RIM execs serenade BlackBerry developers with ‘Keep on Loving You’ music video

Has Research In Motion finally lost the plot? Or is it merely showing everyone it has a sense of humor? A new music video starring company executives thanks BlackBerry developers for sticking with its mobile platform, promising better days ahead.

Research In Motion (RIM) may be experiencing the toughest time in its 28-year history, but it hasn’t forgotten how to have bit of fun.

At its BlackBerry Jam developer conference in San Jose on Tuesday, the mobile company decided to entertain its attendees – or possibly horrify a few of them – with a slickly-produced music video featuring three RIM executives singing a developer-focused version of the classic REO Speedwagon hit, Keep on Loving You.

The video is apparently RIM’s way of expressing its appreciation for developers that have stuck with the BlackBerry platform.

“This video is a thank you to all developers supporting the BlackBerry platform. Your Developer Relations, Alliance and Developer Tools teams appreciate your enthusiasm and loyalty! We’re Going To Keep On Loving You,” reads the accompanying blurb on YouTube.

The three-and-a-half-minute production kicks off with the lyrics:

We’ve all seen these are challenging times, baby,

‘Cuz we’re in transition.

A whole new mobile computing platform may be

one tough proposition.

So don’t be misled,

The launch is just ahead,

We’ll have BlackBerry 10 both in full touch and QWERTY editions.

In a message to BlackBerry developers, vocalist Alec Saunders – RIM’s VP of developer relations and ecosystem – sings, “We’re gonna keep on loving you,” at the same time reassuring them that “our updated SDK is really cool.”

Check it out at the end of this piece and let us know: epic fail or good laugh?

Besides serenading the developers, RIM is also hoping to hold on to existing ones, or even attract new ones, by offering $10,000 per BB10 app submitted to its app store, provided it meets certain quality requirements.

The video was screened on the same day that RIM boss Thorsten Heins announced some better news for the Ontario-based company. Against expectations, BlackBerry subscriber numbers rose to 80 million for the quarter ending September, an increase of two million from earlier this year.

RIM’s future rests heavily on its next mobile operating system, BB10, which is set to launch early next year, together with a number of new handsets. Hopefully the Keep On Loving You video released on Tuesday won’t have scared off too many developers, and the phones can come to market with plenty of BB10 apps to choose from.

Source : digitaltrends[dot]com

Social casino games will generate $2.4 billion in revenue by 2015. Will gambling save Zynga?

As executives abandon Zynga in droves, a new report on the future of social gambling bodes well for the company's new ventures.

The social game dream is dead! No longer can companies rely on Facebook’s unwitting users to sit in front of a screen, dropping dollars on in-game items and clicking on ads just so they can watch a virtual farm thrive. The market for viral social games like Farmville is shrinking, just as companies like Zynga thought they were going to get rich on people’s addictive habits.

But wait! There’s still plenty of opportunity to take advantage of people’s addictive habits after all! That’s why Zynga, Big Fish, RocketPlay, and others are turning to the oldest type of social game on the planet: Gambling for real money. Why keep trying to reinvent the Mafia Wars wheel when you can just get people betting on football games and playing poker?

Zynga and the other social game makers will likely see their gamble pay off big according to new data compiled by SuperData. That analyst group’s latest report on “Social Casino Metrics” predicts that revenue from real money social game gambling will total $1.6 billion by the end of 2012. By 2015, the take will be $2.4 billion.

“Both small social game developers and large land-based casino operators are looking at this new space,” says SuperData VP Janelle Benjamin, “With declining margins in the overall social games segment, casino-style games offer a healthy growth potential.”

According to SuperData, the average social gambler is spending almost twice as much as the average social game player, $78 to $43 in July alone, a dead period in the year when most people are spending on activities rather than gaming. The bulk of spending is happening in the US. $660 million of all social game gambling revenue this year will come from the US’ more than 35 million active players (around 11 percent of the total population.)

 If clicking on a virtual cow on Facebook wasn’t depressing enough, social games will now be the virtual equivalent of Atlantic City slot machines.

The expected growth of the social gambling market doesn’t necessarily mean that Zynga’s survival is guaranteed. Corporate upheaval may kill the company first. It’s bleeding executives right now. After its stock was crippled in August, chief operating officer John Schappert quit the company. Chief technology officer Allan Leinwand followed last week, and chief marketing officer Jeff Karp quit on Tuesday. Maytal Ginzberg, Zynga’s executive in charge of real money gambling operations, just joined the company on Aug. 31.

Source: Venturebeat

Source : digitaltrends[dot]com

Release dates, subtitles finalized for Peter Jackson’s Hobbit trilogy

Peter Jackson is now making three Hobbit films, and we've got release dates and subtitles for each one.

When news broke that Peter Jackson had convinced executives at Warner Bros. and MGM to let him film J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit as a trilogy, instead of the originally-planned duology, fans were understandably excited. A whole ‘nother film full of Jackson’s vision of Middle Earth? Another two-plus hours of Martin Freeman as Bilbo Baggins? A third helping of Benedict “Most British Name In History” Cumberbatch as the evil dragon Smaug? What’s not to like about all of this?

Very little, as it turns out. The ‘net is almost unanimously positive about this project (which is weird because you people hate everything), but hardcore fans have kept their excitement in check, preferring to keep the celebration to a minimum until we were granted two very crucial pieces of information about Jackson’s upcoming films: Specifically, their subtitles and an accurate release date for each film.

Fortunately, that information was revealed this morning. ComingSoon has a full report:

Warner Bros. Pictures and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures jointly announced today that the final film in Peter Jackson’s trilogy adaptation of the enduringly popular masterpiece “The Hobbit,” by J.R.R. Tolkien, now titled The Hobbit: There and Back Again, will be released worldwide on July 18, 2014. All three films in the trilogy are productions of New Line Cinema and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures.

The Studios also announced the title of the second installment in the franchise,The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, which will be released on December 13, 2013. The first film in the trilogy, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, opens this holiday season, on December 14, 2012. Shot in 3D 48 frames-per-second, the trilogy of films will be released in High Frame Rate (HFR) 3D, other 3D formats, IMAX and 2D.

Happy now? With this announcement you hardcore fans now have a proper, verbose title to describe whichever segment of this trilogy you’re most excited for, and we’ve discovered that the producers behind this film series are aiming for an unprecedentedly rapid release schedule. When asked to explain the move, Warner Bros. President Of Domestic Distribution Dan Fellman claimed that this whole scheme is an effort to appease the rabid Tolkien fanbase while simultaneously maximizing these films’ potential profitability. “We wanted to have a shorter gap between the second and third films of The Hobbit trilogy,” Fellman said. “Opening in July affords us not only the perfect summer tentpole, but fans will have less time to wait for the finale of this epic adventure.”

The announcement also describes the relatively recently announced third Hobbit film (now officially dubbed “The Hobbit: There And Back Again“) as “an action spectacle and an emotional conclusion for this already much-anticipated trilogy,” though it does little to explain how Jackson intends to expand what was once a duo of films into this now heavily-anticipated trilogy.

Still, we’ve got faith in the man. Peter Jackson has done more than anyone (save perhaps Tolkien himself) to popularize the Middle Earth mythology, and at this point most audiences will view whatever Jackson puts together as completely canonical. Plus, it’s not exactly like Jackson is going to have to make things up to pad out his film. Tolkien kept an obscene amount of notes and unpublished material related to the universe of The Hobbit, and one could easily fill four or five movies with that extraneous text alone. Consider this an opportunity to finally, officially admit slavering excitement for the trilogy.

Source : digitaltrends[dot]com