V-Moda M-100 headphones offer slick features for the urban audiophile with a fancy price tag to match

V-Moda ventures into the tumultuous world of audiophilia with its new M-100 headphones. Armed with dual inputs, a music-sharing cable and the ability to add a boom mic, the M-100 are a bit of a departure from the company's previous offerings. The same can be said for the price, which is set at $300. Expect the M-100 to drop sometime this holiday season.

 

Today,  V-Moda launched their M-100 headphones, which it says were designed by “crowdsourcing” DJ’s, journalists, and consumers. Once the design team had collected enough input, they began working on the headphones with outside recommendations in mind. Still, the company indicates it was never going to stray too far from its roots, as an organization reportedly obsessed with the intricacies of audio.

“Speaker drivers must be carefully quality-controlled like grapes at fine vineyards,” said Val Kolton, Chief Visionary Officer at V-MODA. You know when a company is comparing the crafting of its speaker drivers to the making of fine wines, it’s run by folks who consider themselves real audiophiles. If you’re not one yourself, you may want to skip this high-end offering.

The real question, however, is: do the M-100’s deliver? As part of the Crossfade series, the phones are billed as versatile, durable, and functional. In terms of versatility, the dual inputs are said to allow the phones to serve as an on-the-go mixer, and there’s also the option to add-on a Boom Pro mic if you’re the gaming/podcasting/broadcasting type. As for durability, the V-Moda M-100 come equipped with detachable, kevlar-reinforced cables, and in terms of functionality, the phones feature a SharePlay cable for music sharing without the aid of extra adapters.

The literature for the M-100’s is laden with the phones’ supposed features, but no amount of marketing savvy can make a shoddy pair of cans sound spectacular. When we reviewed the V-Moda Crossfade LP’s, we found the sound quality a bit lackluster but we’ve yet to get our hands on these as of yet, so we’re still in wait-and-see mode. Looks like we may be there for a while too, as  V-Moda is a bit nebulous on release details. The company says only that the Crossfade M-100 will be available this holiday season. They’re priced at $300 and for an extra $10, you can pre-order a pair at V-MODA.com, which will ship with an extra set of personalized shields and a set of Faders VIP Tuned Earplugs for a limited time.

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