CrowdStar Targets Female Gamers With First Mobile-Only Title, Top Girl

Source: http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/16/crowdstar-targets-female-gamers-with-first-mobile-only-title-top-girl/

Fresh off a $23 million round of funding, Social gaming company CrowdStar is launching its first mobile-only social game, Top Girl. As you can see from the headline, the free game, which is launching for iOS, targets female gamers interested in shopping and fashion.

While CrowdStar offers another female-focused game on Facebook, It Girl, the two games have no connection. Top Girl is a mobile role-playing game that allows players to create a fashionable avatar and then climb up the fashion social ladder, collecting money by doing modeling jobs, buying new outfits, and going to clubs.

The core gameplay is around the modeling job, where as you work more,you earn coins and cash and are able to buy better clothes. The game also has a dating feature, allowing users to flirt with a virtual boyfriend.

The game actually doesn’t require Facebook integration and is utilizing OpenFeint’s (a fellow YouWeb company) plug and play social gaming platform more iOS. And Top Girl isn’t totally devoid of social features. For example, players will see a leaderboard of fellow players who have accumulated the most clothes.

As CrowdStar CEO Peter Relan has told us previously, he believes interactions on mobile social games will be different from social gaming on Facebook, necessitating the need to create new titles. We saw this trend with Zynga’s newest CityVille game ‘Hometown’, which was announced yesterday.

Relan says we can expect more mobile titles from CrowdStar in the coming year, with three mobile games already in development. And the company will expand these titles to Android as well as iOS.

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Screenr Business: Add Screencasting To Your Site With A Few Clicks (And Preserve Your Sanity)

Source: http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/16/screenr-business-add-screencasting-to-your-site-with-a-few-clicks-and-preserve-your-sanity/

“Do you see the ‘File’ option at the top? No, higher, at the very top of the screen. Click that. What do you mean it went away? What went away? What did you press? No, stop clicking for a second. I AM BEING PATIENT… sigh”

Ah, the pleasures of describing a computer problem over the phone, doubtless experienced by many of the people reading this post. And while most of us have only had to deal with tech support questions to help our friends, family, and dorm-mates, there are plenty of businesses that face the same challenges every day — and for them, money is on the line. And now Screenr, a company that offers a web-based screen recorder that lets you make screencasts directly from your browser without requiring additional downloads, has an answer.

This week Screenr is launching Screenr Business, a service that makes it very easy for any site to integrate the company’s browser-based screencast technology. In other words, they’ll make it super easy for your customers to file support tickets by video.

Say you have a standard support site for your product, which includes basic help information and a submission form where customers submit descriptions of their problems — descriptions that often aren’t very specific or may be difficult to understand. Using Screenr, you could now embed a button at the top of your support site that invites users to quickly capture a screencast of their issue, which they can then immediately send to your company’s support staff. Pretty cool.

That’s not the only use-case, either: CEO Adam Schwartz says that they’re seeing companies use the tool for internal software development (QA people don’t have to manually write out how to reproduce a problem, they can just take a video). The service is also often used in companies for internal collaboration, allowing coworkers to share a product demo without requiring a meeting.

In addition to the aforementioned widgets that can be easily embedded, Screenr also offers an API that allows for deeper integration (Stocktwits is one company that’s already using this).

As for pricing, Screenr Business is free for 15 days, then charges on a monthly basis with plans starting at $19/month (more expensive plans include more options, like analytics, custom branding, and API access).

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Googleâs Related Searches Now Harness Google Squared (And Theyâre Pretty Nifty)

Source: http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/16/googles-related-searches-now-harness-google-squared-and-theyre-pretty-nifty/

Google has just announced a new feature for its core search engine that sounds like it will be very helpful: a new kind of related search result that’s based around lists. Starting today, when you run a general query like, say, “Greek philosophers”, Google will actually present a list of top Greek philosophers instead of queries that are simply similar to that one.

Okay, so it isn’t the kind of announcement that’s going to make you scream from the rooftops, but it’s a subtle and important difference. Previously, for the query “american authors” you would have gotten suggested searches including “famous american authors” and “american literature”. Now you’ll also get a list of some of the top American authors themselves: Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway, and a half-dozen others.

Google’s post says that the feature also works for a variety of other query types, like movies (you’ll get a list of actors). I just ran a query for “Jelly bean flavors” (which was not one of the examples) and got a list that includes Green Apple, Coconut, and Blueberry. Neat.

Google’s post notes that this is actually based in part on Google Squared, the feature it launched in Labs two years ago that presents search results as structured data. At the time Squared seemed overly ambitious (the structured results didn’t seem very reliable), but obviously it’s come a long way.

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Study: Youâve Never Met 7% Of Your Facebook âFriendsâ

Source: http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/16/study-youve-never-met-7-of-your-facebook-friends/

A just-released Pew study on the ways people use social networking sites has found, unsurprisingly, that the most popular social network is Facebook, with 92% of social networking users reporting that they have a Facebook account.

The study also found that on average Facebook users have about 229 Friends, with about 22% of their total Friends list being comprised of people they know from high school, 12% extended family, 10% coworkers, 9% college friends, 8% immediate family, 7% people from extracurricular groups and 2% being neighbors.

According to Pew, the average Facebook user has never met 7% of their Facebook “Friends” in real life, which means that on average about 16 people on a given Facebook Friends list are actually more like strangers. Users on average have only met 3% of their list (around 7 people) just once.

These numbers seem about right: A quick scroll down my Facebook Friends list reveals a smattering of people I’ve just added because I know “of” them and a few people I’ve added who I’ve met once at a conference. These not-quite friends Facebook Friends serve as reminders that Facebook should make it easier to mass “un-Friend.”

Either that or come up with a different word for the relationship.

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Brain Workshop Is a Brain-Training App That Might Actually Make You a Little Bit Smarter [Video]

Source: http://lifehacker.com/5811960/brain-workshop-is-a-brain+training-app-that-might-actually-make-you-a-little-bit-smarter

Windows/Mac/Linux: Though it may not look very different from other (dubiously beneficial) brain-training games, Brain Workshop is special in that there's a growing body of evidence to suggest that it may actually succeed in making its players a little bit smarter.

Free, cross platform, and open source, Brain Workshop is founded upon the "dual n-back," a tricky sort of memory game where the objective is to keep track of two unrelated sequences of events at once. In most versions of the game, that means paying attention to a spoken list of letters while simultaneously tracking the changing position of a block on a three-by-three grid. Every turn, the game provides a letter and grid position and, every turn, the player has to indicate whether these newest values match the ones given a fixed number of turns ago. The more you play, the higher that number gets. Sound tiring? It can be! But it can also be kind of energizing. The dual n-back is, in that sense, the only brain exercise we've encountered that actually feels like conventional exercise.

If it were like other self-styled "brain games," dual n-back training would probably make you very skilled at dual n-back training and little else. What researchers have found, however, is that, with a little practice, the game can bring about significant improvements in a person's short-term or "working" memory (often abbreviated WM), a faculty the University of Michigan describes as "the ability to maintain information in an active, easily retrieved state, especially under conditions of distraction or interference." It's believed that this improvement in working memory, in turn, can boost "fluid" intelligence, a person's ability to solve unfamiliar problems independent of acquired knowledge.

How much practice does it take to see those effects? Surprisingly little, though it does seem the more you put in, the more you get out. Study participants are generally asked to perform the task about 20 minutes a day for a period of 3 or 4 weeks. While the cognitive benefits of n-back training aren't permanent (and thus require upkeep to maintain), research shows that, at least in schoolchildren, they can persist for up to three months after training has stopped. And, interestingly, new research indicates that single n-back training may be just as effective as the more complicated dual-task sort. (Brain Workshop makes it easy to switch between dual and single n-back modes should you find you prefer one to the other.)

Standard postmodern caveats apply. Your own mileage may vary, yada yada. But, even if the positive effects are in your head, that's where your brains are anyway, right?

Brain Workshop - a Dual N-Back game | SourceForge via University of Michigan News Service

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Scan Is the Best QR Code Scanner for iPhone [Downloads]

Source: http://lifehacker.com/5812632/scan-is-the-best-qr-code-scanner-for-iphone

There are a ton of QR code scanners for iPhone so it almost seems silly to highlight one above the rest, but if you've gone through a bunch of them you know they're not all made equal. Scan is great because you launch it, it's immediately in scanning mode, and it can pick up a code within seconds. There is no BS—it just does its job.

Really, that's all there is to it. You launch it, scan the code (it even works from far away, out of focus, and at an angle), and it provides you with what's inside. If the contents are a URL, it just loads the URL in its built-in web browser. It does its one job really well, so if you need a QR code scanner this is the one to download. And as an added bonus, it's completely free.

Scan (Free) | iTunes App Store via One Thing Well

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You can follow Adam Dachis, the author of this post, on Twitter and Facebook.  Twitter's the best way to contact him, too.

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