion titled: “Trust, Privacy, and Ethics in the Facebook Age.”

I am the moderator, and the interviewees include M. Ryan Calo, director of the Consumer Privacy Project at Stanford Law School; Matt Cohler, one of Facebook’s earliest execs (where he remains a special advisor) and now a VC at Benchmark Capital; FutureWorks’ Brian Solis; and ReputationDefender CEO Michael Fertik.

Video TK, natch, although I am going more for wobbly, rather than exhilarating.

I certainly could not do much better than another genius version by Next Media Animation from Taiwan. While only in CGI, there is bathroom sex, beatings, peepholes and–say what?–a gay love triangle.

Really and truly–enjoy:

Until now, Elowitz has been in the business of helping other publishers build sites with wiki-based tools. But now he’s opening up his own shop at Wetpaint.com, which should be working by the time you read this. (If not–take a look at the sample screenshot at the bottom of this post.)

Elowitz is presenting Wetpaint as a sort of upscale, thinkier version of content factories like Demand Media. Like Demand, Wetpaint uses technology to help it figure out which stories to assign–in Wetpaint’s case, via an “ingestion engine” that is supposed to crawl the Web looking for spiking stories on discussion boards, Twitter, Facebook, etc.

The difference is that Demand is primarily interested in finding lots and lots of stories that will appeal to a relatively small group of searchers, which is how it ends up with search bait like “How to Donate a Used Car in Dallas.”

But Wetpaint is trying to create a destination site for a large number of eyeballs, and says it will use its tech to get them more of what they want, produced by a core group of 10 editorial employees and a freelance squad of 20.

“We don’t care about Google,” Elowitz says. “We’re not trying to get long-tail, we’re not trying to get search traffic.”

Okay. So that’s a bit of hyperbole–Elowitz would like some Google (GOOG) juice as much as the next publisher, which is one of the reasons he’s using the existing Wetpaint name for his site.

But he’s clearly set on exploiting social networks, too. He says Wetpaint.com, via its focus on Facebook-friendly TV shows, has already garnered 500,000 fans on the social network.

Elowitz is also positioning himself as a competitor of pop/gossip Web sites published by old media brands, specifically Time Warner’s (TWX) People, TMZ and Entertainment Weekly sites. But the people who read that stuff online don’t limit themselves to a handful of brands, which is why big Web players like Microsoft (MSFT) and Yahoo (YHOO) are there, too.

Add in freelance upstarts like Perez Hilton and millions more you’ve never heard of, and it’s a very, very crowded field. Elowitz will need a very clever tech team to make this work.

Courtney Love went into a Twitter frenzy yesterday, threatening to sue Activision Blizzard (ATVI) over of its use of the image of her late husband and grunge music legend Kurt Cobain in the latest version of its popular music game, Guitar Hero.

Some tweet gems:

“not in twenty JILLION years would i EVER have allowed this and this is lethal.”

“we get NO money for this, travesty, Frances gets NO money for the rape.”

Except, oops, Love signed the contract herself and also, sources said, the check has long been cashed from Activision.

Smells like mean spirit!

“Guitar Hero secured the necessary licensing rights from the Cobain estate in a written agreement signed by Courtney Love to use Kurt Cobain’s likeness as a fully playable character in Guitar Hero® 5,” said Activision in a statement.

Cobain, who killed himself in 1994, is an “unlockable” character in the Guitar Hero 5 game recently released. When a character is unlockable, the avatar can play other songs too.

So, presumably Cobain could play Bon Jovi, which apparently pisses Love off.

In fact, Love’s lawyer told the TMZ.com Web site: “Activision is exploiting Kurt’s image in a manner anathema to the very essence of his music, spirit and essence. I along with Ms. Cobain hope those who love Kurt’s music strongly voice their sentiments to Activision and demand his image not be debased by singing the songs of Bon Jovi.”

But one still has to wonder why Love–who is now better known for her wacky antics than her own music (you can see a list of some of her frequent outbursts here from Entertainment Weekly)–chose to go nuts now rather than before the game was released.

Well, BoomTown has a very good guess, but I will keep it to myself!

So until the more dulcet meds kick in for Love, here’s a video from a recent tour I did at Guitar Hero HQ in Silicon Valley, on the release of GH5:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090911/smells-like-mean-spirit-courtney-love-collects-check-from-guitar-hero-but-goes-on-twitter-rampage-anyway/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20090811/good-news-for-twitter-i-think-it-has-scaled-the-peak-of-inflated-expecations/ http://allthingsd.com/20090811/good-news-for-twitter-i-think-it-has-scaled-the-peak-of-inflated-expecations/#comments Tue, 11 Aug 2009 13:53:12 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=9774 Can the hype surrounding buzzy tech like Twitter, the Kindle and cloud computing get any louder? No, pronounces tech consultancy Gartner Inc., which has a very official-looking chart to make its case.

It’s part of Gartner’s annual “Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies” report, which is basically a fancy version of one of those “What’s Hot in 2009″ issues that magazines like Entertainment Weekly put out (EW is still around, right?).  Gartner has been pumping these out since 2005, and if nothing else, they’re fun to look at. Click the chart to enlarge:

The gist, as I understand it, is pretty straightforward: The promise of new technology moves much faster than the technology itself, which means that expectations get inflated, then deflated, before the technology eventually becomes mainstream (if it ever does). Can’t tell you what methodology Gartner uses to assemble the chart, but I have a hunch that you could figure out the top of the expectations peak with a simple Google (GOOG) search.

Of course, even though the chart looks cool, there’s more art than science here. As Reuters points out, Gartner’s 2006 report told us that Web 2.0 would would go mainstream by 2008. Today, Gartner tells us that Web 2.0 is still another two-to-five years away from breaking big. Meanwhile, be advised that we still have more than a decade before “human augmentation” plays in Peoria.

And I’m still not sure what it is, exactly, that you’re supposed to do with this knowledge. Should Amazon (AMZN) be psyched or worried that e-book readers have reached the top of the hype cycle? If the tablet computer is already climbing up the “Slope of Enlightenment,” does that mean Apple’s (AAPL) presumed-to-be iWant is already late to the party?

But who cares? I love the terminology. I always imagine that the “Trough of Disillusionment” can be found somewhere near the horse latitudes, or perhaps the Fortress of Solitude.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090811/good-news-for-twitter-i-think-it-has-scaled-the-peak-of-inflated-expecations/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20081114/time-inc-layoff-update-30-from-essence-entertainment-weekly-many-more-to-come/ http://allthingsd.com/20081114/time-inc-layoff-update-30-from-essence-entertainment-weekly-many-more-to-come/#comments Fri, 14 Nov 2008 14:06:34 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=1082 Another day, another few dozen firings at Time Inc.

The Time Warner (TWX) publishing unit let more than 30 people go from its Essence and Entertainment Weekly titles yesterday. The NY Observer and Gawker have details; the NY Post’s Keith Kelly reports that Matt Turck and Charles Kammerer, publishers of This Old House and Golf Magazine, respectively, are also out.

That brings the total body count (announced firings + requested resignations) to about 250, which means that CEO Ann Moore still has a long way to go before she gets to her rough target of 600 job cuts this year. Which means the next few weeks will continue to be unpleasant.

UPDATE: Add another 8-10 from In Style.

One thing Time Inc. staffers won’t be seeing during that time: More memos announcing details of the reorg. Executives at the company seem to have concluded that internal communications that have been showing up at this Web site and others haven’t helped employee morale. That seems sensible. But it also means that employees have even less information about their fate than before.

Meanwhile, I’m still collecting tips. As always, I keep all correspondence anonymous: peter@allthingsd.com.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20081114/time-inc-layoff-update-30-from-essence-entertainment-weekly-many-more-to-come/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20081103/time-inc-boss-ann-moore-to-troops-act-like-a-private-equity-companywe-will-all-get-through-this/ http://allthingsd.com/20081103/time-inc-boss-ann-moore-to-troops-act-like-a-private-equity-companywe-will-all-get-through-this/#comments Mon, 03 Nov 2008 20:37:26 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=494

Apologies to Time Inc. employees waiting to learn their fate: There’s no new information to offer you here.

But thanks to a source familiar with Time Inc. boss Ann Moore’s meeting today with the senior staff at her “Style and Entertainment” Group, we can give you a very good sense of what she’s telling employees at Time Warner’s (TWX) magazine unit.

In short, it’s a pep talk version–sort of–of the reorg memo she distributed last week: Suck it up, buckle down and get to work. We’re restructuring the company because the economy stinks, but we’re still a magazine company, and don’t lose sight of that.

And while we doubt that any of Ann’s employees would take her words lightly, the folks at the Style group need to pay even closer attention–following the reorg, she now oversees the unit directly.

Again, this is not a verbatim transcript of Moore’s remarks. If anyone wants to offer more details, correct errors, etc, please contact me: peter@allthingsd.com.

Some insiders don’t see the need for change. They look outside, but outsiders don’t know how to succeed. We need to be insider/outsiders. The rules have changed, and we need to find who within our org can work as a team. Is this re-org forever? We hope not. It’s a two-year plan. Employees need to act like an equity company that bought Time Inc.

Digital performed really well in 2006-07 in the face of the greatest economic recession in her lifetime. The situation today reminds her of the 1978 economy all over again. History repeats–this is a cycle. She relayed an anecdote about renting the top 12 floors to Lehman Brothers one year ago. They spent extraordinary amounts of money renovating, and then they moved out last week. Time Inc. Digital was exhausted and exhilarated at the end of 2007 with double-digit growth. What we are in now is technically not a recession, but it is for us.

Moore said she is working hard at Gratitude. At the quarterly manager’s meeting, her following gratitude points never got picked up by any reporters:

1. Readers are not abandoning print. Net profits are up in 2008.  Readers are still reading and buying magazines. They provide relaxation and relieve stress.

2. Digital traffic growth was 72 percent in 2007, with strong revenues outpacing EVERYONE. Traffic is strong. CNNMoney drew 650 million page views, 36 million video streams, 40 million visitors. People.com was up 51 percent in revenue in 2008. This is solid biz; don’t let the media reports confuse you.

3. Editors are achieving short-form video.

4. Print ads are still effective, and the best ROI is still a media mix. Internet display ads don’t work as well as print and video combined. Print is strong because there is still a need for fact-based reporting. (Moore quoted a story picked up by Google–didn’t hear which one. [Ed: Pretty sure she was talking about the United Airlines bankruptcy story, a mix-up that caused $1 billion in damages.]) Moore added, “The algorithm can’t do everything”; trusted content is valuable. We are in an economic tsunami and we need to take extraordinary measures.

Why we are organizing 24 groups into three? Moore said this has nothing to do with digital and 100 percent to do with recession.

Organizational Principles

1. Centralizing: Decentralization is slow and cumbersome. We need clear authority and faster decision-making.

2. Collaboration: Sharing access across titles. Moore cited Olympic coverage with SI and Time.com. EU and Asia have already been sharing coverage. She cited Andy S. writing for Time. 

We need to root for newspapers, she said. Without newspapers this would not be a better world. 

Children need to be taught that not all content can be free. Bloggers won’t have reliable information [touché]. Moore quoted Eric Schmidt about trusted news sources and the Internet being a cesspool. 

We all need to pitch in without whining, flatten the vertical organization and drop costs (Moore said she learned this from Andrea Jung at Avon). We need a simpler two-year plan and to reduce costs. We need to innovate, create value. Launch two valuable initiatives for Q1, MagHound and Life.com.

Managing Change

These changes will be hard and will sustain a personal toll. Take care of yourself and maintain your internal compass. Trust is a powerful tool.  Moore cited a link between trust and corporate performance adding that we need to nurture a healthy internal debate. She quoted John Quelch: “Market your way through a recession.”

Important Factors for ’09

1. Maintain market spending and research–don’t cut advertising (resources)
2. Adjust pricing and tactics
3. Stress market share
4. Core Values–Moore emphasized layoffs by the company and how we face difficult times; maintaining quality will not be easy, plenty of work to do, unpleasant for sure…your world has changed…it’s worth controlling your own destiny so no one else will.

Lastly, Moore added, we will all get through this.

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