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Metacritic now charting iOS games

Gaming review aggregation site Metacritic has posted that it is now charting for iOS games through its service. The site has long charted movies, music and video games as an overall average of all the scores found online (out of 100), and now it’s going to do the same thing for iOS games. Metacritic will do this by aggregating all of the scores found online with a weighted average and assigning a score out of 100 to each title in the system. You can see the main iPhone page right there — Tiny Wings is highly rated as a new title, and on the overall list, World of Goo leads the way, with iBlast Moki right behind and a good mix of games on down the list.

As you’d expect from a list of iOS games, the titles are all over the place, from bigger studio releases to tiny indie downloads. The game reviews are also coming from a number of sites of all sizes, from more traditional gaming sites to iOS-specific review sites. Metacritic has become something of a lightning rod in the industry. While it does provide an interesting list of quality titles for each game system, both developers and review publishers are often frustrated that it averages out scores — and some great games have been brought down in the past by a relatively bad Metacritic score — for a number of reasons.

We’ll have to see what effect Metacritic will have on iOS. I’d think that most iOS users take a lot of their feedback from the iTunes store itself, and when you combine that with the generally low prices of most iOS games, it seems to me that reviews aren’t as big a deal as traditional gaming retail. But we’ll see — if nothing else, it’ll provide a good list of iOS games for newcomers to the scene.

Metacritic now charting iOS games originally appeared on TUAW on Tue, 15 Mar 2011 19:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Study: Mobile Ad-Tracking Systems Are “Blind” To 80 Percent Of Apple iOS Devices

Apple mobile iOS devices (iPads, iPhones, and iPod Touches) are used by 130 million people, but they present a huge blindspot to advertisers. All Apple mobile devices use the Safari browser, as do millions of Apple laptop and desktop computers. Safari blocks third-party cookies by default, which is good for privacy and good for consumers. But it is bad for advertisers who rely on browser cookie tracking to measure the effectiveness of their ads.

Marin Software, which offers a way to manage paid search advertising, conducted a study it provided to TechCrunch which shows that 80 percent of the time iOS devices don’t count paid-search conversions (i.e., clicks) because cookie-tracking is turned off. On the Mac, the undercounting occurs 50 percent of the time. All told, when you count all browsers, 38 percent of all paid-search clicks are not being counted.

These numbers are for so-called third-party cookies, not first-party cookies which come only from Websites you visit. Third-party cookies are served from various advertising networks or monitoring tools, and they are required for any type of retargeting across multiple Websites. While Marin only looked at paid search ad conversions, the numbers should hold true for display ads as well.

Not only are ads not being tracked properly on most Apple devices, but if they were tracked properly, Marin suggests that Apple devices actually perform better. As part of the study, Marin compared actual ad conversions to Windows computers as a baseline. While the perceived conversion rate of search ads is 56 percent lower because of the undercounting, the actual conversion rate is 23 percent higher.

Following the maxim that you don’t get paid for what can’t be measured, this blindspot poses a growing challenge to the online advertising industry, and Google in particular. (And you thought Apple was just doing this to protect consumers). The way around the blindspot is to use first-party cookies served from the Websites people visit, or to come up with better ways to measure the performance of online ads. But that’s the topic for another post.

Lifelapse app promises to turn your iPhone into a life-logger

We’ve seen a few dedicated “life-logging” devices that let you record your every waking moment, but why spend a couple of hundred bucks on something when you’re already carrying around a perfectly capable smartphone? That’s the thinking of the folks behind the Lifelapse iPhone app which, like the Vicon Revue we’ve tested, promises to simply record a time-lapse video of your entire day — they’ve even developed a “LifePouch” so you can conveniently wear your iPhone around your neck (no iPad version just yet). Unfortunately, the developers aren’t offering a peek at the app itself just yet, but they are now accepting applications for those that wish to participate in the beta.

Lifelapse app promises to turn your iPhone into a life-logger originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 10 Mar 2011 07:19:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Interactive TV has finally happened — just not on TVs

Comcast Xfinity iPad app[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.

There is an entire category of TV engagement apps emerging on mobile devices. ABC has launched iPad apps that can identify what TV show you are watching, using audio soundprinting technology from Nielsen that works like Shazam but for TV shows, and offer up options to interact with the show. GetClue lets viewers “check in” to TV shows and offers a recommendation service based on people’s expressed preferences.

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.

It is not a huge leap to assume that Google will iterate on its failed Google TV launch and make it so that Android devices can easily stream video to TVs. Vizio already announced at CES last month that their new tablets will be able to seamlessly hand video streams over to Vizio TVs. Even Intel got in the game at CES, and launched WiDi 2.0 which will enable mobile devices and notebooks to stream full 1080p HD video to any TV with a WiDi adapter.

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.

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