real-time

Two amazing deals on PC games

Got plans for the weekend -- or, for that matter, the month? Cancel 'em, because you're about to score a boatload of PC games on the cheap.

For a limited time, GameStop has Command & Conquer: The Ultimate Collection for $16.99. Let's just round that up to $17, which means you're paying a buck apiece for 17 C&C games. Nice!

The collection includes everything from the original Command & Conquer to C&C Generals (my personal favorite) to the most recent entry, Command & Conquer 4: Tiberian Twilight, with all the various expansion … Read more

League of Legends the world's 'most played video game'

New statistics from the creator of League of Legends (and a variety of industry sources) indicate that the free multiplayer PC real-time strategy game had an average of 3 million concurrent online users in July, besting the entire combined total peak player count for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 on Xbox 360 (1.4 million) and people playing the top 100 games on Steam (650,000).

Riot Games, developer of League, also noted in an infographic that the game usually sees an average of 12 million players a day, with about 32 million active players logging in every month. Just for reference, when World of Warcraft sat at the top, it had about 12 million subscribers total.… Read more

Twitter introduces embeddable tweet-stream tool

Twitter today announced the launch of a real-time tool that allows Web site operators to embed interactive Twitter timelines on their Web pages.

"Today we're bringing Twitter and the Web closer together by launching new real-time tools for Web site developers," Twitter developer advocate Sylvain Carle wrote in a blog post today. "With our new embedded timelines, you can place any public timeline on your Web site, connecting your readers with the Tweets that you and others create on Twitter."

The way the tool works is that it lets users embed a stream of tweets … Read more

YouTube Real Time shows instant comment reactions

Launched yesterday, YouTube Real Time is a new site that lets you watch a YouTube video alongside a stream of its timestamped video comments. This means that right as big, LOL-worthy moments unfold before you, you can simultaneously see what people said about them.

As an example, let's take the classic viral video David After Dentist. Watch it on YouTube Real Time, and you'll see streams of comments trickle in at specific moments of hilarity. And when you hit 0:59, you'll see exactly how the masses felt about little David's Super Saiyan freak-out moment.

All … Read more

Behavioral data tracking rising dramatically (Q&A)

Web sites are increasingly targeting ads at visitors based on behavioral data collected via cookies and other tracking techniques behind the scenes. This riles privacy advocates and many consumers, but there's no question it will become even more widespread.

Since November 2010, behavioral tracking has increased 400 percent, according to a new study from Krux, a firm that helps Web sites manage customer data. The average visit to a Web site in December triggered 56 instances of data collection, up from 10 instances in Nov. 2010, the company found after crawling pages on the 50 most-visited sites measured by … Read more

Bitly picks up $20M in funding

Bitly, a tech company known for URL shortening, looks like it's heading toward greener pastures and making more user products. The New York-based company is said to have raised about $20 million in funding, according to tech news site The Verge, citing multiple sources. This is double the amount the company raised in its previous round of funding.

"The link shortening has always been a bit of a Trojan Horse," investor Joshua Stylman told The Verge. "Bitly is really an analytics tool for tracking content across the open, distributed web, and doing it at a massive, … Read more

Frogger Fifth Ave. dodges real-time traffic

Frogger was a popular arcade game that had kids hooked in the 1980s. Now, with a little help from advertising creative director Tyler DeAngelo, the game takes on the world in real time.

DeAngelo used a Webcam to record traffic in real time on New York's busy Fifth Avenue. He wrote code that corresponded with the position of cars and turned it into live, streaming data. That means the frog in the game dodges cars as they make their way through New York traffic.

After the game was finished, it was installed in a real arcade cabinet. The game was then placed on the sidewalk along Fifth Avenue in New York and played in real time. … Read more

Twitter to Google: You broke the Internet!

Now that Google has made it possible to personalize searches with social information from Google+ and Picasa, some of its social-media rivals are getting hot under the collar--starting with Twitter.

The microblogging service today fired back at Google's new "Search plus Your World" feature in unusually blunt terms. Twitter general counsel Alex Macgillivray, who formerly worked at Google, tweeted:

Bad day for the Internet. bit.ly/Am5bqz Having been there, I can imagine the dissension @Google to search being warped this way.

— Alex Macgillivray (@amac) January 10, 2012 Twitter followed up with this formal corporate statement:

For … Read more

How microneedle sensors could watch your blood chemistry

Patches of tiny needles have already been shown to effectively deliver medications painlessly, and without a bloody mess. Now the tiny needles could also be used to monitor body chemistry in real time.

The new tech, developed by a team of biomedical engineers out of North Carolina State University, the University of California at San Diego, and Sandia National Laboratories, employs electrochemical sensors in the hollow channels of microneedles to detect certain molecules. The researchers reported their findings in the chemistry journal Talanta.

Current body chemistry monitoring involves taking samples, often before or after an event. Wearable micro-sensors, on the … Read more