Women now play games more than men, according to a report by mobile app analytics provider Flurry. At least that’s true in the realm of mobile and mobile social games, where the likes of Zynga’s FarmVille and Popcap’s Plants vs. Zombies are at the forefront.
More than half of all mobile and mobile social gamers — 53 percent, to be exact — are women, bucking the stereotype that gaming is typically a male-dominated form of entertainment, according to the report. Only 40 percent of “traditional” gamers are women, according to the report.
The report found that women social gamers were typically older than their male counterparts — as women outnumbered men in the 26 to 65 age range. Men barely outnumbered women in the 18 to 24 age range. Just about a third of all mobile and social gamers were also in that same age range — 18 to 24 — while about half of mobile and social gamers fell in the 26 to 44 age range.
A majority of mobile and social gamers also appear to come from middle-class origins and make between $50,000 and $80,000 yearly, according to the report. Mobile and social gamers typically earn 50 percent more than the average American and are twice as likely to have a college bachelor’s degree. The majority of mobile and social gamers — about 65 percent — are white, as well.
Flurry detected more than 250 million devices running Apple’s iPhone operating system and Google’s Android mobile operating system, and detects around 750,000 new activations across both operating systems each day, according to the report. Flurry tracks around 26 million unique users that play social games for an average of about 25 minutes each day.
Ever feel that your Mac speakers aren’t loud enough? We may have an app to solve your audio frustration.
Boom, a volume booster app, will crank the audio output on your Mac up to 400%. Whether your main thing is watching YouTube videos or it’s listening to tracks on iTunes, Boom will dramatically pump up the volume.
The audio boosting app that recently won a Best in Show award at Macworld 2011, works with any application on Mac including iChat, Quicktime and Skype. It will also jack up the volume while streaming media on the web with sites such as YouTube.
Volume Slider
After installing Boom, a handy volume slider will be readily available within the taskbar. This is a lot easier than having to fire up the app and, it clearly displays whether the boom volume is on or off.
Presets & Equalizer
While increasing the volume is great, it’s not the only feature found within Boom. Users also have the option to choose from various presets to customize the sound.
Each one of the presets including bass boost and treble boost, can be tweaked to suit the listener’s preferences but it additionally gives users the option to create and name their own pre-defined sounds using the equalizer. They’ve also included presets for both music and movies that were specifically designed for the aforementioned media types.
Boost a File
Another cool feature within Boom will boost the volume of your audio files by dragging and dropping a supported file into the app. By doing this, Boom will automatically boost the audio level of the file or song and it will sync them to iTunes, allowing you to later throw them on your iPhone or iPod.
The boost file option supports mp3, m4a, aiff, caf and wav.
The Bottom Line
If you’re not satisfied with the audio levels on your Mac, Boom will be worth the $4.99 for you. Global Delight, the developers of the app have provided a free trial download on the site so you’ll have a chance to play around with it before buying. Compared to my Macbook Pro, the sound volume of my older Macbook is seriously lacking so I put Boom to the test using the older model. Overall the result was quite impressive and seemed to roughly double the volume of the audio output, although, the developers do promise its boosts audio by up to 400 percent.
[Peter Yared is the vice president of apps at Webtrends, which acquired Transpond, a social-apps developer he founded. He submitted this column to VentureBeat.]
Ever since Yahoo Connected TV launched at CES in 2009, there has been a steady stream of TV app platform launches, including Google TV, Samsung, Broadcom/Adobe, Boxee, Blu-ray players, MythTV, and even Microsoft Xbox. However, there haven’t been any breakout apps for Internet-connected TVs — so-called “smart TVs.”
And the dirty secret? The TV apps out there are rarely used. I know this first-hand: At Transpond, the social apps-developer I founded and sold to Webtrends last summer, we made a couple of connected-television apps for one of the major broadcast networks, and the apps had almost no traction.
So what happened? It’s pretty simple. TV apps are cumbersome and awkward to use. Using a remote control to navigate across a bunch of app features is slow and confusing. In the process, you annoy everyone else watching the TV. This is the reason that Apple is not supporting apps on the Apple TV, even though it is essentially an iPod Touch with an HDMI port instead of a touchscreen. Games are the only apps that people want to run on a big screen, and they usually want to run highly interactive, multiplayer games that are well beyond the capabilities of connected televisions. In addition, delivering TV apps required implementing a ragtag assortment of quirky APIs from players ranging from Yahoo Widgets to proprietary offerings from Blu-ray manufacturers.
Instead, people are using their smartphones, tablets, and notebook computers for all of the much-ballyhooed interactive TV scenarios. Who’s that actress on Entourage? Let’s look it up on IMDB. What’s that song at the beginning of Gossip Girl? Let’s Shazam it. What are people saying about this episode of Glee? Let’s search Twitter for #Glee. Even the onscreen guide, the one staple interactive unit that you’d expect to run on the TV screen, is moving to your palm, with apps such as the Comcast’s Xfinity Remote iPad app (show above) that lets viewers browse TV listings and even program their DVR.
The only popular connected-TV apps are the ones that let you select video and audio content on demand, such as Netflix, Amazon Video on Demand, and Pandora. Even these apps are now being replaced with a new generation of mobile devices that can transmit what they are playing onto television screens. Much like using the iOS Remote app to play iTunes music on a stereo with an AirPort Express, Apple’s AirPlay will stream video from any iOS device to a TV with an Apple TV set-top installed.
With flat panels relatively commoditized, TV manufacturers attempted to differentiate with connected-TV features and 3D. However, the market has moved and the real differentiation is offering interactive features in the remote control. When the core differentiator for TVs becomes the controller you hold in your hand, Apple becomes a very scary competitor — and Google looks more like a friend. TV manufacturers should seriously consider bundling Android-based controllers that can run engagement apps and transfer streams to their large screens. It’s either that, or watch their customers change the channel once and for all.
At its press conference at Mobile World Congress today, Deutsche Telekom — the German parent of T-Mobile subsidiaries around the world — mentioned that it’ll start launching NFC payment systems in handsets across multiple markets starting this year with full deployments in 2012. T-Mobile USA will be included in the action through the Isis initiative announced in late 2010 in partnership with AT&T and Verizon, but here's where it gets particularly interesting: DT execs apparently name dropped Apple during the live event for a 2011 launch. Of course, there's no shortage of rumors that the next-gen iPhone will include some manner of NFC capability, and it certainly seems like an Apple endorsement would work wonders in taking the technology to a new level of consumer acceptance. Follow the break for the full press release — it doesn’t mention Apple, interestingly, so it’s entirely possible that this was an executive slip-up. More on this as we have it.
Update: Rich from Phone Scoop wrote in to let us know that the Apple mention was in a slide deck handed out during the conference, not verbalized by executives. Interesting!
iPad apps like Sketchbook Pro and Brushes, have both helped artists produce amazing works of art on Apple’s tablet.
Women now play games more than men, according to a report by mobile app analytics provider Flurry. At least that’s true in the realm of mobile and mobile social games, where the likes of Zynga’s FarmVille and Popcap’s Plants vs. Zombies are at the forefront.
Ever feel that your Mac speakers aren’t loud enough? We may have an app to solve your audio frustration.
[Peter Yared is the vice president of apps at Webtrends, which acquired Transpond, a social-apps developer he founded. He submitted this column to VentureBeat.]
