Online printer Moo has just started trialing a new kind of business card that 'links to your digital world' by way of an embedded NFC chip. Any takers?

Online printing company Moo.com has come up with an idea to jazz up its business cards by adding what it calls a “third side” in the form of a Near Field Communication (NFC) chip.

The card looks like a regular business card except that embedded inside is a programmable NFC chip, capable of transmitting data to an NFC-ready handset when the two are tapped together.

As Moo explains on its website, the user can program the chip to “download your portfolio, play music or video, load web pages, maps or apps, save your contact details – the possibilities are endless. Think of it like an enormous, dynamic and exciting third side [to your business card].”

A special app allows the user to update what action the NFC chip initiates when someone taps their smartphone against it.

The award-winning London-based startup said it began trialing the new cards this week, sending out a single NFC-enabled card to anyone ordering a pack of business cards. The company will listen to feedback from users of the 150,000 cards before deciding whether to make them a permanent fixture.

The company admits on its blog that it’s early days for its new type of card, going so far as to ask customers for suggestions on how they’d like to use it.

“We’re dabbling with the technology and whilst we think we have the actual technology pretty well understood, we’re sure there are plenty of exciting and creative things that you can actually DO with them that we haven’t thought of,” the company said in the post. “So, if you have any burning bright ideas, whether prosaic or “out-there” about what you’d like to do with a pack of NFC Business Cards, please do let us know.”

Of course, the NFC element of the card is only any good for recipients with an NFC-ready handset. While some had been hoping for the technology to be included in the iPhone 5, Apple decided to pass on it this time around, so that’s iPhone owners out for a start. There are plenty of non-iOS handsets, however, with the technology.

To find out more about Moo’s new kind of card, check out the video below.

NFC Business Cards from MOO from MOO.COM on Vimeo.

Despite various incidents of injuries related to texting while walking, some people still don't understand the potential danger.

Detailed in the Anchorage Daily News, a young woman named Maria Pestrikoff plummeted sixty feet off a cliff when she was walking while texting. According to the account of the incident, she was attempting to write a text on her cell phone when she walked near a cliff to flick a cigarette butt off the edge. Her home is located near the cliff, thus it’s likely that she commonly uses the cliff to discard old cigarette butts when outside. While she was occupied with sending a text message, Pestrikoff lost her footing on wet grass and quickly fell onto a dangerous, rocky area on the Kodiak beach below.

Luckily discovered by her friend Anthony Burke, Pestrikoff was spotted between large boulders along the beach. Shrieking in pain, both the Bayside Fire Department and Kodiak Fire Department were called to the scene in order to attempt a rescue from above.

While some of the firefighters were able to descend to her location using an aluminum ladder, others eventually had to rappel down the side of the cliff in order to stabilize Pestrikoff and lift her to safety.

Fortunately, the firefighters were able to remove Pestrikoff from the rocky terrain prior to the tide coming in to cover the rocks. Just ten feet away when she was moved away, the freezing cold water could have escalated her injuries with the threat of hypothermia. Regarding the incoming water, Burke stated “The tide was right up to her toes by the time they were able to get her out.”

Placed in a stretcher, Pestrikoff was transported to Providence Kodiak Island Medical Center in an ambulance before being flown to an Anchorage hospital. After falling on September 17, Pestrikoff is still in the Anchorage hospital recovering from her many injuries. This incident is somewhat similar to the Texas student that drove off a bridge while texting “I need to quit texting,” as well as the woman that walked off a pier into Lake Michigan while attempting to send a text message.

Research In Motion posted a second-quarter loss of $235 million on Thursday. It's not good, but analysts had been expecting worse, with shares surging as a result.

On many occasions when a company posts a big loss in its quarterly report, its shares tumble like a sandbag-laden lead balloon, but when struggling mobile maker Research In Motion on Thursday announced a $235 million loss in its fiscal second quarter ending September 1, its shares shot up 18 percent. Why? Because analysts had been expecting worse numbers, that’s why.

Here’s a quick breakdown of the figures for its second quarter:

- $235 million loss compared with profit of $419 million a year ago

- $2.9 billion revenue

- 7.4 million BlackBerry handsets shipped, which is 3.2 million fewer phones than a year ago but a million more than analysts had predicted

- 130,000 BlackBerry PlayBook tablets shipped

The financial figures come a couple of days after RIM CEO Thorsten Heins announced – against expectations – that BlackBerry subscriber numbers had risen to 80 million for the quarter ending September, up two million from earlier this year, thanks to healthy sales in developing markets. However, in North America its share of the mobile market continues to fall.

Long-term success?

While RIM executives and investors may be sleeping a little more soundly in their beds this evening, Peter Misek, an analyst at Jefferies, sounded a note of caution about the data, telling AP, “They are driving sales in emerging markets and we think they will continue to lose subscribers in developed markets,” adding, “It doesn’t tell you anything about the long-term success of the platform or the company.”

Ah, yes, the long-term future. RIM certainly has a fight on its hands if it’s to climb out of the sticky situation in which it finds itself. According to research firm IDC, BlackBerry’s share of the US market has fallen from 45.8 percent in 2008 to an alarming 2.7 percent in 2012, with Apple’s iPhone and handsets running Google’s Android operating system now dominating the market.

For Ontario-based RIM, everything depends on how its next-generation BB10 operating system and handsets are received by consumers. The problem is, they’re not coming to market until early 2013, giving companies like Apple and Samsung even more time to increase their market dominance.

In a conference call with analysts on Thursday, Heins acknowledged that competitors have launched strong products in recent months but promised that BlackBerry 10 “will advance the operating system environment to a whole new level.”

He needs to be right, and consumers need to be wowed, for if they’re not, the company which was once the world’s leading force in the smartphone market may have no place left to turn.

We have a copy of Madden 13 on the PS3 waiting to be given away. Read on to find out how.

The refs are back! Thank the almighty, the refs are back! The news today that the NFL settled the dispute with its refs was greeted with a mixture of joy and relief. The consequences of awarding a few lucky fans with the chance to see an NFL game from a unique angle – the field, apparently – was not quite the rousing success that the NFL had assumed when the strike began, but on the flip side it probably went off exactly as the NFL Referee Association had hoped it would. More than a zebra-flavored few cackles were surely heard following Russell Wilson going down in history as the first quarterback to ever throw a game winning interception.

For those that are more into the digital side of things this probably didn’t affect you much, as Madden 13 remained unaffected. Sure, we all want realism in our football simulators, but sending out an update to lower the cognitive ability of the refs may be a little too real, even for the most dedicated.

So with that in mind, and with the balance restored to the force (of football), we have decided to celebrate by giving away a copy of Madden 13 on the PlayStation 3.

For your chance to win, all you have to do is come up with a legitimate argument within the rules of the NFL  that would justify awarding that touchdown to Seattle at the end of the Packers/Seahawks game. And go. 

We kid, we kid. You could seriously hurt yourself trying to twist that play into a legitimate one, so instead we’ll make this easy on you:

All you have to do is let us know your picks for the Super Bowl. That’s it. There is no wrong answer! Well, that’s not entirely true, there could be a wrong answer. Saying you think the Montreal Expos are going to win the Super Bowl would be wrong, for example… But this is just entirely opinion based.

So just post a comment below and let us know who you predict will be in the big game, and you will be entered to win a copy of Madden 13 for the PS3!

The contest will run from now until Tuesday, October 2 at noon PST. Good luck!

The latest entry in the Earth Defense Force series is coming to your nearest PS Vita handheld.

After months of waiting and hopeful speculation, D3Publisher has officially announced that Earth Defense Force 3 Portable will be hitting American shores at some point during the upcoming winter. This news was relayed via the game’s official American Twitter account, which simply states, “Earth Defense Force 2017 Portable Coming to North America for PlayStation Vita!” There’s a link there to the game’s official Facebook page, but that site only brings up an image with similarly exciting, yet ultimately informationless text.

Though we appreciate the multi-pronged attempt to get this news out there, it does little to prepare new players for the game. Thus, this seems like a good time to compile what we already know about the game. Despite the title, Earth Defense Force 3 Portable is more or less the same game that was released on the Xbox 360 in 2007 as Earth Defense Force 2017. That game, though largely unheralded, attracted a devoted cult following and EDF2017 became something of a sleeper hit — particularly for those gamers who enjoy chaotic multiplayer games full of giant bugs just begging to be blown to pieces. As a result of this success, D3Publisher tapped American development studio Vicious Cycle Software to develop a proper sequel. The result was 2011′s Earth Defense Force: Insect Armageddon, which while a valid follow-up to EDF2017, failed to capture that game’s quirky, decidedly Japanese tone, leaving many fans of the earlier title hoping that D3Publisher would again join forces with Japanese developer Sandlot to create a true EDF2017 sequel.

While we have yet to receive that game, Sandlot was tapped to bring Earth Defense Force 2017 to a handheld system. Specifically, Sony’s PS Vita. Instead of a direct port however, Earth Defense Force 3 Portable would be something of a remix of the original game. It improves the title’s graphics, cleans up a few of the more egregious software bugs, adds new levels and weapons, and resurrects the “Pale Wing” character class from Global Defense Force (which, for the record, is the game that would have served as Earth Defense Force 2, except that the series has a really bizarre, confusing history when making the transition from its original Japanese iterations into English-language titles). Most crucially however, the Vita version of Earth Defense Force 3 Portable includes both local and online multiplayer modes, allowing gamers to multiply their bug-exploding potential by however many Vita-owning friends they can round up.

At the moment we have no indication on when Earth Defense Force 3 Portable might hit store shelves, but given the relatively small amount of text included in earlier Earth Defense Force titles, we can’t imagine that the game’s localization process would take an exceedingly long time. That, combined with the fact that the Japanese version of Earth Defense Force 3 Portable just hit that country’s retail outlets, leads us to believe that D3Publisher will have more information on the imminent English port sooner, rather than later. This is, after all, the company’s flagship series, so don’t expect them to let us forget that it’s on its way to this side of the Pacific.

There has been a lot of rumors about the next-gen Nexus smartphone of late. One camp claims that the rumored HTC phablet is going to be the next Nexus device. The other camp says that the super-powered LG Optimus LG could be the Nexus device. What’s the right answer? Both, perhaps. It sounds more than possible that there will be several Nexus devices rolled out this time around.

The rumor of LG building a member of the Nexus family is now supposedly confirmed through Spanish site Movilzona. The site claims its source is somehow connected with Vodafone and has come out with additional information about the LG Nexus device.

The LG Nexus device will feature a 4.7-inch display and a display that is of similar quality and detail to Apple’s Retina Display. From what we know of the Optimus G, this seems to fit the bill- the G has a 1280×768 resolution and a 4.7-inch display.

Keep in mind that this is all speculation and rumor, so take it with a grain of salt. If multiple Nexus devices are going to be simultaneously released, which interests you more? A high-end LG Nexus or a phablet-sized HTC model? Conversely, would you rather see a Nexus device from Google’s own Motorola Mobility?

EA will not release an NBA Live title this year, and will instead use the extra development time to focus on NBA Live 14.

“After a lot of consideration, we have made the decision to not launch NBA LIVE 13,” begins the latest news post on the official NBA Live website.

For those of you keeping score at home, this is the second time in the last three years that NBA Live publisher EA has canceled a new addition to the series. NBA Elite 11 — EA opted to momentarily ditch the “NBA Live” moniker for this particular ill-fated sequel — was initially scheduled for release in November of 2010 but was canceled only a week prior to its scheduled shipping date due to concerns over the game’s quality.

So why is it that EA, a company that regularly battles Activision for the title of world’s largest video game publisher, and who has been successfully pushing annual updates in its Madden NFL series for more than two decades, unable to regularly generate new professional basketball games? According to EA Sports executive vice president Andrew Wilson, the company is simply not able to put a version of NBA Live 13 together that they would be satisfied with qualitatively.

“We also made a commitment to deliver a high quality experience — this is what our fans expect and what we demand of ourselves at EA Sports. But making great games is not easy, and we’re just not there yet on NBA LIVE 13,” Wilson said. “Having continued to look at the game over the past few days, it’s clear that we won’t be ready in October. And rather than launch midway through the season, we’re going to sit out the full year and stay focused on making next year’s game great. This decision puts us on the right track for success well into the future in a rapidly changing industry.”

That’s a surprising level of candor, and who can argue with that reasoning? If EA were to release a subpar NBA Live 13, not only would fans be disappointed, but the publisher would also lose tons of supporters to hoops rival 2K Sports, publishers of the excellent NBA 2K series of basketball titles.

Where does EA go from here? According to Wilson the company plans to take the next year to completely reexamine the core fundamentals of its NBA Live series in preparation for the inevitable NBA Live 14. Wilson hopes that by spending this extra time polishing the franchise’s core concepts and introducing new features that are truly ready for the public, that the company can put the NBA Live series back on track permanently. We wish Wilson and his team of developers all the best, but it’s going to take a lot of work to top the 2K Sports team. For instance, were you aware that NBA 2K13 includes the ’92 Dream Team? Or that it’s the first game in years to include Charles Barkley? EA’s going to have to come up with something spectacular to top that kind of nostalgic appeal.

Rovio continues to expand the world of Angry Birds with an entirely new series that focuses on the bad guys. Bad Piggies is a fresh start in a familiar world.

Mobile games developer Rovio has created quite the path for itself. The absurdly popular Angry Birds series took players everywhere from tropical islands to outer space, but even that doesn’t capture the astronomical growth that the multimedia company has had. They’ve expanded to a full-blown phenomenon, selling everything from plush toys to tickets to their new European theme park. Now they’re getting back to their roots by creating a spin-off title from the Angry Birds franchise. Bad Piggies takes the villains of the vengeful feathered flyers and makes them the stars.

The goal of Bad Piggies is rather simple: collect pieces of a map that will lead you to your treasure — in this case, bird eggs. In that sense, the game must be a bit of a prequel to the Angry Birds franchise. This game should show what makes the birds so darn angry in the first place. To accomplish the task at hand, players will have to build some basic forms of transportation to bring the bodiless swine to their destination.

Players start out each level with a selection of pieces to create a cart that will carry the pigs to a lost piece of the map. The parts players have range from wheels and boxes for basic wheeled carts to spinning fans and shaken up soda bottles that propel the carts forward. Some levels even have balloons and umbrellas to change vertical direction. Once a primitive craft has been built, you have to pilot it across the landscape to reach your goal.

There are three different goals on any given level. One is to finish with your pig intact, which is reasonable enough considering the game isn’t called “Slaughter House.” The second and third objectives vary from time-based challenges, to finishing a level without using the fan or propelling piece of your build, to collecting a star that is off the beaten path. Accomplishing any of the tasks at hand will result in a star reward. 

While the gameplay is significantly different than that of Angry Birds and the mode of transportation has changed from slingshot to player-built vehicle, the method of accomplishment through trial and error remains. You’ll want to play through levels multiple times to achieve that elusive three star rating, and every attempted build will give a different result. That’s where the true replay-ability factor lies and it’s something that few do as well as Rovio.

Also similar to Angry Birds is the fact that early levels don’t really have multiple ways of winning. These levels serve as an introduction and have a very clear path to completion. In Bad Piggies, you’ll be given a certain area in which you can build and place pieces. At the start, that area is very limited and only allows for certain types of designs to be made. It expands as the game goes on, opening itself up to unique creations and clever usage of provided parts. This especially is true once one earns enough stars to get into Sandbox mode. All the limitations are dropped here, and players can take control of any part in the game to make some absurd yet awesome creations. That appears to be where the true potential is in this title. Unfortunately, the Sandbox mode is currently quite small in comparison to the fully fleshed out missions of standard play. 

While it’s not entirely fair to do, Bad Piggies will be compared to Angry Birds because it’s from the same developer and is in the same universe. It definitely is not the same game. The pace is slower and requires a bit more thought. When things don’t work properly, it’s also considerably more frustrating than Angry Birds, where one could simply restart and begin firing away again. In a way, it is quite similar to Amazing Alex, Rovio’s other recent non-Birds mobile game launch, which requires a lot more planning. Restarting in Bad Piggies means going back to the drawing board and hoping your pieced together project will function how you imagined. The groundwork of the game is good. Rovio has laid a solid foundation for a title that begs for more levels — especially in Sandbox mode. While there’s a little bit of hand holding in the early going, Bad Piggies thrives when it lets go of the playable tutorial style and lets players and their imagination run wild.

Bad Piggies is available for iPhone/iPod for $1, iPad for $3, Android for free, and Mac for $5.

Valve's Steam on Linux will enter its first round of beta testing outside the studio this October.

Valve’s version of the Steam client for the Linux operating system is almost ready for primetime. A new post at the developer’s official blog announced that it will host the first external beta testing program for Steam Linux in October.

“Things have been going well,” reads the post, “We will be having an internal beta starting next week, and a private external beta for 1,000 users sometime in October.”

Those lucky 1,000 Linux users, at least those running Ubuntu version 12.04 and up, will run Steam and just one Valve-made game for testing purposes. Newer Valve features like the television-supporting Big Picture mode won’t be available at this point.

Valve does advise Linux neophytes to avoid entering for a chance at using this version of Steam as it will still be somewhat tricky to install and run on the operating system.

Valve announced Steam on Linux in July right around the time that Gabe Newell started to excoriate Microsoft for making Windows 8 a closed platform, restricting what PC game developers can create.

Foursquare has pushed an iOS update, offering a robust social recommendation engine, iOS 6 and iPhone 5 compatibility, and faster map.

Foursquare has pushed its latest update, bringing a few back end and front end changes in addition to compatibility with the iPhone 5’s larger screen size. Simply put, the app offers a faster browsing experience and uses the data culled from your friend’s outing habits to become a smarter version of itself.

Since pivoting from a complete focus on the check-in, Foursquare has honed in on building products for personalizing the experience with unique results for each user. You can think of it as a mobile, personalized Yelp on-the-go. “It’s a personalized map made just for you,” Foursquare wrote in its blog post. What this means is that the search results will be uniquely tailored to you rather than offering “one-size-fits-all” content. It’s a pretty direct jab at Yelp, which was recently integrated into Apple’s new iOS 6 map.

With Foursquare using OpenStreetMap, you could even use the service as an Apple Maps as well as a Yelp alternative. Of course you have to realize that Foursquare is a much bigger, more fully-featured platform than Yelp is; the latter is a rudimentary service that simply plots venues and restaurants on a map sans recommendations. 

With over 2.5 billion check-ins and “tens of millions” of tips, Foursquare claims to know a thing or two about your friends and the places they frequent. This information is tied into Foursquare’s search function (which actually has a decent amount in common with Google Social Search), so when you’re typing in “Chinese food,” it’s most likely that no two results using the same term on from two different user accounts will be the same. If your friends have checked-in to a specific Chinese food location, that restaurant will likely be suggested and appear at the top of the search results.

In addition to the under-the-hood update to its search engine, you’ll notice a few search categories that have popped up within the “Explorer” tab for discovering new venues or restaurants. Categories like “Haven’t Been,” “Been Before,” and “Friends Have Been” are the latest newcomers to the existing list of general tabs including “Food,” “Arts,” “Shopping,” and “Top Picks.” You can also now add places that you’ve visited to a list of “Saved” locations for those favorite places that you’d like to revisit.

It deserves mentioning that for the new personalized features to work,  users will still have to rely on checking-in ti their locations — there’s no workaround to this, and in order to give you those personalized results, Foursquare needs to know where you and your friends are going. Until Foursquare implements some sort of ambient location feature that runs in the background, the check-in is going to remain an important part of its function. 

The update is available in the App Store for all iOS devices, including the iPhone 5.

When you look at most other smartphones, they’ll tell you that they have a Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 running at 1.2GHz or an NVIDIA Tegra3 chip clocking it at 1.4GHz, for example. These numbers are offered openly for our scrutiny. That’s just not the case with Apple, but that doesn’t mean we can’t figure it out. We were told at the Apple A6 chip inside the new iPhone 5 was faster, but it turns out that it’s even faster than the 1.02GHz previously reported. A more recent benchmark has it running at 1.3GHz.

This is not with some sort of jailbroken overclocking hack. Instead, the “new” clock speed comes from an updated version of Geekbench (v.2.3.6) that has been upgraded to better identify the true clock speed of the Apple A6 processor. Earlier tests run with an earlier build of Geekbench showed the A6 running at 1.02GHz. Given this, does this mean that the “real” clock speed is 1.3GHz?

Maybe. Maybe not. It is possible that the Apple A6 chip has been configured to dynamically “overclock” itself or even simply adjust its clock speed within its normal range depending on the current load. According to 9to5Mac, the A6 can “downclock” itself as low as 550MHz too. This would help to provide better battery life, of course, but it can ramp up to 1.3GHz when the performance demands require it. At least we know that it has dual CPU cores and three GPU cores, based on a recent dissection of the A6.

If it worked for Castlevania, it might work for Silent Hill. Konami asks Metal Gear Solid creator to rehabilitate its horror series.

There’s a strategy taking shape at Konami: Take an old, faded franchise and bring it to Hideo Kojima to fix it. It worked with Castlevania: Lords of Shadow, and according to Kojima, Konami wants it to work with Silent Hill.

Speaking with Eurogamer, Kojima said that Konami’s president came to him with the series after he’d mentioned an interest in it on Twitter. “In the past I’ve mentioned Silent Hill in interviews, and as a result of that the president of Konami rung me up and said he’d like me to make the next Silent Hill,” said the Metal Gear Solid creator, “Honestly, I’m kind of a scaredy-cat when it comes to horror movies, so I’m not confident I can do it. At the same time, there’s a certain type of horror that only people who are scared of can create, so maybe it’s something I can do.”

“That said, I think Silent Hill has a certain atmosphere. I think it has to continue, and I’d love to help it continue, and if I can help by supervising or lending the technology of the FOX Engine, then I’d love to participate in that respect.”

The FOX Engine is the new multiplatform engine Kojima is using to create Metal Gear Solid: Ground Zeroes.

Although it was created as a rival to Capcom’s Resident Evil series, Konami’s Silent Hill has never been the cash cow that the publisher seemed to think it could be. Silent Hill 1 through 4 were made by a dedicated team of peculiar designers, concerned with making psychologically disturbing, smart horror video games, not mega blockbusters. The series was never going to be Saw or Paranormal Activity. It was intended to be video games’ Jacob’s Ladder. Team Silent actually wanted to end the series with Silent Hill 3 in 2003, and began working on a new type of horror game that Konami eventually insisted on calling Silent Hill 4: The Room.

The team was then disbanded and Konami embarked on eight years of hiring western studios to make action-based entries in the series. Games like Silent Hill: Homecoming, Silent Hill Origins, and this year’s Silent Hill: Downpour have all failed to make an impact with players, selling poorly and getting poor review scores on average.

Konami is trying to rehabilitate the brand as a film franchise again this fall. It’s been years since the first Silent Hill movie hit theaters, and the sequel has been repeatedly delayed in production.

The little app that could, Instagram, keeps on showing veteran networks who's boss and bests Twitter on mobile reach for the month of August.

According to the latest comScore report, Instagram was a bigger mobile drawn than Twitter was during the month of August. AllThingsD reports that smartphone users visited Instagram more often and for longer periods of time that they did Twitter.

The report says that during August, Instagram had an average of 7.3 million daily active users (DAUs), while Twitter had approximately 6.9 million DAUs. What’s more, the average Instagrammer spent 257 minutes on the mobile app, while the average Twitter user spent 169.9 minutes on the platform’s mobile version.

The news is simultaneously surprising and completely not. Twitter is a social media veteran with an app that’s been around for years. It’s not like mobile hasn’t been good to Twitter, and it’s received positive reports for its smartphone-friendly ad scheme. But Instagram has had an almost magical, inexplicable rise to the top of the social networking sphere: Its user numbers are on an unstoppable ascent, its updates are nearly universally lauded (something Facebook and Twitter can’t really relate to), and people genuinely love the platform. It’s not a utility we’re overly invested in and using for that reason only — people really, truly, honestly gravitate toward it and that type of engagement is hard to manufacture. The mobile numbers clearly prove as much.

So while Twitter might be able to brag about its mobile ad reach, Facebook has an incredible value in Instagram. It’s currently not being utilized for marketing or brand-pushing services, but this report clearly means that there’s potential to leverage the eyeballs and time spent on Instagram – something users will be horrified to hear even suggested. Since day one of the acquisition, both Instagram and Facebook have said the proprietary Instagram app will be allowed to grow and exist independently, but you have to expect that the social network is aware of the photo sharing platform’s appeal, and is mulling over how to both keep users happy and benefit from the reach. 

The latest Nintendo 3DS update permanently blocks the use of flash carts for playing pirated games according to one cart manufacturer.

No more pirated games on the Nintendo 3DS, at least for awhile, thanks to the latest firmware update for the handheld.

Before the pricing fiasco that forced Nintendo to sell its Nintendo 3DS portable console at a loss for almost a year, the Nintendo DS successor was positioned to be a massive hit for the company’s investors. It wasn’t just that Nintendo expected consumers to buy the console in droves. Nintendo believed that the 3DS would be protected from the rampant piracy that crippled Nintendo DS software sales and chased third party publishers away from the system. The Nintendo 3DS would end the reign of game pirate terror caused by R4 flash carts.

That didn’t work out for Nintendo. Flash carts for the Nintendo 3DS were available within weeks of the console’s release in 2011, and while piracy hasn’t been as much of a problem as it was on DS, it’s still affected the console. According to flash cart maker SuperCard though, the latest firmware update for the 3DS will block all flash carts from working on the system permanently.

Nintendo 3DS update version 4.4.0-10U reportedly introduces anti-piracy measures that prevent existing flash cart users from using new software on the carts to work around Nintendo security. SuperCard indicates that if a flash cart is going to work on the 3DS from here on out, it will have to be entirely new type hardware.

Nintendo’s anti-piracy measures on the 3DS have been extreme to date. When updating the system’s firmware in the past, Nintendo could “brick” the system if it detected unsigned applications, making the device little more than a pretty piece of plastic.

“In developing the Wii U and Nintendo 3DS, we recognized that security is an extremely important factor for the sake of our business and in making sure that our consumers feel that playing our product is safe,” said president Satoru Iwata during an investor Q&A in July, “While some acts of piracy are still possible in its DS-compatibility mode, as we had to ensure that the Nintendo DS software could still be played on the Nintendo 3DS, the Nintendo 3DS itself still maintains a robust security system, even after this much time has passed since its launch.”

With this new update, even old DS flash carts are locked out.

Source: Tiny Cartridge

Microsoft won't make another Banjo Kazooie, but some of the staff that worked on the platformer series are hoping to make a successor.

There are people out there that love bears who wear backpacks, are friends with birds, hate witches, and love jumping on things. Banjo Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts, an Xbox 360 game which purported to be about those bears but was in fact some weird exercise in Lego car creation, likely disappointed those people. All they’ve had for years now are the Xbox Live remakes of the original Banjo Kazooie and Banjo Tooie to satisfy their bear-related cravings. Not all hope is lost though. MingyJongo, an anonymous Twitter user and purportedly former Rare Inc. employee is gathering the creators responsible for those N64 games, looking to build a “spiritual successor” to the series.

“Let’s make the spiritual successor to Banjo Tooie!” reads the profile information from the MingyJongo Twitter profile opened this month. Mingy Jongo says Banjo Kazooie composer Grant Kirkhope and artist Steven Hurst will work together again on the new game. “Core members of the original team are ready to go. All we need is your support. So join us today!”

Fans still feeling the sting of Nuts and Bolts’ odd shift in style will be pleased by the group’s goals. “I’m thinking 3D platformer,” reads one Tweet, proposing a game that would be “something new” that doesn’t “try to recreate Banjo.”

“[A] game that shares the same kind of humor, silly characters, fun game play, great tunes and all that stuff that we enjoy making.”

Citing a Eurogamer article on Obsidian’s success funding Project Eternity, MingyJongo suggested that Kickstarter would be a good way to both fund the Banjo successor as well as gauge fan interest. It also said that Unity would be a good platform to build that game on. Unity would definitely make the game accessible to PC owners, but in light of Unity’s new partnership with on Wii U, it would also make it easer for this new 3D platformer to retrace Banjo’s console roots with Nintendo.

Kirkhope’s Tweets to the Mingy Jongo account suggest that the operation is credible, but as of this writing, no one knows precisely who it is maintaining the MingyJongo account. There are only a couple of potential candidates as most of the Banjo Tooie team beyond Kirkhope and Steven Hurst are still employed by Microsoft or Rare. The only potential candidates are William Bryan and Andrew Pollington who left the company after completing Kinect Sports in 2010. 

Weeks after reports of EA's attempted Valve acquisition comes word that Korea's Nexon and NCSoft have made an offer for the Steam studio.

More reports of a potential Valve acquisition, this time involving some of Korea’s biggest game companies.

Valve co-founder and digital entertainment industry maverick Gabe Newell aims to keep his company independent or he’ll die trying. Newell said recently that the likelihood that Valve will be sold is slim indeed. He would rather “disintegrate” Valve than see it sell out to a larger technology company or video game publisher. That doesn’t mean that other companies aren’t trying to acquire the Steam studio. Enter Korean video game giants Nexon and NCSoft.

Korean outlet Joonang News (via MCV) claims that Valve met with both companies in Hawaii on Wednesday to discuss a potential merger. The pooled offer for Valve from Nexon and NCSoft is 1 trillion won, or around $893 million.

Nexon and NCSoft would certainly benefit from owning, or at least partnering with, Valve on a large scale. NCSoft sits right behind Blizzard as the world’s leading MMORPG company, publishing and hosting games like the recently released Guild Wars 2 amongst many successes in the genre like City of Heroes, Lineage and others. Nexon, meanwhile, is one of the biggest mobile and online game providers throughout Japan, China, and Korea. It’s currently valued around $5.9 billion. Steam, being the leading digital PC game retail platform in the US, would strengthen those companies’ interests outside Asia.

NCSoft could use the steady income. The publisher is having difficulty maintaining profits now that the MMO industry has moved away from paid subscriptions in favor of free-to-play revenue models. Its second quarter earnings saw revenue fall 12 percent year-on-year to around $130 million. (By comparison, Electronic Arts pulled in $276 million from its PC operation alone over the same period.

Nexon on the other hand is thriving, with revenue earnings in the first quarter of 2012 up 46 percent to around $480 million, and net income up 60 percent to nearly $154 million. It also already enjoys a partnership with Valve, with plans to host Asia’s Counter Strike Online community.

The long and short of it: Yes, it would make sense that these companies want Valve. The purchase price of $893 million rings false though. Electronic Arts reportedly made informal advances on Valve offering a cool $1 billion and Newell and company were unmoved. That was in the past as well. Today, Valve is valued at around $2.5 billion. With the company plotting major expansions in the next few years—branching out into non-gaming apps and hardware—Valve’s business is on the cusp of growing in value even more.

For any Korean readers out there getting pumped up, our apologies: That Team Fortress 2 MMORPG will have to remain a fantasy.

SportStream continues its mission to connect fans with socially-sourced sports data with its new iPhone app.

If there’s any market that’s primed for the social, second screen experience, it’s sports. What with the stats, player news, fantasy teams, and of course, heavy dose of trash talking, the two are made for each other. That’s not to say there isn’t still plenty of friction in this space, but developers are doing their damndest to figure out how we want to use social platforms and mobile devices to enhance the experience of watching sports.

And today, one of the biggest names in this market, SportStream, is taking another step into the thick of it with the debut of its iPhone app. At the moment, SportStream is available via Web or iPad app, but the team has wisely noticed that plenty of users are content to multitask during TV watching from the palm of their hands as well: A recent Pew report found that more than 50 percent of adults use their phones while watching television.

“People watch sports in real-time: The don’t DVR,” says co-founder and CEO of SportStream Bob Morgan. “They want to see outcomes, share their comments and trash talk in real-time, too. This creates a very interesting opportunity for second screen experience. Our primary goal is to provide fans with the best content for every game, while connecting them with each other.”

The SportStream iPhone app brings with it everything available in the iPad and Web versions — commentary, sideline reports, and game stats. Except these aren’t sourced from what you’re already seeing on TV; it’s all aggregated from sports personalities’ and experts’ social media accounts. If that makes you raise a skeptical eyebrow, consider that Packers guard TJ Lang’s Twitter slam against the replacement NFL refs quickly became the most retweeted post of all time. There’s an inarguable connection between fans and sports figureheads, be they players or pundits, and it’s being made using social platforms.

In addition to features like Twitter and Facebook sharing (with some slick focus on trending hashtags focused on your content and improved technology to filter out any irrelevant social noise), SportStream’s recent integration with Are You Watching This?! (RUWT?!) also shows up in the new iPhone app. RUWT?! is an algorithm-based system that alerts users when games get exciting — it’s supposed to keep you from beating yourself up for turning the TV off during that assumed blowout only to hear the next day that your team made an epic comeback (points at self).

SportStream, which launched in June, has been building fast. The iPhone is an interesting next iteration, given the startup’s early tablet focus. “We’ve seen tablet and Web browser use as fairly similar — it appears users have one or the other open during games,” Morgan tells me. “This isn’t too surprising given the research in this area. With the launch of the iPhone app, we’re very interested to see how people interact with the app on their phones, while on the go. One of the most interesting things we’ve seen is how low latency game information and commentary is on Twitter. This makes for a really rich, 360-degree view of a game.”