Industry news

Kongregate's Flash games come to Android in style

One of the most exciting prospects of Flash coming to Android devices has been games. While the iPhone platform has become a developmental heavyweight for indie gaming in just a few short years, it remains unable to take advantage of the rich library of titles developed to work on Adobe's Flash player.

With this week's inclusion of Flash player 10.1 on Android phones as part of the 2.2 software update, however, gamers on the go now have access to these titles. The only problem, it seems, is that not all of them are mobile phone-friendly.

Kongregate, a popular Flash gaming host and community, has gone through the effort to weed through its library and pick out titles that work well on smaller screens. Of the site's more than 28,300 titles, its staff has pulled together around 120 that they think work quite well.

CNET on Monday spoke with Kongregate CEO Jim Greer about the collection, as well as the site's efforts to get some of its top games' developers to make small adjustments, a process he says is going quite well. "There were a few games where developers had to make some buttons bigger, or put some buttons on-screen to replace the need for a keyboard," Greer said. "But they're psyched about it."

Greer said Flash developers who were aiming to port over their games to the iPhone had gotten "the wind taken out of their sails" after Apple's change to the developer agreement back in April. "There were a number of developers who had Flash games that they were working on using Adobe's Flash compiler," Greer explained. After the change in the rules, Greer said many began focusing on Android instead.

As for the battery life, Greer said it's not as horrible as Steve Jobs might have made it out to be in his open letter earlier this month.… Read more

Students now get priority access to Google Voice

Google on Friday began giving students priority access to its Google Voice service, which has remained in a closed beta since its transition from GrandCentral in March of last year.

Typically, invites for the service can take anywhere from a few hours to several months to arrive after a user signs up. But the company is now promising those who have an e-mail address that ends with .edu access to the service within 24 hours. Google had done something similar for active members of the U.S. military back in August.

In a blog post on the new initiative, Google … Read more

Hulu improves its player, commits to Flash

If you've been holding your breath for Hulu to offer an HTML5 video player, your skin's about to get purpler.

Eugene Wei, Hulu's VP of product, posted a missive on the popular video site's company blog that goes over various improvements while adding a decisive note about sticking with Adobe's Flash technology over using an HTML5 video player. At least for the time being.

"We continue to monitor developments on HTML5, but as of now it doesn't yet meet all of our customers' needs," Wei said. "Our player doesn't just … Read more

Shoefitr uses 3D to help buy the right kicks

Shoes are one of those things that can take a leap of faith to buy off the Internet. Sure there are online retailers like Zappos that offer free two-way shipping, but if you're in a pinch to get the right size the first time around, there's a new company that just might help you do it.

Shoefitr, which demoed its technology at Thursday's AlphaLab incubator demo day in Pittsburgh, Pa., is attempting to solve the size problem by feeding shoes through a 3D scanner. This results in the company having a 3D model of the shoe that'… Read more

Ngmoco acquires Touch Pets development house

Game developer and publisher Ngmoco has acquired game house Stumptown Game Machine, the co-creator of the Touch Pets series. The two companies had worked together on the burgeoning virtual-pet franchise for the iPhone and iPod Touch in 2009.

Financial details of the deal were not disclosed.

Stumptown Games, a creation of Andrew Stern, is Ngmoco's third developer acquisition in the past year. Previous pickups include Miraphonic, which Ngmoco acquired in November of 2009, and Freeverse, which Ngmoco bought shortly after its $25 million round of venture capital funding in February. Both of those development houses continue to run under … Read more

Blippy gets an API and a way to track groceries

SAN FRANCISCO--What a difference a few weeks can make.

At the Finovate conference, which is a biannual gathering of financial start-ups, Blippy co-founder Philip Kaplan put on a brave face, demoing new features and announcing that the service was launching an API for application developers. Kaplan's presentation came just a few weeks after it was discovered that the company had inadvertently leaked the credit card information of five of its users to Google's search engine.

However, privacy is still very much on the mind of the company, which posts details to its Web site about what purchases people … Read more

Mint to give its users long-term goals

Mint.com's CEO Aaron Patzer on Tuesday is giving attendees of the Finovate spring conference in San Francisco a sneak peek at its next major enhancement. The financial planning and tracking service, which was snapped up by Intuit back in September, is getting long-term goals--a feature its software cousin Quicken has had for years, but that could be overly complicated and disjointed.

Patzer, who spoke with CNET about the upcoming service update on Monday, said the new system has been designed with the same kind of simplicity as the rest of Mint.com, and the goals themselves were decided … Read more

iPad is hot on eBay, but for how long?

Last week I did the unthinkable. I sold my iPad on eBay.

Was it a case of buyer's remorse? There was some of that, sure. But more than anything it was due to Apple's returns and exchanges policy, which gives buyers two weeks (instead of the more typical 30 days) to change their mind. And if it's been opened, you have to pay a fairly standard 10 percent restocking fee, which for the iPad can range from $60 to $83, depending on what model you got.

To be fair, I knew about these limitations upfront. So, being … Read more

Dropbox gets a mobile API and a trio of apps

Dropbox is getting more serious about its efforts to bring its cloud storage solution to mobile devices. On Tuesday the company is announcing a mobile API for developers to build ties to Dropbox's servers into their own apps, as well as formally launching first-party applications for the iPad and Android and BlackBerry devices.

The new mobile API is something Dropbox is calling "Dropbox Anywhere." The company has worked with a number of developers to integrate their apps into the new data pipeline. These include Fuze's FuzeMeeting app, Dictamus, Air Sharing, GoodReader, QuickOffice and Sprite Mobile's … Read more

Face.com opens its face recognition tech to devs

The facial recognition technology that powers Face.com is now available to third-party developers. Those who are interested in using it inside of their applications will be able to take advantage of an open API that the company is making public Monday morning.

For consumers, Face.com's technology brings some very interesting things to the table. Face has already offered a tagging tool, as well as a recognition-based alert service for Facebook. But not everyone keeps their photos there. Using the new API, developers could build similar facial recognition tools into both desktop and Web based photo organizing apps … Read more