2011/11/12

Moshi Monsters leaves the web and move on to the Nintendo DS

Moshi Monsters the children's on-line social world that already has over 50m registered users (between 6 and 12) has now moved on to the Nintendo DS with the release of Moshling Zoo.

The game allows children to run the Moshling Zoo and they have to collect up to 52 different Moshlings (which are Moshi Monster pets) including some rare and even ultra-rare types.

The game is available now from on-line retailers for £29.99, and a limited edition is available from Game which includes three days membership to the on-line version of Moshi Monsters, 1,000 free Rox (the in-game currency of MoshiMonsters), Topps series 2 trading cards, an exclusive Moshi Monsters top trumps card and the exclusive Moshling.

Moshi Monsters comes out of Mind Candy the brainchild of Michael Acton Smith and will be followed by music videos (if they don't get sued again) and video series.

2011/11/10

NVidia introduces Tegra3

NVidia has starting showing off it's new Tegra3 ARM based system (code named Kal-El). It has 4 cores based on the Cortex-A9 architecture and a 12 core GForce graphics GPU which allows for hardware accelerated affects such as dynamic lighting, Flash Player 11, HTML5 and WebGL.

It can also output to HDMI and support NVidia's 3D Vision technology which converts OpenGL to stereo 3D for viewing on a 3D TV.

However the main advancement is that it offers 3 times the graphics performance while offering a 61% lower power consumption than the Tegra2. It achieves some of this by actually having 5 CPU cores (the 5th being a low power ARM variant) and only using the Cortex-A9 cores for intensive CPU applications, so when a system is just playing music or some other non-CPU intensive task the big cores are powered down. This is known as variable symmetric multiprocessing (vSMP) and is a technology patented by NVidia.

The Tegra3 will be used in a forthcoming tablet from ASUS known as the Asus EE Pad Transformer Prime.

Other ARM licensees such as Texas Instruments (TI) are already snapping at NVidia's heals with forthcoming high performance OMAP chips which will support technologies such as holographic displays, HD augmented reality, real time voice translation and natural speech interaction.

There are now more ARM processors than actual arms in the world now.

2011/11/09

Ofcom fine Just4Us TV and Playboy TV

Ofcom has fined Just4US TV Ltd (£60,000) and Playboy TV UK/Benelux Ltd (£40,000) for offensive advertising relating to premium rate call services enabling the viewer to chat to the female presenter. The fines are payable to HM Paymaster General.

The channels concerned are Red Light 1 (operated by Just4US TV) and Red light 2 and Red Light 3 (operated by Playboy TV). Just4US TV is a wholly owned subsidiary of Playboy TV.

The offences occurred in April 2011 and the finding highlighted a number of examples of broadcast material that was clearly inconsistent with the Chat Service Guidance2, such as images of the presenters:

* spitting on their bodies to emulate ejaculate;
* using a cupped hand and on one occasion a telephone to cover their genital area, resulting in clear pressure between their hand or telephone and the genital
area;
* pouring oil onto their buttocks and genital area; and
* wearing clothing that did not adequately cover their genital area (in one case outer labia were clearly visible).

These channels were all broadcast on Sky's open channels (marked Adult on the EPG).

2011/11/08

Moonfruit makes on-line selling easy

A couple of weeks ago, Moonfruit the website building service launched the ability to set-up an eCommerce enabled shop through their on-line tools.

The system called Shopbuilder allows a site owner to set-up an eCommerce enabled shop in 10 minutes. The back-end is provided by PayPal and there are tools to enable stock control and other features an on-line retailer requirers.

The system can also make the items available through Facebook and Twitter (with eBay coming soon).

Moonfruit currently host over 4m sites and these now all can be eCommerce enabled so anyone who may have thought about selling on-line can now do so very easily.

With the social network integration, this really does differentiate the service from other eCommerce solutions out there as it provides a one stop eCommerce solution. The site produced will even work with mobile browsers so giving access to the millions of users who now use the Internet through their mobile phones.