L'Atelier US : The high-tech studio for a changing world

Designers of Social Game Platforms - “World of Farmcraft” Panel at PAX

Ivory King — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 22:21:58 GMT

At a Penny Arcade Expo Panel on Saturday, game designers analyzed current trends in online games. Category leaders in the area of casual, social and MMO (massive multiplayer online) gaming spoke about how these genres are blurring and how that effects their companies’ monetization strategies. Casual games took advantage of a new demographic of Internet [...]

Steve Jobs’ Keynote Delivers Apple Social Network and Revamped TV Box

Ivory King — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 21:30:19 GMT

While yesterday’s keynote from Apple brought Face Time to the iPod Touch and a multi-touch screen to the iPod Nano, two new products could have wider effect. Ping, a social network focused on music, is a new feature of iTunes 10, and Apple TV has features that a wider variety of people will find useful. Besides [...]

Social Gaming Revenue Valuable Acquisition for Big Media

Ivory King — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 22:50:49 GMT

The latest big company acquisitions of social gaming startups points to a maturing of the market, as reporting from eMarketer today suggests. While the social gaming market’s "explosive growth will moderate in coming years," major media influences Google and Disney have become interested in incorporating these new business models into their own. Google will be [...]

Microsoft Gears Up For Windows Phone 7 Release

Ivory King — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 19:35:38 GMT

Windows Phone 7 will be released this holiday season, and Microsoft is trying to stir up excitement about it by maxing out its budget. TechCrunch coverage estimates that the Redmond-based company could "spend a half-billion dollars or more in marketing costs and payments to developers and handset manufacturers to subsidize the expense [...]

Highest Levels of Social Media Strategy Adoption Seen This Year

Ivory King — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 16:54:38 GMT

A study released this summer from King Fish Media showed that an overwhelming proportion of companies have social media strategies. The study, titled "Social Media Usage, Atttitudes and Measurability: What do Marketers Think?" covered US marketers and managers, over half of which were in the publishing, media, advertising and marketing industries. Most of the [...]

Tobacco Brands Found to Indirectly Advertise on YouTube

Ivory King — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 00:28:15 GMT

A New Zealand study published yesterday shows a significant presence by tobacco brands on YouTube as pro-tobacco videos proliferate as indirect marketing. Contributors collected and analyzed global data by searching the video site “using five leading non-Chinese cigarette brands worldwide.” Themes and content were scrutinized to assess the resulting list of videos that contained tobacco [...]

Google Chat Now Can Dial to Any Phone Line

Ivory King — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 21:16:09 GMT

Google announced a new feature for their online chat service Wednesday morning - not only can Gmail users make voice calls between personal computers, they can now make calls to regular phone lines. Calls made to US and Canada numbers are free, and per minute rates apply to other countries. These rates range from [...]

140 Characters Conference: What the Real Time Web can bring to the World?

Matthieu Soule — Sat, 21 Aug 2010 02:17:52 GMT

Yesterday, the San Francisco 140 Characters Conference (#140conf) gathered the emerging social media expert crowd from the Bay Area. The topic of the day was “What the Real Time Web can bring to the World?” The 140 characters conference objective follows Twitter spirit: “One can change the world with one hundred and forty characters.” @Jack [...]

Hourglass Syndrome Study Show Tech Frustration Common

Ivory King — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 20:24:02 GMT

The spinning wheel, the ticking clock or the hourglass - a familiar icon for waiting is now a pervasive theme for a culture that increasingly relies on digital processors in daily activities. The Intel Corporation has coined a new term in technology: the “Hourglass Syndrome,” not a real syndrome or medical condition but “a term [...]

Mobile Payments System Test Launching Next Month

Ivory King — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 19:55:49 GMT

Bank of America and Visa Inc will launch a smartphone purchasing test system next month. As covered by Reuters Thursday evening, the largest US consumer bank and the largest payment processor in the world will run a system in the New York area that will allow customers to use cell phones installed with near [...]

Branded Virtual Goods More Profitable On Social Gaming Sites

Ivory King — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 22:44:04 GMT

The success of virtual goods has enabled innovative business models in the categories of social networking, virtual worlds and free online game sites. This phenomenon was analyzed with its relationship to companies and celebrities in the “Branded Virtual Goods Market Report” for July 2010 from social gaming platform Viximo and virtual goods platform Virtual Greats. [...]

Facebook Places Launches With Privacy Control

Ivory King — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 20:15:39 GMT

Facebook announced a geolocation feature on Wednesday evening called “Places.” The feature allows users to check themselves and their friends in on the mobile application or browser. Those familiar with location-based apps like Foursquare and GoWalla will be familiar with the procedure, but may be disappointed with the lack of in-game perks, such as mayorships, [...]

Founder Conference 2010: entrepreneur’s lonely journey to success

Matthieu Soule — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 21:56:16 GMT

Yesterday, the Founder conference 2010 gathered two hundred enthusiastic entrepreneurs looking for advice and cofounders to start their new business. First speaker was Aaron Patzer, well-known CEO of Mint.com which has been bought by Intuit for $170M in 2009. According to Aaron, the entrepreneur path is a long journey. “In the early days of Mint.com, [...]

Singularity Summit 2010: Human Health and Body Improvements Innovation Round-Up

Mathilde Berchon — Sun, 15 Aug 2010 02:35:02 GMT

First day of the Singularity Summit 2010 and first round-up of the last innovations and cutting-edge projects in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). The conferences focused more on demos and concrete applications, less on Theory. L’Atelier US was there. Human health and body improvement was a highly discussed subject today. Ben Goertzel, CEO [...]

Oracle’s Java Lawsuit Called Baseless By Google

Ivory King — Sat, 14 Aug 2010 00:33:57 GMT

Oracle filed a complaint against Google for patent and copyright infringement Thursday evening related to the development of the Android mobile operating system. Oracle spokesperson Karen Tillman in a press release posted by MarketWatch explained that the lawsuit’s complaint is that Android infringes upon Oracle’s Java-related intellectual property. The integrated business software and hardware systems [...]

Most Time Online: Social Networking For Desktops, E-Mail for Mobile

Ivory King — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 22:46:32 GMT

Americans spend much of their time online visiting social network sites and blogs when they are in front of a full sized screen, but on mobile devices their activities are very different. A Nielsen study released this month, "What Americans Do Online: Social Media and Games Dominate Activity," breaks down US online time on [...]

Touchscreens Get Texture Via E-Sense

Ivory King — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 00:48:29 GMT

New technology from Senseg and Toshiba delivers texture and other forms of haptic feedback to any screen-type surface. Demonstrated at the Embedded Tech Systems Expo, their system is called E-Sense. The tech is built upon a type of human-machine interface called electrotactile arrays, which apply very mild electrical current to the nerves of the skin. [...]

Google Releases Voice Commands App and Chrome to Phone

Ivory King — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 23:23:37 GMT

Google released Voice Actions today, a new Android app that provides voice-activated support for a list of tasks that users can now ask their mobile phone to do. Augmenting the voice search option on all Android mobile handsets running version 2.2, this will allow for even less typing or other manual navigation for such common [...]

Alexander Osterwalder’s Business Model Generation: A Tool for Startups and Corporations Alike

Matthieu Soule — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 17:59:21 GMT

For the last few weeks, Alexander Osterwalder has been in Silicon Valley to talk about his must-read book, Business Model Generation, and to see what his next step in the area of facilitating business model will be. We talk a lot about the fast-changing environment in which companies are evolving and how hard it [...]

Motor-Disabled Make Calls With Brainwave-Controlled Mobile App

Ivory King — Sat, 07 Aug 2010 00:07:01 GMT

A mobile application that uses a brainwave scanner to make phone calls has reached a usable level of development. With the ThinkContacts system, individuals with motor disabilities can select contacts from their mobile phone’s address book and make calls. TheNextWeb reported on ThinkContacts, which uses hardware from NeuroSky that registers two types of qualities in brain [...]

Digg’s New Site Could Prevent Future Abuse

Ivory King — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 20:56:18 GMT

News sharing site Digg was undermined by fringe groups of conservative news manipulators for over a year before the story broke yesterday.These users frequently buried news deemed “too left-leaning” by the group, ensuring that this news was effectively removed from the site. The San Francisco startup, founded by Kevin Rose, was responsible for shaping the [...]

“There’s a Science to Art, an Art to Science.” Don Marinelli at SIGGRAPH

Alice Gillet — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 18:41:04 GMT

Everyone remembers Andy Pausch’s famous “Last Lecture,” which the computer science professor gave a couple months before he died of cancer, and which became hugely popular in the U.S. Andy was the co-founder of the Entertainment Technology Center (ETC) at Carnegie Mellon University. In the Last Lecture, Pausch refers to the “Tornado” he founded the ETC [...]

FCC Pulls Out of Net Neutrality Talks That Google Denies Happened

Ivory King — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 23:59:05 GMT

A labyrinth is emerging surrounding the state of network neutrality today involving Google, Verizon and the Federal Communications Commission. Beginning in late June, reports claim that the FCC held meetings with numerous large Internet organizations regarding how service providers may privilege data transfer from paying companies over others. Net neutrality is concerned with the equality [...]

Virtual Reality Attempts Taste At SIGGRAPH 2010

Ivory King — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 20:52:51 GMT

One of the first examples of virtual reality affecting smell and taste was showcased at last month’s SIGGRAPH, the computer graphics conference in Los Angeles. Using visual and olfactory stimuli, the system attempted to alter the subject’s perception of taste using virtual and real life cookies. After donning combination eye/nose goggle headgear, the user [...]

“A New Point of Entry for Brands.” Interview with Flipboard CTO Arthur Van Hoff

Atelier — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 00:32:04 GMT

The day Flipboard launched, Robert Scoble evangelized it. Which is about as successful a launch a company can hope for, even if it hadn’t yet scaled to handle Scoble’s profound influence. Scoble continued to play with Flipboard the rest of the day his article appeared (we know; we were sitting next to him), and since then [...]