Credit: Goni Monte
Nintendo Confronts a Changed Video Game World
“MARIO VS. ANGRY BIRDS Games for mobile devices have challenged Nintendo’s turf, but the video game maker is pinning its hopes on the Wii U”
How a $20 tablet from India could blindside PC makers, educate billions and transform computing as we know it
Suneet Tuli, the 44-year-old CEO of UK/Canadian/Indian startup Datawind, is having a taxing day. “I’m underwater,” he says as he struggles to find a cell signal outside a restaurant in Mumbai. Two days from then, on Sunday Nov. 11, the president of India, Pranab Mukherjee, will have unveiled the seven-inch Aakash 2 tablet computer Tuli’s company is selling to the government for distribution to 100,000 university students and professors. (If things go well, the government plans to order as many as 5.86 million.)
Full Story: Quartz
Quartz: Hurricane Sandy was a mobile event for Quartz users and staff →
Like so many other people in the Northeast US, the Quartz staff was displaced by Hurricane Sandy. We managed just fine and escaped the sort of devastation felt in some parts of the region, but today is our first day back in the office after a nomadic week.
Our headquarters in the SoHo…
Dragon Baby FTW.
Today the emoticon turns 30 years old :-) Here is an extract from The New York Times on its 20th anniversary.
TYPOGRAPHIC MILESTONES; Happy Birthday :-) to You: A Smiley Face Turns 20
By KATIE HAFNER
Published: September 19, 2002
TWENTY years ago today, Scott E. Fahlman, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University, posted an electronic message on a university bulletin board system suggesting that a colon, a minus sign and a parenthesis be used to convey a joking tone.
Dr. Fahlman’s brief post was almost an aside, made in the midst of a discussion about something else. But his idea caught on, and the typed smiley face and its many variants, known as emoticons, are now fixtures online.
For years Dr. Fahlman, now a researcher at I.B.M., thought that his post, stored on a form of magnetic tape that is now obsolete, had disappeared. But this year some colleagues embarked on an dig through Carnegie Mellon’s digital archives in the hope of unearthing the original post. Last week, after months of detective work, they succeeded.
The post was a simple one, even briefer than he remembered.
I propose that the following character sequence for joke markers:
:-)
Read it sideways. Actually, it is probably more economical to mark things that are NOT jokes, given current trends. For this, use :-(
Read the rest…
Maskull Lasserre - Incarnate (Three Degrees of Certainty II)
Skull carved out of old computer manuals
Once upon a time it used to be that the only news site on the iPhone marketing material was The New York Times - not so since Steve Jobs passed away.
How to Beat High Airfares aka The Art of Hidden-City Ticketing (Larger Image)
If Dr. Seuss Books Were Titled According to Their Subtexts
Twitter Gardenhose: Free Twitter Data
Did you always want your own Twitter dataset to work with?
Well, you can have one for free—use our free, open source Twitter Gardenhose, which stores 1% of all tweets to your S3 bucket. You only pay for storage costs—the tweets and the code are free.
The README describes how to deploy on Heroku—it should take you about 30 minutes to set up and get running. It’s a surprisingly simple node.js app.
Mitt Romney’s Resignation Speech
Courtesy of an unusually high amount of selective video editing…
