Xappr and appBlaster are fine weaponizers for your smartphone, provided you don’t care to share your violent tendencies with your friends. Thankfully, Hasbro is bridging the gap between new-school AR shooter and that teenage classic — laser tag. The NERF Lazer Tag system is getting an update for 2012 that lets you pair your blaster with an iPhone or iPod touch. The top of the plastic guns now sport a slot for your iDevice which, when loaded with the Lazer Tag app, provides you with an augmented HUD view. While you can play against purely virtual opponents, the real fun is in using to track your battles with fleshy foes. The app will display your gear and power level, and update your progress on a global Lazer Tag leaderboard. As you play, new attacks and gear will be unlocked for you to enhance your gaming experience. The app will even actually show your blasts’ trajectory, letting you see exactly where you shot your former friend. The 2012 edition of Lazer Tag will hit shelves on August 1st with individual blasters costing $40 and sets of two $70. Check out the PR and a screen shot of the app after the break.
Continue reading Hasbro reinvents Lazer Tag for the smartphone generation, lets you live out your Doom-fueled fantasies
Hasbro reinvents Lazer Tag for the smartphone generation, lets you live out your Doom-fueled fantasies originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 07 Feb 2012 11:30:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Facebook says “mobile” is big risk — starting with Android and iOS
Mark Zuckerberg owns 28.2% of Facebook, Peter Thiel has 2.5%
Facebook’s monster mobile numbers: Over 425M users
How Zuckerberg wrested control of Facebook from his shareholders
Facebook has 845M monthly users, 2.7B likes & comments each day
Zynga accounted for $445M, or 12 percent of Facebook’s revenue, in 2011
Facebook made $1B on $3.7B in revenue last year
Facebook’s core values include a powerful, results-oriented, anti-theoretical philosophy called “The Hacker Way,” according to founder Mark Zuckerberg.
“The Hacker Way is an approach to building that involves continuous improvement and iteration,” Zuckerberg writes. “Hackers believe that something can always be better, and that nothing is ever complete. They just have to go fix it — often in the face of people who say it’s impossible or are content with the status quo.”
The remarkable “letter” from Zuckerberg appears in Facebook’s S-1 form announcing its intention to go public, which the SEC released to the public today. No starting price has yet been named, but Facebook said in the filing it expects to raise $5 billion in the IPO. The transaction may leave the company valued between between $75 and $100 billion.
The Hacker Way, Zuckerberg writes, is embedded deeply into the company’s culture. It prioritizes code-based solutions over theoretical arguments, practicality over perfection, risk-taking, and iteration (creating things quickly, testing, then refining).
It’s a remarkable codification of principles that many programmers and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs have understood for a long time. The 37signals founders Jason Fried and David Heinemeyer Hansen elaborated a similar philosophy in their book Rework, and Eric Ries touts an entrepreneurial version of the code in his book and blog, The Lean Startup.
Reading a business book is one thing; seeing the principle outlined in the SEC documents filed by a company planning to go perfect is another. It’s a sign of how deeply the hacker ethos has transformed the way the tech industry works.
Among other things, the philosophy appears in sayings that Facebook employees frequently repeat.
“Done is better than perfect.”
“Code wins arguments.”
“Move fast and break things.”
“The riskiest thing is to take no risks.”
Leaving nothing to chance, the company also ensures that all employees are steeped in this worldview by putting them through a Facebook “Bootcamp.”
“To make sure all our engineers share this approach, we require all new engineers — even managers whose primary job will not be to write code — to go through a program called Bootcamp where they learn our codebase, our tools and our approach,” Zuckerberg writes. “There are a lot of folks in the industry who manage engineers and don’t want to code themselves, but the type of hands-on people we’re looking for are willing and able to go through Bootcamp.”
Another prominent part of the company’s culture: Frequent hackathons, all-out coding marathons that produce code everyone gets to see and comment on. Some of Facebook’s most popular features emerged from hackathons, including the new Timeline, chat, video, the company’s mobile development framework, and even some infrastructure elements.
Zuckerberg’s letter also shows a sharp awareness of the shift in human interconnectedness brought about by the internet and mobile technologies. The company was “built to accomplish a social mission — to make the world more open and connected,” Zuckerberg writes. Facebook does that, he says, by helping people connect to one another, starting with the most fundamental relationship: That of two people to each other.
Here’s the full text of Zuckerberg’s letter.
Facebook was not originally created to be a company. It was built to accomplish a social mission — to make the world more open and connected.
We think it’s important that everyone who invests in Facebook understands what this mission means to us, how we make decisions and why we do the things we do. I will try to outline our approach in this letter.
At Facebook, we’re inspired by technologies that have revolutionized how people spread and consume information. We often talk about inventions like the printing press and the television — by simply making communication more efficient, they led to a complete transformation of many important parts of society. They gave more people a voice. They encouraged progress. They changed the way society was organized. They brought us closer together.
Today, our society has reached another tipping point. We live at a moment when the majority of people in the world have access to the internet or mobile phones — the raw tools necessary to start sharing what they’re thinking, feeling and doing with whomever they want. Facebook aspires to build the services that give people the power to share and help them once again transform many of our core institutions and industries.
There is a huge need and a huge opportunity to get everyone in the world connected, to give everyone a voice and to help transform society for the future. The scale of the technology and infrastructure that must be built is unprecedented, and we believe this is the most important problem we can focus on.
We hope to strengthen how people relate to each other.
Even if our mission sounds big, it starts small — with the relationship between two people.
Personal relationships are the fundamental unit of our society. Relationships are how we discover new ideas, understand our world and ultimately derive long-term happiness.
At Facebook, we build tools to help people connect with the people they want and share what they want, and by doing this we are extending people’s capacity to build and maintain relationships.
People sharing more — even if just with their close friends or families — creates a more open culture and leads to a better understanding of the lives and perspectives of others. We believe that this creates a greater number of stronger relationships between people, and that it helps people get exposed to a greater number of diverse perspectives.
By helping people form these connections, we hope to rewire the way people spread and consume information. We think the world’s information infrastructure should resemble the social graph — a network built from the bottom up or peer-to-peer, rather than the monolithic, top-down structure that has existed to date. We also believe that giving people control over what they share is a fundamental principle of this rewiring.
We have already helped more than 800 million people map out more than 100 billion connections so far, and our goal is to help this rewiring accelerate.
We hope to improve how people connect to businesses and the economy.
We think a more open and connected world will help create a stronger economy with more authentic businesses that build better products and services.
As people share more, they have access to more opinions from the people they trust about the products and services they use. This makes it easier to discover the best products and improve the quality and efficiency of their lives.
One result of making it easier to find better products is that businesses will be rewarded for building better products — ones that are personalized and designed around people. We have found that products that are “social by design” tend to be more engaging than their traditional counterparts, and we look forward to seeing more of the world’s products move in this direction.
Our developer platform has already enabled hundreds of thousands of businesses to build higher-quality and more social products. We have seen disruptive new approaches in industries like games, music and news, and we expect to see similar disruption in more industries by new approaches that are social by design.
In addition to building better products, a more open world will also encourage businesses to engage with their customers directly and authentically. More than four million businesses have Pages on Facebook that they use to have a dialogue with their customers. We expect this trend to grow as well.
We hope to change how people relate to their governments and social institutions.
We believe building tools to help people share can bring a more honest and transparent dialogue around government that could lead to more direct empowerment of people, more accountability for officials and better solutions to some of the biggest problems of our time.
By giving people the power to share, we are starting to see people make their voices heard on a different scale from what has historically been possible. These voices will increase in number and volume. They cannot be ignored. Over time, we expect governments will become more responsive to issues and concerns raised directly by all their people rather than through intermediaries controlled by a select few.
Through this process, we believe that leaders will emerge across all countries who are pro-internet and fight for the rights of their people, including the right to share what they want and the right to access all information that people want to share with them.
Finally, as more of the economy moves towards higher-quality products that are personalized, we also expect to see the emergence of new services that are social by design to address the large worldwide problems we face in job creation, education and health care. We look forward to doing what we can to help this progress.
Our Mission and Our Business
As I said above, Facebook was not originally founded to be a company. We’ve always cared primarily about our social mission, the services we’re building and the people who use them. This is a different approach for a public company to take, so I want to explain why I think it works.
I started off by writing the first version of Facebook myself because it was something I wanted to exist. Since then, most of the ideas and code that have gone into Facebook have come from the great people we’ve attracted to our team.
Most great people care primarily about building and being a part of great things, but they also want to make money. Through the process of building a team — and also building a developer community, advertising market and investor base — I’ve developed a deep appreciation for how building a strong company with a strong economic engine and strong growth can be the best way to align many people to solve important problems.
Simply put: we don’t build services to make money; we make money to build better services.
And we think this is a good way to build something. These days I think more and more people want to use services from companies that believe in something beyond simply maximizing profits.
By focusing on our mission and building great services, we believe we will create the most value for our shareholders and partners over the long term — and this in turn will enable us to keep attracting the best people and building more great services. We don’t wake up in the morning with the primary goal of making money, but we understand that the best way to achieve our mission is to build a strong and valuable company.
This is how we think about our IPO as well. We’re going public for our employees and our investors. We made a commitment to them when we gave them equity that we’d work hard to make it worth a lot and make it liquid, and this IPO is fulfilling our commitment. As we become a public company, we’re making a similar commitment to our new investors and we will work just as hard to fulfill it.
The Hacker Way
As part of building a strong company, we work hard at making Facebook the best place for great people to have a big impact on the world and learn from other great people. We have cultivated a unique culture and management approach that we call the Hacker Way.
The word “hacker” has an unfairly negative connotation from being portrayed in the media as people who break into computers. In reality, hacking just means building something quickly or testing the boundaries of what can be done. Like most things, it can be used for good or bad, but the vast majority of hackers I’ve met tend to be idealistic people who want to have a positive impact on the world.
The Hacker Way is an approach to building that involves continuous improvement and iteration. Hackers believe that something can always be better, and that nothing is ever complete. They just have to go fix it — often in the face of people who say it’s impossible or are content with the status quo.
Hackers try to build the best services over the long term by quickly releasing and learning from smaller iterations rather than trying to get everything right all at once. To support this, we have built a testing framework that at any given time can try out thousands of versions of Facebook. We have the words “Done is better than perfect” painted on our walls to remind ourselves to always keep shipping.
Hacking is also an inherently hands-on and active discipline. Instead of debating for days whether a new idea is possible or what the best way to build something is, hackers would rather just prototype something and see what works. There’s a hacker mantra that you’ll hear a lot around Facebook offices: “Code wins arguments.”
Hacker culture is also extremely open and meritocratic. Hackers believe that the best idea and implementation should always win — not the person who is best at lobbying for an idea or the person who manages the most people.
To encourage this approach, every few months we have a hackathon, where everyone builds prototypes for new ideas they have. At the end, the whole team gets together and looks at everything that has been built. Many of our most successful products came out of hackathons, including Timeline, chat, video, our mobile development framework and some of our most important infrastructure like the HipHop compiler.
To make sure all our engineers share this approach, we require all new engineers — even managers whose primary job will not be to write code — to go through a program called Bootcamp where they learn our codebase, our tools and our approach. There are a lot of folks in the industry who manage engineers and don’t want to code themselves, but the type of hands-on people we’re looking for are willing and able to go through Bootcamp.
The examples above all relate to engineering, but we have distilled these principles into five core values for how we run Facebook:
Focus on Impact
If we want to have the biggest impact, the best way to do this is to make sure we always focus on solving the most important problems. It sounds simple, but we think most companies do this poorly and waste a lot of time. We expect everyone at Facebook to be good at finding the biggest problems to work on.
Move Fast
Moving fast enables us to build more things and learn faster. However, as most companies grow, they slow down too much because they’re more afraid of making mistakes than they are of losing opportunities by moving too slowly. We have a saying: “Move fast and break things.” The idea is that if you never break anything, you’re probably not moving fast enough.
Be Bold
Building great things means taking risks. This can be scary and prevents most companies from doing the bold things they should. However, in a world that’s changing so quickly, you’re guaranteed to fail if you don’t take any risks. We have another saying: “The riskiest thing is to take no risks.” We encourage everyone to make bold decisions, even if that means being wrong some of the time.
Be Open
We believe that a more open world is a better world because people with more information can make better decisions and have a greater impact. That goes for running our company as well. We work hard to make sure everyone at Facebook has access to as much information as possible about every part of the company so they can make the best decisions and have the greatest impact.
Build Social Value
Once again, Facebook exists to make the world more open and connected, and not just to build a company. We expect everyone at Facebook to focus every day on how to build real value for the world in everything they do.
Thanks for taking the time to read this letter. We believe that we have an opportunity to have an important impact on the world and build a lasting company in the process. I look forward to building something great together.
Facebook’s S-1 form with the SEC shows it made $943 million in advertising revenue in Q4 2012. If you include the company’s payments from Zynga and other fee revenues, then Facebook’s total sales were $1.141 billion between September and December of last year.
That puts Facebook on course to sell well over $1 billion in ads in Q1 2012.
(It’s also just one 10th of Google’s Q4 2011 revenues, $10.58 billion, which are almost all from ad sales.)
According to Facebook’s S-1:
The [sales] increase was primarily due to a 44% increase in advertising revenue to $943 million. Advertising revenue grew due to a 16% increase in the number of ads delivered and a 24% increase in the average price per ad delivered.
See the chart below:
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Researchers from Carnegie Mellon, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Georgia Tech have issued a list of 9 tips for better tweeting based on a study of Twitter usefulness.
Commercial ebook publishing and distribution is a crowded space: Amazon, Apple, Google, Barnes and Noble and others each have stores and devices for digital books, which have been seeing consistent growth. Ebooks are undoubtedly the future of long-from content. They’ve opened up a whole range of new publishing opportunities for independent authors, and the significance of being able to self-publish books so cheaply and simply should not be underestimated.
For the most part, the focus on ebooks has been commercial. One area that’s underrepresented: free contemporary ebooks. While many exist, and most commercial ebook stores like Amazon and Google Books have some free ebooks, there’s no central source for readers to download free ebooks or for authors to distribute them under more lenient licenses like Creative Commons.
With Leebre, Michael Bethencourt — a 22-year-old free software and free culture fan who graduated with a Computer Science degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison — plans to change that (Bethencourt’s previously contributed to open source projects like Google’s MOE and the games Nexuiz and Warzone 2100, and during college he did internships with Microsoft, Facebook and supercomputer company Cray). “Right now, there aren’t really any good communities for independent authors to publish their works, and certainly none focused around free culture,” he says. “Furthermore, independent authors have no easy-to-use tools for making ebooks or nicely formatted online books, so self-distribution and self-publishing is really hard, unless they have technical knowledge.”
“Leebre intends to fill this gap: provide a community and tools for independent authors to publish their work and get noticed,” says Bethencourt. “In 2010, I received a Nook as a gift, and was rather dismayed to find that there was no huge repository of fresh, free fiction, just like I was used to for music,” he says, referencing Jamendo. The repository for free music from independent artists was a huge inspiration to him, and he wants Leebre to provide similar resources and community to independent authors.
A community of readers and writers
Bethencourt has an ambitious vision for a community platform that will both give authors an easy way to format and share their work, and readers a place to find free books and connect with their favorite authors. A cornerstone of Leebre, like Jamendo, will be the driving free culture philosophy and use of Creative Commons for licensing. However, Bethencourt’s vision goes far beyond website simply for Creative Commons books to be hosted and shared. The community, especially, is what he hopes will differentiate Leebre from popular ebook stores like Google Books and Amazon. “The key to (for example) YouTube’s success wasn’t that it was simply a host for videos, but that it was a social platform built around videos,” he says. “Readers like being able to connect with authors, and vice-versa.”
Readers can support authors through donations and links to other sites that sell books, like Amazon and Lulu. Bethencourt doesn’t see services like these as competition; instead, Leebre is “intended to complement them.”
One of the more interesting ideas he has for the donate button: authors can choose to support a cause and have donations directed to a non-profit of their choice. “I hope to see even established authors distribute short stories or books on it in order to fundraise for a cause,” he says.
Each book will be downloadable in ePub, MOBI, HMTL, and PDF, and can be read online as well.
Leebre for authors
Of course, the most important part about a website for book lovers is the selection of books. But Bethencourt isn’t worried about that part. The feedback he’s seen from authors has been positive and supportive. He expects it to be a platform where works that might not otherwise be published will be given a chance. Short stories, for example — “anyone who has completed a Creative Writing degree (and I know this since I took several creative writing classes while in college, which have definitely influenced my design decisions) will have probably 5 or 6 or so rather decent short stories which are basically un-publishable through conventional means.” Novels are much more of an investment from authors, but he expects a strong community, the donation system, and the opportunity to get noticed will “be enough to offset trepidations about posting it for free.”
“With my discussions with authors, it would seem the biggest barrier isn’t ‘not wanting to give them for free’, but rather just the effort of putting them online, and in a place people would download them,” says Bethencourt, “The authors I’ve shown the website to barely bat an eye at the idea of posting their work for free: they’re generally just enthralled to put it up somewhere, and not have it rot on their hard-drive looking like crap.”
A major draw for authors — and an integral part of the platform and Bethencourt’s vision for its future — is an online book editor. It’s how books are uploaded, and it’s how every author will be able to have a professional looking ebook without having to worry about formatting and design.
The process of adding a book to Leebre
Everything on Leebre will first go through the online editor (built entirely using HTML and JavaScript), to ensure a high quality, consistent display of all books, regardless of the format. Authors can either upload their books (as a .doc, .docx, .odt, .html, or .epub) or simply copy and paste the text in, which actually works better, according to Bethencourt (and it means you can upload a book from any source that supports “copy”). Then the system parses the text and “guesses” at what’s what — dedication, chapter headers, prologue, endnotes, footnotes, etc. The author then gets a chance to check whether the system guessed right, but he says it usually does, “especially if you are uploading as an ePub which gives a few more clues than, say, Word.” The book can be worked on within the editor, and Bethencourt has plans for group editing and “crowd-sourced” editing.
Semantic book editing
This is all done with the help of an internal format that Bethencourt’s currently calling “SemBook” for Semantic Book, because it “encodes the book in a very semantic way. That is, it retains much more of the author’s intent than ePub or MOBI.” Instead of using normal formatting tools — bold, font size, etc. — to set how each chapter header, footnote and everything else looks, everything is specified as what it is (chapter, footnote…). Then, depending on the style chosen, everything will be formatted automatically. “It is inspired by LaTeX, and so has a What You Mean is What You Get philosophy, as opposed to word processors and their What You See is What You Get,” says Bethencourt.
The use of the semantic format allows for some pretty cool things to be done. For one, it makes it really easy for a book to look good, without the author knowing anything about design. The author just makes sure everything is specified in the editor, and then chooses a styling template (there will be many to choose from). The template takes care of making everything look how it’s supposed to, and the look of the entire book can be changed simply by changing the template. “That way, it always achieves excellent formatting, no matter what the author originally submitted: the manuscript could be in 20pt pink Comic Sans, but the result will be the same across authors,” explains Bethencourt, “With Leebre, I want to even the playing field and give independent authors this same ‘professional’ look.”
In the future, this could become an even bigger part of the platform: “Eventually, I hope to connect graphic artists and people with experience in typesetting to authors, by providing standardized ways to specify templates to the graphic artists, and a similar community (with rating systems, comments, popularity metrics, and so on), to create and consume templates for books. This is to provide the largest possible selection to authors for style.”
The internal format also makes it easy for books to be published on Leebre in various formats. “As long as the author can get it into this [SemBook] format, it can be formatted extremely well as any other format.” For example, in the ePub and Kindle formats, anything specified as a chapter in Leebre’s editor will be designated as a chapter in the table of contents.
The format even recognizes more complicated elements like dialog, which allows quotation marks to be customized depending on language.
The semantic format pervades Leebre’s concept. But to almost everyone, it’ll be invisible (the only people who need to deal with it are developers and eventually designers). Authors upload a document or copy and paste their books to get them into Leebre; readers read them online or download them in ePub, MOBI, HTML, or PDF. Behind the scenes, SemBook makes it all work. “The semantic format is something only used internally, and is the ‘secret sauce,’ if you will, to getting automatic professional looking formatting, without using a typesetting program.”
Eventually, Bethencourt would like to spin the editor off and make it easy for other projects, like Project Gutenberg, to make use of it. “Project Gutenberg right now has a massive collection of public domain books,” he says, “but they are all inconsistently and sloppily formatted.”
Bethencourt sees the ease of publishing books with the online editor as something that sets Leebre apart from other ebook stores. “I’ve looked at Amazon some, and it’s not a simple task to turn your manuscript into a publishable ebook,” he says, “With Leebre, it is a very simple task, and the end product is polished, elegant, and to publishing standards. The online edition looks like a real paperback book.”
Where it stands
Bethencourt has been working on Leebre for just over a year. The core is nearly ready, although Bethencourt says “there are a few non-essential features that are unfinished (such as the rating system), and a few others which do not live up to my vision.” He plans to launch a private beta in mid-February, open to Kickstarter supporters and anyone who’s submitted a beta request. He wants it to be “stunning” before it’s available to everyone.
On Kickstarter, the project has passed its goal of $3000, for a virtual private server for the beta.
After the private beta, Bethencourt plans to open it up to those with .edu email addresses, and finally to the public. He hopes to involve more developers — currently, it’s only him, Rebecca Carvalho as publicist, and another developer that hasn’t started — and “get the software itself polished up and separate, so that projects like archive.org, Project Gutenberg, WikiBooks, and WikiSource can all benefit from better formatting.”
As far as financials, he plans to create a a 501(c) non-profit, making donations “easier and tax-deductible,” but is waiting until the project is more established. “I’m planning on going the route of other free software non-profits, like Mozilla, the Document Foundation, etc.,” he says. The project will be funded by donations, an occasional fundraising drive if necessary, and perhaps branded gear for sale, although it’s obvious that money is of little importance to Leebre, beyond what’s needed to sustain it. The project promises “100% dedication to the community and free software,” and that there “will never be ads, or any other sort of compromise of the site’s mission.”
“I plan on keeping it dedicated to the free software and free culture community,” Bethencourt says, “I want it to be the best tool for educators, writers, and readers, and so I intend to keep it non-profit.”
Along with the crowd-sourced editing feature, Bethencourt plans for online creativity workshops that mimic traditional creative writing courses and workshops, internalization (of the site, and of books, potentially through crowd-translating), and eventually, support for more diverse types of fiction like graphic novels and illustrations.
(Fre)ebook revolution
Jamendo, Flickr, Wikipedia and many other projects have proven that both the creators and consumers exist to make free projects work. The demand is there, and Leebre seems a welcome companion for both readers and authors. Bethencourt has a long road ahead of him to make Leebre succeed, with his ambitious vision as both its greatest asset and greatest challenge. Above all though, the project’s success will hinge on its community. It needs people willing and able to fill it with quality independent books. And it needs readers passionate enough to make it worth it. It’s an uphill battle, for sure — but for the sake of independent authors, readers, and the free culture movement, I hope Bethencourt succeeds.
Xappr and appBlaster are fine weaponizers for your smartphone, provided you don’t care to share your violent tendencies with your friends. Thankfully, Hasbro is bridging the gap between new-school AR shooter and that teenage classic — laser tag. The NERF Lazer Tag system is getting an update for 2012 that lets you pair your blaster with an iPhone or iPod touch. The top of the plastic guns now sport a slot for your iDevice which, when loaded with the Lazer Tag app, provides you with an augmented HUD view. While you can play against purely virtual opponents, the real fun is in using to track your battles with fleshy foes. The app will display your gear and power level, and update your progress on a global Lazer Tag leaderboard. As you play, new attacks and gear will be unlocked for you to enhance your gaming experience. The app will even actually show your blasts’ trajectory, letting you see exactly where you shot your former friend. The 2012 edition of Lazer Tag will hit shelves on August 1st with individual blasters costing $40 and sets of two $70. Check out the PR and a screen shot of the app after the break.
