Digital Trends
Back in April the music industry was awarded $3.6 million in damages when the four men behind file-sharing site Pirate Bay were found guilty of copyright violations. They each also received a year in jail.
At the end of last month Pirate Bay was sold to Swedish software company Global Gaming Factory, which is currently in negotiations to take it legit. The price was $7.8 million, half in cash, half in company stock.
The economy is tanking, no one really knows what’s going to happen, but micro-blogging service Twitter keeps growing in popularity. It might not have found a way to make money yet, but there’s enough confidence that it will that two Silicon Valley venture capital firms have pumped $35 million into the company, according to the Financial Times.
Benchmark Capital and Institutional Venture Partners put up the money, and Benchmark partner Peter Fenton has joined the Twitter board.
Last year Twitter turned down a Facebook takeover offer of $500 million, and the new investment would indicate that the company wants to go it alone.
Imagine someone gave you $89. The only instruction was to split it with someone you didn’t know, and who had no idea how much money was involved. How much of it would you give away?
That was the basis for a test conducted by business professors at Rutgers, Lehigh and DePaul universities to establish how people lie in writing.
48 students were given the money, and results showed that 92% of them lied when using e-mail to split the cash, but only 64% when writing by hand.
However, most students lied about the amount involved.
Although many MMO publishers do their best to keep real-life money out of their games to keep the playing field level for gamers of all income levels, the hopelessness of that fight has lead some publishers to simply embrace virtual transactions. Sony Online Entertainment announced on Wednesday that its upcoming titles The Agency and Free Realms will both allow gamers to open their wallets to get ahead in the game – with the publisher’s blessing.
The Recording Industry Association of America, which represents record companies, has been quick to go after various peer-to-peer networks and even individuals theysay have illegally downloaded copyrighted recordings. But, according to a story in the New York Post, artists are complaining that they’ve yet to see any ofthat money, even though some of the settlements are now a few years old. Artist lawyer John Branca told the paper, “Artist managers and lawyers have been wondering for months whentheir artists will see money from the copyright settlements and how it will be accounted for. Some of them are even talking about filing lawsuits if they don’t get paid soon." For theirpart, the record companies insist that some money has been paid and that they’re trying to establish the best way to pay artists.
Back in the pre-crash days of the dot-com revolution, it was possible to tell which technologies and sectors were hottest by keeping track of where venture capitalists and financial institutions invested their money. These days, all the buzz seems to be around social networking, and investors seem to be willing to put their money where their buzzers are: Facebook application developer Slide has managed to raise $50 million in a round of institutional financing. Slide develops some of the most popular software applications/widgets used on social networking sites like Facebook, Bebo, and MySpace. The company’s best known applications include FunWall, SuperPoke, and Top Friends.
Second Life might be a world of avatars, but it’s also a place that seems more and more to be an analogue for the real world, with gambling, commerce,and even job fairs. Yes, real world companies are trawling for employees on Second Life. TMP Worldwide Advertising & Communications has already hosted twojob fairs in the virtual world, and companies like Accenture, GE Money and U.S.Cellular attended, interviewing literally hundreds of avatars for jobs.
That’s doesn’t mean it’s been wildly successful yet. To date there’s been one confirmed hire: hire: food and services management company Sodexho found a new executive chef at the May job fair.
Intel dropped off their V8 workstation the other day, which truly is a workstation and not a typical gamer rig by any stretch of the imagination. However, this technology will have worked itself into game systems by year’s end, so I think it is important to give you a sense of what ultimate power will mean by that time.
AOL announced earlier this week they had added some new features to their Money & Finance website. These features include daily stock picks, shopping advice and enhanced financial news coverage.
The new daily stock picks feature is being written in a blog format by noted financial expert Hilary Kramer, a financial editor at AOL as well as a business and finance columnist for the New York Post. In addition, other new features are product buying guides from Consumer Reports, a weekly series from SmartMoney.com with five things everyone should know on a specific financial topic, financial news coverage from a variety of sources such as The Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Business Week, Fortune and Forbes, customizable stock portfolios which makes use of real time information and tips, advice and answers from business, financial and money authors such as Tom Peters and Mary Hunt.
When assassins from Agent 47’s contract agency, The ICA, are systematically eliminated in a series of hits, it seems a larger, more powerful agency has entered the fray. For Agent 47 it’s business as usual, until suddenly he loses contact with The ICA. Sensing that he may be the next target, he travels to America, where he prepares to make a killing.
Agent 47 is back and this time he’s paid in cold, hard cash. How the money is spent will affect his passage through the game and the weapons at his disposal, resulting in a unique gameplay experience for each player. Powered by a new version of Io’s stunning Glacier engine, Hitman: Blood Money will deliver the most brutal and realistic simulation of life as the world’s deadliest assassin.
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