Facebook Co-Founder’s Social Network

GOOD, a social innovation website and the publisher of GOOD magazine, has just bought Jumo — the Chris Hughes-helmed social network built around philanthropy.

While the amount and exact terms are unknown, Hughes will be joining GOOD as a senior adviser while keeping Jumo close to its charitable roots. “Jumo.com will be the home for our open source code base, so that nonprofits and developers can use it,” Hughes told Fast Company. The goal is to enable other social entrepreneurs to use Jumo’s own progress to further global projects.

Hughes, who helped create Facebook, continued to rise through the social media ranks as part of Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign. He started Jumo as a non-profit social network to help people find ways to help the world.

The sale to GOOD marries Jumo’s network of activists and nearly 15,000 socially driven organizations with GOOD’s own community of 3 million monthly users, according to Jumo’s official announcement.

This story is ongoing and will be updated throughout the day.

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“We’ve had to basically rewrite the recommendation engine,” Camp told Mashable. “Even though it seems a lot of work going into one feature, that one feature is going to influence the entire experience.”

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New Xbox 360 250GB S hacked with video

It’s no secret the older version of the Xbox 360 was being exploited as you could look on Craigslist and find hacked consoles and “backup” games, quite frequently. When the new Xbox 360 “Slim” was released, first thoughts I had was that Microsoft was permanently addressing the “Red Ring of Death” (known to MS as the “overheating”) issue. In the back of my head, I also thought, maybe they’re also tackling the piracy concern, as well.

We’ve seen companies go under and piracy plays a huge part in this, as many “backup” games float around. On that note, this video was spotted by a team that is already claiming that they have indeed hacked the new Xbox 360 250GB “Slim” console.

I can’t wait until Microsoft starts their next wave of bans and hopefully permanently ban these gamer tags.

Here is the video of the team claiming to have patched the DVD Rom to allow for the play of backups.

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“We’ve had to basically rewrite the recommendation engine,” Camp told Mashable. “Even though it seems a lot of work going into one feature, that one feature is going to influence the entire experience.”

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Is Sega Worried About Sonic Colors Stealing Sonic 4s Thunder

The saga of the latest two Sonic games has to be some of the oddest handling of PR I’ve seen in the industry in a long time. First, Sega made a huge deal of teasing Sonic 4 through its Project Needlemouse hype campaign, with the reveal of a new 2D Sonic game met with renewed hope by longtime series fans. A few months later, without any fanfare or hype build up, Sonic Colors was announced. It was almost as if Sega was embarrassed to mention Sonic Colors. And with the announcement that it would be a 3D platformer with new gimmick characters in the colored alien wisps, many fans were perfectly content to ignore the game and put their full attention on the hedgehog’s return to 2D.

Then E3 came around where we actually got to play both games, and Sonic Colors was freakin’ amazing. At least for me personally, easily a contender for Game of the Show.

But I wasn’t the only one who took notice. Across all manner of gaming blogs and news sites, Sonic Colors was gaining a lot of attention. After all, by all accounts it was the 3D Sonic game fans had been waiting for: fast, fun, only Sonic as a playable character, and without any of the camera issues or sticky geometry of past 3D Sonic games. Sega replied to the excitement by saying that Sonic Colors was actually a kids game, and that Sonic 4 was the game that core gamers will enjoy. Now, in a recent interview with Game, Sonic Colors lead designer Takashi Iizuka has reiterated that distinction between Sonic for kids and Sonic for the core gamer. When asked about how speed and control would be managed in Sonic Colors, to prevent the game from feeling like rollercoaster playing itself, Iizuka replied:

We know there are sometimes opinions about control from core gamers, but we’re intending Sonic Colours to be played by children of probably between six and twelve years-old.So, with Sonic Colours we have aimed more to make a game that everyone can control and have fun in. So, it’s not really a game for the core gamers. If you take the rail grind, it’s something that’s fast, not difficult but is fun to do and looks great. It’s about making a game that’s right for the core audience of the game.
As I’ve said before, the distinction between Sonic games for kids and “core” gamers is an utterly ridiculous one to make. Sonic games on the Genesis were all kids games when they were released, and Sonic 4 models itself after Sonic 1 and 2, so logic would dictate that Sonic 4 would be classified as a kids game as well. The only difference is the nostalgia factor, but from a pure gameplay standpoint Sonic 4 would attract the same age group audience that the original Sonic games did: kids.

But I think the bigger problem is how Sega seems to view Sonic fans, as revealed in later comments from Iizuka in that same interview.

Blogger Templates and Test Link.

“We’ve had to basically rewrite the recommendation engine,” Camp told Mashable. “Even though it seems a lot of work going into one feature, that one feature is going to influence the entire experience.”

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Assassins Creed 2 Lost Money ($54.02 Million)

No s***. What do you get when you mix a medicore game with tons of DRM crap. A loss. Now watch them blame all the dirty pirates out there for this one, lol, fools. Here is the story from Gamasutra :French Splinter Cell publisher Ubisoft recorded a decrease in sales and a loss for the fiscal year ended March 31, 2010, blaming worldwide economic downturn.

The company on Tuesday recorded a 17.7 percent drop in annual sales to €871 million ($1.08 billion), and posted a loss of €43.7 million ($54.02 million).

Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot said in a statement, “The global economic crisis had a pronounced impact on the video game industry in 2009, which contracted by nearly 10 percent year-on-year.”

“Ubisoft’s sales were hit particularly hard, falling 18 percent over the full year despite a stabilization in the second half of the year, when figures came in on a par with the corresponding period of 2008-09,” he added.

Fourth quarter sales were €200 million ($247.32 million), slightly higher than guidance but lower than the €206 million ($254.76 million) recorded for the same quarter a year ago.

During Q4, Ubisoft said that it had strong sales ofJust Dance for Wii, which has seen 3 million units sold-in. The publisher also said that November’s Assassin’s Creed II has reached nearly 9 million units sold-in during the fiscal year.

Ubisoft noted the strong reviews of Red Steel 2 for Wii, and said the game’s performance was in line with recently-revised forecasts. In addition, sales of Avatar exceeded forecasts, “notably on Wii,” Ubisoft said.

Guillemot said during a conference call that Ubisoft will continue to support Nintendo’s platform, but with a focus on family-friendly titles.

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“We’ve had to basically rewrite the recommendation engine,” Camp told Mashable. “Even though it seems a lot of work going into one feature, that one feature is going to influence the entire experience.”

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IVG: Developer: Medal of Honor

Being a franchise reboot, how drastically different from the past games will this Medal of Honor game be?

For this game, we’ve gone back to our roots and the core tenets that the franchise was founded on. We’ve focused on the soldier and telling their story with authenticity and respect.

With so much emphasis on multiplayer these days, single player campaigns in games – shooters in particular – tend to get ignored and we end up with 5-6 hour campaigns. With DICE handling the multiplayer aspect of MOH, can we expect a beefier single player experience than we’ve grown used to?

Absolutely. This is one of the reasons we made the decision to utilise the core strengths of two separate studios. It is a crowded genre and our competitors are very good at what they do. So for this reboot, we wanted to do everything we could to give the Medal of Honor fans a great experience on both sides of the coin.

What were the challenges and advantages of using Afghanistan as a setting for the game in terms of level design and mission structure?

The setting allowed us a great deal of diversity. Afghanistan has a visual cascade of differing environments. From lush green river valleys and dry, arid desert terrains to squalid inner city slums and snowy mountain peaks.

Blogger Templates and Test Link.

“We’ve had to basically rewrite the recommendation engine,” Camp told Mashable. “Even though it seems a lot of work going into one feature, that one feature is going to influence the entire experience.”

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StumbleUpon’s New Explore Feature

Social discovery tool StumbleUpon has inspired 25 billion clicks by directing people to pages accross broad topics like “art” or “fashion.” Now it’s taking its recommendations to a more specific level with a new feature it launched on Wednesday.

With the “Explore Box” feature, users can Stumble pages related to hundreds of thousands specific topics — like Vincent Van Gogh — instead of working within about 500 set categories — like art — that StumbleUpon has stuck to in the past. It’s as though a search engine and a “best of” list had a child. If StumbleUpon hasn’t sorted the exact term you’re looking for, it will match you with the next best thing.

Right now the feature is restricted to a small search bar in the browser product. But despite the minimal presence on the homepage, it’s a huge change for StumbleUpon.

In the future, StumbleUpon CEO Garrett Camp says, StumbleUpon will integrate Explore Box’s technology with its follow feature so that users can Stumble a mix of general and specific topics. That will make the discovery engine a lot more personalized, and eventually (though Camp says probably not anytime soon) enable StumbleUpon’s advertisers to more closely target their ads.

Blogger Templates and Test Link.

“We’ve had to basically rewrite the recommendation engine,” Camp told Mashable. “Even though it seems a lot of work going into one feature, that one feature is going to influence the entire experience.”

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Real Football 2010 for Android and Iphone

Real Football has been involved in a real ding-dong battle with the likes of FIFA for footy supremacy in recent years on both iPhone and mobile. Gameloft’s footy franchise always plays a fast, fluid game, encouraging swift tippy-tappy passing triangles and surging runs into the box.

Unfortunately, the franchise’s Android debut doesn’t make the statement of intent Gameloft might have hoped for.

The issue – as with many of Gameloft’s recent iPhone to Android conversions – is one of control. The trouble is, nothing shows up sloppy controls better (or worse) than football sims, which demand instant and pinpoint changes in direction.

Real Football on Android (or at least the Nexus One) really suffers in this regard, your players continuing to run in a direction a whole second after you’ve pushed the virtual stick in another. What’s more, the ‘A’ and ‘B’ buttons (which control your kicks) simply don’t work at times. It’s maddening.

The game suffers on the visual front, too, with a noticeable drop in texture detail on the players and pitch.

Blogger Templates and Test Link.

“We’ve had to basically rewrite the recommendation engine,” Camp told Mashable. “Even though it seems a lot of work going into one feature, that one feature is going to influence the entire experience.”

Test Table

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