Videogames are serious business in China. The country’s online game market will reach 41 billion yuan ($6 billion) by 2010, accounting for half the global market, according to newly released data from Cnzz.com, a Beijing-based data analysis firm.
The Cnzz.com report says that almost two-thirds of China’s 338 million Web users are now online gamers. The online-game industry, which currently accounts for more than half of the total Internet economy, will see strong annual growth at a rate of 20 percent in future years, the report says.
Here is the latest comic from our Joy of Tech friends at Geek Culture, Nitrozac and Snaggy. Joy of Tech appears three times a week in the Voices section of this site. (Click on the image to see a bigger version.)
by Eliot Van Buskirk, Contributor, Epicenter, Wired.com
MySpace, rumored to be on the verge of purchasing the free music streaming site imeem, is struggling to keep up with its own payments to music copyright holders, according to a top News Corp executive–a problem that has plagued every other licensed free music service.
China’s bloggers are a focus of organizers of the President Barack Obama’s upcoming visit, echoing similar efforts by the administration to use social-media tools to communicate with Americans.
by Damiano Beltrami, Blogger, The Local, New York Times
Where’s my pancakes, read Rodney Bradford’s Facebook page, in a message typed on Saturday, Oct. 17, at 11:49 a.m., from a computer in his father’s apartment in Harlem.
Interest in social gaming is jumping to new heights. One of the players in the space, Playdom Inc., just raised a giant-sized $43 million round from Lightspeed Venture Partners, New Enterprise Associates, Norwest Venture Partners and Rick Thompson, one of the co-founders and an existing angel investor in the company.
by Andrew LaVallee, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal
Face.com is opening its photo-tagging system, based on facial-recognition technology, to Facebook members Wednesday.
Photo Tagger, which launched to a limited group of users in July, scans a user’s photo albums on the social-networking site, then lets him tag faces it identifies.
As cheap, powerful automatic cameras and camera phones proliferate, the music industry–and its sports counterpart–have had to realize they can’t control fans’ ability to take pictures.
by Marisa Taylor, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal
As news of the Fort Hood shooting rampage spread last week, media outlets and readers both put Twitter and its new lists feature to the test.
Just as the service was instrumental in providing updates during the summer’s election protests in Iran, Twitter feeds from Texas-based news sources such as the Austin-American Statesman and the Killeen Daily Herald provided a stream of local updates.
by Andrew LaVallee, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal
CoTweet, a start-up that helps businesses manage their Twitter accounts, is rolling out its first fee-based services, with McDonald’s, Ford and SunTrust among its paying customers.
The San Francisco company said over the summer, when it announced $1.1 million in funding, that it would eventually charge for some offerings.
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