Industry news

Intuit-owned online financial tool Mint.com posted an item entitled "The Economic Impact of Immigration" to its MintLife blog earlier this week that quickly caught attention for all the wrong reasons.

The story, which featured an "infographic" and has since been taken down by the company, detailed the monetary impact that undocumented immigrants currently have on the U.S. economy, citing such numbers as 43 percent of all food stamps and 41 percent of unemployment benefits going to these individuals.

Besides being controversial, the numbers behind the imagery turned out to be questionably sourced. The Atlantic, … Read more

LOS ANGELES--Nintendo's 2010 E3 press conference was likely a satisfying one for the company's longtime fans. In it, the company unveiled a slew of new software titles slated to ship this holiday shopping season through to next year that bring back old and very popular franchises.

The biggest news out of the event though, and what had lines with an hour-long wait at the L.A. Convention Center, was the company's new 3D DS hardware, dubbed simply the 3DS.

Revealed at the end of the Nintendo press conference, the Nintendo 3DS is a variant of the Nintendo DS portable gaming hardware that adds a 3D element to the top screen that can be seen without the use of 3D glasses. It also has dual external cameras that can be used to take 3D photographs, which can then be viewed on the device.

Nintendo didn't go into specifics on what users can do with these 3D photos besides viewing them on the 3DS. The big deal here, though, is that Nintendo--and not a proper camera manufacturer--stands a chance at getting 3D cameras into a mind-boggling number of pockets when the 3DS is released next year.

Nintendo has also done some neat tricks to make the 3D effect on its top screen work, by including a "depth slider" that physically moves the 3D layer to either apply the effect full-on, or turn it off completely. As explained by Nintendo President Satoru Iwata, this has been included so that players can get rid of 3D in games if they so choose, or simply tweak the effect to their liking.

The 3DS is also the first for any of Nintendo's portable hardware to include an analog stick, which many would say is long overdue. This, along with an accelerometer and internal gyroscope sensors gives developers several new avenues to take control schemes.

What may end up being the biggest hint at Nintendo's ambitions for the system though, is that the company plans to bring 3D movies to it. While Nintendo was not announcing any at the expo, or how they would be delivered, it was showing off a variety of 3D trailers from studios like Warner Brothers, Dreamworks and Disney at its E3 booth. Presumably these will be the studios to offer content for the 3DS when it launches next year.

Nintendo has long been known for its family-friendly image, and the event the company not only embraced it, but pointed out that it has led to ample hardware and software sales.

"Last year you heard people say Wii momentum was starting to wane," said Nintendo of America's president, Reggie Fils-Aime. "But last December, we set an all-time record for game system sales of any kind, in any month." Fils-Aime went on to say that more games have been sold for Wii in 43 months than any other platform in the same launch period. … Read more

LOS ANGELES--I had to hold back a laugh or two as Electronic Arts' E3 press conference kicked off. Not because of its scale, which was quite large in LA's Orpheum Theater, but because it began with a video of Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit, EA's latest vehicular "chase or race" title that features rural mountain police driving Bugatti Veyrons.

How a sleepy mountain town's police force got itself a $1.7 million supercar was never really explained. But the hiss of turbo, the wild revving of million-dollar engines, and the road signs that frequently went whipping by in a blur of yellow only made it easier to forget. After all, it's EA's world, and after sitting through enough of the company's trailers you just end up accepting it as its own form of reality.

As the video transitioned into a live demo of Hot Pursuit, EA's Craig Sullivan desperately tried to catch up with the bad guy in a Lamborghini Gallardo, who was eventually flipped, totaled, and presumably still alive, despite the epic slow motion crash sequence that sent bits of the car showering toward the camera. In other words, exactly the kind of thing you'd expect to happen when you mess with the boys in blue--and their car with tires that cost $25,000.

The pomp and circumstance of the event came just two hours after Microsoft had unveiled a smaller, more feature packed Xbox 360 hardware, and demoed a handful of motion-controlled games that will run on the Kinect platform. EA followed suite, showing off its Active series, which has been designed to get gamers off the couch by turning exercise into a series of mini-games.

The new version of Active (called simply Active 2) comes out in November and works on all three major consoles. However, on stage it seemed to have the best showing on the Xbox 360, which was using a Kinect unit to track the demo player's body movements. The players using Sony's PlayStation 3 and Wii, on the other hand, had to have sensors attached to various parts of their bodies--and even then, the movement looked a little artificial when rendered back on screen.

Casual fitness games were not what stole the show though. Ultimately what got the most applause were… Read more

Like the lead-up to any big, annual Apple event, the weeks and months ahead of this year's WWDC brought the usual wash of rumors about new hardware, software, and online services.

The biggest unknown was not so much on the hardware side--as we all knew there was a new iPhone on the way (even what it looked like and whose fault that was), but the software and online services portion remained a mystery. This is typically the chunk of the WWDC keynote where Steve Jobs and company go into detail about the latest operating system tweaks and new software offerings.

There were rumors on both sides of the spectrum ranging from paid services like MobileMe going free and iTunes getting a streaming component to a fancy new wireless trackpad. Read on to get the details.

1. OS X 10.7

Apple's preview of OS X 10.6, nicknamed Snow Leopard, happened at 2008's WWDC. 10.5 was unveiled during 2006's keynote, and 10.4 in 2004's. Following that logic, 2010's show would bring a preview, or at least an acknowledgment that Apple had 10.7 in the oven. Though given the focus on Apple's iOS, and the shiny new device that will run on it, it's not all that surprising we didn't hear a peep.

An OS update, especially for the desktop, would have likely filled an hour or two on its own. Yet, the downside of this omission is that the eventual preview of that update will likely be shelved until next year's show, since WWDC is Apple's only big developer event of the year.

2. A developer preview for the iPad's iOS 4

When introducing OS 4 at a preview event back in April, Jobs said we'd be seeing a public release of it for the iPad sometime this fall. Again, logic would dictate that developers would get their hands on a build of the iPad 4.0 SDK at Apple's big developer event, alongside the first beta of the firmware for testing on real devices.

So why the no-show? Apple has likely had its hands full getting the iPhone and iPod Touch version of OS 4 ready to go in time for the iPhone 4 launch in two weeks. And developers only got their hands on the gold master candidate version of that late Monday. Maybe the delay was to include some new OS features being baked into the next batch of iPods this fall.

3. A Steve Ballmer appearance

In a note to investors, Global Equities Research analyst Trip Chowdhry claimed that Microsoft's CEO Steve Ballmer would be giving a seven-minute presentation of Visual Studio 2010 during the WWDC keynote. This was vehemently denied by Microsoft reps, then later retracted by Chowdhry, though many large news outlets (including us) picked up the story and ran with it.

There was some semblance of truth to the rumor of Microsoft having a presence at the keynote, in the form of Jobs announcing that Microsoft's Bing was now a search option in Safari, both on portable devices and on the desktop software.

4. iTunes streaming service

Like Apple's annual "buy a Mac, get a free iPod" promotion, which always manages to end just a few days before the company announces a new model, it seemed just a little too convenient music-streaming service Lala, which Apple bought back in December of last year, was being shut down just a week before WWDC.

Prior to Apple picking up the company, sources had told CNET that Apple was planning to purchase the company primarily for its music streaming technology and engineering talents. It seemed fair then (given the timing), that Apple would fill in the gap Lala.com's closure had left with something similar built right into iTunes, though that never came to fruition during Monday's keynote. Then again, given Apple's propensity for having its "music" events in September, we might just have to wait three months. … Read more

AppBackr, which launches in invite only beta on Tuesday, is one of the most interesting investment projects to come up in the last few years if only for its premise. It plans to offer iPhone app developers a way to get an advance paid by investors who buy into future sales, then stand to make a profit on their investment; that is, if they get in early, and the app sells.

Those are some pretty big ifs, though the bootstrapped alternative means waiting until the sales come in before ever seeing a return on what could be months of work. On top of this, there's promotion through blogs and publications--or PR agencies that can do that work for them.

What AppBackr is trying to do is roll those two extra steps of financing and promotion into a single service, while at the same time giving developers with little or no money a way to get a cash advance in exchange for some of the eventual profits.

Here's how it works: 1. Developers pay a $25 fee (per month, the first of which is waived) to list their app in AppBackr's marketplace. 2. Developers sign up with Apple as a developer (if they haven't already), then share their iTunes Connect account credentials with AppBackr so it can keep track of sales. 3. AppBackr creates a bank account for that developer, where they can funnel revenue from app sales. 4. A developer can sell lots of their sales to investors who buy them wholesale and at a discount. 5. As soon as a buyer purchases that lot, the developer gets that money in advance to actually build the app. 6. When the app sells through each lot of sales, that buyer of the lot gets paid more than they invested. How much depends on at what stage they invested.

There are obviously quite a few more details in how this works, the primary one being how much a developer and investor stand to make after Apple and AppBackr take a cut. Developers can get a 25-cent advance (out of a 69-cent cut of a 99-cent purchase), then another 11 cents when it sells. In turn, buyers can earn a 53-cent cut of either a 45- or 35-cent investment--something that is determined on whether they poured money into the app ahead of, or after its release (respectively). AppBackr also takes a 10-cent cut of the 69 cents both before it's sold, then either 5- or 2-cent post-transaction fee depending on the whether buyers invested in it before or after it went to market.

But what happens if an invested-in app simply does not sell, or even make it past Apple's sometimes stringent reviews process?

AppBackr creator Trevor Cornwell, who CNET spoke with last week, says much of the success of the program revolves around commitment. "We've created an agreement between the buyer and the seller," Cornwell said. "Look at something like Craigslist transitioning into a marketplace like eBay. On eBay, you look for buyers--in this case developers who have a good track record. We are solving a problem for a group where there's been no simple function to be able to do that." … Read more

Storage and online collaboration service Box.net on Friday is introducing a new version of its site that lets users with HTML5-enabled Web browsers drag and drop files into their browser to upload them to the company's servers.

The company has long had a Java-powered drag-and-drop tool for uploads, but it's been slow to load, required users to have a recent version of Java installed, and put the drop zone in a pop-up window. Under the new system, users can simply drag files to any Box.net folder they're in, and it will start uploading in the … Read more

Google's Moderator service, which up until now has existed as a standalone product, is now available within YouTube and to all its users. Previously, YouTube had integrated it into the service for special events, and given access to a few select users.

The core of the service, which has users voting up or down on user-submitted ideas, began as a pet project of Google engineer Taliver Heath, who built it to help prioritize the barrage of questions asked during Google's company meetings and hosted lecture series. In its transition to YouTube it serves a similar purpose: bringing order … Read more

Would you be willing to pay $150 for a video camera peripheral that will only work with a $200 gaming console?

Microsoft hopes so--at least according to Edge Online's "trusted source," who says that $150 is in fact the price tag for a Project Natal unit, and that Microsoft is planning to offer it both as a standalone item and as part of an Arcade system bundle.

Project Natal, which is widely expected to be renamed at its near-final press debut at next month's E3 conference in Los Angeles, is a video capture device for the … Read more

Did you hear? Having the Internet on your TV is a big thing again.

Google is just now getting into the game, but companies like Hillcrest Labs and its Kylo browser have been around for years. On Wednesday Hillcrest is putting out an update to its TV-friendly browser, which brings a handful of new goodies like user agent spoofing and integration with Windows Media Center.

Between the two major features, the user agent string tweaker is infinitely more geeky, but can go a long ways towards making some sites simpler to navigate from your couch. In short, it lets you … Read more